There’s a man in Petersburg, Alaska — retired schoolteacher, apparently unremarkable in every way except one — who is running for Senate against the sitting senator. His name is Dan Sullivan. So is the incumbent’s. Same first name, same last name, no relation, and now the Times is out there trying to figure out if this is a coincidence or a plot, which tells you everything about how thin the line between those two things actually is in a low-information primary. Ballot-name confusion is a real, documented tactic — recruiting a spoiler with the right surname is cheaper than a media buy and probably more effective — and whether or not that’s what’s happening here, the fact that it’s a plausible enough theory to send a reporter to a town of 3,000 people is the story.

Then there’s Florida, where the primary coverage keeps reaching for the word “identity” — the state’s new identity as a Republican stronghold, its transformed voter rolls, its dominance up and down the ballot. But identity implies something that grew. Four of those Republican-leaning seats didn’t emerge from persuasion; they were drawn onto a map before a single vote got cast this cycle. Calling that an identity is like calling a thumb on the scale a personality trait.

Different scales, same move, really — one guy borrowing a name, one legislature borrowing geography. Neither requires convincing anybody of anything. You just need the architecture to do the work the argument used to do.

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