Will the Real Dan Sullivan Please Stand Up?

What in the Dan Sullivan is going on in Alaska? Senator Daniel S. Sullivan is running for reelection. Daniel J. Sullivan is one of his challengers. And former Anchorage Mayor Daniel A. Sullivan recently endorsed the senator, while also declaring himself “the OG Dan Sullivan.”“It’s kind of hilarious,” Daniel K. Sullivan, a 33-year-old diesel mechanic and off-road fabricator from Wasilla, who is not running for Senate, told me.“I got a chuckle out of it,” Daniel P. Sullivan, a longtime teacher from Nome, who is also not on the ballot, told me.Control of the Senate could come down to a ranked-choice ballot that currently includes two Dan Sullivans (the Republican incumbent and the Republican challenger) and one Mary Peltola (a Democrat who was the state’s former at-large congresswoman). Republicans are worried that voters could be confused about which Dan Sullivan to select. Theories abound: Is this some sort of nefarious political plot by the Democrats? Or is it just that there are so many Dan Sullivans in the state that something like this was bound to happen?To get at the question, I reached out to half a dozen Dan Sullivans who appear to live in Alaska.I caught a second Daniel P. Sullivan, this one from Chugiak, while he was driving on a remote gravel road the other day. “The Dan Sullivan thing” has become a common topic of conversation, he told me, and his co-workers call him “the senator.” So many Dan Sullivans live in Alaska that his firearms purchases require a deeper background check. “So I don’t get mistaken for another Dan Sullivan,” he explained. (He said that he’s planning to move next summer so likely won’t vote for either of the Dan Sullivans: “Not really fair to vote when the outcome doesn’t affect me.”)Daniel F. Sullivan, a registered nurse, called me back from Palmer. “I often joke that I’m the real Dan Sullivan, and those are all imposters,” he told me. He said he grew up in New York with another Dan Sullivan in his high school, who was a better student than he was: “My parents would sometimes get honor-roll letters in the mail. I always wondered if his parents got all the bad letters about skipping school.”In Alaska, he found that his name had even greater benefits. A few years back, he had workers out to fix the electronic system in his hot tub, and the bill they promised to send never arrived. “I often wonder if the other Dan Sullivan got the bill,” he said. Whenever he’s part of a group going out to eat, the reservation is in his name in case it prompts VIP treatment. In this election, he said, he’ll probably vote but hasn’t settled on a candidate. “I won’t vote just because it’s a Dan Sullivan,” he said.This is not the first time a ballot has featured multiple Dan Sullivans. In 2014, Dan S. Sullivan was running for Senate for the first time when Dan A. Sullivan, the mayor of Anchorage, was running for lieutenant governor (the Senate bid was successful; the lieutenant-governor one was not). Then, in 2016, the former mayor briefly ran for the state’s other Senate seat. Had he won, both of the state’s U.S. senators would have been named Dan Sullivan. Neither of those Dan Sullivans returned my messages.The Dan Sullivan who has put the name into the news is Dan J. Sullivan, who lives in Petersburg, a small fishing village on an island where Sitka black-tailed deer outnumber the roughly 3,000 people. His father was named Dan Sullivan. So was his grandfather. At the moment, so is one of his sitting senators. Shortly before the June 1 deadline, he filed paperwork declaring his candidacy. “We need a Sullivan who stands up for Alaska,” his website says.Read: Republicans have only themselves to blame for their Alaskan defeatThe only Dan Sullivans he personally knows, he told me in an email, are in his own family: three Dan Sullivans and four more Dans who are not Sullivans. “We all have nicknames,” he said. “Mine will never be divulged.” He says that his campaign strategy mostly consists of maintaining his website and posting on social media. “Maybe some travel, but I don’t have much money,” he told me. (He has $8,400 cash on hand in his campaign account. The other Dan Sullivan has nearly $7.3 million.)His candidacy was immediately challenged by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which referred to him as “Sham Candidate Sullivan,” and the Alaska Republican Party. Senator Dan Sullivan told reporters in Washington that it was “an insult” and that the challenger was “trying to trick my constituents to rig the election for Peltola.” “This is serious stuff,” he told CNN. “When people are going, Oh there’s two Dan Sullivans, isn’t that funny? No. It’s cheating.”The senator and his allies pointed to similarities between the challenger’s logo and the senator’s: Both are navy and mustard-yellow and feature at least one gold star. They accused the other Dan Sullivan of being part of a partisan plot engineered by a Democratic consultant. The Sullivan facing those questions told me the consultant had helped set up his campaign site and provided “tips on communications and basic campaign functions,” but said “she is not currently working for me.” They questioned his party affiliation. (He was previously a member of the Alaska Independence Party, but when that disbanded late last year, he switched his affiliation to the Republican Party, which he said was in line with his conservative views.) The director of the Alaska Division of Elections, which is overseen by the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, determined in June that the newcomer’s declaration as a candidate was invalid because it had been “filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead and to thereby compromise the ballot’s fairness or neutrality.” The Sullivan in question appealed to the Alaska Superior Court.“I am running because I am tired of sitting back and watching our current Senator routinely fail to represent the interests of ordinary Alaskans like me,” he wrote in his defense. “The fact that Senator Sullivan shares my first and last names adds insult to injury, motivating me to raise my hand as an alternative choice for Alaskans.”Ultimately, the court determined that Dan Sullivan met all the requirements for making the ballot: It was his actual name; he did live in Alaska; he was over the age of 30. The whole experience, he told me, has been “daunting” because he feels unfairly singled out. “Typical of Sullivan to cry about it, make a nickname, and blame others,” he said, when asked about being called a “sham” candidate. Of the dozens of candidates running statewide in Alaska, he said, “only I have been accused of bad intentions (including one guy who is in jail). Seems unfair to me.”Both Dan Sullivans were on the ballot in the nonpartisan primary earlier this month, after which the top four candidates advanced to the general election. Peltola, the Democratic candidate, got the most votes, leading the incumbent Sullivan by seven percentage points. Daniel J. Sullivan came in a distant third with 2.5 percent of the vote, qualifying him for the general election—and showing that he could be a spoiler in November.His advancement angered Republicans, including the president. “The Crooked, Radical Left Dumocrats have put up another man named ‘Dan Sullivan,’ and they did this to take Votes away from our Great Senator of the same name,” Donald Trump wrote on social media. Senator Dan Sullivan’s early campaign ads have not mentioned the other Dan Sullivan, and when he talks in his speeches about an opponent, he references only Peltola.Read: Democrats’ great Alaskan hopeBut this is not the first time an election has featured similarly named candidates and accusations of political shenanigans. When John F. Kennedy ran for Congress in 1946 against a Boston city council member named Joe Russo, his allies helped recruit a janitor named Joe Russo to also run. In 2004, Representative José E. Serrano of New York was primaried by an unemployed former dockworker, Jose E. Serrano, who dropped out after being questioned about his legislative platform and not knowing what that was. In 2024, the governor’s race in Washington State featured Attorney General Bob Ferguson running against Robert Arthur Ferguson and Robert Benjamin Ferguson (the latter two Fergusons withdrew from the primary before ballots were printed).The name Dan Sullivan is common enough. There was the offensive lineman for the Baltimore Colts in the 1960s. There was the race-car driver Danny Sullivan, who won the 1985 Indianapolis 500. There’s a theater and film director named Daniel J. Sullivan. Daniel was the ninth-most-common first name and Sullivan was the 107th-most-common last name in the United States in 2020, according to census records. There are nearly 5,300 Dan Sullivans in the country, according to the personal search aggregator Spokeo, and more than two dozen in Alaska.In Anchorage, there’s the Sullivan Arena (named for the city’s longtime mayor, George M. Sullivan, the father of the Dan Sullivan who was the most recent mayor of Anchorage) and Sullivan’s Steakhouse (named after John Sullivan, a 19th-century boxer). “Sullivan just seems to be the big thing,” Dan Sullivan the Wasilla mechanic told me. “But I don’t know any benefits from it that I’m aware of. I don’t get any discount at the steakhouse or anything.”The Dan Sullivan from Nome told me he would occasionally get random calls from people around the state confronting him about his campaign promises, especially when the Anchorage mayor and the U.S. senator were both Dan Sullivans. “I’d show my credit card, and they’d look at me and do a double take,” he said. “I got to meet all the Dan Sullivans. All the famous ones. I’m probably the least interesting out of all of them.” (He has since retired and has been traveling, and says he has not yet done his homework on which candidate he’ll support in the election).For the Dan Sullivans, it can be a little disorienting when the political ads are blanketing the airwaves. “It’ll say, Dan Sullivan’s ruining the Alaska fisheries! Or Dan Sullivan voted to raise your health insurance! I’m like, No, I didn’t! It wasn’t me,” said Dan Sullivan the mechanic. “Or you’ll get an ad on the radio and it’s like, Dan Sullivan’s great for Alaska! Yeah, he is.” He’s not much into politics, so he says he’s unlikely to join the other Dan Sullivans in campaigning. He’s more conservative, so he plans to vote for the incumbent senator.As if things couldn’t get more confusing, there’s also a Dan Sullivan who has run for Congress in Massachusetts. There are so many Dan Sullivans that, at times, my attempts to reach the ones in Alaska went awry. I messaged a Dan Sullivan I thought for sure was from Palmer, Alaska, but instead located one in Cleveland, Ohio. He politely responded that his origins are in Brooklyn and Massachusetts. “I am Daniel M. Sullivan. My dad was Daniel P. Sullivan,” he said. Although he won’t be voting in Alaska, the intrigue has caught his eye: “I have been following this story with interest.”The Alaska race will be determined in November. At least in this election cycle, there’s room for only one Dan Sullivan in the Senate (and possibly none). But some other Dan Sullivans are getting ideas about future options.“Maybe one of us needs to run for president,” Dan Sullivan the mechanic told me. Or perhaps two? “You can pick anybody you want. As long as it’s Dan Sullivan.”