Alaska’s Senate Race Hangs on 637 Votes. The ‘Decoy’ Dan Sullivan Took 3,600.

Alaska’s U.S. Senate race is a coin flip, and the coin has two Dan Sullivans on it. With 400 of 401 precincts reporting, Democrat Mary Peltola leads Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan by 637 votes, 102,962 to 102,325, in the Alaska Division of Elections’ unofficial count posted Wednesday.

The other Dan Sullivan, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., the retired Petersburg teacher at the center of the Justice Department’s “Decoy Dan” probe, took 3,600 votes. That’s more than five times Peltola’s lead. Republican Gerald Heikes took another 4,846.

Nobody is at 50%. Peltola sits at 48.02% and Sullivan at 47.72%. Under Alaska’s ranked-choice law, that means the race isn’t decided by who’s ahead tonight. It gets decided by where those 8,446 Heikes and Sullivan Jr. ballots go next.

Why the small numbers decide it

Alaska voters rank the candidates. If nobody wins a majority of first choices, the last-place finisher is dropped and each of his ballots moves to that voter’s next pick. Repeat until someone crosses 50%. Think of it as a runoff that already happened on the same ballot.

That’s the cruel twist of the decoy. A voter who picked Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. thinking he was the senator may never have ranked the real one at all. A ballot with no next choice simply drops out. That’s the danger of a decoy: he doesn’t have to win to do damage. He just has to take votes that were never meant for him.

Still, the transfers have favored the Republican before. In 2024, when Peltola lost her House seat to Nick Begich, the ranked-choice rounds widened his edge. The Division’s 2024 ranked-choice report shows third-place John Howe’s 13,871 ballots split 4,817 for Begich, 2,724 for Peltola and 6,295 with no next choice. Begich turned a 48.5% first round into a 51.2% win.

Here’s the math, for illustration only. If the Heikes and Sullivan Jr. ballots broke the way Howe’s did, Sullivan would gain about 2,930 and Peltola about 1,660. That swing of roughly 1,270 votes is about twice her current lead. Heikes ran as a Republican, so his voters could lean even harder to Sullivan. Nobody knows how the decoy’s voters ranked, and that’s exactly what the case is about.

What each camp said

Sullivan spoke to the Alaska Republican Party’s election night crowd just after the polls closed, with the Lower 48 already turning blue.

Peltola told her own election night party not to expect a fast answer. “It won’t be days. It will be weeks,” she said. She also waved off the controversy around her campaign without naming it.

She didn’t mention the second Sullivan, the Justice Department’s target letters or the grand jury subpoena to Senate Democrats’ campaign arm. Her campaign and the DSCC have denied any role in putting him on the ballot. The New York Times reported Oct. 28 that Peltola aides and DSCC staff worked on a “ballot composition project” after a staffer was told to find every Dan Sullivan in Alaska. DOJ offered no new details on its investigation Wednesday, the Washington Examiner reported.

What happens next

The count isn’t done. Alaska accepts mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive within 10 days, by Nov. 13, and overseas ballots for 15 days, under state law. Those ballots will move the first-round numbers before any transfers happen.

Then comes the big day. The Division says ranked-choice results won’t be available until Nov. 18, once every eligible ballot is reviewed and counted. Rep. Nick Begich is in the same spot: he’s at 49.52% in the House race, a hair short of the line, against independent Bill Hill at 40.32%.

For Sullivan, the path is narrow but real. He needs the late mail to hold close and the Heikes ballots to come home. For Peltola, the question gets harder the longer this drags: if she wins by fewer votes than a man recruited for his name, Alaskans will want to know who did the recruiting. Prosecutors already do.