I Learned It by Watching You

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

 

Alaska’s director of elections, Carol Beecher, was unsparing in a letter explaining her decision to boot Dan Sullivan from the ballot in November. No, not that Dan Sullivan, i.e., Republican U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan, but another candidate who just happened to go by Dan J. Sullivan.

 

Dan J. Sullivan’s U.S. Senate bid, Beecher concluded, was not “an actual good-faith candidacy” for the office he sought. Rather, it was “filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead and thereby compromise the ballot’s fairness or neutrality.”

 

It was a ruse likely designed by the senator’s opponents to trick his voters into thinking they were casting their ballots for the incumbent when they were inadvertently backing a pretender. There was an element of cosmic timing in Beecher’s decision to put this charade to an end when she did. It corresponded with Democratic outrage over Republican efforts to meddle in Democratic primaries so as to “elevate Democratic candidates viewed as more beatable in November,” according to Axios.

 

“Democrats ‘aren’t happy’ that Republicans are ‘trying to help the far left,’ a senior House Democrat told Axios,” the report read. “A trio of obscure super PACs with progressive-sounding names have cropped up in recent months to support more left-leaning or scandal-tarnished candidates in key battleground districts.”

 

Adam Kinzinger, onetime Republican congressman and prolific Trump critic, called the strategy “extremely dangerous.” After all, the risk in boosting candidates unsuited to federal office is that they might actually win, thereby contributing to the growing number of people in power who are, in Kinzinger’s estimation, “the worst.”

 

Well, yes. That is, after all, the right’s long-standing complaint about a tactic that Democrats perfected.

 

Sometimes, the Democrats are right, and the GOP candidates that Democrat-aligned groups back in primaries are beatable. In 2012, Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill bought herself a temporary reprieve by running ads for GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin, which supposedly attacked him for being “too conservative.” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro owes his office to a campaign that accused him of being too loyal to Donald Trump (“I’m going to have to send him a thank you card,” GOP candidate Doug Mastriano said of the Shapiro camp’s ads). Illinois Governor JB Pritzker dodged a bullet when his allies castigated a weak Republican candidate who “proudly embraces the Trump agenda” while ignoring more formidable GOP hopefuls. Sometimes, this exercise in reverse psychology doesn’t pay off, as Donald Trump’s entire political career attests.

 

But it wasn’t until the GOP got in on the act that this tactic began to raise eyebrows in the legacy press. Until then, it was reported matter-of-factly as a quirky feature of the political scene.

 

“Democrats paying for ads supporting Republican candidates,” NPR marveled. What a country! Sure, “it’s a political gamble,” the outlet conceded, “but it has worked in the past.” Sure, there’s internal debate among Democrats as to whether interfering in GOP politics is prudent, the Washington Post conceded. “But there is little dispute about the effect of altering the Republican primaries in ways that could affect the November matchups,” its dispatch read. And the “strategy seems to have paid off,” an NPR retrospective on the 2022 midterms contended. You can’t argue with success.

 

So, what is the difference between Democratic meddling and the Republican variety? Well, as one former House Democrat argued, “Democrats did their GOP primary meddling more out in the open in those cycles.”

 

As distinctions go, that’s weak sauce. And as Mitt Romney used to say, “What’s sauce for the goose is now sauce for the gander.”