For months, Alaska's ballot was a fight over who belonged on it. A retired Petersburg teacher named Dan J. Sullivan filed to run against Senator Dan S.
Sullivan, setting off a legal and political battle over whether the similar names could confuse voters. The Alaska Supreme Court ultimately allowed him to remain on the ballot. The controversy grew from there.
A New York Times report tied Dan J. Sullivan's recruitment to a Democratic operative, which Peltola’s campaign denied, while President Donald Trump warned the similar names would mislead Alaskans. On election night, however, the namesake finished last with just 1.7 percent.
The much bigger surprise was in Alaska's U.S. House race, where Eric Hafner, a Democrat serving a 20-year federal prison sentence who has never lived in Alaska, took 7.3 percent. That is more than four times the namesake's total.
His own state party had asked voters not to support him, backing independent Bill Hill instead. For comparison, consider the size of Hafner’s vote. On election night, Republican Representative Nick Begich led Hill by 9 points, 49.6 percent to 40.4 percent.
Combining Hafner’s first-choice total with Hill’s would narrow that gap to under 2 points: 49.6 to 47.7, or about 4,100 votes out of more than 213,000. That doesn’t tell us where his voters would have gone without him. It shows how large a share of the vote he drew, in a race where state Democrats had lined up behind Hill.
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