MAGA’s Same-Name "Sham" Shame Game
MAGA is looking at the U.S. Senate primary ballot and seeing a literal infinity mirror of Dan Sullivans, and it's driving them completely insane.
There's a lot of crazy shit going on right now, and Trump's stupid war in Iran, which is pushing gas and energy prices to their highest levels in years, with no end in sight, is at the top of the list. Or, it should be.
As Alaskans, we already pay a premium just to keep the lights on and the heat running. I think it's fair to say that Republican policies are crushing working families and driving up the cost of living. Fact: When energy costs spike, it ripples through everything we buy.
Have you walked through a grocery store lately? I have.
Affordability has completely evaporated, and the most basic groceries have become luxury items. For many of us, feeding our families now means making hard choices between putting food on the table, keeping the gas tank filled, or paying the electric bill.
Alex DeMarban
But don't worry, while corporate profits climb and Alaskans are being priced out of most everything, Republican politicians are choosing to obsess over keeping a U.S. Senate primary challenger off the ballot right here at home.
Big Lie Republicans from the National Republican Senatorial Committee have sent a Big Lie letter to Lieutenant Governor Nancy Dahlstrom and Director of Elections Carol Beecher. You might recall that Dahlstrom ended her campaign for governor this week. While she has always been a terrible candidate, her decision is almost certainly about the lawsuit over her sharing our confidential voter data with Trump's DOJ.
The NRSC's letter, reads like a cheap political thriller written by someone who has never set one foot in Alaska. NRSC General Counsel Blake Murphy spins a wild conspiracy theory claiming the second Dan Sullivan - a respected school teacher from Petersburg, is a puppet deployed to confuse voters and rig the election for Mary Peltola.
Full disclosure - I am not a lawyer, but am mostly competent. After a plain reading of the letter, one can easily deduce that the letter (written in Trump-speak) intends to confuse facts and entice the MAGA base into devouring a dish of raw red meat. Anyone who has spent any time on Alaska social media knows that MAGA is adept at one thing only: repeating the Great Orange One's lies.
First, the NRSC claims the Petersburg challenger is ineligible because the public voter portal still lists his affiliation as undeclared. This hot take isn't even a real thing, but it is noteworthy that Petersburg Dan Sullivan recently changed his political affiliation from undeclared to Republican. The NRSC basically argues that he shouldn't be allowed to that. It's a deranged, nonsensical argument lacking any kind of merit.
Then, there are hilarious accusations that the Petersburg Dan Sullivan has engaged in intellectual property theft because his logo used a blue and gold color scheme as well as the North Star.
Did someone at the NRSC hit their head?
Blue, gold, and the North Star are the most generic, ubiquitous elements in Alaska political campaigns. And further, the Division of Elections is an administrative body, not a federal trademark court, and has zero jurisdiction over what is tantamount to a petty graphic design dispute.
Let's talk about the meta data in Petersburg Sullivan's press release. Someone discovered that the release was formatted by a progressive communications consultant and claims (rather incredibly) that this is proof of COLLUSION between some combination of Peltola's campaign, the Alaska Democratic Party, and Petersburg Sullivan's campaign.
It is a spurious allegation Peltola's campaign and ADP have flatly denied. Still, MAGA, never keen on the truth or facts, doesn't seem to much care about either chiefly because their immunity to hypocrisy is their ultimate political superpower.
Case and point - there was a time when a White House plot to seize state voting machines would have dominated the front page of every news organization in the world and Democratic and Republican members of Congress would be on TV screaming about drafting articles of impeachment.
As Trump's approval numbers plunge through the floor, and it increasingly looks as though democrats will take control of the U.S. House of Representatives after the Midterm elections, Trump is on record as saying that he doesn't even want to even hold Midterm elections.
So I find it curious that a plot endeavoring to ban HALF the country's voting machines isn't something the NRSC or U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan want to talk about - because "dirty tricks" and stealing and rigging elections to disenfranchise millions of Americans is in fact an act right out of the MAGA playbook.
The same D.C. beltway operatives who stayed silent while the Trump White House secretly plotted to break the back of American democracy are trying to cancel a retired school teacher in Petersburg named Dan Sullivan who filled out a candidate filing form cuz "dirty tricks" and election interference. Sad!
They want us to believe they're "concerned" about "election integrity" and "fairness" while actively remaining silent on efforts to ban voting machines, suppress choice, and illegally turn over your your personal voter data to Trump's DOJ.
Sounds about right.
