How worried should the GOP be about two Dan Sullivans on the ballot in Alaska?

Alaska’s Senate Race Gets a Complication: Two Candidates Named Dan Sullivan

Earthguardiansonline.com – The nightmare scenario Alaska Republicans spent months trying to prevent has materialized. The November ballot for the state’s single U.S. Senate seat will carry the name “Dan Sullivan” twice — once for the incumbent Republican senator, and once for a former school teacher who emerged from last week’s all-party primary with a small but real slice of the electorate. The question now consuming party strategists is whether that second name will cost the GOP its narrow path to a Senate majority.

The answer, drawn from the state’s short but instructive experience with ranked-choice voting, points to a modest risk concentrated almost entirely in razor-thin contests. Alaska’s ballot design, adopted in 2020, gives voters the option to rank candidates in order of preference. That mechanism is expected to absorb much of the confusion a same-name candidate might otherwise create — but not all of it.

What the Primary Actually Showed

Results released from last week’s primary placed former educator Dan J. Sullivan at 2.5 percent of the vote, comfortably inside the top four. He finished behind GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan (42.6 percent) and former Democratic Representative Mary Peltola (48.2 percent), with two additional candidates splitting roughly 1.1 percent each for the final slot. In a conventional plurality election, a 2.5 percent independent or third-party candidate sharing the exact name of the incumbent would be an obvious liability: voters scanning a crowded ballot could easily mark the wrong box, and those votes would simply vanish.

Alaska’s system changes that calculus. Under ranked-choice rules, a voter who selects Dan J. Sullivan first can still list Sen. Dan Sullivan second. If the former teacher is eliminated in the first round of elimination, his ballots transfer to the senator — provided the voter bothered to rank a backup. The critical variable, then, is not whether confusion exists on the ballot but how many voters actually complete their rankings.

The Exhaustion Problem

Scott Kendall, the Alaska attorney who championed the state’s 2020 ranked-choice referendum, published an op-ed this month arguing that the system will largely neutralize the same-name threat. His reasoning is sound in theory. In practice, however, a substantial share of Alaskan voters leave their ballots incomplete. Whether out of deliberate indifference or simple unfamiliarity with the multi-ranking format, many voters designate only a first choice. When that candidate is eliminated, the ballot is “exhausted” and drops out of the count entirely.

The state’s limited electoral history under the new rules offers a sobering preview of how often this happens. In the 2024 U.S. House contest, Democrat Eric Hafner initially captured 1.1 percent of the vote. Logic would suggest his supporters, once he was eliminated, would flow to the remaining Democrat on the ballot — Peltola. That did not broadly occur. Roughly one-third of Hafner’s backers ranked no one else and exhausted their ballots. Another third did rank Peltola next, while the remainder pointed to Republican Nick Begich or a third-party option. The net result: of the 1.1 percent who chose Hafner, only about 0.4 percent worth of votes actually reached Peltola.

What 2022 Taught About Ballot Exhaustion

The pattern repeated in two separate 2022 House races — a special election and the November general — both of which featured Peltola alongside high-profile Republicans Begich and former Governor Sarah Palin, the GOP’s 2008 vice-presidential nominee. In each contest, approximately one-quarter of voters initially selected Begich before his elimination. Each time, more than 20 percent of those Begich voters exhausted their ballots rather than designate an alternative. In aggregate terms, that translated into 5 to 6 percent of the entire electorate losing their voice in the final round.

Even among the Begich voters who did rank a second choice, the split was uneven. In the special election, only about half transferred to the other Republican, Palin. By November, two-thirds did. Part of that gap likely reflected Palin’s polarizing presence; some Begich supporters simply preferred ballot exhaustion to endorsing either major candidate.

Across the state’s 2022 and 2024 federal elections, the average figure is telling: roughly 28 percent of a candidate’s voters failed to rank any backup when that candidate was eliminated. Of the remainder, only about half selected the candidate one would most logically expect as a fallback — typically a fellow party member or an ideologically adjacent option.

Applying the Numbers to November

If Dan J. Sullivan enters the general election at approximately 2.5 percent and is eliminated in the first round, the arithmetic suggests roughly half of those votes — perhaps 1.2 to 1.3 percent — would filter toward Sen. Dan Sullivan. The rest would either exhaust or flow to Peltola or other candidates. In a race decided by a few thousand votes, that differential could matter. In a contest with a comfortable margin, it would be statistically invisible.

Yet the picture is not purely mechanical. A 2.5 percent showing in an all-party primary does not automatically mean those voters are Republicans who accidentally marked the wrong name. Minor candidates routinely collect one or two percent of the vote in Alaska’s open-primary format simply because some voters prefer a non-major-party option. The primary data alone cannot disentangle genuine preference from ballot confusion, and that ambiguity tempers any alarm.

What is clear is this: the ranked-choice framework converts what would be a straightforward vote-splitting problem in a plurality state into a more contained, quantifiable risk. The GOP’s exposure is real but bounded, and it scales almost entirely with how close the final matchup turns out to be. For a party counting on a single seat to hold the Senate majority, even a small erosion of votes in a tight race carries outsized consequences. The two Dan Sullivans will share a ballot in November; the question is whether the state’s voting architecture can keep the damage to a rounding error.