And in recent weeks, Mr. Trump’s pitch has faced pushback from an old foil: former President Barack Obama, who is also traveling through competitive states.
Their speeches on Wednesday evening offered a striking split-screen. As Mr. Trump bragged in Ohio about his ability to pass cognitive tests, Mr. Obama assailed him in Atlanta for higher prices and rampant corruption.
They also continued their tiff over a joke Mr. Obama made about Mr. Trump’s décor choices. The former president had said the White House now looks like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” rankling Mr. Trump. Mr. Obama on Wednesday characterized the president’s pique over his comment as “distractions” and “phony outrage.”
The two men will be joined by a third president on Friday. Former President Bill Clinton is scheduled to campaign in Mississippi, where Scott Colom, the Democratic nominee for Senate, has mounted a surprisingly strong challenge in a state that last elected a Democrat to the chamber in 1982.
Tens of millions of Americans have already cast their ballots, as early voting is well underway. As of Wednesday night, more than 40 million had either gone to vote or mailed in their ballot, according to data collected by the University of Florida’s Election Lab, which tracks early voting.
Along with dispatching Mr. Trump to rally the MAGA base, the White House has also turned to pre-emptive legal action. Last week, Mr. Trump directed the Department of Justice to sue to block certification of the Senate race should Mary Peltola, the Democratic candidate in Alaska, win.
He went further on Wednesday, calling for her criminal prosecution after a New York Times report that her campaign was involved in recruiting candidates to draw votes from the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan Sullivan, including one with the same name as him.
Later on Wednesday, Alaska’s Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, said he was ordering an investigation into whether Ms. Peltola’s campaign should face criminal charges or civil penalties.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
New Hampshire debate: Representative Chris Pappas, a Democrat, and former Senator John E. Sununu, a Republican, had a tense debate, fighting over Social Security and the cause of the high cost of living. The two men are battling for the seat of the retiring Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat. Read more ›
A split city: In Mason, Mich., residents are united against a proposed data center that they say is a threat to their way of life. But they are divided on which House candidate — Tom Barrett, the Republican, or William Lawrence, the Democrat — is best suited to protect them from the development. Read more ›
No show of support: After Representative Haley Stevens lost Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in August, she pledged to campaign with him. But the election is now days away, and the two have yet to appear together. Read more ›
But Mr. Droscha, 64, said he wasn’t sure if Mr. Lawrence could deliver on his promises, especially without a Democrat in the White House and with control of Congress unclear. So, he said, he would likely vote again for the familiar candidate, Representative Tom Barrett, a Republican seeking re-election.
“You can say it 100 times a day, every day, but is it going to happen?” Mr. Droscha said last week, before feeding hay to his cows. “That’s the distrust I have.”
The anger toward the data center boom rippling through rural America permeates the front lawns, council meetings and daily conversations in Mason, a mid-Michigan county seat of about 8,300 people where residents view the potential 400-acre project as a serious threat to their groundwater, property values, environment and quality of life.
Their shared backlash has upended local politics, driving emotionally charged public meetings where residents asserted that city officials did not speak openly about the developers’ plans. In exquisite timing, it has also collided with a marquee federal contest, the most expensive House race of the midterms and one that could change the balance of power in Congress.
Even as Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Barrett both oppose the construction of a data center near Mason, their contrasting remedies have managed to divide the community at the rare time neighbors are uniting across party lines.
“It’s the biggest issue for City of Mason voters, absolutely,” said Meg Short, 41, who works in real estate, adding that she wasn’t ready to return the ballot she had marked for Mr. Lawrence and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate. “It’s been hard to choose on the state level who I want to represent me.”
Mr. Lawrence, a progressive who has positioned himself as an anti-corporate outsider, has made reining in tech giants through federal intervention a central pillar of his campaign. On the Republican side, Mr. Barrett has called for repealing state tax incentives for developers but opposes federal action, saying that zoning decisions should remain entirely in local hands.
Some voters around Mason said that Mr. Lawrence’s engagement with the anti-data center community had appealed to them. Zachary Bartels, 48, a conservative who lives about a third of a mile from the proposed data center site, recalled Mr. Lawrence receiving thunderous applause after a speech against data centers in a city council meeting last month.
“He just earned — not even necessarily our vote — but the right to be in the room by being in the room so many times,” said Mr. Bartels, a pastor who has also spoken in recent municipal meetings.
Mr. Bartels said he was undecided about who would receive his vote, even though he had helped elect Mr. Barrett and President Trump. But, Mr. Bartels added, neither House candidate had offered a detailed enough plan on how they could help Mason from Congress.
“I’m kind of going both ways,” he said.
Much like Mr. Bartels, other voters said they were torn. They said they didn’t trust local officials to stop the project. But they were also hesitant to embrace federal regulation or to trust that the progressive candidate, Mr. Lawrence, could make meaningful changes.
They have seen how quickly the nationwide data center surge has suffused Michigan: Favorable tax laws, a cool climate, vast acreages and easy access to water for cooling have made it among the more preferred destinations for artificial intelligence nationwide.
Huge projects have advanced elsewhere in the state, including a $16 billion campus backed by OpenAI and Oracle in Saline Township. Mason-area residents seized on the project’s approval as proof that local governments lacked the legal and financial power to resist big corporations and that state laws favored tech giants over small towns.
The issue flared in Mason late last year, when city officials considered a new zoning ordinance addressing a potential data center. It passed this year, with officials saying they established guardrails, but residents said they were far too weak. The ordinance was later repealed.
Residents also forced a recall vote for a long-serving city councilwoman on the Nov. 3 ballot and began trying to unseat the mayor.
The discussion intensified in August when local landowners working with an Ohio-based developer petitioned the state to annex 400 acres of farmland into the City of Mason to secure municipal water and sewer for a data center, something many residents learned through public-records requests.
City officials have said the data center would bring tax revenues. The Trump administration has also said that the buildup of A.I. infrastructure is necessary to win technological supremacy over China.
A representative for the developer, Comino Development, and the property owners’ lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.
At a city council meeting last week, about 200 residents toting signs, shirts and hats declaring “No Data Centers in Mason” packed City Hall, many of them there to offer public comments before the council voted on a plan for a proposed zoning rewrite. (They ultimately rejected it.)
One resident, Doug DeLind, a sculptor who lives next to the proposed site, took the bold step of suggesting candidates they could support. Partisan divisions surfaced.
When Mr. DeLind said he endorsed Dr. El-Sayed, who has called for a ban on superintelligent A.I. and a cabinet-level agency to regulate the fast-developing industry, someone in the crowd said, “Terrorism.”
“Not terrorism,” Mr. DeLind replied, joining residents recoiling at the baseless accusation leveled at Dr. El-Sayed throughout his campaign that he had ties to terrorist groups.
When Mr. DeLind mentioned Mr. Lawrence’s name, someone said, “Socialist!”
“He is,” Mr. DeLind shot back, drawing applause. “I’m glad we got that out there.”
Mr. Lawrence has let his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America lapse, but still identifies as a progressive. Even with his left-wing platform, he said the issue had given him an opening to talk to conservative voters.
“There are some people that are voting with me on this issue for sure, including people who have been Republican voters in the past who see me standing alongside them,” Mr. Lawrence said in an interview.
For his part, Mr. Barrett said that he did not believe he was losing voters on the data center issue, adding that Mr. Lawrence’s proposal for a federal moratorium was unrealistic.
“Are you going to get enough votes in the U.S. Senate to do that?” he said in an interview. “And then, is President Trump going to sign it, knowing that he’s on record opposing these restrictions?”
Mayor Russell Whipple of Mason, a nonpartisan official, disputed residents’ accusations that he had withheld information about his conversations with data center developers. He said that residents’ fears about the dangers of such a center were exaggerated, adding that the city would establish standards for noise, as well as air and water quality.
But he said he expected the midterms to be “a little more blue” in his city because of Mr. Lawrence’s visibility.
“I had an old newspaperman tell me 30 years ago: He said, ‘In small town elections, the most signs wins,’” Mr. Whipple said. “There’s more Will Lawrence than Tom Barrett signs.”
The odd sentence was a sign that artificial intelligence tools had been used to write parts of his website. A staffer had apparently asked an A.I. chatbot to steer clear of President Trump in its writing. (Mr. Pratt said in a statement posted to Facebook that the passage was “an internal note” and that his campaign had used A.I. tools to “clean up the wording.”)
It was one example among hundreds identified by The New York Times in which candidate biographies and position papers were apparently written with A.I. tools.
A.I. has increasingly seeped into all parts of the nation’s electoral process, rewriting the playbook for how politicians connect with voters. Money-strapped campaigns, eager for shortcuts, have rapidly adopted several A.I. tools, even though many of the candidates have not spoken publicly about their use.
“If it improves the quality of campaign information” for voters seeking information about candidates, “that can be a good thing,” said Lisa Argyle, an associate professor of political science at Purdue University, who studies generative A.I. and political communication. The problem arises when candidates begin prompting A.I. “without really reflecting in a meaningful way on their own views and what they want to do as a representative.”
Chatbots, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, are capable of writing glistening prose almost instantly, after being provided with a set of simple instructions, called prompts. When producing their own text, they have a tendency to drift toward the most likely writing styles — and often the most predictable or clichéd.
To identify campaign sites produced with A.I., The Times downloaded text from the websites of 695 candidates running for House and Senate. That content was then analyzed by two A.I.-text detectors: Pangram and GPTZero. Both services can make errors and can be fooled if writers significantly rework A.I. generated text. But a 2025 study from the University of Chicago found that with the most common types of online writing, Pangram was accurate more than 99 percent of the time, with GPTZero not far behind.
The detectors found there was high likelihood that 291 candidate websites were written with A.I. tools. One hundred fifty had pages flagged as generated by A.I., while the detectors found the remaining sites were a mix of human and A.I. writing.
The A.I. detectors work by detecting subtle linguistic patterns like character frequency, word order and rhythm — all signs that are often imperceptible to humans and difficult for politicians to replicate by accident. That makes the tools less likely to falsely identify mere clichéd writing, which is common in campaign writing, as A.I.-made.
Many passages across the websites used telltale signs of A.I. writing. The systems, trained on billions of passages of text from across the internet, tend to repeat phrases and writing styles that were eventually identified by A.I. watchdogs.
“The cost of living isn’t just ‘high’,” Stephanie Vargas, a Republican House candidate in California, said on her platform page, which was flagged as A.I.-written by detectors. “It’s being driven up by government spending.”
That kind of passage — a phrase that includes the words “isn’t just,” followed by a phrase beginning with “it’s” — was repeated across dozens of campaign websites flagged as having A.I. text, including these:
From Ray Pooley, a Democratic House candidate in Michigan: “True strength isn’t just a mighty military. It’s the wisdom to know when to use it.”
From Patrick Halpin, a Democratic House candidate in New York: “Long Island’s environment isn’t just something we enjoy. It’s what makes this a great place to live.”
The tools identified each of those websites as having been heavily if not entirely written by A.I. tools.
“A.I. has allowed me to be able to run a campaign effectively,” said Dale Pabst, the campaign manager for Mr. Halpin, who is running against Andrew Garbarino, a well-funded Republican incumbent. “It allows us to compete with another campaign that has a 20-time financial advantage over us.” He said that he pulled together Mr. Halpin’s platform webpage in a few days using A.I. tools, instead of a couple of weeks.
The other campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.
While more than 30 states have laws requiring disclosures around A.I.-generated content in campaign ads, such regulations tend to focus on deceptive replicas of candidates, known as “deepfakes.” There are no laws requiring A.I.-written text to be disclosed.
Political operatives have adopted A.I. in a variety of ways this year, seeing the tools as useful for the difficult and monotonous work of campaigning, at least behind the scenes. That includes managing voter databases, writing campaign messages and processing feedback from voters through door-knocking operations nationwide.
Some candidates have also relied on A.I. to help guide their campaigns, turning to chatbots as a cheap form of campaign manager.
But the integration of A.I. in campaigns also threatens to send conflicting messages to voters, especially as lawmakers push for more A.I. regulations and fight plans for enormous data centers that make A.I. possible.
Many of the campaigns flagged for having A.I. text were congressional races with limited funds and long-shot odds. But some had far more resources.
The A.I. detectors found that the online biography for Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate for Senate in Texas, was heavily written by A.I. His race is one of the most expensive nonpresidential races in U.S. history, with ad spending surpassing $500 million.
“Ken Paxton is a fearless conservative, a relentless fighter, and a true defender of Texas values,” the site said. Pangram assessed the sentence as “100 percent A.I.,” indicating it was fully written by an A.I. model.
A representative Mr. Paxton’s campaign declined to comment.
The campaign website of James Talarico, Mr. Paxton’s Democratic opponent, was also tested for A.I. writing. It received a score of “100 percent human.”
Mr. Pappas and Mr. Sununu are running for a seat currently held by the retiring Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat. Both parties view the race as crucial to their hopes of retaking the chamber. Mr. Pappas, who leads in polling, seized opportunities to attack Mr. Sununu and present him as beholden to President Trump — perhaps reflecting a degree of discomfort that Mr. Sununu has been able to keep the race competitive by presenting himself as independent of the unpopular president.
Here are five takeaways from the night.
Neither candidate is new to voters.
Sometimes, a political candidate bursts onto the scene out of nowhere. That is not the story of New Hampshire in 2026.
The Senate race pits Mr. Pappas, an understated, four-term Democrat who has spent much of his adult life in elected office, against Mr. Sununu, a former congressman and one-term senator who won this same seat in 2002 before losing it in 2008. Mr. Sununu is the son and brother of former New Hampshire governors. Mr. Pappas’s family is best known for its popular restaurant, the Puritan Backroom in Manchester.
Mr. Pappas, 46, sought to present himself as a “new generation of leadership.” Mr. Sununu, 62, insisted he could shake things up in Washington after being first elected to Congress 30 years ago.
And each nevertheless accused the other of representing the status quo.
“Chris Pappas talked about all the things he wants to do and wants to accomplish, but he’s been there for eight years, and he hasn’t gotten the job done,” Mr. Sununu said.
“This election is about Team New Hampshire versus Team Trump,” Mr. Pappas said. “Fact is, John Sununu was our senator before and, if he was as effective and as independent as he says he was, then he’d probably still be our senator today. But voters had another idea.”
Both bragged about challenging their own party …
Mr. Sununu’s candidacy depends on his ability to convince voters in New Hampshire — a state that has never really warmed to Mr. Trump — that he is independent of a president who endorsed him early in the race.
So he rattled of a list of his differences with the president: the trade war with Canada, the war in Iran, the $1.8 billion fund Mr. Trump proposed for victims of “weaponization” by the Department of Justice and his now-scuttled plan to televise a military execution.
“When Donald Trump leaves office in two years,” Mr. Sununu asked, “where does the country go?”
What was more surprising, perhaps, was how frequently Mr. Pappas made a point of spelling out his differences with national Democrats like former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“I called out Joe Biden when he was president because he let things get out of control on the southern border, and it created a crisis,” Mr. Pappas said. “And I’ve taken on my own party on immigration, and I’ve gotten a lot of flak for it.”
… and working with the other side.
It’s an era of deeply tribal politics, but things are split in New Hampshire. Republicans have total control over state government, while Democrats hold each seat in the federal delegation.
That might be why, in a somewhat retro twist, both candidates were eager to talk about how frequently they reach across the aisle.
Mr. Pappas talked about his support for one bipartisan measure after another: a ban on stock trading by members of Congress, a measure that would provide heating assistance to low-income people, immigration measures and more.
Mr. Sununu said that he had worked with Democrats plenty, and he praised Senator Susan Collins of Maine — another Republican who likes to talk up bipartisanship — as a “model.”
“I even wrote bipartisan legislation with Hillary Clinton to improve auto safety and protect kids,” he said.
Sununu climbed in his Wayback Machine.
Mrs. Clinton wasn’t the only reference Mr. Sununu made that seemed, well, dated.
He talked about demanding changes to the Patriot Act during the presidency of George W. Bush. He said he was the first Republican to call for the firing of Alberto Gonzales, Mr. Bush’s attorney general.
He grew visibly annoyed as he parsed an attack by Mr. Pappas over legislation privatizing Social Security during his term in the Senate.
“That wasn’t my bill, Chris,” Mr. Sununu said. “OK, you can’t ascribe every crazy bill ever introduced in Congress to me. That’s dishonest.”
He also chafed when Mr. Pappas said his net worth had grown to an “estimated” $35 million after he left the Senate.
“Goodness knows, I’m not worth $35 million,” he said, before accusing Mr. Pappas of being unable to read a financial disclosure form, the federally required filings that publish broad ranges for public officials’ assets. “Now, I blame that on the time he spent at Harvard.” (Mr. Sununu attended M.I.T.)
Pappas demurred on impeachment.
Some Democrats are hungry for candidates who want to punish Mr. Trump for what they see as the excesses of his second term — but that’s not the audience Mr. Pappas was playing to.
Asked about the prospect of impeaching Mr. Trump if the Democrats gained a majority in Congress, Mr. Pappas called instead for “focused hearings” and “oversight.”
“We need to stay focused on how we can solve problems, make lives better for Granite Staters and lower costs,” Mr. Pappas said.
Mr. Sununu nevertheless accused him of being too liberal for New Hampshire. He said Mr. Pappas voted too often with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and knocked him for campaigning alongside former Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
“I don’t know what Chris’s infatuation is with California, but it’s not New Hampshire, and it’s not a good model for our state,” Mr. Sununu said.
Mr. Pappas reminded him that Ms. Harris won New Hampshire in 2024, and that Mr. Trump had not.
“Here in New Hampshire,” he said, “we welcome out-of-town guests.”
“Of course, I’m voting for our Democratic nominee for Senate,” Ms. Stevens said on CNN. “I’m voting for the Democratic ticket. But I want to encourage this campaign to shut out the hate and to call it out and to make people who are in my coalition, right — make them feel comfortable about coming to the polls.”
Ms. Stevens’s remarks are an unwelcome development for Dr. El-Sayed in a high-stakes race. It is rare for the loser of a primary who has endorsed the winner to be publicly critical this close to the general election.
It’s not the first time it has happened in this year’s midterms. In Texas, Senator John Cornyn has missed few opportunities to needle Ken Paxton, who beat him for the Republican nomination in May. Mr. Cornyn, however, has not made as many cable news appearances as Ms. Stevens.
Ms. Stevens, a staunch supporter of Israel, said on CNN that she is representing Jewish Michiganders who supported her and are angry about advertising that they view as antisemitic. The campaign of Dr. El-Sayed, a vocal critic of Israel, has said it was “not affiliated in any way” with the ad that has come under scrutiny. But Ms. Stevens said that does not go far enough.
“He can disavow these ads, and he can reassure these undecided voters who are still out,” she said.
A spokeswoman for Dr. El-Sayed’s campaign declined to comment on Ms. Stevens’s remarks.
Dr. El-Sayed, speaking to reporters earlier Wednesday, dismissed concerns that Ms. Stevens’s fiancé was backing Mr. Rogers over concerns about Dr. El-Sayed’s Israel policy.
“I’m building a movement to take on the challenges that Donald Trump is facing,” Dr. El-Sayed said. “If folks have issues that are more important to them than that, that’s fine — that’s their choice.”
The public criticism from Ms. Stevens made clear that there has been little private reconciliation between the primary rivals despite her vow to vote for him. While Ms. Stevens couched her public remarks as constructive criticism, she has been more critical of Dr. El-Sayed in private, according to a person who has spoken with her, leaving some allies wondering if she would in fact vote for him.
She said in a text message on Wednesday that she would not appear with Dr. El-Sayed in the campaign’s final week. “I am not campaigning with Abdul,” she wrote.
Ms. Stevens’s criticism of Dr. El-Sayed had been building.
On Sunday, in another CNN interview, she said, “I can’t say that I agree with everything that’s gone on.” She questioned Dr. El-Sayed’s efforts to appeal to Black voters and suggested that he was too focused on foreign policy.
On Wednesday, Ms. Stevens’s fiancé, Jason Turkish, a Jewish Democrat, said he planned to vote for Mr. Rogers, and joined him at an event with the Republican Jewish Coalition in the evening.
“I watched Haley graciously concede an election, and open her arms and her heart to Abdul on Aug. 5, the day after the primary, and I prayed that he would moderate, and he hasn’t,” Mr. Turkish said in an interview.
Mr. Turkish said he was frustrated after Dr. El-Sayed declined to answer a question at an October debate about whether Iran or Israel was a greater threat to the United States. And Mr. Turkish expressed disappointment that the day after the primary, Dr. El-Sayed was joined by another Democratic primary contender, Mallory McMorrow, who finished a distant third after dropping out weeks before the primary, rather than Ms. Stevens at a celebratory news conference in Detroit.
Dr. El-Sayed’s campaign said that its leadership remains in frequent contact with Ms. Stevens and that the congresswoman had campaigned on his behalf at a mid-October Democratic event in Oakland County, which she had carried in the primary. It also said Dr. El-Sayed had brought on several staff members from Ms. Stevens’s campaign after the primary.
Dr. El-Sayed’s campaign said it had also asked Ms. Stevens to campaign alongside him. It did not respond to a question about why that had not happened recently.
“The Abdul campaign is grateful for Congresswoman Stevens’s immediate and sustained support,” Roxie Richner, a spokeswoman for Dr. El-Sayed, said in a statement.
Ms. Stevens’s tepid support — and the awkward dynamic between the two Democrats — is one of the most public points of tension among Democrats in Michigan, who remain far more divided than party leaders had hoped to be going into the election next Tuesday.
Opinion polls show that Dr. El-Sayed and Mr. Rogers are running neck-and-neck in Michigan, a traditional battleground state where a Republican has not won a Senate race in more than three decades. The battle between Dr. El-Sayed and Mr. Rogers could play a critical role in the national fight for Senate control.
Israel remains a dividing line for some Democrats in the state, and Jewish voters say they are torn about whether to support Dr. El-Sayed, who has called Israel’s government “evil.” Dr. El-Sayed is also trying to overcome tensions between Black and Arab American voters in the Detroit area.
Dr. El-Sayed and Ms. Stevens clashed regularly over Israel during the primary race, with Dr. El-Sayed assailing Ms. Stevens over support she received from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group. AIPAC is now backing Mr. Rogers.
Lonnie Scott, a Democratic consultant in Michigan, said Ms. Stevens’s recent commentary was not “helpful” and that “Haley should be a team player.” But, he said, Dr. El-Sayed “should be doing more outreach.”
“I don’t place blame on one over the other,” Mr. Scott said.
Representative Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who stayed publicly neutral in the primary, defended Ms. Stevens.
“I’m sick and tired of people blaming Haley,” Ms. Dingell said.
Corrected on
Oct. 29, 2026
:
An earlier version of this article misidentified the Republican who has not made as many cable news appearances as Ms. Stevens. It is Mr. Cornyn, not Mr. Paxton.
We acknowledge mistakes in our reporting with corrections. If you spot an error, please let us know at corrections@nytimes.com.Learn more.
“Deliberately tricking voters into casting their ballots for someone else strikes at the integrity of our elections,” he said in a post on X. “Anyone or any organization found to have broken the law must be held accountable.”
Earlier in the day, President Trump demanded that Ms. Peltola, a Democrat, be removed from the ballot and prosecuted without explaining what crime, if any, was committed.
“They said they didn’t do it, and they did do it, and they got caught,” Mr. Trump told reporters on his way to a rally in Ohio, describing the Democratic effort as “voter fraud at the highest level.”
The secret plan involved senior advisers to both the Peltola campaign and the top campaign committee supporting Senate Democrats. The retiree, who is from a small Alaskan fishing village, was recruited because he shared the Republican incumbent’s first and last name.
Both Sullivans will appear on the ballot on Tuesday alongside Ms. Peltola and a fourth candidate, Gerald Heikes. Mr. Trump called for Daniel J. Sullivan’s removal from the ballot.
Mr. Trump wasn’t the only Republican to object to the plan. But proving that a crime was committed is likely to be difficult. State leaders had tried earlier this year to remove Daniel J. Sullivan from the ballot, but the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that nothing in state law nor in the U.S. Constitution allowed it to rule on the motives of a candidate.
And the Peltola campaign is hardly the first political committee on either side of the aisle to engage in ballot-stacking.
Many Democrats defended the plan by pointing out how commonplace such actions are. Republicans have employed them in a variety of states, including Alaska.
Some Democrats even said that the intricate plot was a welcome sign that the party was fighting tooth and nail to oppose Mr. Trump’s agenda in what they viewed as an existential election.
Lauren French, a spokeswoman for the Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic group aligned with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, posted a series of examples of G.O.P. chicanery on X. Her posts included the instance of a super PAC with Republican ties spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in Alaska to prop up Democratic and Green Party candidates in this year’s Senate primary.
In 2024, the Alaska Republican Party participated in a lawsuit arguing to keep on the ballot a Democratic candidate for the U.S. House who was a federal inmate campaigning from a prison in New York.
Also sharing examples was Chris Meagher, a veteran Democratic strategist who served in the Biden administration.
“The reality is that while it’s maybe an interesting story, this sort of thing is not really new,” he wrote on X.
Ms. Peltola herself appeared to brush off the news at a rally on Wednesday, saying it was “just another distraction.”
A spokesman for Senator Sullivan said in a statement that Ms. Peltola and her campaign “have spent months gaslighting Alaskans, denying a scheme they were running all along.”
Before The Times published its article, the Trump administration had already filed a lawsuit calling for the Alaska Senate race not to be certified if Senator Sullivan lost. That suit did not, however, allege specific illegal activity. And in a Fox News interview on Wednesday, Attorney General Todd Blanche seemed to concede that laws may not have been broken. “It should be!” he exclaimed when asked if the Democratic plot was illegal.
The lawsuit, filed by the Justice Department last week at Mr. Trump’s direction, is unusual because it preemptively demands an investigation only if the incumbent senator loses. It accuses Daniel J. Sulivan, who has said he voted for Democrats in the last three presidential races and for Ms. Peltola in her 2022 and 2024 congressional campaigns, of trying to “dupe Alaska’s voters into believing that he is Senator Sullivan.”
Chief Judge Sharon Gleason of U.S. District Court in Alaska agreed to a motion by the Alaska elections division to move quickly, giving the Justice Department until Thursday afternoon to respond to a motion to dismiss the case.
She also noted in her rulings that the administration waited to sue until “after Alaskans had already begun casting their ballots for the November 2026 election — and nearly four months after the Alaska Supreme Court directed the Division of Elections to include Daniel J. Sullivan on the ballot.”
The Peltola campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have asked to join the case, noting that the state election office tried to block Daniel J. Sullivan from the ballot before state courts overruled them.
The Trump administration initially opposed that request, but on Wednesday afternoon it lifted its objection, “given a change in circumstances.” The administration cited the Times article detailing what federal lawyers called a “sprawling conspiracy to recruit and prop up a sham candidate for the purpose of deceiving Alaskan voters.”
Scott Kendall, a lawyer in Anchorage who has worked for Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, and former Gov. Bill Walker, an independent, said the Democratic effort to influence the ballot might amount to a “dirty trick,” but one with a long history in American politics.
“Go back to J.F.K. There’s a long history of this kind of chicanery,” he said, noting that in John F. Kennedy’s first campaign for Congress, his father’s political operation was accused of paying a man to run against a better-known candidate with the same name, splitting the vote in a crowded Democratic primary.
Mr. Kendall, the architect of Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, said the system could mitigate potential confusion because Republican voters who rank both Sullivans on their ballot are likely to see their vote go eventually to the incumbent senator.
One Alaska Republican not known to embrace the theatrics of the Trump administration also reacted with anger to the news of the Democratic plan.
“While some may try to write this off as just how politics works now, ballot-stacking should have no place in our electoral process,” Ms. Murkowski, a moderate Republican who endorsed Ms. Peltola in her previous campaigns but is supporting Senator Sullivan this year, said in a statement. “Alaskans deserve the honest truth from Mary and her campaign — what has been revealed is a pattern of lies and coverups and a culture of deception.”
Dan Watson contributed reporting.