By SUZANNE DOWNING
Aug. 12, 2026 – A national Democratic-aligned organization is spending $225,000 attacking US Sen. Dan S. Sullivan over the cost of living in Alaska. But the group apparently could not be bothered to film its advertisement in Alaska.
VoteVets Action Fund launched the ad Tuesday as part of what Semafor reports will be a larger campaign against Sullivan, an incumbent seeking reelection against former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola.
The ad attempts to connect Sullivan’s votes regarding President Donald Trump’s military actions against Iran with high prices in Alaska.
“Nine-dollar-a-gallon gas in Dillingham, nine bucks a pound of ground beef in Anchorage,” the narrator says. “That’s not the cost of living. That’s the cost of Dan Sullivan’s votes.”
Yet a closer examination of the VoteVets advertisement reveals that the people and places shown to illustrate those allegedly Alaska-specific hardships are not in Alaska at all. They’re on East Coast time.
Early in the ad, a receipt shows a long list of items someone has purchased, including several “REINDEER NOSES.”
One scene prominently features a CITGO gas station. According to CITGO’s station locator, the company has no retail stations in Alaska.
Another giveaway appears near the top of the gas station scene. A sign in the background reads, “Don’t Get Sacked by Reckless Betting.” It is a problem-gambling campaign created for the University of Maryland School of Medicine. The matching Maryland campaign poster uses the same slogan and football imagery seen in the Sullivan attack ad.
The commercial also shows a solemn older woman gazing into the distance, apparently intended to represent an Alaskan struggling with rising prices.
But that image is stock video. The Getty Images listing identifies the footage as having been recorded in Wilmington, North Carolina.
In other words, a DC-based political organization is using a Maryland gas station, a North Carolina stock-video model and a fuel brand that does not operate in Alaska, along with reindeer noses on a receipt to tell Alaskans what life in Dillingham and Anchorage supposedly looks like.
VoteVets describes its Action Fund as a nonprofit advocacy organization representing veterans and military families. Its broader political operation has supported nearly exclusively Democratic candidates and is also spending millions against Republican Senate candidates in Iowa and Wisconsin.
The group’s Alaska purchase is the latest outside expenditure targeting Sullivan in what national Democrats view as a competitive Senate race. Semafor reported that the initial $225,000 buy is only the beginning of VoteVets’ planned campaign against him.
The advertisement charges that Sullivan “voted a dozen times for this war in Iran,” referring to his opposition to congressional efforts that would have restricted Trump’s war powers. The ad then attributes high Alaska prices to those votes.
Whatever viewers think about the underlying foreign-policy dispute, the commercial’s attempt at Alaska authenticity falls apart under even a casual inspection … by any garden-variety Pinocchio.
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