Chad Peace
ANCHORAGE—Right now, national attention on Alaska politics is all about the “Two Dan Sullivans” in the US Senate race. But there is a broader Alaska politics story that puts the Sullivan drama in context.
Republican US Sen. Lisa Murkowski endorsed a Democrat for governor of Alaska this week, one week before Election Day. The candidate is Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins. The timing is deliberate.
"Our future is too important to be hamstrung by partisan divisions," Murkowski said. She described Kreiss-Tomkins as someone who "understands that governing requires listening to people with different perspectives."
Under Alaska's old party-primary system, a cross-party endorsement like this would be a footnote. Nice gesture. No impact. Under the current Top Four nonpartisan primary and ranked-choice general election, it's a strategic play that can move real votes.
That gap explains a lot. It explains why President Trump has endorsed a different candidate, and why the White House keeps pushing to repeal Alaska's election system.
Who's Running for Alaska Governor, and Why Murkowski Picked a Democrat
The governor’s seat is open because Gov. Mike Dunleavy is term-limited. Four candidates made the ballot: Kreiss-Tomkins, a former state lawmaker from Sitka, and three Republicans, former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson, former Attorney General Treg Taylor, and Bernadette Wilson.
Kreiss-Tomkins is a Democrat, but he spent a decade representing a conservative House district. He has run on bipartisan cooperation and pledged to put Republicans and independents in his cabinet. His backers include Murkowski's father, former Republican Gov. Frank Murkowski, along with several former GOP legislators.
The math backs up the strategy. A bipartisan AARP poll of 800 likely voters in September put Kreiss-Tomkins at 40% in the first round. In a simulated ranked-choice final, he beat Wilson by 10 points. Why? Many Republican voters didn't rank Wilson at all.
That is the system working exactly as designed. Candidates have to appeal beyond a partisan base to win. For a Democrat in a red-leaning state, that opens a door. For the party operatives who used to control the gate, that is the problem.
How Ranked Choice Voting Beat Trump's Spoiler Strategy
Start with how the system actually works. Alaska runs a Top Four primary. Every candidate, regardless of party, lands on one ballot, and the four who finish highest advance to a ranked-choice general election.
No separate party primaries. The party cannot clear the field by anointing a single standard-bearer before the general electorate weighs in.
That design is why partisan political strategies don’t work as well.
On October 8, Trump looked at the governor's race and saw a math problem. "Three Republicans running against one Dumocrat," he complained, then endorsed Bernadette Wilson and dismissed Treg Taylor as someone he had "never heard of."
The message was obvious. Thin the Republican field so the vote doesn't split.
Why stay in and risk splitting the vote? Because under ranked choice voting, you don't.
"I honestly think the easiest way to a conservative win is if we all are in the race and we rank," Taylor said.
Read that again. A Republican candidate just explained why Trump's spoiler logic doesn’t work in Alaska. When voters rank their choices, a crowded field of Republicans doesn't hand the race to a Democrat. The votes consolidate on later ballots.
The Courts Have Already Settled Trump’s Legal Complaint in Alaska
Underneath the politics sits a legal question the Supreme Court took up in 2000. In California Democratic Party v. Jones, 530 U.S. 567, the court struck down California's blanket primary 7-2, holding that parties have a First Amendment associational right to control who bears their label on the ballot.
Alaska answered a different question. In Kohlhaas v. State, the Alaska Supreme Court upheld the nonpartisan primary and Top Four ranked-choice system against both state and federal challenges, rejecting the claim that a party's associational rights override the voters' interest in choosing their own election system.
That is the fight beneath the endorsement. Whose right wins: does the election process serve the voters, or the political parties?
Why Alaska Republicans Keep Trying to Repeal Ranked Choice Voting
Alaska voters approved the Top Four system in 2020 by a narrow margin. Party leadership has never accepted it.
Since that vote, state party officials and allied legislators have tried to repeal the system multiple times. In 2024, voters chose to keep it by an even narrower margin of just 737 votes out of nearly 321,000 cast.
Shawn Griffiths
Because the balance of power in Washington, DC, can be shifted dramatically by a single vote, national interests have set their sights on the last frontier.
As IVN has reported, Elon Musk, who does not live or vote in Alaska, gave $1.5 million to the Wisconsin-based Aurora Action Network PAC, which sent more than $1 million to Repeal Now, the committee behind this year's repeal measure. The public knows about that money only because of the 2020 disclosure law the measure would repeal.
So what do you do when voters keep telling you no? You try harder and spend more money.
That is the pattern now showing up in the governor's race. Trump's endorsement of Bernadette Wilson, his push to thin the Republican field, the White House pressure to scrap the whole system: it is the fallback move of a party that can't win control of the rules politically.
When you can't win inside the system, you go after the system's legitimacy.
Which brings the fight back to Kohlhaas. The argument is always the same. The parties and their allies insist the system itself belongs to them, even after voters kept it twice and the Alaska Supreme Court upheld it.
Lost at the ballot. Lost in court. Still fighting.
What 2022 Taught Alaska Republicans About Vote-Splitting
Alaska ran its new system for the first time in 2022, and the lesson arrived fast.
Mary Peltola, a Democrat, won the US House special election that August. Then she won again in November. In the special, Sarah Palin and Nick Begich split the Republican vote, and enough Begich voters refused to rank Palin second that the seat flipped. A Democrat took a seat Republicans had held for 49 years.
National GOP operatives noticed. By the general election, they coached voters to rank both Republicans.
It wasn't enough. Or maybe Alaska voters just aren’t as partisan as the Republican Party wants them to be. Either way, Peltola held her seat.
The takeaway was not that ranked choice favors Democrats. It doesn't. It’s nonpartisan.
The takeaway was that the party no longer has exclusive control over the candidate field.
That is why the repeal push followed. Party leaders put Measure 2 on the 2024 ballot to scrap the system outright. Voters kept it, 50.1% to 49.9%, the narrowest margin in state history.
Now comes the governor's race, the next test of whether the same dynamics hold. Trump is betting they won't.
The Other Dan Sullivan: Where Trump Has a Point
The governor's race is not the only place Alaska's rules are being tested. In the US Senate race, Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan faces Democrat Mary Peltola, Gerald Heikes, and a retired Petersburg teacher named Daniel J. Sullivan.
On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that the second Sullivan may not be a coincidence. According to the Times, Democrats ran a monthslong effort to find men named Dan Sullivan to put on the ballot.
The paper said it spoke with at least a dozen people with knowledge of the plan and cited text messages between Peltola campaign officials and staff at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. A Peltola campaign staffer told the Times they were asked to find candidates with that name. Heikes, the fourth candidate, told the paper he was recruited by a Midwestern man he could not identify.
Peltola and the DSCC deny any involvement. Peltola's former campaign manager, who told the Times she was aware of the effort, later asked the paper to retract her statements. Daniel J. Sullivan says his campaign is real. "It's all because of my name, and you know, there's nothing I can do about my name," he told the Alaska Beacon in June.
President Trump accuses Democrats of creating a fake candidate in the Alaska U.S. Senate race: "Mary Peltola should resign from the race. I think she should be prosecuted criminally for what she did." pic.twitter.com/OFPPwQQnOw
— CSPAN (@cspan) October 28, 2026
If the reporting holds up, this is a Democratic dirty trick. And on this point, Trump, who has taken to calling the second candidate "Decoy Dan," may be right. Putting a candidate on the ballot who is not there to win, but to confuse voters, is a fraud on the electorate.
But “Decoy Dan” or not, the dirty trick is not a feature of Alaska’s reform. It is old-fashioned gamesmanship that happens in various forms almost everywhere.
Dirty Tricks Are Not Unique to Ranked Choice
Decoy and spoiler candidates show up under every system, including closed partisan primaries.
Anyone who has worked on political campaigns knows this playbook. Before California adopted its Top Two primary, Democratic operatives routinely helped qualify Libertarian candidates for the general election ballot to pull votes from Republicans. Republicans returned the favor by helping Peace and Freedom Party and Green candidates pull votes from Democrats.
It is happening right now in Ohio, which still nominates candidates in partisan primaries. A super PAC with ties to Trump's political operation has spent nearly $400,000 on mailers promoting Greg Levy, a socialist candidate in the US Senate race, an effort widely seen as a bid to pull votes from Democrat Sherrod Brown in his race against Republican Sen. Jon Husted.
Levy is a real candidate, which makes this different from recruiting a decoy. The goal is the same: win by splitting the other side's vote, not by persuading voters.
The Montana GOP even put $100,000 behind Green Party candidates in 2020. In Florida's 2020 "ghost candidate" scandal, Republican operatives funded a no-campaign candidate who shared a last name with the Democratic incumbent, and a former state senator was later convicted.
A "Legal" Dirty Trick? That Depends on the State
CNN has described the Alaska maneuver as a legal dirty trick. That is too broad. South Carolina makes it a crime to offer "money, a loan of money, or any other thing of value" to induce a person to file or withdraw as a candidate for state or federal office, punishable by up to a year in prison.
In Florida, prosecutors uncovered the ghost candidate scheme through campaign finance law, because the money behind the decoy was illegal.
Alaska is the harder case. In June, the state Division of Elections tried to remove Daniel J. Sullivan from the ballot on the theory that he was running in bad faith. The courts reversed that decision, holding that the division had no authority to add qualifications beyond those in the Constitution. Justice Jennifer Henderson called the concept of candidate intent "amorphous."
None of this justifies the Justice Department's lawsuit, which asks a federal court to block certification only if Sen. Sullivan loses. A remedy that applies to only one outcome is, on its face, not an election integrity rule.
Murkowski put it bluntly: "The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit." The state has asked the court to dismiss the case, and a ruling is expected this week.