Hey everyone, Matt here.
The Overton window has shifted, and I really need to talk about it again.
In my last article about political ethics, I wrote about Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Amy Acton’s estranged biological mother. The ad itself was disturbing. But watching people defend it as good politics or an acceptable campaign tactic showed how much our standards have changed.
We have shifted in our intellectual and moral honesty. Democrats are quick to call Republicans unethical, and Republicans do the same to Democrats. Yet when we talk about campaign tactics, we increasingly skip the question of whether something is right or wrong.
Instead, we ask: Did the other guy do it? Can we use it as a political talking point? If they did it, does that mean we can do it, too?
Somewhere in that conversation, we stopped asking whether we should.
The controversy surrounding Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign in Alaska is another example. And Democrats should be willing to call it out.
Two Dan Sullivans on the Ballot
Mary Peltola is a former Alaska congresswoman who lost her reelection campaign in 2024 and is now running for the U.S. Senate against Republican incumbent Dan S. Sullivan.
The New York Times reported that senior members of her campaign worked with Democratic operatives and personnel from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, or DSCC, on a project to shape the ballot in her favor.
Part of that effort involved searching Alaska voter records for people named Dan Sullivan. Another Dan Sullivan, a retired teacher from Petersburg, ultimately entered the race and appeared on the general-election ballot alongside the incumbent.
The apparent strategy was to confuse at least some voters into selecting the wrong Sullivan.
The investigation described internal communications, recruitment efforts, and discussions involving campaign aides and DSCC personnel. Peltola’s former campaign manager, Elisa Rios, said Peltola was “definitely aware,” although she was not directly organizing the operation. Rios later tried to retract her statements, and the newspaper proceeded with its reporting.
Peltola denies knowing about the effort, and the DSCC denies involvement in recruiting the candidates. Those denials sit alongside the communications and accounts described in the investigation.
There is also money to account for. The pro-Peltola 49th State PAC reportedly paid approximately $87,000 to Wingspan Strategies, a consulting firm co-owned by an operative identified in the recruitment effort. The amount spent specifically on recruitment remains unresolved.
This was an organized effort to gain an electoral advantage by changing who appeared on the ballot. In the case of the second Sullivan, the shared name was the point.
“Just Read the Ballot” Is Not a Defense
The response from some Democrats has been that the ballot clearly distinguishes the candidates. Read it carefully, they say, and you can tell which Sullivan is which.
That does not change the practice.
Somebody commenting on my Facebook post treated it as something funny, a way to watch Republicans lose their minds. But deliberately trying to confuse people while they vote is not a joke.
Let’s say 99% of voters understand exactly what is happening. What about the other 1%?
The strategy does not require everybody to vote for the wrong candidate. It depends on enough people being distracted, rushing, or simply not paying close attention when they find the name they intended to select.
Alaska is a Republican-leaning state. For a Democrat challenging a Republican incumbent, small margins matter. One vote, two votes, a hundred votes. Campaigns fight over those numbers because they can change an election.
You can point to the middle initials, party labels, and other distinctions on the ballot all day. The ethical question remains: Why organize a search for somebody with your opponent’s name in the first place?
I think deliberately engineering that kind of confusion should be illegal. We should certainly be able to agree that it is unacceptable without waiting for a court to tell us what our standards are.
The Same Dirty Tricks in Ohio’s 7th
In Ohio’s 7th District, Congressman Max Miller has been attacking Brian Poindexter with claims about an extensive police record, including crack cocaine allegations and swallowing crack during a traffic stop.
But those drug allegations involved a different Brian Poindexter. The two men were born in the same year, but in different months. The other Brian Poindexter is also Black.
Miller put another man’s record in front of voters as though it belonged to his opponent. That is a sleazy, deceptive tactic that depends on people accepting the accusation without noticing that the records belong to somebody else.
Democrats are right to call that out. But those same Democrats should be willing to condemn the Alaska ballot scheme. You cannot be outraged when a Republican uses a shared name to mislead voters and then laugh it off as clever politics when Democratic operatives exploit a shared name to confuse them.
The standard has to apply even when your own party benefits.
Everybody Has an Excuse for Their Own Side
Republicans are furious about the Alaska story. Yet some of those same Republicans defended Ramaswamy’s decision to use Acton’s estranged mother against her, despite the documented history of childhood abuse and her mother remaining with the accused abuser.
Now some Democrats are defending the Alaska tactic with essentially the same argument: Get over it. We need to win.
That is exactly what I am talking about.
The objection disappears when the tactic becomes useful to our side. Suddenly, people who were demanding decency last week are explaining why decency is a luxury we cannot afford this week. Armchair moral justice warriors.
And there is always another example ready. Republicans did something similar somewhere else. Democrats have done worse. Somebody got away with it in the last election. The whataboutism that takes over the debate.
How does any of that answer whether we should be doing it now?
If every unethical act becomes permission for the other party to do the same thing, the standard can only keep getting worse. Each campaign inherits the last campaign’s worst behavior and treats it as the new starting point.
Then we act surprised when somebody pushes it further.
We Cannot Keep Moving the Line
We have to do better.
The Overton window cannot keep shifting until there are no rules, no standards, and no norms we are willing to uphold. Those things are part of what allows this country to function.
The United States cannot run indefinitely on the idea that whatever helps your party win is acceptable.
The tactics described in the reporting about Peltola’s campaign and Senate Democratic personnel deserve to be called out. So does Miller’s use of another Brian Poindexter’s record. So does Ramaswamy’s exploitation of Acton’s childhood trauma.
Our willingness to condemn bad campaigning cannot depend on which candidate benefits.
If we want people to trust elections, we cannot excuse attempts to confuse them when they vote. If we want campaigns to tell the truth, we cannot defend misleading attacks because we dislike the person being targeted. And if we want basic decency in politics, we have to demand it from the candidates we support.
Somebody has to say that a tactic is unacceptable before it becomes another precedent everyone points to next time.
Because the window is moving so drastically and so quickly that we can barely keep up. Every time we excuse it, we help move it again.
I’ll see you closer to election night to talk about where these races stand.
The practices are sadly common and nothing new. Name games honestly bother me much less than false candidates running to divide close races as spoilers-- with all that murky money flowing into campaigns, spoilers pose a far greater threat than name game confusion. In Ohio, we've got a strawman socialist spoiler running against Brown in Ohio with millions of MAGA dollars behind promises of a $30/hr minimum wage an rent freezes. I've received 6 laughable mailers thus far claiming Brown is too pro-Trump.
While Peltola's campaign didn't do anything plenty of other campaigns engage in, this was dumb. Don't forget Alaskan voters had to write-in Murkowski (with legal wrangling over the spelling variations) to re-elect her to the Senate in 2010. While their voters often puzzle me, they're paying attention. The gains for that campaign of Sullivan v. Sullivan confusion are likely to be offset by Alaska voters wrinkling their noses at the tactic.
We do need to win. This is a death match for our nation. I am very upset if Mary’s campaign used dirty tricks and am angry but trump in power for 2 more years is much worse.