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election law political challengers

Who Rigged Alaska’s Senate Race?

Alaska, Sullivan, open primary

On today’s Alaska primary ballot, U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, faces an inconvenient challenger in the person of . . . Dan Sullivan.

The president of the United States is not pleased.

“Because of the trickery in the Voting, the Crooked, Radical Left Dumocrats have put up another man named ‘Dan Sullivan,’ and they did this to take Votes away from our Great Senator of the same name,” Donald Trump wrote on Truth.social. “Democrats are trying to ‘trick’ Alaskans, and treat Alaskan Voters with contempt.”

Is it contemptuous of Alaska voters?  

“His primary purpose is not to win an election,” contends the Senator, “it’s to confuse Alaskans and rig the vote for my opponent, the Democrat.”

Challenger Dan J. Sullivan’s run against the incumbent with the near-identical name, one Dan S. Sullivan, doesn’t quite pass the smell test. He sure appears to be gaming the election. Still, the rigging occurred when the state went to an open primary where anyone — regardless of party membership — can vote for anyone on the ballot.

Regardless of party.

Many people think this sort of thing is a great advance, and voters did approve it (by a whisker) in 2020 and voted to keep it (by an even slimmer margin) in 2024. But this “Nonpartisan Top Four Primary” (sending four candidates to the General Election) is open to malign voting and, yes, candidacies. When former Independent Party member and current Republican Party member Daniel J. Sullivan of Petersburg, Alaska, threw his hat into the ring, confusion was a natural (and likely intended) result. 

Election officials cooked up a halfway reasonable response: they list on the ballot “Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent” and his possible vote-splitting challenger as “Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.” unadorned.

To prevent sneaky campaigning and voting, however, Alaskans should go the opposite direction, allowing — no, requiring — political parties to privately select their candidates. And at their party’s expense, not the taxpayers’. 

Hold the General Election after political parties have freely chosen their nominees . . . confining all game-playing and election-rigging to the smoke-filled rooms. Which voters can then judge accordingly. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Amy Levy

Death, as a general statement, is so easy of utterance, of belief; it is only when we come face to face with it that we find the great mystery so cruelly hard to realise; for death, like love, is ever old and ever new.

Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop (1888), chapter 17.
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Today

Nineteenth on the Eighteenth

On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing women’s suffrage.

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ideological culture national politics & policies

Awake to Evasion 1.0

AOC, woke 1

There are people who still debate the term “woke.” From the beginning, defenders of woke judgments, discourse, and activism claimed it was “just good manners”; others said it didn’t exist, a mere figment of “right-wing paranoia.” 

Truth is, it was a new, trendy term used to replace “social justice” and the peculiar bent and activism methods of “social justice warriors,” after “SJW” became fodder for ridicule by collegiate leftism’s opponents.

Now, more than a few Democrats are trying to distance themselves not only from the rising tide of know-nothing communism but also the woke style itself, which increasing numbers of Americans have come to loathe. The bellwether in this is U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.).

What she and her comrades said in the time of the COVID lockdowns was “not rhetoric that we would use today,” she told an ABC This Week interviewer. But she insists that the extremist/radical positions of her fellow Democratic Socialists (she’s still a member of the New York chapter) were “useful.”

Nevertheless, her apologetics for defunding the police and other crazytown nonsense was not what went viral. It was her repeating of a local politician’s statement to the effect that “Woke 1.0 was crazy” that dominated commentary.

Ha ha ha, it was a confusing time; we can move on, seems to be her takeaway.

But she herself was a big part of the madness, says Robby Soave — and so says your memory. “No one,” declares Soave, “should accept these conversions at face value.”

Of course they aren’t even conversions. They are evasions and spin. AOC is a politician, and no more honest about her past positions than she is her ignorance of economics, political philosophy, and especially . . .

Common Sense.

Of which This Is. (I’m Paul Jacob.)

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Galsworthy

Public opinion’s always in advance of the law.

John Galsworthy, Windows (1922), Act I,
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Today

Steamboat One

On August 17, 1807, Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat left New York City for Albany, New York, on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world.

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Update

An Especially Icky Aspect of the Pandemic

The white fibrous clots, previously mentioned in these pages, has received scholarly attention at last: “Self-Reported Observations of Unusual White Fibrous Structures in Embalmed Corpses: Multi-Year Survey Results from Embalmers in Five Countries, 2022–
2025.” The paper, written by Thomas F. Haviland, Laura Kasner, and Daniel Santiago, has appeared in International Journal of Innovative Research in Medical Science (IJIRMS).

Dr. John Campbell discusses it here:

This is one of the several controversial topics irregularly updated on this website.

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Today

Against Central Banking

On August 16, 1841, U.S. President John Tyler vetoed a bill to re-establish the Second Bank of the United States. This made him deeply unpopular with his former supporters in the Whig Party — which was the party of “internal improvements” as well as an anti-Jacksonian party, and Andrew Jackson had previously set himself against central banking. It is apparent that Tyler did this because he had come to believe a central bank was unconstitutional.

We have a central bank, now, of course. It is called the Federal Reserve.

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Thought

William J. Locke

We have the richest language that ever a people has accreted, and we use it as if it were the poorest. We hoard up our infinite wealth of words between the boards of dictionaries and in speech dole out the worn bronze coinage of our vocabulary. We are the misers of philological history. And when we can save our pennies and pass the counterfeit coin of slang, we are as happy as if we heard a blind beggar thank us for putting a pewter sixpence into his hat.

William J. Locke, The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (1905).

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Update

Hong Lost

In “Uh & Other Naughty Words,” this week, Paul Jacob considered the apparent meteoric success of Francesca Hong, on Election Day expected to win the Democratic primary in her state.

She did not succeed.

Major media blames the polls. Forbes, for example. The polls were wrong. “Socialist Francesca Hong was heavily favored to win the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary Tuesday in betting odds and among politicos, but the few polls taken proved unreliable in a primary with several major last-minute developments that changed the dynamics in the race.”

But really, why did she lose? Some say it is the result of the alleged fact that “progressives don’t vote.” Karlyn Borsenko has a different opinion: