Dirty Tricks in the Alaska Senate Race

 

“Mistah Kurtz—he dead.” 

--Joseph Conrad, Part III,  Heart of Darkness

 

The two Dan Sullivans: The Senator on the right

 

Kellen Browning's outing of the Peltola campaign this morning in the NYTimes is first-rate reporting. The Alaska Senate candidate's top aides, working with "a mysterious Midwestern operative," apparently participated in a scheme to get someone else named Dan Sullivan on the ballot to confuse voters and draw votes away from the actual Dan Sullivan, Republican Senator (though on the Alaska ballot, the sitting senator is identified as "Incumbent").

See, Alaska has a system of allowing the top four finishers in the state's primary -- no matter their party -- to be on the fall ballot, because they also use ranked-choice tabulations. There are actually three registered Republicans to choose from for Alaska's US Senator on November 3rd, along with one Democrat, Mary Peltola. It appears that the mysterious political operative from Ohio, who used the state's "buckeye" nickname in his email address, was responsible pretty much single-handedly for recruiting both of the other Republicans. It's obvious that splitting the Republican vote among several candidates -- two of them with the same name -- can only help Mary Peltola, and the latest odds right now are on Peltola's winning this race.

The mysterious operative has a name, Jerid Kurtz, and an employment history. He was once upon a time former Congressman Tim Ryan's press secretary. He then went to work for the Ohio Democratic Party as communications direction, and he eventually went professional as co-owner of Wingspan Strategies, a political consulting firm whose Google presence seems to have vanished. Kurtz comes off in Browning's reporting as not only the idea man for packing the ballot with multiple Dan Sullivans but also the on-the-ground chameleon seducer who sought face-to-face meetings in brew pubs with the chumps being targeted for recruitment. Kurtz used aliases when he approached prospects (to one man he was "Zane"). Kurtz was charming and persuasive, encouraging a potential recruit into thinking they were special and moreover needed. He also promised valuable (though unspecified) campaign support, and there was a Peltola-allied super PAC that was willing to throw a little money toward boosting name-recognition for anyone who might divide the Republican vote. For his very successful efforts -- until, that is, this all got reported -- Kurtz brought home some $87,000 for Wingspan Strategies. The Peltola-allied super-PAC 49th State PAC paid the bill. 

Kurtz looks like a late-arriving Nixonian dirty-trickster. Either this scandal will kill his future as a political strategist or it will catapult him into a higher bracket. These days ambitious people enjoy skillful underhandedness. The scandal of course taints Mary Pertola and is upsetting her applecart just 5 days from the election. Talk about October surprises. Also looking bad in all this is the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), which pushed Kurtz on the Pertola people. Elisa Rios, Peltola's campaign manager at the time this scheme went into effect, was fired in August. She spilled all the beans about Jerid Kurtz and the ballot-stuffing to reporter Browning -- seeking revenge, I suspect, for her firing. She's also Browning's chief source about Mr. Kurtz, so her characterizations of him as a hustler and performative braggart might ought to be taken with a salt chaser.

Browning reports that not only did Kurtz recruit two other Republicans to run in the primary, he also helped lean on another Democrat, David Leslie, who had finished in the top four in the primary and would presumably dilute the Peltola vote: "That Democrat, a progressive named David Leslie, quickly faced calls from his party to withdraw. One of those callers, Mr. Leslie said in an interview, was Jerid Kurtz. Mr. Kurtz met with Mr. Leslie in person, at a cafe in Fairbanks, according to a person familiar with the exchange. Mr. Leslie soon agreed to drop out." 

When Leslie dropped out, that left room for the second Republican, Gerald Heikes, who had finished fifth in the primary. Heikes, a drywall contractor, told Browning that he was recruited to run “by a guy from the Midwest.” Heikes had already thought about running for office and evidently thought the call from the mysterious guy from the Midwest was really the voice of God, calling him to service. Kurtz knew how to pick his victims.