Antics in Alaska
Plus: Israeli election results, Warsh might favor raising borrowing costs, and more...
The plot thickens: Last night, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, said he would launch an investigation into Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola. This is because of late-breaking allegations that Peltola's staffers tried to recruit candidates to run in the Senate race that could confuse voters into not voting for her opponent.
"In the summer of 2025, a staffer for Mary Peltola, the Alaska Democrat who was eyeing a run for Senate, received unusual instructions from top campaign aides: Find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as you can," reported The New York Times yesterday. "This was no random request. Dan S. Sullivan is the name of the state's Republican senator. And if the Peltola campaign or its allies could track down and persuade another Dan Sullivan to run for Senate, the confusion could cost the senator crucial votes on the state's unusual, four-person ballot." A retired teacher named Dan J. Sullivan got on the ballot and started running for Senate.
Peltola's campaign denied allegations that they were involved in getting Sullivan on the ballot.
The Reason Roundup Newsletter by Liz Wolfe Liz and Reason help you make sense of the day's news every morning.
It's kind of a nasty tactic designed to confuse voters into submission. And the Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to block the certification of election results based on the Sullivan hijinks, seemingly because the issue has garnered President Donald Trump's attention.
Yesterday, Trump said not only that Peltola should leave the race, but also that she should be criminally prosecuted. It's possible the behavior Peltola engaged in isn't actually illegal, to which Attorney General Todd Blanche countered: "It should be!"
This trick has been tried before. In 1946, John F. Kennedy was running in a crowded Democratic primary for Massachusetts' 11th Congressional District. One of his rivals was Joseph Russo, a popular Boston city councilman and the only Italian-American candidate in the race (in an area with a mighty Italian population). So a second Joseph Russo—a janitor—mysteriously appeared on the ballot. Kennedy family patriarch Joe Kennedy is widely believed to have combed the voter rolls to find him.
In that case, the hijinks were unnecessary: JFK won with about 42 percent of the vote, and the real Russo got about 11 percent. Decoy Russo only got 799 votes.
I think the candidates in tight races who are engaging in desperate chicanery—think not just Peltola, but also Vivek Ramaswamy's use of Amy Acton's mother in a nasty ad—might overestimate voters' tolerance of such antics, especially in a midterm cycle that's been so characterized by cost-of-living issues.
Scenes from New York: A Brooklyn woman, Halima Salman, was apparently training with ISIS. Salman, an American citizen, was brought to Syria by her father when she was a teenager and somehow developed close ties to the terrorist group. "Salman, who faces up to 10 years in prison at sentencing, is believed to be the first woman accused of being an ISIS member to stand trial in federal court," reports The New York Times. (There are a lot of jokes I could make here, most of which would not be so tasteful, so I'll let our esteemed commenters handle it.)
QUICK HITS
- "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu entered Tuesday's Israeli election with a governing majority and is now on course to exit with something less," reports the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. "That's one way to understand the result, but it was also widely anticipated. The surprising news is the opposition's failure to come out ahead of Mr. Netanyahu. He may not have won, but the opposition lost.…At present count Mr. Netanyahu's Likud party is in first place, projected to win 26 or 27 seats in Israel's 120-seat Knesset. That's down from 32 in the current Knesset but up from the 19 or 21 in pre-election polls. The opposition Yashar party of former military chief Gadi Eisenkot lags at 21 seats."
- "Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh on Wednesday left the central bank on track to raise interest rates again this year, even as he stuck to his refusal to offer any explicit guidance on the future path of policy," reports Bloomberg. "Operating within his self-imposed communication boundaries, Warsh used his assessment of a strong economy and warnings over persistent inflation to signal the Fed's job is not yet done. The message reinforced expectations that officials will raise borrowing costs in December—after holding them steady Wednesday—with the potential for another increase in early 2027."
- Allie Beth Stuckey is politically burnt out, says Bloomberg.
- The differences between sex realism and gender realism, and what sex-realist feminists are actually fighting for.
