In the week before Labor Day 2026, thousands of Alaskans opened an email from their senior senator. The subject line said "Delivering for" — and then the name of their own town. Inside, on official United States Senate letterhead, was a list of everything he says he has won for that town.

Dan Sullivan is running for a third six-year term this November. Alaska reporter Dermot Cole, who published the emails, said readers sent him copies addressed to at least 19 different places: Fairbanks, Anchorage, Bethel, Nome, the Mat-Su Valley, Kenai, Juneau, Haines, Wrangell, Ketchikan, Kodiak, Homer, Prince of Wales Island, Sitka, Soldotna, North Pole, Utqiagvik, Delta Junction and Petersburg.

Every one of them opened the same way: "I am contacting you to share an update on some of the important work I've been doing on behalf of" — and then the town's name. Every one closed with a version of the same sentence: "The [town] community is so important to Alaska." Every one ended with his signature.

Nobody asked for these. Cole called them what they look like: unsolicited campaign material, sent at government expense, two months before an election.

What the Senate's own rules say

The Senate Select Committee on Ethics publishes a plain list of what official Senate letterhead may and may not be used for. It is not buried, and it is not ambiguous. Under Improper Use of Senate Letterhead, the very first items are:

Solicitation of a financial contribution or other form of assistance for any campaign or election.

...

Any campaign or campaign-related correspondence.

Personal correspondence.

Political or partisan correspondence, including political endorsements.

The reason the rule exists is money. Senate letterhead is bought and printed with public funds, and the Ethics Committee's guidance on campaign activity explains why that matters: under federal law, "official funds may only be used for the purposes for which they were appropriated. Accordingly, Senate resources may only be used for official purposes, and official resources may not be used to conduct campaign activity."

Sullivan has a campaign. It reported $7,295,069 in the bank at the end of July. It could have paid for these emails.

The timing is the tell

Congress wrote itself a rule about exactly this problem. Under the franking statute and Senate Rule 40, a senator may not send mass mailings in the 60 days before a general election. This year's election is November 3, which put the start of that blackout on September 4.

Sullivan's emails went out right before it.

The rule has a gap he can drive through, and he did. The Ethics Committee states flatly that "the Franking Regulations do not apply to electronic communications," and that the committee "does not generally review mass emails, as they are not sent under the frank."

So the mailbox rule and the inbox rule are not the same rule. But the letterhead rule does not care what the envelope is made of, and it is the letterhead rule that says campaign correspondence does not go on Senate stationery.

Congress noticed the blackout was coming and pushed material out ahead of it. That is not a Sullivan invention. Indiana's Mark Messmer bought a taxpayer-funded TV ad touting his votes that stopped running on September 2, exactly 62 days before Election Day — right at the line.

He will email your town. He will not stand in front of it.

Here is what makes the "Delivering for" emails hard to read as constituent service.

In March 2025, Alaskans in Fairbanks, Anchorage and Juneau organized their own town halls and Sullivan did not come to any of them. In Fairbanks, about 175 people packed the Noel Wien Public Library auditorium and set a life-size cardboard cutout of him in the middle of the room to stand in for him. One constituent told the room, "You should probably know my address by now; I leave you voicemails every single day." In Juneau, on March 20, nearly 170 people did the same thing at the Mendenhall Valley Public Library. Anchorage's, the same night, drew a crowd the organizers put at more than 600 and was well attended aside from the elected officials.

Asked about it in Juneau on March 20, 2025, Sullivan told reporters he had already held what he called "the ultimate town hall" — his own address to the Alaska Legislature, which he gave in Juneau that day. "There were 60 elected officials who could ask me any question they wanted," he said. As for the constituents in the library auditoriums: "If it's all about screaming and yelling and viral moments that they want to send out to their colleagues? You know, it's not necessarily the most constructive way to do what I just did in there."

Eighteen months later, with an election two months out, he emailed those same communities to say each one "is so important to Alaska," and that he is "honored to have the privilege of serving as your United States Senator."

The people in Haines and Bethel and Utqiagvik could not ask him a question in March 2025. They can receive his email now.

The same trick, over and over

Every member of Congress gets an allowance of public money to communicate with the people they represent. It exists so you can find out what your representative is doing. It is not a campaign budget, and the line between the two is the single most reliably abused line in Congress.

• Minnesota's Michelle Fischbach spent $51,000 of public money in three months on mass communications while not holding an in-person town hall in her district.
• Georgia's Mike Collins spent more than $400,000 in office money on TV ads built around Trump praising him, ads that look nearly identical to his campaign spots.
• Pennsylvania's Rob Bresnahan had a taxpayer-funded video surface in Google's political ad library under his campaign account, and a constituent filed an ethics complaint.
• Colorado's Gabe Evans spent more than $320,000 of public money advertising himself and routed $225,000 of it to the same firm his campaign pays.

None of them ran out of campaign money first. Neither did Sullivan.

Who is actually paying for his campaign

Sullivan's emails are addressed to Alaskans. His donors are not.

Individuals have given his campaign committee and his leadership PAC $10.15 million this cycle. Only $991,911 of it came from Alaska — more than 90% came from outside the state, and Florida, at $1,001,881, edged out the state he represents. Counting everything raised for him since 2020, campaign money and outside spending together, 7% has come from small grassroots donors and 73% from PACs, super PACs and large donors.

That is the campaign that had the money to send these emails. Instead they went out on the Senate's stationery.

What the record shows

Dan Sullivan sent at least 19 versions of a town-by-town list of his own accomplishments to thousands of Alaskans on official Senate letterhead, days before the September 4 start of the 60-day pre-election blackout on mass mailings. The Senate Ethics Committee's published rules say that letterhead may not be used for "any campaign or campaign-related correspondence," and federal law says Senate resources may only be used for official purposes. His campaign had $7.3 million in the bank, and more than 90% of the individual money behind him this cycle came from outside Alaska. The communities he emailed had already held town halls without him, in front of an empty chair.

Source

Dermot Cole, Sullivan misuses Senate letterhead for unsolicited campaign emails, Reporting From Alaska, September 6, 2026. Photo: official U.S. Senate portrait via Wikimedia Commons.