The View’s co-hosts usually treat Republican complaints about election tricks like bedtime stories for the tinfoil-hat crowd.
This time the trick came from their own side, and nobody at the table could laugh it off.
And Whoopi Goldberg just summed up the panel’s real complaint in three words.
The Story ABC’s Daytime Crew Couldn’t Wave Away
According to a recent New York Times report, a staffer for Democrat Senate candidate Mary Peltola combed through Alaska’s voter records and built a list of every Dan Sullivan in the state.
That list had nothing to do with planning a family reunion. The search turned up Dan J Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher from Petersburg, who now sits on the same Senate ballot as the incumbent, US Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK).
Peltola says she knew nothing about it. When the Associated Press asked the challenger whether he’d had any contact with her campaign, he answered “zero, none, zilch.”
But Senator Sullivan smelled it from the start. “He’s purposely trying to trick my constituents to rig the election for Peltola,” he said back in June.
One left-leaning Alaska outlet answered with a piece mocking Republicans for losing their minds over a fellow with a common Irish name.
Donald Trump didn’t wait around for the count. Trump sued Alaska ahead of the election to block certification of the race if Peltola wins.
Then the Times story hit, and the ladies of The View had to say something on live television.
Five Hosts Took Turns Holding Their Noses
Goldberg called it “a shady tactic” if the reporting holds up. Joy Behar labeled it “a mistake on the part of the Democrats.”
Alyssa Farah Griffin piled on. “I think it stinks to high heaven,” she said. “I just believe candidates should win on their merits, not through shady tactics.”
Sara Haines kept it brief: “I think it’s definitely dirty.”
And Sunny Hostin confessed she figured the scheme had to break some law before she learned otherwise. “It’s not even illegal!” she said. “So, also, the laws surrounding this area, those need to be reformed. It’s just grotesque.”
Goldberg closed out the segment by calling the whole business “sloppy and dumb.” She added that Peltola had been “doing fine” before the news broke.
Sloppy and Dumb Is How a Coach Grades a Fumble
Sit with those words for a second. Sloppy. Dumb. A mistake.
That’s locker-room talk. A coach says it after his running back coughs up the ball on the 2-yard line. Nobody grades a con on neatness unless the real offense was leaving fingerprints behind.
And Goldberg’s follow-up fills in the rest. Peltola was “doing fine.” The worry at that table centered on a Democrat’s standing in the race, not on the 80-year-old Alaskan who might squint at two Dan Sullivans in the booth and pick the wrong one.
Griffin made the pecking order even plainer. She told viewers she doubted the scheme would have a “tangible impact” on the race. Then she named what actually bugged her.
“What it does, too, we know that Donald Trump has already telegraphed he wants to challenge the election results,” Griffin said. “This is absolutely going to show up in one of these lawsuits afterwards if Peltola wins.”
So the decoy candidate barely matters, but the ammunition it hands Trump matters a great deal. Funny way to rank the problem.
Maybe Griffin is right that Alaskans can sort it out on their own. Those same voters managed to write in Lisa Murkowski’s name in 2010, a point Alaska commentators tossed at Republicans all summer. But a write-in voter walks in knowing exactly whom to pick. A same-name decoy fishes for the other voter, the one in a hurry who never stops to check a middle initial.
Joy Behar Grabbed the Both-Sides Crutch
Behar couldn’t leave it at “dumb.” “I mean, it’s done on both sides. It was done back in the day by the Republicans. They did it,” she said.
She never said which case she meant. The best-known example ran through a Florida state Senate race in 2020, and a jury convicted the Republican operative behind that ghost candidate of felonies in 2024. Nobody on the Right excused that one as just politics.
Alaska may end up testing the same principle. Governor Mike Dunleavy has already handed questions about the scheme to state public safety officials.
Then Behar swerved to her favorite villain. “Let’s remember that Trump was the one who asked to find 11,780 votes. Remember that? So he’s up to dirty tricks all the time. This is politics. And it was dumb of the Democrats.”
Trump made that phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021, while millions of Americans were raising hard questions about the last-minute voting rule changes rushed through under cover of COVID. Fani Willis turned it into a sprawling racketeering case anyway, until an appeals court disqualified her over her romantic relationship with the special prosecutor she hired.
But the prosecutor who inherited the file, Pete Skandalakis, dropped the whole thing in November 2025. His own filing laid out an alternative interpretation of the call, and a judge dismissed the case within minutes.
So Behar’s big gotcha rests on a case that no longer exists. She used it to soften a scheme her own panel had just called grotesque.
Griffin tried a similar move, lumping Republican redistricting in Texas in with ugly tactics that “backfired.” But a state legislature drawing maps is a job the Constitution hands lawmakers, and they did it out in the open. Combing a voter list for a stranger with the right name is a different animal altogether.
Hostin Wants New Laws While Trump Already Went to Court
Hostin’s proposed fix says plenty. She wants legislators to rewrite the rules so nobody can pull this stunt again.
But the moment Trump asks a judge to weigh in on the very same scheme, Griffin files it under efforts to “challenge the election results,” as though going to court over a decoy candidate were the real outrage.
That’s the tell with this crowd. Democrats and their friends in the media spent years warning that democracy itself hangs on every single ballot. A campaign on their side allegedly went hunting through voter files for a name match, and the harshest word the panel could find was “dumb.”
Griffin did offer Peltola some free advice. “I think the candidate herself should denounce it and try to create distance from it,” she said. “If she can honestly say she had nothing to do with it, she should say, ‘We don’t need these kind of tactics. I’m running against this Dan Sullivan.’”
Notice the “if.” Even the panel’s resident Republican left the door wide open.
Five women spent a whole segment on the scheme’s optics, its legality, and its fallout for Mary Peltola. Not one of them got around to the Alaska voter who will stand in a booth, stare at two Dan Sullivans, and have to guess.
Sources: Mediaite, “‘Stinks To High Heaven!’ The View Hosts Pile On Alaska Democrats For Putting A Second Dan Sullivan On The Ballot”; The New York Times (as reported by Mediaite); Associated Press via Kodiak Daily Mirror; Petersburg Pilot; Alaska’s News Source (KTUU); Anchorage Daily News; The Alaska Current; ABC News; Associated Press via News Tribune; The Boston Globe; Georgia Recorder; South China Morning Post