Donald Trump has again insulted Republican voters in Alaska over his belief that they don’t know what the word “incumbent” means.
The president’s fears spawned from the Alaskan ballot going into Tuesday’s midterm elections, on which there are two Senate candidates named Daniel Sullivan, the incumbent senator and a previously unknown moderate. Republicans (as well as the New York Times) claim this was a strategic play by Democrats to stack the ballot by recruiting a candidate with the same name as the incumbent to confuse voters into picking someone besides the Republican, giving the edge to Democrat Mary Peltola in the neck-and-neck race.
Trump believes that Republican voters in Alaska won’t be able to differentiate that the incumbent Dan Sullivan is the current Alaskan Republican Senator and will vote for the wrong one. On the sample ballot the listings are: “Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.,” “Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent,” and “Peltola, Mary (Registered Democrat).”
The president thinks voters need an extremely high IQ to figure out who is who.
“You need about 190 IQ to figure out the ballot,” Trump told Kansas City radio host Pete Mundo Friday. “They put a ballot down where they’re talking about ‘incumbent’ Republican, and the other one. Most people don’t know in Alaska — and a lot of other states, too — what does incumbent mean? I don’t know what incumbent means. Incumbent!”
He added: “I mean, you talk about voter fraud! Nobody’s ever seen voter fraud like this. This is, this is as bad – it’s the same thing, actually – but it’s as bad as what we went through in 2020 and what we always go through. Because, you know, the whole thing with – it’s such an important thing. We got rigged. We had a rigged election in 2020. We cannot ever let that happen again. Look what happened to our country in four years. Terrible.”
This is just the latest from Trump on his vocal concerns that Alaskans might not be smart enough to differentiate between the Dan Sullivan candidates on the ballot. Many have taken issue with the president thinking so little of his supporters’ mental capacity.
“To assume that the voters are not smart enough to recognize their incumbent, the guy who’s been in office. He’s been there since 2015,” Whoopi Goldberg said on “The View” this week. “He’s been there a long time. So the idea that they don’t know who he is because they saw another Dan, ‘Oh my God, who is it?! Where is he?’ It says incumbent right next to it.”
“Well, I don’t mean this as dismissive, but they’re really only considering Republican voters as stupid,” Sara Haines agreed. “I mean, if you want to be precise, because that’s what they’re doing.”
