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With our small staff here at the Anchorage Press, we don’t usually take it upon ourselves to bother fact-checking political claims. There are only a few of us, and there are many, many more candidates and political ads.
But yesterday, President Donald Trump made some assertions about Alaska’s U.S. Senate race that we couldn’t resist running to ground. Specifically, he commented on Dan Sullivan — the retired Petersburg teacher who’s infuriated Republicans by challenging the incumbent GOP Alaska U.S. senator of the same name.
“The other man, who had never been in politics, had never voted,” Trump said in remarks at a news conference. “He hasn’t voted for years.”
Petersburg Sullivan responded to reporters Wednesday by asserting that he’s a diligent voter. We went a step further and obtained a copy of his voting record. We swore our source to secrecy, and committed to not publishing screenshots — but suffice to say it was not hard to find: Political campaigns and operatives of all stripes can pull up a person’s voting record in a matter of seconds. (Such records show only whether a person voted or not — not whom they voted for.)
What the record shows: Trump, perhaps unsurprisingly, was making stuff up. Since 2000, Sullivan has only failed to vote in a single once-every-two-years general election, in 2002.
His record in primary elections is a little more sporadic.
He voted in 2024, but before that hadn’t participated in a regular primary since 2016. (He did, however, vote in the 2022 special primary election to fill the seat left open by the death of longtime Alaska U.S. Rep. Don Young.) He’s also voted in seven municipal elections since 2010, according to the database — and all told, he’s voted more than 30 times since 2000.
We asked the White House, in an email with the subject line ‘fake alaska dan sullivan’ to get their attention, if they could explain where Trump got his bad information. They haven’t responded; we’ll update our story if they do.
For his part, Petersburg Sullivan did not respond to our request for comment; yesterday, he told an Alaska Public Media reporter that he’d been out mushroom hunting and hadn’t heard the president’s remarks.
He later sent the reporter a photo of chanterelles, Alaska Public Media’s story said.