Is There a Reason There Are So Many Dan Sullivans in Alaska? An Investigation.

Alaska has two men named Dan Sullivan on the ballot for Senate. Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, the sitting Republican senator, has been endorsed by a third Dan Sullivan, the former mayor of Anchorage.

Having multiple Dan Sullivans on the ballot has already created serious issues for the election. The Trump administration has preemptively lined up a challenge to Alaska’s results should the Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan lose. The other Dan Sullivan running is only doing so “for the purpose of confusing or misleading voters,” the Justice Department alleges.

But all this got us thinking: Is there a reason Alaska has so many Dans Sullivan?

Let’s approach the data systematically.

At birth, Daniel — by far the most common Dan variant to appear on birth certificates — hasn’t been unusually popular in Alaska, Social Security Administration data shows. In recent decades, Daniel has, if anything, been less common up there than in the nation at large.

While Social Security’s privacy rules make it tough to look beyond Daniel, other metrics allowed us to include Dan and Dannys, as well as alternate spellings thereof. We excluded Danas, Danes and Dantes on the advice of resident expert and Sun columnist Dana Milbank, who’s never been a Dan in his life.

These sources show Alaska once had a proud Dan tradition. A sample from the 1930 Census showed the territory was home to twice as many Dans as the national average rate, while WWII enlistment files show Dans holding strong at 1.8 times the national rate. One of the few sources of contemporary names, FEC donor files from the past two decades, suggest the state remains well-endowed, Danwise. It’s got about 16% more Dans than you’d expect, putting it in 4th place among all states.

How can that be, given the state’s quotidian Daniel birth rate?

Well, Alaska’s adult male population is unusual. It has, proportionally, the most men of any state in the union.

Thanks to military bases, oil fields and other male-dominated workplaces, Alaska just happens to have, pound for pound, more men ages 20 to 44 than any other state.

And it just so happens the name Daniel peaked in popularity about 40 years ago, giving Alaska the most Dan-friendly population profile of any state.

Most of those men came from elsewhere. And it turns out, many came from America’s Dan belt — particularly California, the second-most-Daniel-heavy state and the biggest source of out-of-state Alaskans.

Now let’s talk about the Alaska Sullivans.

Our estimates varied by source but, if anything, the state has fewer Sullivans than the national average — an average pushed up pretty high by Massachusetts and its New England neighbors.

But it doesn’t take that many Sullivans to generate a bumper crop of Dan Sullivans. Male Sullivans are several times more likely to be named Dan than the non-Sullivan males, a fact you can perhaps blame on the Catholic Daniels and, perhaps, a few Gaelic Domhnalls who preferred not to go by Donald.

You get an additional boost from the fact that Dans and Sullivans are a bit more likely to be in politics than folks with other first and last names (by exactly how much depends on the age group you’re looking at).

But while you can get cute with numbers — and we do! — in reality, the Dan logjam is almost certainly a coincidence in the sparsely populated far-flung state.

That said, if you were drafting states in which men named Dan Sullivan would dominate politics, you’d probably pick Alaska in the early rounds.