It looks like Alaska will have two candidates named Dan Sullivan on the November ballot for U.S. Senate, as well as Democrat Mary Peltola.
Rounding out the top four in the early results was Republican Gerald Heikes, leading Democrat David Leslie by just 16 votes.
That’s according to preliminary results the state Division of Elections released late Tuesday.
Peltola, who served as Alaska’s lone U.S. House representative from September 2022 to January 2025, led the Senate race with nearly 47% of the vote, with more than half of Alaska precincts reporting. Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, a Republican who has held the seat since 2015, was in second with more than 44%.
At Peltola’s watch party at 49th State Brewing in downtown Anchorage, the crowd cheered as the national cable news networks showed the Alaska results.
She took the stage early in the evening and said just one member of Alaska's delegation to Congress is working for the state — a reference to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Republican who sometimes breaks party ranks.
Without saying the president’s name, Peltola criticized Trump administration policies, from job cuts to reducing Medicaid, and knocked Sen. Sullivan for not opposing them.
“Dan Sullivan, every single vote, votes along with corporate greed,” she said. “He is there for every fat cat in the nation, from healthcare to fuel to groceries to transportation to heat.”
Alaska’s Senate race is one of just four nationwide that are rated as tossups. With control of the chamber at stake, money from around the country is flooding into the campaigns, much of it in small donations through the partisan fundraising platforms ActBlue and Winred. Sullivan had raised nearly $12 million by the end of July. Peltola had raised more than $18 million.
Dan J. Sullivan, a registered Republican from Petersburg in Southeast Alaska, trails the major candidates by a large margin, but it appears he’ll win a spot on the November ballot, too.
That could be problematic for the incumbent. Republicans fought hard to keep him off the ballot, saying some voters could accidentally cast their ballots for the challenger, whom they’ve dubbed “Decoy Dan.”
But incumbent Sen. Sullivan’s accusations of “cheating” and “corruption,” followed by Republican insistence that the other Dan Sullivan be removed from the ballot, brought more and more attention to the first-time candidate.
President Donald Trump has endorsed Sen. Sullivan and, in a social media post early Tuesday, called the other Sullivan an “imposter.”
“Vote for the “INCUMBENT SENATOR.” Don’t let these Fraudsters get away with this HOAX,” Trump wrote.
Petersburg Dan Sullivan maintains he’s not trying to trick voters. He said he’s tired of seeing his name associated with positions his abhors and wants to provide an alternative.
“Having my representative share my name and continually do a job that, in my opinion, is not what helps people of Alaska — it just sort of hit harder maybe than it hits other people,” he said in June. “You just take it a little more personally.”
The Alaska Democratic Party and the Peltola campaign have said they had nothing to do with Petersburg Sullivan’s candidacy. So far, his fundraising reveals no major partisan help. His contributors are mostly from Petersburg.
Meanwhile, newly created super PACs spent more than $3 million to elevate minor candidates, including Heikes and Leslie, in the Senate race, hoping they would draw votes away from one of the major candidates, to the advantage of the one they want to win.
