Democrats have finally come to terms with reality and realized their policies are broken and unsellable. But rather than admit it, Democrats in Alaska have decided to fake it. Literally. Alaska’s Dan J. Sullivan, a Democrat-affiliated…
Page A11From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 31 August 2026
Long Island's Democratic chair is accused of backroom deals with the GOP; Alaska Democrats ran against themselves.
As it ran on the front
Let's follow the money and the votes at the same time, because on Long Island and in Alaska this week, the Democratic Party is demonstrating two different ways of failing at the same job.
On Long Island, party members are accusing their own chairman of cutting backroom deals with the GOP. Not losing to the GOP — dealing with them, according to members inside his own organization. That's not a story about Republicans winning. That's a story about the people who are supposed to be beating them deciding it's easier to trade with them instead. Whatever the deals are actually worth, the fact that members felt the need to go public with the accusation tells you the arrangement wasn't cleared with the room first.…
…(cont) Up in Alaska, a different flavor of the same problem. Democrats there couldn't put together a candidate who could beat Senator Dan Sullivan, so, according to this week's reporting, they ran their own candidate anyway, not against Sullivan exactly, but as an alternative inside their own lane. When a party can't beat the other side, and its answer is to multiply its own options rather than consolidate them, you don't get a stronger candidate. You get a split.
Put those two stories next to each other and the pattern isn't ideology. It's structure. A party that's willing to make side deals with its opposition in one state, and a party that's willing to run against itself in another, is a party that has stopped agreeing on what winning even means. Neither of those is a strategy for beating anybody. Both of those are ways of managing decline gracefully instead of reversing it.
Nobody in either story is a criminal, and nobody's accusing anybody of one. This isn't about corruption in the legal sense. It's simpler than that: it's what happens to an institution when the people inside it start optimizing for their own position inside the party instead of the party's position against the other side. You end up with a chairman doing deals nobody voted on, and a candidate roster nobody consolidated, in the same election cycle, a continent apart.
That's the con, if you're the guy at the end of the bar trying to figure out who to vote for: it's not that the other side is beating you. It's that your own side, in two different states, in the same week, forgot it was supposed to be trying.
“One county chairman's cutting backroom deals with the same party his own members are supposed to be beating, and a thousand miles north the state party couldn't beat the Republican so they ran a second guy just to split what's left. That's not two parties fighting each other. That's one party fighting itself while the other side counts the votes.”
“Coalition-building takes many forms — sometimes that's working across the aisle in good faith, and sometimes, in Alaska, it's running an additional candidate to represent primary voters who felt left out, which is just democracy, more of it — well, more of it can also mean fewer votes for either candidate, technically, but that's a turnout question, not a strategy question.”
The receipts
Party members claim Rich Schaffer, the incumbent party chairman for the Suffolk Dems, secretly sabotaged their candidates to protect Republicans.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.