Results suggest left-leaning voters buoyed Petersburg Sullivan in Alaska's U.S. Senate primary
In urban areas where the leading Democrat performed well, the retired teacher from Petersburg also saw strong results.
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For months, Republicans have been criticizing U.S. Senate candidate Daniel J. Sullivan — a retired Alaska teacher who in May filed to challenge his state’s GOP incumbent: Daniel S. Sullivan.
Republican critics asserted that the retired teacher — known as Petersburg Sullivan for his Southeast Alaska hometown — was a plant by Democrats, and alleged the duplicate Dan aimed to siphon support for the incumbent from voters who couldn’t tell the difference between the two Sullivans.
But last week’s primary election results suggest his candidacy had the opposite effect, with a significant share of votes for Petersburg Sullivan likely coming at the expense of the leading Democrat in the race, Mary Peltola.
Petersburg Sullivan, who’s running as an anti-incumbent, anti-MAGA moderate Republican, currently sits third in unofficial results.
The fear among incumbent Sullivan’s allies was that the senator’s supporters were at risk of accidentally voting for Petersburg Sullivan — meaning that they expected the retired teacher to draw more votes in precincts where the incumbent performed strongest. In districts where Peltola performed better, Petersburg Sullivan could still draw the same share of votes from the incumbent, but because they’d come from a smaller slice of the full electorate, his overall performance would presumably be worse.
Instead, Petersburg Sullivan’s level of support actually appeared to rise in certain urban areas where Peltola ran up huge margins.
In the ski town of Girdwood southeast of Anchorage, for example, Peltola won 74% of the 567 votes in the U.S. Senate race. Petersburg Sullivan, meanwhile, claimed 4.4% of votes there — nearly double the level of support, 2.5%, that he earned statewide.
In one downtown Juneau polling place, meanwhile, Peltola won 84% of the 566 votes, while Petersburg Sullivan notched 5.3%, or 30 votes. The incumbent Sullivan, meanwhile, got just 47 votes at the same polling place. If the votes for Petersburg Sullivan were primarily a result of confusion, that would mean he drew an improbably large proportion — one-fourth or more — of incumbent Sullivan’s support base at the Juneau polling place.
Across urban Alaska polling places, a broader analysis by the Anchorage Press using artificial intelligence found a strong relationship between Peltola’s and Petersburg Sullivan’s levels of support in last week’s primary — with only a roughly one in 10,000 chance of the correlation being the result of random chance.
Those results, however, don’t entirely rule out that some conservative voters still could have supported Petersburg Sullivan unintentionally. Petersburg Sullivan also drew more than 2% of votes in areas where the incumbent Sullivan performed well, like in one Delta Junction polling place, where the incumbent claimed 69% of votes and Petersburg Sullivan notched 2.3%, or 14 votes.
Petersburg Sullivan this week told his local public radio station, KFSK, that he feels “pretty vindicated” by the results.
“It seems to prove that there was very little, if any, voter confusion between the senator and myself,” said Sullivan.
Petersburg Sullivan is now poised to appear on the general election ballot — though without his party affiliation, which was stripped by election officials in GOP Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration. Those officials also tried to remove Petersburg Sullivan from the ballot entirely, though the Alaska Supreme Court rejected that effort.
One question unanswered by the results themselves: Whether voters who would otherwise be inclined to support Peltola voted for Petersburg Sullivan because they genuinely supported his candidacy — or because they wanted to help him finish in the top four in the primary so he’d secure a place on the general election ballot as a spoiler for incumbent Sullivan.
“I represent a lot of moderate Republicans, and I've had conversations with people who say, ‘This is a Republican-leaning state, this guy would be pretty good,’” said Democratic state Sen. Jesse Kiehl, whose Juneau-area district includes the polling place where Petersburg Sullivan notched strong results.
But another explanation for that showing, Kiehl said, could be the “Streisand effect” — where, Kiehl said, a “colossal overreaction” by the GOP to Petersburg Sullivan’s candidacy “has brought on a snapback, and people saying, ‘Oh, well: If that's what they're afraid of, I'll give it to them.’”
Petersburg Sullivan himself did not agree to an interview request from the Anchorage Press. In a text message, he said that “local people have mentioned they voted for me because they were tired of career politicians.”
“I have seen comments online about people voting for me because they thought I was treated unfairly, and people who were (Peltola) supporters who just wanted me on the ballot,” he said. “I have not heard anyone use the word ‘confusion’ except reporters and the senator.”
A spokesperson for the incumbent Sullivan, Nate Adams, said the primary results offered their own vindication for Petersburg Sullivan’s GOP critics by proving that “Mary Peltola's voters put Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. on the November ballot.”
“This is just more evidence that Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.’s entire candidacy is centered around being a spoiler to benefit Mary Peltola,” Adams added.
After boosting Petersburg Sullivan onto the ranked choice general election ballot, Adams added, voters aligned with Peltola are now free to support the Democratic candidate again.
Kiehl, the Juneau Democratic senator, argued that Republicans who are still worried about voter confusion among supporters of the incumbent can deliver a simple message to voters: Just vote for all the Sullivans on the ballot.
Assuming that Petersburg Sullivan — who’s raised little money for his campaign — will be eliminated from contention before the two major party candidates, any voters who mistakenly rank him above the incumbent will have their votes reassigned.
The incumbent’s message should be, “Rank the Dans,” Kiehl said. “And if the combined two Dan Sullivans get more votes than Mary Peltola, the incumbent wins.”
