Alaska Senate Race 2026: Mary Peltola, Two Sullivans, and a DOJ Fight Over Certification
On Tuesday, November 3, Americans will vote in 35 Senate races that decide the shape of Donald Trump's final two years in office, and very few of those races carry as much strange baggage as Alaska's. The incumbent, Republican Dan S. Sullivan, is defending his seat against Democrat Mary Peltola. Also on the ballot is a nonpartisan candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired schoolteacher from a remote fishing village who shares the incumbent's name. That third name is now at the centre of a federal investigation, a civil lawsuit, and a fight over whether Alaska could even certify its own result.
The sequence, as reported by Reuters on October 31, began with a New York Times report on Wednesday that aides to Peltola had recruited the second Sullivan to run. Peltola has denied knowing about any recruitment effort, and Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. has denied coordinating with her campaign. The Justice Department's top prosecutor in Alaska, US Attorney Michael Heyman, nevertheless called him a "sham candidate" at a Friday press conference, said the Times report had driven a "surge" of FBI resources, and said several prosecutors had been assigned and that investigative steps were taking place "intensely and swiftly." Heyman declined to say what crime may have been committed.
That is only half the federal intervention. The department, acting on a civil lawsuit that President Trump said he instigated, has also filed further motions seeking to block Alaska from certifying the Senate result if Sullivan loses a close race on a ballot that includes the second Sullivan. In other words, the federal government is not only investigating how a name got on the ballot; it is asking a court to hold up the outcome if that name appears to have mattered. That is an extraordinary position for a Senate race, and it is worth saying plainly why it alarms election officials even if a court ultimately rejects it: certification is normally a state function, and threatening it in advance changes the incentives for everyone counting the votes afterwards.
The Alaska fight is not happening in isolation. The Trump administration has also sued California to try to prevent the counting of ballots cast by more than 20,000 registered voters it alleged could be noncitizens, and has sued roughly 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking unredacted voter rolls. On Friday, a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to stop threatening to prosecute California election officials who do not comply with its directives on alleged noncitizen voting. Sean Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center for Justice told Reuters that the administration is unlikely to win in court, but that the efforts could create a political atmosphere in which state officials feel pressure to do something they are not supposed to do. I think that distinction matters: a lawsuit can fail legally and still succeed at sowing doubt, and doubt is cheaper to spread than a verdict is to overturn.
Against that background, the ordinary electoral facts still point in one direction. More than 49 million Americans had already cast ballots by Friday, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab, a record for a midterm election and above the nearly 46 million who had voted before Election Day in 2022. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take the Senate from a 53-47 Republican majority, and Alaska is widely seen as one of the seats that decides whether that arithmetic works. Prediction markets priced Peltola at about 70% on Kalshi on the morning of October 31, down six points over the previous week, with the Republican side implying roughly a 31% chance. That is a lead, not a coronation, and the six-point slide is a reminder that this race has been moving against the Democrat even before the Justice Department stepped in.
My own reading is that Peltola still wins, and that the name on the ballot helps explain why rather than undermining it. A second Sullivan on the ballot is most likely to confuse voters looking for the incumbent, not voters looking for Peltola, and confusion of that kind rarely helps the candidate whose name is being borrowed. The Justice Department's intervention may energise Republican voters who see a rigged process, and it may intimidate some officials, but it does not change the ballot, and it does not erase a market lead built over months. The honest uncertainty is the margin: if the race is genuinely close, the certification lawsuit gives the losing side a ready-made argument to contest the count, and Alaska could spend weeks arguing about a result that voters thought they had settled on Tuesday night. A win is one thing; a clean, promptly certified win is another, and in this race the second may prove harder than the first.
That is what I will be watching on Tuesday night, beyond the headline of who leads. The count matters, but so does what happens after the count, when the question stops being who got more votes and becomes whether the institutions that certify those votes hold their nerve. Alaska, of all places, may be where that question gets its sharpest test.