When Democrats cannot win on the merits they rewrite the rules. That is the only conclusion left after a New York Times report detailed how operatives tied to Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign spent months hunting for another Alaskan named Dan Sullivan so they could plant him on the ballot and siphon votes from the Republican incumbent.
Governor Mike Dunleavy responded the only way a serious executive should. He ordered the Department of Public Safety to investigate whether the scheme broke Alaska law and whether criminal charges or civil action are warranted.
“Today’s New York Times reporting reveals disturbing new evidence of an organized effort to manipulate Alaska’s elections by recruiting candidates — including one with the same name as an incumbent U.S. Senator — to deliberately confuse voters and misdirect their votes,” Dunleavy wrote on X. “The Alaska Division of Elections investigated these very concerns in June of this year. The new reporting substantially supports the Division’s findings.”
He added that Alaskans “have a fundamental right to vote for the candidate they actually intend to support” and that deliberately tricking voters “strikes at the integrity of our elections.”
The Times account is not subtle. In the summer of 2025 a Peltola staffer received instructions from top campaign aides to scour voter records for every person in the state named Dan Sullivan. The goal was obvious. Alaska’s ranked-choice system advances the top four finishers from the primary regardless of party. Planting a namesake next to Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan would force some voters to choose between two nearly identical names. The plan worked. A retired teacher from the tiny Panhandle village of Petersburg, Dan J. Sullivan, filed and made the general-election ballot.
The reporting goes further. The effort, internally called the “ballot composition project,” involved Peltola’s team, campaign lawyers, and senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Veteran operative Jerid Kurtz, described as a specialist in secret ballot maneuvers, made contact with the Petersburg Sullivan.
According to the Times, Kurtz told Peltola aides that the retiree “said he hated Trump, and if it was going to help Mary, he liked Mary.” Text messages show Peltola’s then-chief of staff worrying that Kurtz was being too conspicuous; a DSCC official replied they would “check in.”
Former campaign manager Elisa Rios, who was later fired, told the paper that Peltola herself was “definitely aware” of the operation even if she did not participate directly. Rios later tried to retract those statements. The Times said other evidence still supported the story.
Both the Peltola campaign and the DSCC continue to deny any role. “The Alaskans for Mary campaign has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign and did not recruit any candidates into the race,” the campaign told the Times. That denial now sits next to text messages, a dozen interviews, and documents prepared for a potential lawsuit.
In June the Division of Elections had already removed Dan J. Sullivan from the primary ballot after finding a “preponderance of the evidence” that his name and party affiliation were chosen to confuse voters. The Alaska Supreme Court put him back, ruling that state law does not require candidates to run in good faith. He appears on the November ballot as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., listed without party affiliation, while the incumbent is clearly marked as the Republican.
President Trump called the scheme “Voter Fraud at the Highest Level” and demanded that Peltola be removed from the ballot and prosecuted.
“The Democrats cheated,” he wrote. “They found a man named Dan Sullivan, put him on the Ballot, then lied to the Court, and said they didn’t know anything about it. That’s perjury.”
Sen. Dan Sullivan, appearing on Hannity, said this is what happens when a candidate “has nothing to run on” and noted that Peltola still has not apologized. “What’s remarkable here is that even today, she has not apologized. Even today, she’s kind of playing as if nothing happened.”
The Justice Department has already sued to delay certification if the namesake’s votes could change the outcome.
Peltola dismissed the entire story as “all stuff to sell newspapers.” That is the classic response when the facts become inconvenient. Ballot-stacking is not new in Alaska, and both parties have used it. The difference is the months of public denial while the evidence of coordination accumulated.
Scripture does not grade on a curve when it comes to deliberate deception. “Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another” (Ephesians 4:25).
Voters are not pawns in a consultant’s game. They are citizens entitled to a clear choice between the candidates who actually want the job.
Dunleavy’s investigation will test whether Alaska’s laws can still reach an organized effort to confuse the electorate. The evidence will decide what comes next. Until then the rest of the country has a clear picture of how far some Democrats will go when the polling does not cooperate.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.