How Alaska’s Top-Four Primary Works — And Why There Are Two Dan Sullivans on the Ballot
Sixteen candidates, one ballot, no party gate, and a ranked-choice general in November. A plain-English guide to the only federal election system of its kind in the country — and the same-name filing that is testing it.
On Tuesday, Alaska voters will look at a U.S. Senate ballot containing sixteen names, two of which are “Dan Sullivan.” Almost nobody will be eliminated. And the candidate who finishes first may well not be the candidate who eventually wins the seat.
None of that is a mistake. It is how Alaska has run its elections since voters approved a ballot measure in 2020 by a margin of 51 percent to 49 percent, replacing closed party primaries with a nonpartisan top-four system feeding into a ranked-choice general election. Alaska is the only state in the country that runs federal races this way, and the mechanics confuse even experienced election watchers — including a fair number of national reporters who will spend Tuesday night describing the results incorrectly.
Here is what actually happens.
Step one: one ballot, every candidate, no party gate
There is no Republican primary and no Democratic primary in Alaska. Every candidate who files for an office appears on a single ballot regardless of party, and every registered voter gets the same ballot. You pick one candidate. That is the entire exercise.
The four candidates with the most votes advance to the November general election. Everyone else is out. Party affiliation appears next to each name, but it carries no procedural weight — there is no requirement that the four advancing candidates represent four different parties, and nothing stops all four from being Republicans, or two Democrats and two independents, or any other combination the vote produces.
In a race with two dominant candidates and fourteen minor ones, the top-four primary eliminates almost nobody who matters. Sen. Dan Sullivan and former Rep. Mary Peltola are both going to advance. Tuesday will not narrow that race. What it will produce is a strength reading — the raw gap between them, on a real electorate, five months after Peltola entered.
Step two: ranked-choice in November
The general election in November is where the winner is actually chosen, and it uses ranked-choice voting. Voters rank the four finalists in order of preference. If someone takes an outright majority of first-choice votes, the count ends there. If nobody does, the last-place candidate is eliminated and that candidate's ballots are redistributed to whoever those voters ranked next. The process repeats until one candidate holds a majority.
This is why finishing first in August means less in Alaska than it does anywhere else. A candidate can lead the primary, lead the first round of the general, and still lose after transfers if the eliminated candidates' supporters break heavily against them. It happened in reverse in 2022, when Peltola won a U.S. House special election through exactly this mechanism.
Who actually filed
Sixteen candidates filed for the Senate race by the June 1 deadline: seven Republicans, three Democrats, three independents, one Green, and one Libertarian. Two of them have raised meaningful money. The rest are, in the main, perennial candidates — a category Alaska produces in unusual abundance because the filing barrier is low and the ballot is open to everyone.
| Candidate | Party | Standing |
|---|---|---|
| Dan Sullivan | R | Two-term incumbent, first elected 2014 |
| Mary Peltola | D | Former U.S. Rep.; entered the race January 12 |
And then there is the other Dan Sullivan
A second Dan Sullivan — a resident of Petersburg, a fishing town of about three thousand in the southeast panhandle — filed as a Republican for the same Senate seat at the candidate deadline. He will appear on Tuesday's ballot alongside the incumbent.
Alaska has been here before. Dan Sullivan is not an uncommon name in the state; a different Dan Sullivan served as mayor of Anchorage and later as the state's labor commissioner, and voters have periodically confused the two. But a same-name filing on the deadline day, in a race where national Democrats have made the incumbent a top target, is a different kind of event. The incumbent's campaign has had to spend money and airtime on the elementary problem of telling voters which Dan Sullivan is which.
There is no legal remedy. Alaska law does not bar a candidate from running under their own name because an officeholder shares it, and the top-four ballot does not offer the party-label disambiguation a closed primary would. The practical effect is a vote-splitting risk that falls entirely on one candidate.
The governor's race is where top-four actually bites
The Senate race is a two-candidate contest wearing a sixteen-candidate costume. The governor's race is the opposite — a genuinely fractured field where the top-four cut will decide something real.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy is term-limited, and seventeen governor and lieutenant-governor tickets filed for four general-election slots. Former state Sen. Tom Begich has led public polling all year without ever approaching a majority; a May survey put him around 21 percent, with the entire Republican field — Dave Bronson, Bernadette Wilson, Click Bishop, former Attorney General Treg Taylor, Adam Crum, Edna DeVries, Shelley Hughes, and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom — scattered in single digits behind him. Former Gov. Bill Walker is running again as a nonpartisan.
Under a closed-primary system, Republicans would consolidate around one nominee before November. Under top-four, they may send three or four candidates to the general and sort it out through ranked-choice transfers instead. That is a meaningfully different race, and it is the single best argument for why Alaska's system matters beyond its novelty: it changes when consolidation happens, not whether.
What to actually watch Tuesday night
- The Sullivan–Peltola gap. Not who wins — the margin. It is the first hard number on this race from an actual electorate rather than a poll.
- How much the decoy pulls. Even one or two percent tells you something about ballot confusion heading into a ranked-choice general.
- Which four survive the governor's primary, and specifically how many are Republicans. A three-Republican general is a very different math problem for Tom Begich than a one-Republican general.
- Turnout. Alaska's mail and rural precincts report slowly. Early results will skew toward the road system; final calls can take days.
One last mechanical note: results Tuesday night are unofficial and incomplete. Alaska accepts absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day, and counting continues well past the first night. Treat any early call in a close race with more caution here than you would almost anywhere else in the country.