The New York Times reported Wednesday that operatives aligned with Mary Peltola, the Democrat seeking to unseat Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, secretly recruited other Republican candidates to act as spoilers in Alaska’s U.S. Senate election.
According to the Times story, one of them was a man with the same name as the incumbent senator — Dan J. Sullivan of Petersburg — who is on the ballot alongside the incumbent senator and his Democratic challenger in a tight and pivotal race.
And while the Peltola campaign has also said it did not work to convince the Petersburg Sullivan to run, the Times found evidence and people that said otherwise.
New York Times reporter Kellen Browning says that included Peltola's former campaign manager, who was fired shortly before the August primary election.
Listen to the interview at the link above. The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kellen Browning: Well, I think after people were fired from Mary Peltola's campaign, veteran people that had been with her for years, that obviously creates a dynamic where people are potentially more willing to divulge information that they previously were trying to keep secret, right?
In my reporting and in this story, I quote Elisa Rios, Mary Peltola's former campaign manager, who was fired in August and, as we report in the story, had been preparing for a lawsuit against the campaign. And she was the one who told me on the record quite a bit of this story about how Democrats had worked to recruit candidates to get on the ballot, and that's of course information that I verified elsewhere and had corroborating evidence to support. But that certainly is a key part of it.
Casey Grove: So it sounds like one of those people that was was doing the recruiting, maybe the main person, was this guy Jarid Kurtz. And the story describes some concern about keeping his activity secret, and I think some of the text messages that you mentioned point to that. Can you tell me, who is Jarid Kurtz? What was he up to in Alaska?
KB: Yeah, so Jarid Kurtz — and we, I should note, did not get the chance to talk to him for the story. We reached out in a variety of ways but did not hear back from him, and he actually made his social media accounts private I think over just the last couple of days — he is from Ohio, had worked in Ohio politics for some time, and also in Georgia. And so he was brought in by National Democrats with the DSCC (Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee) and the Peltola campaign.
He was introduced to the Peltola people as somebody that was a specialist in these kinds of ballot tricks or schemes. That was his job here: to be on the ground and speaking with candidates, potentially using fake names, at least in one instance that we know about, to convince them to get on the ballot.
CG: So the Petersburg Dan Sullivan, Dan J. Sullivan, is one of these people that has been revealed in your story to have been recruited to run for U.S. Senate. Of course, there's been a ton of controversy around him. He has denied that anybody persuaded him to run. I mean, he said that to us. I heard audio that you had on the Daily, the New York Times podcast, literally saying "Nobody put me up to this." Of course, the story says that's not true. What efforts did you make to get him to address that?
KB: Yeah, well, as you note, I spoke with him in August in Petersburg. I flew to this small fishing village in Alaska where he lives, and I pressed him on this issue, and he was pretty definitive that he had not been pushed into the race. Although I will note, he did not really want to speak about his connection with a woman named Amber Lee, and this is a Democratic consultant that we know from a Republican investigation at the time that this is a woman who helped him file, actually file to run for office.
Now he said to me that she is someone that he found using an online search, and that there was no broader effort to push him into the race. But of course, I asked him about that at the time, and we made efforts to reach him again in the past week when we were preparing to publish a story and did not hear back from him. So, by that standard, we have to go on the evidence that we've collected, and that suggests that he he was indeed pushed into this race, was at least contacted by Jarid Kurtz, and told Kurtz that he was open to running if it would help Peltola.
Now, of course, we don't know was he already thinking about running. He had told me that people for years had joked with him about how he should run for Senate because he and the senator have the same name. But it seems clear that Democrats were involved in this, at least.
CG: Yeah. And I guess at least one humpback whale surfaced while you were talking to him on the beach there in Petersburg.
KB: Yeah, I mean, there's there's a lot of benefits to being in Alaska at a beautiful time of year.
CG: So he has denied that and hasn't talked since the story was published. But the story does include one person that you spoke to that says he was recruited to run. What did he say?
KB: Yeah, this is a man named Matthew Salisbury. He told me that he was contacted by a man back last December, out of the blue. This man called himself Zane, but we know and believe now that that was Jarid Kurtz, because I asked this would-be candidate Matthew Salisbury to identify him. I sent him a picture of Jarid Kurtz, and he said, "Yeah, that's the guy that I talked to."
So this is actually Kurtz using a pseudonym, talking to this guy Salisbury, and Salisbury told me this man, Kurtz, asked him to run for Senate, encouraged him to get into the race, and over the course of several months, including in person, continued to push him to run, although he did not share who he was working for or his motivation or even a last name, so that obviously gave this guy Salisbury some skepticism.
CG: Now, whether these activities were shady or not, I think is up for debate. But in your reporting, did you find anything to suggest that this was illegal? And if not, how common is this sort of thing?
KB: No, we did not find anything that appeared illegal about this, and this is a defense that Democrats have made since the story came out, that this is not illegal, and both parties engage in these kinds of shenanigans with some regularity, which is true. Republicans, as recently as this year, were supporting super PACs that backed Democratic candidates in the Senate primary, with the seeming purpose of getting Democrats on the ballot alongside Mary Peltola to split the vote, just in the same way that Democrats were trying to do the same with Republicans.
So it's definitely true that this is not outside the norm, but this is maybe an especially interesting case with the two Dan Sullivans and the interest around them. It's a case where we have a lot of details and evidence that might be a bit unusual, and of course, the Trump administration has tried to make hay out of this in the last week or so.
CG: Including an amended complaint in the Department of Justice lawsuit that actually references the New York Times. It says something like, "The New York Times publishes things that aren't true, but in this case, we agree with them," is I think the gist of what I saw there.
I did want to ask you, you mentioned Alisa Rios, the the former Peltola campaign manager, she seemed to be the the main on-the-record source in that story, at least kind of where it starts. And then it says that she tried to retract her interview. Why did the Times decide to go ahead and publish her comments despite that?
KB: Yeah, well, and I can't get into too much of my sourcing and of our internal deliberations, I'm not sure that I'm even authorized to speak about that. We have editors that ultimately make those decisions, but I can say that we spoke with her, and I spoke with her and worked to verify what she was telling me, and did, and found evidence to support her claims.
We never agreed to let her take back statements or anything of that nature. So I think anything more detailed on that would probably have to come from people above me at the Times. But suffice it to say, we thought about this decision, of course, and tried to follow our best journalistic practices here, and again corroborated what she was saying elsewhere,
CG: Right, yeah, gotcha.
So ranked choice voting is the system that we have in Alaska, and of course there is a ballot measure to try to remove that. But that's what we have right now. And, at least in theory, ranked choice voting should blunt the impact of spoiler candidates. Do you think that fact is getting lost in the national conversation around this story?
KB: Yeah, I do a little bit, and I think it's an important point that, as you say, because of ranked choice voting, if you're a Republican and you're confused about which Sullivan is the "real" Sullivan, the senator, you could rank both Sullivans. You could leave the rest of your ballot blank if you wanted, and presumably the other Dan Sullivan, Dan J. Sullivan, will be eliminated in an early round of the tabulation of the ballot, and his votes would then go, people that vote for him, would then go to their second choice, which would be Sen. Dan Sullivan, and he would ultimately get their support. So that is true, and it's an important point.
But it's also true — and I think this is the scenario that Republicans are concerned about — that some voters could simply rank one person. Maybe they don't have the time or the interest to read up about all these different candidates. They haven't heard about this, I don't know, but they rank one person, and maybe they rank the "wrong" Dan Sullivan in Republicans' eyes, Dan J. Sullivan, and leave the rest of their ballot blank. And in that case, the senator would not ultimately get that vote, and maybe that could indirectly benefit Mary Peltola if it's a close race.
So if they leave the rest of their ballot blank and only rank one person, that could be one area where this maybe could have an impact, and I believe it's also true that Republicans in the past have been found to be more likely to only rank one candidate than Democrats.
CG: I'm just curious what type of reaction you've had so far to the story since it was published.
KB: Well, I would say that Democrats, for the most part, have said this is normal behavior, "It's not a big deal, and by the way, it's something that we should be doing, pulling out all the stops to stop the Trump administration in this existential era." That's what Democrats are saying.
And, of course, Republicans are furious, and they feel that this is feeding into what they were already suspecting, some sort of plot, and the president, as everyone I think is aware, has reacted very strongly to this. And the Justice Department was already pursuing a lawsuit, and we now know that they are carrying out more investigatory actions because of this, so I think it's fair to say that this has broken down along partisan lines. But also, you know, there may be plenty of voters that decide this is not that important to them. So it's hard to say. We're only a few days out from the election, so I think we're going to kind of have to wait and see how this plays out on Election Day and maybe in the days beyond.
