Democrat Dirty Tricks Heat Up Alaska Race. Senator El-Sayed Wouldn’t Need Security Clearance. Hit Job on Cleta Mitchell. Lame Cheesecake Factory Joke Still Eating Obama. Brutal Course at Harvard. More
Nothing like a last-minute October Surprise to shake things up.
Courtesy of the New York Times—whose reporting certainly can’t be dismissed as right-wing bias!—we learn, at last, why there are two Dan Sullivans on Alaska’s ballot.
“Inside Democrats’ Secret Effort to Stack Alaska’s Ballot” is the New York Times headline. It details how the campaign of Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola “spent months recruiting candidates to peel votes from Senator Dan Sullivan, the Republican.” Amazing reporting:
In the summer of 2025, a staffer for Mary Peltola, the Alaska Democrat who was eyeing a run for Senate, received unusual instructions from top campaign aides: Find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as you can.
The staffer complied, combing through voter records to produce a list of Dan Sullivans from across the state.
This was no random request. Dan S. Sullivan is the name of the state’s Republican senator. And if the Peltola campaign or its allies could track down and persuade another Dan Sullivan to run for Senate, the confusion could cost the senator crucial votes on the state’s unusual, four-person ballot.
The plan worked. This spring, a retired teacher from a tiny fishing village along the Alaska Panhandle, reachable only by air and sea, announced his candidacy for Senate. His name was Dan J. Sullivan.
The Times used information from a lawsuit, text messages, and interviews with several Dan Sullivans who were secretly approached to put their name on the ballot. A primary source was Elisa Rios, former campaign manager, who is suing the campaign and who attempted to retract what she had said. News outlets are not obligated to honor such demands, and the Times did not. The Peltola campaign and national Democrats deny the allegations.
Meanwhile, National Review’s Rich Lowry calls “the bizarre Senate doppelganger” effort “a new low for Democratic dirty tricks.” The Justice Department is seeking a preemptive order blocking certification if the faux Dan Sullivan affects the outcome. This is going nowhere, but it has the commentariat in a lather. CNN charges that the Alaska Democrats have played into Trump’s hands. President Trump has “lashed out,” and Alaska’s Governor has ordered a criminal investigation. The situation is complicated by Alaska’s adoption of ranked-choice voting.
The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel writes:
Maybe the election results will be clear enough to make litigation unnecessary. But especially if Senate control ends up hinging on Alaska, the candidacy of Decoy Dan can’t be allowed to stand. Meanwhile, Alaskans will do themselves and the nation a favor if they pass this year’s ballot initiative to ditch ranked-choice voting, which we now know Democrats rigged to swing a Senate election.
Will it matter? Sean Trende writes at Poll Vault that the Alaska fiasco just might make a difference. “Being accused of trying to rig a system while running to unrig a system could be unhelpful,” he claims.
If elected to the Senate, Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed will have access to highly classified information. In a piece headlined “Abdul El-Sayed’s Background Check,” Zach Kessel observes that Senators don’t have to have background checks for this, which is good for El-Sayed because he would never pass one:
An investigator doing a background check on an American who has also described himself as an Egyptian citizen and signed a letter supporting a Muslim Brotherhood government would likely be interested in knowing more—particularly after the Trump administration named the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group in January 2026. That Mr. El-Sayed’s campaign declined to answer the New York Times’s questions about the letter makes it even more notable.
Mr. Rogers has a political motivation for attacking his opponent’s background and connections, but he happens to be right. … [El-Sayed’s]record is littered with national-security red flags.
It’s Just Lunch. Accusing the White House of mobilizing a whole-of-government response to his cheesecake blunder, Barack Obama grumbles that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent neglected inflation to enjoy lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. Maybe Obama should just eat his words and move on?
“Netanyahu Gives Israel One More Surprise.” An editorial in the Wall Street Journal explains why it’s too early to count out Benjamin Netanyahu:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu entered Tuesday’s Israeli election with a governing majority and is now on course to exit with something less. That’s one way to understand the result, but it was also widely anticipated. The surprising news is the opposition’s failure to come out ahead of Mr. Netanyahu. He may not have won, but the opposition lost.
For the Churchill-quoting Prime Minister of Israel, we’d say “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.
Amid unremitting indications of a blue tsunami, Republicans are hoping something similar happens here. Oh, no—Dems are still having trouble identifying genuine working-class people. Seems records indicate that “logger” Troy Jackson is actually a consultant. But Cleta Mitchell is actually one of the country’s foremost experts on election law. For her effectiveness and emphasis on election integrity, the left-wing Pro Publica has put out an attack piece. Mitchell responds with “Democrats Want Me in Jail for a Post Explaining Election Security” in The Federalist.
Brazil just had an election, and the victorious leftist Lula regime targeted defeated conservative Flávio Bolsonaro. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal observes:
Political victors are supposed to be gracious to the vanquished, but in Brazil they prosecute the losers. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva won re-election on Sunday, and within minutes his government ordered opposition leader Flávio Bolsonaro to give up his passport.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a Lula ally, signed off on a federal police request to seize Mr. Bolsonaro’s travel documents. On Tuesday Mr. Bolsonaro secretly fled Brazil with his wife and daughters across the Argentine border. On Wednesday they arrived in Miami. The U.S. said it issued visas for the family, a justifiable offer of political protection.
Bolsonaro’s flight was by necessity cloak and dagger.
Good News. U.S. Economy Picked Up Speed, With GDP Growth at 3.4% in Third Quarter. Matthew Hennessey of Free Expressions writes that, while we cannot “eat prosperity,” economic growth means “a bigger pie for everyone.” Meanwhile, the Fed voted to hold the interest rate—for now.
There was a positively exhilarating story on education in the Wall Street Journal the other day. “The Brutal Harvard Class That Suddenly Everyone Wants to Take” describes the “ungodly amount of reading” for Humanities 10 and marvels that freshmen nevertheless are lining up to take the course:
Those who see the humanities, heavy coursework and value of a Harvard education as gravely imperiled can take heart in the phenomenon that is Humanities 10.
On a Tuesday morning in October, Samantha Matherne paced as she marked up on a white board explaining the philosophical underpinnings of Jane Austen’s “Emma,” with segues into Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant.
The philosophy professor posed big questions to the 90 students gathered in Boylston Hall: “Why did Austen create such an unlikable heroine?” she asked. “Why read novels at all?” And finally, as the 75-minute lecture ended, “What will become of Emma—and what will become of you?”
The students burst into applause….
It’s all distinctly old school. Hotly contested terms like “Western Civ,” “Great Books” and “the canon” appear nowhere in the course description. But the curriculum begins with “The Odyssey,” travels forward in time to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and then backward to end with “The Iliad.” In between are assignments on Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Baldwin, Dante and Plato.
Once upon a time, students routinely signed up for humanities courses as preparation for life. A story in the London Spectator makes this point:
These students weren’t preparing to become professors of Renaissance History or 19th Century Poetry. They expected to go into business, law or some related field. … Still they wanted a liberal education before they went into the working world, and they got it in traditional humanities disciplines. They wanted to immerse themselves in Shakespeare’s plays and debates around the French Revolution, and what Plato meant by eternal forms and how African tribes governed themselves. …
Dare we hope that Harvard’s “brutal course” is a harbinger of a return to this?
