The New York Times profile of the bogus Dan Sullivan candidate in Alaska exposes why many Americans have zero faith in the media these days.
Alaska’s oddball Senate race turned into a media litmus test when multiple men named Dan Sullivan crowded the ballot and the press treated the situation as if confusion was the story. The New York Times ran a profile that downplayed any scheme and leaned on the claim that investigators found no conclusive plot. That framing, especially from a paper still treated as the standard-bearer, felt like a shrug to a lot of conservatives.
The reality is simpler and uglier: ranked-choice and top-four systems invite chaos, and cheap ballot access makes mischief easy. It costs just a hundred dollars to file statewide, which practically guarantees oddball entries and strategic stunts. In a state where turnout patterns and local quirks matter, this kind of maneuver can distort outcomes and spin headlines.
What set off alarm bells was how one of the non-incumbent Dan Sullivans behaved and who helped him get on the ballot. One report noted that an Anchorage official with the same name publicly backed the wrong Dan Sullivan, and metadata showed a longtime Democratic consultant assisted with filing paperwork. Taken together, those details make the “just a coincidence” explanation less persuasive to anyone skeptical of political gamesmanship.
https://x.com/VoteHub/status/2091529667337412634?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Instead of pushing back hard on those red flags, the paper leaned into the candidate’s denials. The story emphasized that the challenger voted Democratic in recent presidential elections, supported Mary Peltola for House, and said he was running as a moderate Republican in good faith. That portrait reads like a soft landing for someone who, by any reasonable suspicion test, warranted firmer scrutiny.
The Times quoted the challenger at length and listed his voting history, attendance at local protests, and a lack of overt ties to a broader scheme. Those are facts worth reporting, but context matters. When a campaign’s website mimics an incumbent’s branding and the filing uses a confusing middle initial, reporters should treat those details as signals, not footnotes.
Republicans pushing back in Alaska highlighted how the challenger filed as “Dan S. Sullivan” using the senator’s middle initial instead of his own, registered as a Republican the same day he filed, and had help from a Democratic consultant. Each detail looks strange on its own; together they form a pattern that journalists should have interrogated more aggressively. The outcome is a story that reads defensive toward the challenger and dismissive of voter concerns.
From a conservative perspective, the media’s instinct to avoid implying wrongdoing unless there’s a smoking gun often becomes a shield for plausible manipulation. Call it caution, but when that caution consistently falls against the party in power or the public’s sense of fairness, audiences smell bias. That pattern feeds distrust, and distrust is the real headline here.
None of this excuses throwing around accusations without evidence. But neither does it excuse treating obvious tactics as mere eccentricities when they could be strategic. The press has a responsibility to weigh both possibilities and report the implications, not just the denials. When reporters take the easier route, they hand partisanship the advantage of plausible deniability.
Voters deserve reporting that connects dots and explains possible motives, even if the connections are ultimately disproven. Leaving the most interesting questions on the table and walking away because a profile “did not find case-closing evidence” is not fearless journalism. That posture reads as protective of institutions rather than protective of the public’s right to know.
Talking to Mr. Sullivan and reporting in Petersburg, I did not find case-closing evidence of either a Democratic plot or a fully independent campaign without ulterior motives. But I did learn a few things about his politics:
He told me he has never voted for President Trump. He voted for the Democratic nominee in the last three presidential elections.
He said he voted for Ms. Peltola in her bids for the House in 2022 and 2024. He did not vote for Senator Sullivan in his previous two Senate campaigns.
He is politically active, attending local events protesting the Trump administration, including at least one “No Kings” protest.
Nonetheless, Mr. Sullivan, who at 69 is eight years older than the incumbent Mr. Sullivan, maintained that he was running in good faith and of his own volition, as a moderate Republican and not a secret Democrat. He said he’d voted for some Alaska Republicans, like Senator Lisa Murkowski.
[…]
Republicans have been trying to derail Mr. Sullivan’s campaign from the start. They said his campaign website bore similarities to the senator’s. They noted that he filed as “Dan S. Sullivan,” using the senator’s middle initial instead of his own (J). He registered as a Republican on the same day he filed to be a candidate. And a longtime Democratic consultant, Amber Lee, helped him file to run, according to metadata from a filing document.
When elite outlets default to a posture that privileges the subject’s denials, it naturally angers readers who see a pattern of unequal skepticism. Conservatives don’t want baseless accusations, but they also do not want institutions reflexively defending behavior that looks engineered. That tension is why trust in media keeps slipping in conservative America.
