Episode Details

Susan Collins lost in Maine after years as the most moderate Republican in the Senate. Across the country, Republicans ran solid candidates and still underperformed. In Alaska, “Decoy Dan” Sullivan remains on the ballot with thousands of votes while Mary Peltola leads by a few hundred.

Hosts Kathryn Johnson and law professors Joshua Kleinfeld and Ilan Wurman give their high-level thoughts on the results — and an update on the Alaska decoy.

On the results: Ilan argues the lesson is to scrap primaries and bring back smoke-filled rooms. The Democrats have already done it twice — replacing their primary winner with Kamala Harris, and forcing out their own nominee in Maine before a convention picked the replacement. Kathryn sees a different problem. The candidates were fine. Republicans simply did not show up at the levels they did two years ago, while Democrats did.

Josh treats the result as a reversion to default American habits: non-ideological voters focus on practical problems and personalities, then go back to sleep once the immediate chaos fades. The deeper clash with the Left, including the emerging Red-Green alliance, has not gone away. The task is to build an anti-Left politics that still registers as practical to voters who do not think in ideological terms.

On Alaska: The second ("Decoy") Dan Sullivan is not ordinary third-party ballot stacking. Nor is it "fraud in the inducement." It is fraud in the fact — deceiving voters about which candidate they are choosing. That fits the federal statute against a candidate fraudulently misrepresenting himself as acting for another candidate on a matter damaging to that candidate. It may also fit 18 U.S.C. § 241, the conspiracy-against-rights statute long used against ballot-stuffing schemes that injure the right to vote. With Peltola ahead by roughly 600 votes and Decoy Dan holding more than 3,500, the Senate could refuse to seat her under the Elections Clause. But Democrats will be in charge, so of course they won't.

This is the rational — and based — discussion of the midterms, primaries, turnout, and election integrity that you won’t hear anywhere else.

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