Donald Trump has encouraged Alaskans to vote for the “real” Dan Sullivan, as he sought a breakthrough for the Republican incumbent senator in a tightly fought Senate race complicated by a rival candidate with a near-identical name.
Sullivan’s re-election campaign this year against Democrat Mary Peltola, a former US House lawmaker, has turned into one of the most hotly contested battles of the midterm elections, in which Democrats are hoping to seize back control of Congress and hamper Trump for the final two years of his presidency.
Though Alaska supported the president by a wide margin in the 2024 elections, recent polls have shown a close race between Peltola and Sullivan, who are joined on next month’s ballot by another candidate named Daniel Sullivan , a retired schoolteacher also running as a Republican. The incumbent has accused his similarly named challenger of colluding with Democrats to split the votes of his supporters to Peltola’s advantage.
“On November 3, we’re going to send one of the best and most respected senators in DC Dan Sullivan, the real Dan Sullivan,” Trump told a packed auditorium on Tuesday in Wasilla, a city about 45 miles (72km) north of Anchorage. He urged the audience to reject “the fake Dan Sullivan”, whom he said was “put up by” the Democrats.
“That’s just cheating. They’re terrible,” the president said. “They found a guy named Dan Sullivan, they put him up to get a little confused.”
Noting the 2.5% of the vote that the challenger Sullivan received in the August primary election , Trump said: “That’s a lot, that’s too much. That could be the difference.”
The incumbent senator will appear on the 3 November ballot with the words “(Registered Republican) Incumbent” next to his name.
The election will be held under ranked-choice voting and Alaskans can rank up to five candidates. In his speech, Trump attacked the method approved by a 2020 voter referendum as “a scam”, and encouraged Alaskans to support a measure on this year’s ballot to repeal it.
Speaking before Trump took the stage, Sullivan accused Peltola of planning to undermine Alaska’s oil and gas industry, which plays a major role in supporting the state’s economy even though production has declined since its peak in the late 1980s.
“Joe Biden, [Chuck] Schumer, their Democratic allies came after Alaska with a barrage of executive orders to shut down our state, kill jobs, drive up the cost of energy, and my opponent, Mary Peltola, not only did nothing to stop it, she enabled it,” Sullivan said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Peltola’s campaign said the candidate “looks forward to working with President Trump to unleash Alaska energy and lower costs … when she’s elected to the United States Senate.”
“While Dan Sullivan continues to feel the fallout of his failed policies and support for the war in Iran, Mary spent the day talking with Alaskans … about how she will fight to lower their costs (and) take on DC corruption,” the spokesperson said in reference to Peltola’s campaign visit on Tuesday to Kotzebue, in north-west Alaska.
Peltola won a special election to the US House of Representatives in 2022 after the death of longtime Republican congressman Don Young, then a full term later that year. She was defeated in 2024 by Republican Nick Begich, who is seeking re-election this year.
Recent polls have the candidates neck-and-neck in a state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 2008.
