With all the controversy swirling around the U.S. Senate race in Alaska, an important piece of context has been largely absent from the coverage of Democrat Mary Peltola’s bid to unseat Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan: Donald Trump has been the beneficiary of numerous “spoiler” candidates and initiatives aiding his political ambitions.
This month, Trump directed the Justice Department to try to halt the election underway, citing Republican objections to the candidacy of Dan J. Sullivan, Jr., a potential spoiler to the GOP. But the Alaska Supreme Court already ruled that removing Dan J. Sullivan from the ballot would be unlawful. Plus, the ballot makes clear that Dan S. Sullivan is the “registered Republican” and the “incumbent,” while the other Dan Sullivan is not.
Trump’s unprecedented intervention could determine whether his political party remains in control of the Senate and able to rubber stamp the operatives he wants installed as judges and government officials, like his lickspittle personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, who is now paid by us to act as the Attorney General of the United States.
Long-standing DOJ rules and policies have prevented the use of prosecutorial power close to–and specifically before–elections to avoid government interference in the democratic process… until now. Under Trump, that restraint has effectively disappeared.
Blanche’s selective use of prosecutorial power is also evinced by the way he has gone after Trump’s political targets, like James Comey, who, as FBI director, refused to swear a loyalty oath to Trump in 2017. Blanche is pursuing criminal charges against him for a third time, now accusing him of leaking national security information in 2016.
Meanwhile, Blanche took no action whatsoever to investigate documented reports that Pete Hegseth shared secret troop movements in a Signal group chat in 2025. Nor has he investigated Trump’s reckless and casual disclosure of details related to some of America’s most sensitive methods for combatting terrorism with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in 2017.
Speaking of Russia, the hypocrisy is striking. Trump is hammering Peltola for purportedly “stacking” the race with a candidate who has the same name as her opponent to siphon off votes. But Trump himself sought to stack the deck against his 2016 political opponent Hillary Clinton by literally inviting Russia, a foreign adversary, to help him out. “Russia, if you’re listening,” Trump infamously declared, urging Moscow to find the 30,000 emails allegedly missing from Clinton’s private server. Russia went on to interfere in the election in numerous ways and helped Trump win.
Afterward, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, with Kislyak’s help, even sought to set up a secret phone line with Russia at a diplomatic facility in DC to shield his communications with Vladimir Putin from the U.S. intelligence community. In the years since then, Trump has repeatedly acted like Putin’s stooge, destroying American foreign policy and alienating our nation’s closest strategic allies by acting in alignment with Putin’s interests. Todd Blanche has taken no action to investigate any of it.
The “but her emails” scandal pales in comparison to that, and it certainly pales in comparison to the millions of emails and other documents from the Epstein Files that Blanche has actively suppressed to serve and protect Trump.
That’s not the only way Trump has benefited from spoilers in elections, even leaving aside his mysterious admissions about his billionaire buddy Elon Musk’s 2024 actions: “He knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers ... And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide.” Blanche is not investigating that either.
That’s not all that happened in 2024. That year Jill Stein–once again–ran for president on the Green Party ticket, and key Republican lawyers tried to help get her on the ballot, obviously to siphon away votes from Joe Biden and later, Kamala Harris. (Stein had also siphoned away votes from Clinton in 2016, although she subsequently pushed for recounts in three swing states–-raising a cool $5 million to do so.)
Among those helping her in 2024 was Jay Sekulow, a right-wing lawyer who represented Trump in his first impeachment trial. Sekulow is also known as one of the “four horsemen”–alongside Leonard Leo and two others–who helped get John Roberts and Samuel Alito installed on the U.S. Supreme Court. Does anyone seriously believe that Sekulow, a Trump loyalist, would help Stein if doing so didn’t benefit his man?
Stein, like Dan J. Sullivan, had a right to run–even though her campaign was never designed to actually win the election. It was meant to draw votes away from Democrats. In 2024, she was especially focused on targeting Muslim Americans, many of whom were angry over the Biden administration’s aid to Israel in the war killing civilians in Gaza.
Stein also paid $100,000 to a Republican-tied firm called “Accelevate,” led by Trent Pool, who, according to The Intercept, was reportedly inside the Capitol with a Gadsden flag on January 6. And Stein was not Pool’s only 2024 client. His firm also received at least $10 million from the campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who was running as an “independent” to siphon off “MAHA” moms from the Democratic Party. He eventually dropped out to endorse Trump–who rewarded him with a key cabinet position.
And yes, there’s more!
In 2020, Kanye “Ye” West took off his red MAGA hat to announce an independent campaign for president. As with Stein and RFK, Jr., major Republican players worked to get him on the ballot, positioning him to draw some Black votes away from Biden/Harris. As the Daily Beast reported: West’s 2020 campaign “appears to have disguised potentially millions of dollars in services it received from a secretive network of Republican Party operatives, including advisers to the GOP elite and a managing partner at one of the top conservative political firms in the country.”
Some of the Republicans involved in propping up West’s campaign can be traced back to a group called the “American Center for Voting Rights” (ACVR), an operation spawned in 2005 to aid Karl Rove’s goal of securing a “permanent Republican majority” by… wait for it… peddling claims of voter fraud, even back then. (I’m saving more on ACVR and its crew’s ties to the current crop of voter fraud peddlers for another day.)
Before Trump’s rise to power in 2016, billionaires Charles and David Koch were also busy promoting potential spoiler candidates to counter President Barack Obama, whom Trump had been assailing over his birth certificate since 2011. In 2011-2012, they used Tea Party events organized by the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity to promote Herman Cain’s presidential campaign, which was run by one of the Kochs’ long-time operatives in Wisconsin, to potentially siphon away some Black voters. Years later, Cain backed Trump and remained an avid supporter until he died from Covid-19 in 2020.
So, here we are in 2026, with Trump wielding the power of the U.S. Department of Justice to accuse a Democratic Senate candidate and her staff of taking a page from his own party’s playbook. Peltola, meanwhile, has denied being part of the ballot-stacking effort.
Truth be told, the strategy of using candidates with similar names to draw votes away from opponents is hardly new in American politics. Both parties and their allies have employed variations of the vote syphoning tactic for decades. It’s not pretty, but it’s the way politics has been played repeatedly, and there’s no proof that any of what has been alleged–and denied–in the Alaska Senate race violates the law.
But there have been criminal efforts to interfere in our elections–by Donald Trump. So let’s remember just who is pushing for a criminal investigation in Alaska: the felon president, the king of modern election interference and subversion.
What I’m Reading or Rereading:
David Daley’s Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections, a vital and illuminating book on how we got here.
Marc Elias’s Democracy Docket, a must-read daily briefing on efforts to counter Trump’s actions to subvert the midterm elections.
And, Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which provides expressly that: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing (sic) Senators.”
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