President Donald Trump declared on Saturday that Republican Senator Dan Sullivan had won reelection in Alaska. The official count says otherwise, and the race has not been called.
In a post on Truth Social on Saturday, November 7, Trump wrote that Sullivan was “leading substantially” once the votes for two other candidates were added to his total. “When you add Daniel (3,600, 1.68%) into Dan, and Gerald Heikes (4,846, 2.27%), Senator Dan Sullivan is up by thousands of Votes,” he wrote. “The Alaska Race is OVER. Dan Sullivan WON, BY A LOT!”
Daniel is Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired teacher from Petersburg whose name is similar to the senator’s, Dan S. Sullivan. Gerald Heikes is the fourth candidate in the race. Trump has argued for weeks that the second Sullivan was put on the ballot to confuse voters and draw votes away from the senator. The Peltola campaign has denied any part in his candidacy, no court has accepted the claim, and no one has been charged.
The Associated Press tally tells a different story. As of Saturday, Democrat Mary Peltola led the senator by 637 votes, 102,962 to 102,325, with an estimated 74 percent of the vote counted. Neither the Associated Press nor Decision Desk HQ has called the race. Alaska will release its next count on Tuesday, November 10, and absentee ballots can still arrive until November 18.
Adding the other Sullivan’s votes to the senator’s total is not how Alaska law works. Alaska uses ranked choice voting, in which voters rank the candidates in order of preference. Because no candidate has passed 50 percent, the state will run a ranked choice tabulation on November 18. The lowest finishing candidates are removed, and each of their ballots then counts for the next candidate that voter chose, if the voter chose one. A ballot cast for Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. moves to the senator only if that voter named the senator as the next choice.
An analysis of the cast vote records by The New York Times suggests that may not help the senator much. Of the voters who picked the other Sullivan first, nearly 30 percent ranked Peltola second, about a third ranked no one else at all, and only about one in six named the senator as their next choice.
The legal fight over the ballot remains open. The Justice Department sued Alaska on October 22, asking a court to set aside the ballots cast for the second Sullivan and to block certification of the race if the senator lost. U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason dismissed the suit on November 1. She ruled that the government lacked standing to bring it and had offered no workable plan to separate those ballots without breaking ballot secrecy. The Justice Department appealed the same day to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where the case is pending. The dismissal stands unless the appeals court acts. Alaska is set to certify its results on November 25. Read our earlier report on the Peltola campaign’s ballot records lawsuit.
