Democrat Mary Peltola's lead over Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) jumped to 5,800 votes in Thursday's count, her widest of the race, one day after a smaller update had pushed her margin back below the vote total of the second Dan Sullivan on the ballot.
The Alaska Division of Elections' Nov. 12 report gives Peltola 125,157 first-choice votes, or 49.08%, to Sullivan's 119,357, or 46.8%. Republican Gerald Heikes has 5,490, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., the namesake Republicans call "Decoy Dan," has 4,199, and write-ins have 807. Peltola now leads the two Sullivans combined by 1,601 votes.
In Wednesday's count, Sullivan outgained Peltola and her lead slipped from 4,250 votes to 3,975, which was 125 fewer than the 4,100 votes Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. had at that point. For one day, the two Sullivans added together were ahead of Peltola again, reversing what we reported on Nov. 11, when her lead first topped the decoy's total.
Thursday's batch, much of it from Juneau and the rest of Southeast Alaska according to the Anchorage Daily News, gave Peltola 3,670 more votes and Sullivan 1,845, adding 1,825 to her lead.
Adding the decoy's votes to the senator's also assumes those voters meant to pick the senator, and the ballots show more of them ranked Peltola next than ranked Sen. Sullivan. In the ranked-choice data the Division released Wednesday, covering about 245,000 ballots, FairVote found that of 3,940 ballots ranking Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. first, 1,345 would count for Peltola in the final round and 910 for the senator, while 1,685 ranked neither finalist.
A separate analysis of the same data by the Anchorage Daily News found the same pattern in second choices: of 4,055 ballots with the namesake first, 1,174 ranked Peltola second and 655 ranked the senator, while more than 1,455 ranked no one else.
Decoy Dan voters split along the lines of the governor's race: those who backed a Republican for governor went 679 to 315 for Sen. Sullivan, but those who backed Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins went 987 to 208 for Peltola, according to FairVote's breakdown.
Heikes' voters lean the other way, with 43% of ballots ranking him first counting for Sullivan and 17% for Peltola. Because Peltola is below 50%, those transfers will be run in the ranked-choice tabulation on Nov. 18, the deadline for absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive, and certification is set for Nov. 25. FairVote's preliminary tabulation has Peltola winning the final round 50.1% to 49.9%, on data from before Thursday's 1,825-vote gain.
On Election Day, Sullivan warned on CNN that thousands of Alaskans could waste their votes on the second Sullivan, and accused Peltola and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of engineering the candidacy.
President Trump called the namesake's candidacy a fraud on voters the same day, and has argued that every vote for Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. belongs to the senator, as we noted on Election Day.
The New York Times reported in October that operatives around Peltola's campaign spent months looking for a second Dan Sullivan to put on the ballot; Peltola's campaign and Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. deny any involvement. Gov. Mike Dunleavy ordered a state criminal investigation, and the Justice Department's inquiry has reportedly reached Democratic lawyer Marc Elias.
A federal judge threw out the Justice Department's bid to block certification if the senator lost, and the department has appealed. On Wednesday, a state judge turned down the Peltola campaign's demand for immediate access to records of rejected absentee ballots.
Peltola is already claiming the race, posting Thursday that "the numbers so far tell a clear story - we are squarely on track to win this race."