It was always a conspiracy, and everyone knew it.

No one, not even the dumbest of Democrats, ever thought this guy acted alone. No one is idiotic enough to believe that some retired teacher named Dan Sullivan woke up one morning, having never before run for political office, and said, I think I’m gonna gum up the works of Alaska’s Senate race.

Put another way: Anyone who believed that Daniel J. Sullivan acted alone when he put his hat in the ring probably thinks that dirty document-doctoring rat Kevin Clinesmith acted alone.

Yesterday, The New York Times slipped an October Surprise into the battle for control of the U.S. Senate. Its headline: “Inside Democrats’ Secret Effort to Stack Alaska’s Ballot.” That headline, by itself, doesn’t do justice to the treachery of the Democrats involved, nor does the subhead: “Operatives aligned with Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee for Senate, spent months recruiting candidates to peel votes from Senator Dan Sullivan, the Republican.” But reporter Kellen Browning delivered the goods right up front:

In the summer of 2025, a staffer for Mary Peltola, the Alaska Democrat who was eyeing a run for Senate, received unusual instructions from top campaign aides: Find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as you can.

The staffer complied, combing through voter records to produce a list of Dan Sullivans from across the state. This was no random request. Dan S. Sullivan is the name of the state’s Republican senator. And if the Peltola campaign or its allies could track down and persuade another Dan Sullivan to run for Senate, the confusion could cost the senator crucial votes on the state’s unusual, four-person ballot.

The plan worked. This spring, a retired teacher from a tiny fishing village along the Alaska Panhandle, reachable only by air and sea, announced his candidacy for Senate. His name was Dan J. Sullivan.

Sullivan “said he hated Trump, and if it was going to help Mary, he liked Mary,” according to the Times. “He didn’t have any interest in being a politician, but if this could help...” That, and he isn’t exactly, you know, campaigning.

But Alaska’s voters can’t be as dimwitted as the Democrats make them out to be, could they? Clearly, some Alaska voters were stupid enough to vote for the wrong Dan Sullivan in the state’s nonpartisan primary election in August — which is what allowed him to advance to the state’s rotten ranked-choice “Final Four” ballot on November 3, and it’s why Alaskans find themselves in the embarrassing and infuriating situation they’re in today.

My first question is: What did Mary Peltola do to piss off The New York Times? Recall that it was just two months ago when the Times reported that Peltola had shaken up her campaign by cutting loose her campaign manager and some key staffers. And last month, the Times reported the following bombshell about Peltola:

Former aides describe angry and profane outbursts, sometimes directed at aides and sometimes expressed about others who had displeased her. In one instance, she shoved an aide, according to a former staff member who was present and two others who were told about it at the time. Another conflict led to a surprising staff shake-up on the eve of the primary election last month.

Four former staff members said they directly heard her use the word “faggot” over the years, in some cases about her own staff members, an allegation the campaign denied. She also used the word “retarded,” according to former aides and text messages viewed by The New York Times.

Ahh, there it is. My guess is that words like “faggot” and “retarded” don’t go over too well among the New York Times editorial board.

My second question is: Why is this story only coming to light now? It’s about the most bald-faced act of unscrupulous political chicanery imaginable.

And my third question is: What will be the consequences for this despicable act of electoral treachery? “The Alaskans for Mary campaign has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign,” said the Peltola campaign in a statement. “Like Mary, our campaign is focused on lowering costs and fixing the rigged system in DC, and did not recruit any candidates into the race.”

That seems legalese and evasive, downright Clintonian, doesn’t it? I mean Peltola herself, in August, said, “It should be a criminal offense to lie or mislead the electorate. YES!”

Yesterday, my colleague Nate Jackson wrote that the Times apparently thinks the biggest threat to this year’s election is Trump’s election observers. And yet later that day, the Times reported on an actual election-rigging scheme by a bunch of dirty Democrats.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that dirty play has entered into Alaska’s senatorial politics. In fact, a case can be made that the Sullivan caper isn’t even in the same league as the clearly criminal prosecutorial misconduct that DOJ lawyers engaged in to withhold exculpatory evidence from longtime Republican Senator Ted Stevens and thereby run him out of town on a corruption charge.

Why was that caper even worse than this one? As The Wall Street Journal reported back in 2012, “Guilty verdicts against the Republican Stevens arrived less than two weeks before Election Day in 2008, causing the previously popular Senator to lose a close race to Democrat Mark Begich. Mr. Begich would go on to provide the 60th Senate vote to pass ObamaCare in 2009.”

On top of that, Stevens died in a plane crash in 2012, so he never learned the full extent of the DOJ’s efforts to trample on his rights. Nor were any of the lawyers ever punished for their misconduct.

Stevens and his family must’ve wondered: With friends like these in the Bush Justice Department, who needs enemies?

Maybe the Trump Justice Department can put the screws to the fake Dan Sullivan — make him sing like a canary and thereby unravel the whole conspiracy. And maybe they can use the RICO statute to go after the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee — which, according to the Times, was also involved in the conspiracy. I mean, if ever there was a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization, it would have to be the power-mad political party that welcomes foreign money into its campaign coffers; that floods the electorate with bulk-mail ballots; that undermines the integrity of the voting process by running sham candidates; that stands foursquare against wildly popular commonsense electoral reforms like photo ID and proof of citizenship, right?

Memo to Alaskan voters: The Democrat Party thinks you’re idiots. On Tuesday, you can prove them wrong.