Sly maneuvering around third-party candidates is a time-honored, bipartisan tradition in politics. Democrats and Republicans alike have long stealthily tried to help little-known names on the ballot who might siphon votes away from the opposing party’s nominees. The issue has suddenly become a top midterm story line because of remarkable drama in Alaska, where Democrats carried out a gambit to place a second Dan Sullivan on the ballot, alongside a Republican senator with the same name.
But several other midterm battlegrounds also have outsider candidates who could swing a close race. In Ohio, Republicans have spent more than $2.2 million to promote a socialist candidate in the state’s vital Senate race, aiming to pull votes from the Democratic nominee, former Senator Sherrod Brown. In Virginia, Matt Baker is running for a competitive House seat as an independent.
Though he identifies as a centrist, Republican mailers have promoted his support for abortion rights and other left-leaning views. Credit...Matt Baker campaign In Virginia, a Republican group has sent mailers highlighting the Democratic-leaning positions of a self-described “radical centrist” running as an independent in a competitive House race. And in Nebraska, both major parties are jockeying to help minor candidates peel votes away from Senator Pete Ricketts, the Republican incumbent, and his Democratic-backed independent challenger, Dan Osborn.
With modern elections often decided by extremely thin margins and billions of dollars sloshing through campaigns, both parties have ample incentives and opportunities to gain an edge through mischief involving third parties. The jockeying around spoiler candidates is widely considered a legal yet shadowy part of political campaigning that has gone on for decades. The Sullivan episode in Alaska is far from the first time that multiple candidates with the same name have run for the same office, with the lesser-known one often deliberately trying to confuse voters.
There was even an Eddie Murphy movie in 1992 based on the concept of his character’s winning a seat in Congress previously held by a deceased politician with the same name. Usually the actors propping up spoiler candidates are careful enough about wiping away their fingerprints that they do not get caught in the kind of uproar that Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign now faces in Alaska. After a New York Times report detailing how allies of Ms.
Peltola, a Democrat, had recruited little-known candidates to try to stack the ballot, Gov. Mike Dunleavy of Alaska ordered an investigation into whether the Peltola campaign should face criminal charges or civil penalties, and President Trump demanded that she be removed from the ballot. Neither suggested a specific law that had been violated.
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