Dishonestly claiming that a new report about the Alaska Senate race validates President Donald Trump’s yearslong campaign to delegitimize elections his party loses, MAGA pundits are paving the way for a new attempt to subvert the 2026 election if the GOP suffers significant defeats.

The campaign of Democratic nominee Mary Peltola “work[ed] with people trying to recruit” retired teacher Dan S. Sullivan to join the race against incumbent Republican Sen. Dan J. Sullivan, and “the group worked to coax other would-be spoilers into the race, to dilute the incumbent’s support and help catapult the Democrat to victory,” The New York Times reported Wednesday, citing interviews and text messages (the Peltola campaign denies such involvement).

The Times report noted that “ballot-stacking tactics are common in politics and generally considered legal — and have been employed by both parties in Alaska.” But Trump promptly and opportunistically responded by claiming the account showed “Voter Fraud at the Highest Level” — and decreed that Peltola and Dan S. Sullivan “should be removed from the Ballot and prosecuted.”

Trump’s propagandists are responding to his fervor with overheated attacks on Peltola, arguing at times that the ballot-stacking proves that he’s been right all along about Democratic election malfeasance.

“So the president has been saying for years now that they're cheating,” Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones said on Thursday morning. “They’re cheating in the election. And now we have proof of it. "

“Now, in this scenario, this decides the power in the Senate,” his colleague, Brian Kilmeade speculated. “You think 2020 was controversial? That’ll look like a day at the beach compared to this if Sullivan — the real Dan Sullivan — loses.”

Jones and Kilmeade are engaged in a noxious rewriting of history that diminishes what happened in 2020 — and makes it more likely something similar will happen again if Republicans don’t triumph in the 2026 midterms.

The ballot-stacking tactic described by the Times report is sleazy — it’s wrong to try to confuse voters. It’s also much more likely to backfire by becoming public than to succeed in getting voters to pick the wrong candidate. Alaska voters are canny enough to have elected a write-in candidate for Senate in recent memory and the state has ranked-choice voting, meaning that even a confused voter could vote for both Dans and have their ballot count for the incumbent.

All that said, it is unfortunately not uncommon for political operatives to try to prop up additional candidates because they think it will help their own candidate win. Republicans in the MAGA era have regularly employed such tactics. GOP operatives seeking Trump’s reelection ran a presidential campaign for Kanye West in 2020, and GOP-aligned super PACs backed the Green Party candidate for president in 2024 and spent millions in support of a far-left Senate candidate in Ohio in 2026. Even in Alaska this very year, “in the U.S. House race, Democratic candidate Eric Hafner — a felon who has never lived in Alaska — is being boosted by Republican groups,” the Alaska Beacon reported.

But that does not resemble in the slightest what Trump has alleged over the years, which is a massive coordinated effort by Democrats to steal elections through voter fraud. This is entirely a fabrication, given the incredibly low number of confirmed cases of election fraud. And it requires advocates of 2020 election denial — which now includes virtually all Republican officeholders and right-wing media pundits — to accept the logical leap that Democrats decided to falsify enough votes to steal 2020 from Trump but not 2016 or 2024, while also, in Trump’s telling, still stealing California.

Kilmeade’s claim that the 2020 election was “controversial” gives the game away. Trump and his Fox News propagandists spent the weeks after that vote trying to churn up dust, claiming widespread voter fraud. The courts ultimately rejected such claims from the Trump campaign, his subversion effort failed thanks in part to Republican elected officials who stood up to him, and Fox ended up on the hook for a massive defamation settlement over its promotion of voter fraud conspiracy theories.

But before President Joe Biden took office, a horde of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol seeking to overturn the election on Trump’s behalf. Fox helped purge the GOP of Republicans who stood against him, justify the mob’s insurrection, minimize the subversion effort, and return Trump to office so he could fill the administration with election deniers. And now the network is poised to try again.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters