Dem
52
Ties
1
GOP
47
Alaska uses a top-four primary followed by a ranked-choice election in November. Mary Peltola (D), Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and teacher Dan Sullivan have all qualified for the November ballot. The fourth slot is not definite yet, as the fourth- and fifth-place finishers are separated by only 43 votes with some votes still not counted in the sprawling state. The sled dogs are overheating in the hot summer and aren't moving as fast as usual to bring in the last ballots.
Should Dan Sullivan (1) be worried about Dan Sullivan (2), given the complexity of the ranked-choice voting? In a word, yes, due to exhaustion. Not voter exhaustion or candidate exhaustion, but ballot exhaustion.
A rational Republican who didn't know which Dan Sullivan was the senator and which was the teacher should mark one of them as #1 and the other as #2. If it is close, the not-yet-selected fourth-place candidate, who got about 1,000 votes in the primary, will be eliminated on round 1. Then teacher Dan will be eliminated in round 2, and all of his ballots should go to real Dan in the next round. Then it will be a straight two-way race between the Senator and Peltola.
However, not all voters are rational. Some of them may pick teacher Dan as #1 and fail to designate a number 2. This is called ballot exhaustion, and in that case, after the first round, the exhausted ballot is discarded and does not count for the senator.
Could this happen in practice? In the immortal words of Sarah Palin, "You betcha." There is even evidence of this. In the 2024 Alaska House race, 1.1% of the voters picked Democrat Eric Hafner. Maybe he was special in some way. Fine. One would have expected all of Hafner's voters to pick the only other Democrat on the ballot, Peltola, as second choice. That didn't happen. About one-third had Peltola as #2, about one-third were scattered over many candidates, and about one-third were exhausted—that is, there was no second choice. This means that most likely some fraction of the people voting for teacher Dan will not make a second choice and their ballots will be exhausted. Those are most likely votes intended for the Senator. In a close election, losing a few thousand votes could be enough to defeat Senator Dan. In 2022, something similar happened when Nick Begich, Sarah Palin and Mary Peltola were left after 1 round. Again, about 20% of Begich voters didn't have a second choice, so when he was eliminated, their presumably right-leaning ballots were exhausted.
Teacher Dan said he is a non-MAGA Republican. We have no idea if that is true (well, if you pressed us, we could make an educated guess). If the Democrats want to engage in a little rodent reproduction, they could run ads in Alaska for teacher Dan pushing him as a libertarian Republican who doesn't like Washington bossing Alaskans around, and who will vote in the Senate to reduce the size of the federal government. That might actually attract quite a few Republican votes. There could well be voters who actually know which Dan is which but who have a preference for a libertarian candidate over a MAGA candidate. Of course, if they are smart, they will mark the "other" Dan as #2, but the ads wouldn't point that out. The ads could even show a person marking the ballot for teacher Dan and immediately putting it in the ballot box with no second choice, to tacitly encourage people to exhaust their ballot. In a close election, every vote could matter. (V)