Ironcloud compares party-backed spoilers with scrutiny of Native women

Federal intervention distinguishes Alaska from earlier ballot efforts

Petala Ironcloud’s commentary in The Guardian examined a recurring practice of party allies pushing third-party candidates onto ballots, then used that history to compare two Native American women in U.S. Senate campaigns. Mary Peltola is running in Alaska, where polls favor her, and Peggy Flanagan is running in Minnesota. Ironcloud said the candidates were testing entrenched doubts about the electability of women of color in majority-white statewide races at the moment scrutiny intensified.

Ironcloud began with earlier party-backed efforts. In 2020, Trump’s allies pushed Kanye West onto ballots in states including Vermont, Arkansas and Wisconsin to take votes from Democrats. In 2024, Trump allies worked to get Jill Stein and Cornel West onto ballots in swing states. The commentary said Trump praised both from a rally stage because each “takes 100%” from Democrats. No federal lawyer intervened in those earlier examples, Ironcloud wrote.

Her argument then turned to active ballot efforts in Ohio and Iowa. She wrote that the federal pretext fell flat, pointing to Ohio, where Democrat-affiliated groups were promoting Libertarian candidate Bill Redpath while Republicans had spent more than $1.58 million boosting progressive candidate Gregory Levy.

In Iowa, Democratic-aligned PACs had deployed hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Libertarian candidate Thomas Raymond Laehn, whose presence on the ballot could eat into Republican candidate Ashley Hinson’s already slim polling lead. Ironcloud called this the same tactic, used by the same party, against the same kind of target — a Republican in a tight race — and said the Justice Department had not intervened there.

She said the Justice Department had sued in only one state, Alaska, where an Alaska Native woman was favored to win. “What’s different in Alaska is not the tactic. It’s that the federal government has decided to police it in one race,” she wrote.

Scrutiny also connected the Alaska case to Peggy Flanagan’s Minnesota campaign. Ironcloud wrote that Flanagan, a Democratic candidate and member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, was experiencing similarly heightened scrutiny. On 21 October, the Wall Street Journal reported that Flanagan had inflated her credentials by claiming Phi Beta Kappa membership, but the paper’s own examination did not support the report. Phi Beta Kappa associate secretary and chief operating officer Amber Fox confirmed to CBS News that Flanagan had been inducted in 2002, and the Wall Street Journal later corrected the story.

Ironcloud cited political scientists who had found that doubts about electability follow women of color. She said primary voters may personally agree with a candidate’s positions yet withhold support because they fear other voters, especially general-election swing voters, will not back the candidate. Local party chairs share those doubts too, she said.

The commentary also cited researchers at Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics, who found that Native American women in politics, among other women of color, carry heightened stress and perform additional emotional labor because of their intersecting identities. Native women remain among the least studied groups in the field, the researchers said. Ironcloud placed Peltola and Flanagan in majority-white statewide races and said they were testing entrenched doubts at the point when scrutiny arrived.

Peltola had weathered two major New York Times investigations in five weeks, one into her treatment of staff and one into the ballot scheme, and her lead had held. No Native American woman had ever served in the U.S. Senate, and Ironcloud said both candidates were within reach of it in 2026. She said both had spent the final weeks of their campaigns fending off scrutiny: one from a major newspaper that appeared to have gotten the story wrong, and the other from a federal government that had singled out Peltola’s race alone.

Against that backdrop, the Alaska certification dispute provides recent context. Days before Alaskans were scheduled to vote, the Justice Department sued at Donald Trump’s behest to block certification of Alaska’s U.S. Senate race if the Republican incumbent narrowly lost. A judge dismissed the suit on Sunday, and the administration said it planned to appeal. On Wednesday, Trump demanded that Peltola, the Alaska Native Democrat whom polls favored to win, be removed from the ballot and prosecuted. Alaska’s Republican governor ordered an investigation into Peltola’s campaign.

A New York Times investigation reported that operatives working with Peltola’s campaign helped recruit the other Sullivan, a retired teacher from Petersburg, to split the incumbent’s vote. Peltola and her campaign denied the report. Ironcloud noted that the tactic was generally legal in Alaska and that the state supreme court had refused to remove the other Sullivan from the ballot.

For Ironcloud, Senate arithmetic was the simplest explanation for the federal attention. Republicans held the Senate 53-47, and Alaska was one of only a small handful of toss-ups that would determine whether Trump could keep his majority for the last two years of his presidency. Alaska had carried Trump three times, although a majority of likely voters disapproved of him.

Alaska Native voters complicated the picture, Ironcloud wrote. In 2024, the North Slope and North-west Arctic district, where Alaska Native voters were a majority, gave Trump half its vote in the presidential race and gave Peltola 55% in that year’s House race. Many of the voters Washington now claimed to be protecting had chosen both, she said.

Ironcloud argued that the method mattered more than the motive. A Justice Department suit brought on behalf of one candidate to preempt a state’s certification before a single ballot was counted, she said, was testing the limits of constitutional power left to states. She asked what would stop a similar move in 2028 in any state close enough to matter. Trying the approach first against an Alaska Native woman in a state far from Washington’s attention, she said, should concern more people than the Native voters it would target first.

Ironcloud also wrote from her perspective as an enrolled member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes. She said she would vote in New York, not Alaska, on Tuesday, but had watched the race as a test of whether Washington would let Native people win on the same terms as everyone else. Her great-great-great-great-grandfather, Mahpiya Maza, also known as Chief Iron Cloud, signed the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which she said guaranteed the Black Hills to the Sioux before the federal government broke that promise within a decade. She called the Alaska effort a harbinger familiar to Native people and said it reflected what she described as the government rewriting rules after the fact. Ironcloud is a Lakota-Dakota investigative journalist and writer based in New York City.