I hope you’re sitting down for this: the New York Times did some actual journalism this week. I know, right? But seriously, they did. The Times ran a story about how Democrats in Alaska, specifically the campaign staff of the Democrat nominee for the Senate, Mary Peltola, cooked up an idea to try to fool voters into electing her and then executed it to near perfection. Their only flaw? Someone talked to the Times BEFORE the election.
Dirty tricks are nothing new in politics, of course, but the stories of them usually come out after the votes have been cast; they come out in books about the race or investigative reports that win awards – real behind-the-scenes tales of how politics really works.
In this case, a fired former campaign manager talked out of spite. And while that should normally be enough to cause skepticism, she brought the receipts and tried to retract it all, likely out of fear of never working in the state again. To their credit, the Times ran the story anyway, writing, “Last week, as The Times prepared to publish this article, Ms. Rios, who had been planning to file a wrongful termination lawsuit against the Peltola campaign, contacted The Times and said she wanted to take back her previous statements.”
I understand your instinct to think this was a stupid plan that would never work. You think that because you are a smart person, and an educated person, you would recognize the word “incumbent” next to the name of the “real” Dan Sullivan. But you have to understand that there are a lot of dumb people, a lot of illiterate people, a lot of people in a hurry, a lot of people who don’t pay close attention to things, and every other configuration of people out there in this country.
There is also the fact that in the vast wilderness of Alaska, some people’s closest neighbors are grizzly bears, not people, and they don’t watch a lot of news. People off the grid are off it because they don’t want to be bothered by it. Their votes count too.
Most importantly, in a four-way race with ranked-choice voting, this dirty trick of recruiting someone with the same name as the incumbent to dilute the vote isn’t to get that Dan Sullivan elected – he’s just a tool. It’s to keep the real Dan Sullivan under 50 percent in the first round. If Senator Dan Sullivan doesn’t get 50 percent in the first round of vote counting, he’s done. Even if he gets 49.99999 percent, he’s done.
Ranked-choice voting is the most anti-democratic scheme the Left has cooked up, and it should be challenged as the ultimate disenfranchisement ever conceived, as it allows the person who got the most votes to lose because someone else got more second- and third-choice votes.
I’m not going to bore you with the details of how it works; just know that rather than whoever gets the most votes wins, or causing a run-off between the top two candidates if no one gets over 50 percent, ranked-choice could end up with someone who got the second or third most votes “winning.” And in a close race, you don’t need to fool that many people, only just enough.
The other Dan Sullivan, the fake candidate, according to the Times, “‘said he hated Trump, and if it was going to help Mary, he liked Mary. He didn’t have any interest in being a politician, but if this could help.’ Mr. Sullivan, who has maintained that he entered the race of his own volition, did not respond to repeated requests for comment over the past week.”
For a con to have a chance of working, you have to ride that horse into the grave…
What we know is Democrats did this – the campaign and operatives named in the story largely stayed silent. In politics, if you can’t refute allegations, ignore them and wait for them to fade away.
Will this matter in Alaska? I don’t know. The people on whom this sort of trick could work are unlikely to be consumers of news and will not be New York Times readers. So, the prospect of them finding this out and making a point of spite-voting for the real Dan Sullivan seems slim…under normal circumstances.
But these aren’t normal circumstances. Social media exists. And while the odds of these voters reading the Times are next to zero, the odds are much higher they have a Facebook or some similar page. They have friends and family. This story can get to them; it can anger them, and it can impact how they vote, maybe even inspire some fence-sitters to vote. Spite over insults, even if delivered indirectly, is a hell of a motivator.
Democrats think Alaskan voters are stupid; wouldn’t it be hilarious if that arrogance and condescension cost them control of the Senate?
Derek Hunter is the host of the Derek Hunter Show on WMAL in Washington, D.C., and has a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and is the author of the book Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.