1.
In Petersburg, Alaska, the rain is not something you mention after October. It is something you live inside. The town is small enough that every face is familiar, every boat moored in the harbor has a story, and every name comes with a second name attached—a nickname, a boat name, a parentage. But this season, one name has come unattached and float-free. It belongs to two men. Dan Sullivan, retired schoolteacher, lives in a green house on a quiet street above town. His mailbox is full of mail nobody ever intended for a sixth-grade science teacher. There are campaign flyers, polling reminders, and occasionally an advertisement for someone who is not him; it makes a kind of sense that the other Dan Sullivan, the United States senator from Alaska, would have his name everywhere. But here is the paradox: when the mailman comes with a big, glossy envelope that says “DAN SULLIVAN,” the retired teacher gets it. He stands there in his kitchen, holding a letter about a tax plan he voted against many lives ago, and he laughs through a cup of coffee. The name is all he has—an ordinary name, maybe, but in this wild state election season, the name has become a political weapon: it divides. Around Petersburg, people ask, “Do you mean the real Dan Sullivan?” They no longer know what “real” means anymore. There is the senator in Washington, with his portrait of an Alaska resource, and there is the man who stands at the end of the dock, his sweater old and stained, his boots worn by thirty years of teaching under fluorescent light. There is no suspense in the question “Who is Dan Sullivan?”—there are two correct answers, and that is exactly the problem.
II.
Let’s go back in time the history. The retired Daniel Sullivan of Petersburg, Alaska, was once a schoolteacher. He taught social studies and coached a little basketball, and he owned a small boat not exactly large enough to be named in the harbor logs. He grew up in the Pacific Northwest, moved to Petersburg to marry his wife. His friend says he was tall and broad-shouldered. There was always too much energy. He could be goofy in the classroom; he taught the Civil War through a monologue about his own family’s history. He would call students by first names and remember their grandmothers’ names. When asked why he is in politics at a time, he answers with a story. A few years ago a class of his students interviewed the mayor and learned about the city budget. One kid asked why the town’s old pool no longer has warm water. The mayor explained that the money had gone to other priorities. The kid shrugged and said, “Then the pool is just a puddle.” Daniel didn’t stop thinking that answer. He retired in 2019, but the puddle stayed. He didn’t want to watch his small town give up things that mattered. He became convinced Alaska needed a new voice in Washington, Alaska’s Dan Sullivan—the one who grew up on a hill without a hotel lobby. He will say: “I’m a retired schoolteacher from Petersburg. I’m not a career politician. I’m not a millionaire. I cannot buy the race. But I know what old Alaskan kids need—the thing you don’t get from a campaign attack ad: a reason.” He stands in his small meeting room with a whiteboard, trying to explain an issue he learned in retirement, but it cannot erase the larger confusion.
III.
The problem is that, in the far corners of Alaska, there really is a sitting United States senator named Dan Sullivan. He is a Republican, a former marine, a confidant in Washington. He has a stable floor in the state party and national politics. He is not a small-town teacher; he is one of the most visible politicians in the largest state, in a manner of speaking. For the challenger Dan Sullivan, every day is a small, slow exercise in self-invention. He has to begin every statement with “I am the Dan Sullivan from Petersburg.” He wears a gray hat with DAN sharply stitched in front, but sometimes someone will ask if it’s him. He signs his letters “Dan Sullivan (Retired teacher)” and in a bad enough handwriting that it looks like “Dan Sullivan Retired Teacher.” At a coffee stand in Petersburg, a fisherman walks up and shakes both their hands: “It’s definitely gonna get confused.” The retired teacher has set up a small booth at Fisherman’s Hall. Someone says, “So you’re the other Dan.” He says “I’m the one who didn’t close the schools.” The man nods. But at a campaign event in Anchorage, there is a real identity test. A woman with a clipboard asks to see his ID. He shows her a driver’s license. She looks at a name, and there is a blue pause of confusion. He says “I’ll help: I’m the one who used to teach.” She says “But you’ve rewritten…” She replies “You both did.” He understands. Every call, every photo, every campaign mailer with the name attracts a kind of suspicion from people who don’t think names can be accidental. The other Dan knows it may be too late to tell the difference. “Some people think I’m trying to use the same name as an established politician, a brand,” he says. “But you can’t use another man’s his own name. It’s on my birth certificate. I met the name first. This body just goes with it.”
IV.
Alaska has a new voting system. Since 2022, a top-four open primary and ranked-choice general election have been in effect. That has changed how straightforward spoiler math works. In the primary, all candidates appear on the same ballot in one party-by-party fight; the top four advance, regardless of party. In the general, voters rank candidates. If no one gets a majority, an instant runoff selects by weighing second choices from the last-place ballot. This system was designed to give voters more choices, and to make it more difficult for an spoiler to throw an election to an opposite front-runner. But the name Daniel Sullivan introduces an alarming twist. If he and the incumbent both advance, they share a name. In the ranked-election count during a photo-finish race, officials might take care, but actual voters will be confused about whom they ranked. In a low-information moment, a voter could rank the “wrong Sullivan” first, finally forcing the incumbent’s elimination and causing a Democratic rival to win the state. Or alternatively, the retired teacher’s voters, who would never vote for Senator Sullivan, may list him first, and later rank the incumbent second to stop a Democrat; in that case the teacher is not a spoiler, but a helper. The point is that in the riptide of ranked choice, a name is not just a label; it’s a wave. The candidate doesn’t need an ad. It just needs an unqualified question. A pollster in Alaska says “Dan Sullivan is the name you dial if you want to take a guess.” When he hears the word “spoiler,” the retired teacher winces. He knows a spoiler as someone who isn’t in it to win, who uses money and fear to take the district from the rest. He says “Spoiler is a word designed for me before I had a chance. I am in it. Why can’t I run because of my name? That is not the district system in Alaska. Use your eyes.”
V.
We traveled through Alaska to find Dan. The town of Petersburg is connected by ferries and small airplanes, by hardworking people who know ocean. There’s a red thunder wind surrounding the town, in a light place, and the air is so clean you can taste the rain. At the high school gym under a dark blue weekend, students practice 3-pointers. The school, which the challenger loves, has a clock whose battery replaced by a student. There is a poster on the Wall: “Home of the Pirates.” A tall boy, wearing jersey number 14, was in Dan’s class eight years ago. Now he’s a fish processor, and he comes over to stand with a big hand. “Dan taught us that they all have a seat at the table, that a minority is still a majority,” he says. “I don’t know where the other Dan went to school. He wasn’t here.” The retired school teacher quietly surveys. He tells us that on the first day of class he used to ask his students: “What is a state?” They’d answer “a government, the flag, the history.” He says “I ask them: you are in my classroom. That’s your classroom. That’s a state.” A story: “The state starts with you.” He uses a tennis ball in a classroom; student who present choose a ball or ideas; they choose. That is why, at the age of 70, he agrees—with a damn: to be a candidate for the Senate of the United States, and in the process, to be maligned as a name thief, as a rather oversized child, as a “delay” of the retired to the real.
V.
The campaign of the retired teacher is not a closed-loop, democratic thing. It is a cottage over. Inside there are no paid campaign consultants. There is a former student coding signs, and a hairdresser handling database. The treasurer is his wife, who sighs. He uses a separate coffee can with a handwritten label “DONATIONS STIR HERE.” At the end of the week, he had $17,000, most from donations of $20. The incumbent’s operating account could be $10 million. When they asked what he thinks of the “spoiler” accusation, he writes the word in light: “I’m not spoiling democracy; I’m trying to participate in it.” A reporter tells him that some people say he is “not a real candidate.” He nods and says, “But I’m a real voter. In my state, the name has a constitutional right to be there.” He tells about how he started to get death emails from a small knot of online accounts. One said “You’re a fraud using another’s last name to hurt the U.S.A.” He held the note with a grin. “They may think I’m a fake. But my refrigerated freezer is filled with halibut that don’t have a political affiliation.” He believes in “outdoor state rights,” even saying “I’m a man who isn’t going to let a rival jockey use our our strategy.” It starts to feel, as a matter of story, that there is a man who is the opposite of a stuck political label; he’s half joke, half honest; he’s not a national strategy, he’s a federal advocate. You cannot know if he really thinks he can get more than a few percent, but you can see that he knows something more about politics than a teacher knows. He also knows that if he loses, he can go to a small house in Petersburg, and the name may become a question again. And yet he runs.
VI.
Monom Berger in the run-up to the vote. The incumbent Sullivan returned to Alaska, serene and well-coiffed, speaking in small dusty, airtight sentences, standing next to a responsibility table. When a reporter asked about “your opponent Daniel Sullivan,” he had to laugh and “I’m obviously only one.” He no doubt sees the whole campaign as stage. In a private pub in Petersburg, the teacher is told an old friend: “If I win, then the real Dan Sullivan in the Senate is me. Then he will add ‘—the teacher.'” But those name can be too much for a voter. The day after the election, after the new, some Alaskans will get confused in an entirely new way, but afterwards they will shake our hero. The voter experiences the poetic moment: “If a man called Sullivan runs and a man called Sullivan wins, the loser may be Dan Sullivan. Let’s not know if we are represented.” The answer to the question we traveled to find: Is he a spoiler? In the most mechanical sense, yes, by sharing a name with an incumbent, he can drain a little vote from the incumbent. But as a hazy, tired schoolteacher, he is not a “false flag.” He is not a perfect. He is a man in a rain town with an idea. The name has always been at a birth certificate, not a surrender. The “S” on a paper may be a guess, but the man’s face is unmistakable behind it. If the senator has his own committee, and the challenger has his own class card, and in a long democracy neither is a polling mistake. “I’ve been registered.” He says. “Because the United States is still a place a retired schoolteacher can say the same name.” The post office says “C. Sullivan”? Dan laughs, “No—D. and Da—D for a being.” And when the rain hardens, Petersburg’s streets empty, water shines, and the retired teacher walks home with a man’s arm in arms, the hood white and flapping. He is not running away from his name. He is running in it. The question, as ever, is whether anyone can see the man behind the name. Dan Sullivan hopes, at last, that someone will. It is all he asked of them as a teacher; it is all he asks of them now as a future senator.
