Sly maneuvering around third-party candidates is a time-honored, bipartisan tradition in politics.
Democrats and Republicans alike have long stealthily tried to help little-known names on the ballot who might siphon votes away from the opposing party’s nominees. The issue has suddenly become a top midterm story line because of remarkable drama in Alaska, where Democrats carried out a gambit to place a second Dan Sullivan on the ballot, alongside a Republican senator with the same name.
But several other midterm battlegrounds also have outsider candidates who could swing a close race.
In Ohio, Republicans have spent more than $2.2 million to promote a socialist candidate in the state’s vital Senate race, aiming to pull votes from the Democratic nominee, former Senator Sherrod Brown.
In Virginia, a Republican group has sent mailers highlighting the Democratic-leaning positions of a self-described “radical centrist” running as an independent in a competitive House race.
And in Nebraska, both major parties are jockeying to help minor candidates peel votes away from Senator Pete Ricketts, the Republican incumbent, and his Democratic-backed independent challenger, Dan Osborn.
With modern elections often decided by extremely thin margins and billions of dollars sloshing through campaigns, both parties have ample incentives and opportunities to gain an edge through mischief involving third parties.
The jockeying around spoiler candidates is widely considered a legal yet shadowy part of political campaigning that has gone on for decades. The Sullivan episode in Alaska is far from the first time that multiple candidates with the same name have run for the same office, with the lesser-known one often deliberately trying to confuse voters. There was even an Eddie Murphy movie in 1992 based on the concept of his character’s winning a seat in Congress previously held by a deceased politician with the same name.
Usually the actors propping up spoiler candidates are careful enough about wiping away their fingerprints that they do not get caught in the kind of uproar that Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign now faces in Alaska. After a New York Times report detailing how allies of Ms. Peltola, a Democrat, had recruited little-known candidates to try to stack the ballot, Gov. Mike Dunleavy of Alaska ordered an investigation into whether the Peltola campaign should face criminal charges or civil penalties, and President Trump demanded that she be removed from the ballot. Neither suggested a specific law that had been violated.
“Ghost voters are a bad phenomenon, but it’s a phenomenon that’s been in American politics for decades,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, a prominent Republican election lawyer. “At this point there’s no legal violation. Coming when it does, it’s purely up to Alaska voters, who, after all, put both Dan Sullivans on the ballot with their votes.”
He added, “The whole thing is clearly political.”
History offers plenty of precedent of third-party candidates playing spoiler.
Former Senator Jon Tester of Montana, a Democrat, won his first two elections with a margin of victory that was less than the vote total for the Libertarian candidates in those contests. In 2000 and 2016, the number of votes that left-wing presidential candidates received could have been enough to flip the results had they gone to the Democrats running in those years.
It does not always work. Mr. Trump’s allies tried to engage in this when they encouraged Kanye West to run for president in 2024, in an effort to shave off some Black voters from Mr. Trump’s Democratic rivals. The musician failed to get on the ballot in most battleground states.
Usually, the third-party candidates are relatively innocent bystanders to the political drama swirling around them.
This year in Ohio, Greg Levy, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, is making a long-shot run for the Senate, his first bid for public office. He has raised about $132,000 mostly from small donors, is still working full time as a mover and is squeezing in his campaign stops in the evenings.
So it came to his great surprise when a shadowy Republican group began what has become a nearly $2.3 million campaign to promote him to Democratic voters, mostly through mail and text messages, funded by a weeks-old super PAC with ties to Mr. Trump and Ohio Republicans. The group is itself entirely funded by a Republican group that regularly meddles in Democratic politics.
“Say yes to the revolution,” one piece of mail pushing for Mr. Levy reads. “Vote Greg Levy for U.S. Senate.”
Mr. Levy, 49, said in an interview that he opposed on principle the idea “that billionaires subvert the democratic process.”
“I’m the only candidate that’s running that openly opposes political donations, period,” Mr. Levy said. “We want money out of politics, and we need to have an honest political system.”
Republicans are trying to help Mr. Levy because polls show that the top of the ticket is a tight race between Senator Jon Husted, a Republican, and Mr. Brown, a Democrat trying to return to the chamber. In a contest that has drawn nearly $500 million in advertising spending so far, the money for the texts and mail on Mr. Levy’s behalf is a relative pittance.
Ohio Democrats are aiming to help their own spoiler candidate in the Senate race.
The state Democratic Party and Mr. Brown’s campaign have sent mail promoting the Libertarian candidate, Bill Redpath, as “a proud supporter of gun rights” — an apparent attempt to appeal to Republican voters.
Tony Wen, a spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party, declined to comment on the Redpath mailers. Mr. Redpath did not respond to messages.
It is often hard to tell before an election how many voters are attracted to third-party candidates. The polling is complicated because research has shown that simply including a third-party candidate in a poll can lead to a drastic overstatement of their support, while not including them forecloses on voters’ opportunity to demonstrate any support for them.
Pollsters typically err on the side of not including these minor-party candidates, largely because the candidates have not historically received much support. In 2024, third-party presidential candidates drew less than 2 percent of the vote nationally.
This year, most of the late spending to help third-party candidates has come from groups that will not have to disclose their donors before Election Day. One such group, Our Heritage Matters, revealed last week that it had spent $340,000 to help Libertarian candidates in Senate races in Iowa and Kansas as well as in six House contests.
In New Jersey, Republicans have tried to elevate a mysterious candidate named Seamus O’Toole. He is on the ballot in the House district where the Republican incumbent, Representative Tom Kean Jr., is running for re-election against Rebecca Bennett, a top Democratic recruit.
Mr. O’Toole’s party is listed as “Stop Israel’s Genocide” — a position that could catch the eye of left-wing voters.
Mr. O’Toole did not respond to messages from The New York Times and has not responded to New Jersey news outlets that have tried to reach him.
In Virginia, Matt Baker, a retired Marine from Norfolk, decided to run for Congress as an independent because he was dissatisfied with both parties. In an interview, he described himself as a “radical centrist” and said that he borrowed policy ideas from both parties.
Yet only his ideas that align with Democratic views — that he believes in abortion rights and that the 2020 election was not stolen, among others — showed up in mail sent by a Republican group called Progressive Champions PAC that called him “the independent choice for Congress.”
The other side of the mailer called the Democrat in the race, former Representative Elaine Luria, “a corporate candidate.”
The House Democratic campaign arm, however, signaled to outside groups that they should spend money to call Mr. Baker “a staunch supporter of the 2nd Amendment,” a detail reported earlier by Axios.
Mr. Baker was not pleased to be used this way.
“It makes me mad as hell,” he said. “They didn’t coordinate with me. They’re only telling half my story. I am a retired Marine, 28 years of service, and I think integrity is incredibly important. These shadowy people are going around trying to use me to trick people.”
Other potential spoiler candidates are more sanguine about their situation.
Two years ago, Lynn Chapman, a conservative political activist from Sparks, Nev., earned 5 percent of the vote as the Independent American Party candidate in Nevada’s Second Congressional District. It did not matter much, since Representative Mark Amodei, a Republican, won re-election by 19 percentage points.
But this year Mr. Amodei is retiring. The race to succeed him is competitive. And Ms. Chapman is back, this time with some Democratic support. She is well aware that her vote total could be enough to swing the result to the Democratic nominee, Teresa Benitez-Thompson.
Ms. Chapman, 77, said that, given the choice, she would rather see the Republican, David Flippo, an Air Force veteran, win the general election over Ms. Benitez-Thompson, a former state legislator. How would she feel if Ms. Benitez-Thompson won?
“Oh, well,” she said. “Gee whiz, too bad.”
Ruth Igielnik contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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