Alaska Democrat Senate candidate Mary Peltola spent significant time staring down at notecards during her debate with Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK), and Sullivan responded by asking if she had gotten the questions beforehand.
The former congresswoman glanced down at the paper for several seconds at a time while answering early questions at Thursday night’s “Debate for the State” in Anchorage.
After Peltola again appeared to read from her notes, Sullivan asked the moderators, “We weren’t supposed to get these questions beforehand, were we?”
“No, sir,” replied Alaska’s News Source reporter Wil Courtney. “Absolutely not,” added Alaska Public Media chief editor Lori Townsend.
“Okay, I’m just watching my opponent,” Sullivan replied, glancing over at Peltola after she read off a card during her answer.
Peltola cut in that she was simply better “prepared.”
A National Republican Senatorial Committee official mocked Peltola for apparently relying on talking points written by “Lower 48 handlers.” The Republican Party’s research arm posted a clip of her looking at her notes while discussing Alaska’s fishing industry.
Sullivan later told reporters that he believed them when they said no one saw the questions in advance.
“I’m not blaming you guys,” he said.
Presidential debates typically ban prepared notes and give candidates only blank paper and a pen. State and local debates are often looser. Alaska Public Media has not publicly posted its policy on notes.
Even where notes are permitted, the unwritten rule is to glance, not read. Checking a statistic or bill name is fine. Reading answers word for word tends to suggest a candidate doesn’t know the material, and answers that seem to anticipate questions can raise suspicions of a leak.
Those suspicions have a real history behind them. In 2016, hacked emails published by WikiLeaks showed that Donna Brazile, then a CNN contributor and later DNC chair, slipped the Clinton campaign advance word of questions during the Democratic primary.
The day before a March 2016 CNN debate in Flint, Michigan, Brazile emailed Clinton aides that a question would come from a woman with a rash. A Flint mother then asked about the water crisis. Brazile also tipped off the campaign about a death penalty question at a CNN town hall.
CNN cut ties with Brazile in October 2016. She later wrote that she would forever regret her decision to tip off the Clinton campaign.
The cue-card dust-up was only one front in a brawl. During the Alaska debate, Sullivan hammered Peltola over a New York Times report that former staffers accused her of angry outbursts. Peltola called the claims “outright fabrications or mass exaggerations,” and moderators threatened to cut the candidates’ microphones if the cross-talk didn’t stop.
The race has already had evidence of chicanery; a second Dan Sullivan, retired Petersburg teacher Dan J. Sullivan, is also on the November ballot after surviving a state effort to remove him. Republicans have accused him of entering the race on behalf of Democrats to confuse voters.
In a June Facebook post, Senator Sullivan said Peltola had been in Petersburg days before the other Sullivan announced, and that a Left-wing political operative helped launch the campaign. Alaska’s Division of Elections disqualified him, ruling that his candidacy had not been filed in “good faith.” Fourteen Republican-controlled states filed an amicus brief backing the division’s authority to remove him. But Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews ruled the disqualification unconstitutional, writing that the law doesn’t allow removing a candidate who meets the legal qualifications for office.
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