Well, now I think I might have heard everything. 

Last week, The New York Times broke a big story: reporting alleging that the Peltola campaign was behind the effort to solicit another Dan Sullivan to get in the Alaska Senate race to confuse voters. The report also alleged that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) was also involved. They had the receipts, with texts and sources. 

It was actually a great job of journalism, which was all the more remarkable that they did it. 

But it made some on the Left unhappy that it dropped right in the final days of the election and made the Democrats look bad.

Here was one sample of a subscriber at a Peltola event flipping out at them for doing it and accusing the reporters behind it of being "white supremacists" (without any evidence). 

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Apparently they've been getting some backlash from their readers that they dared to commit journalism.

They've actually written a story trying to explain that they did their job and how they even asked the lead reporter, Kellen Browning, about it and the deputy editor, Amy Gardner. Unbelievable. 

Since our article was published on Wednesday, readers have asked why we devoted a long investigation to this instance of “ballot-stacking” — a strategy considered legal that has been used by Democrats and Republicans alike. Some have wondered about the timing of our article, published less than a week before Election Day, and our interviews with a source who might have had a grievance with the Peltola campaign and who later tried to retract her statements.

We spoke about these questions with Kellen, who has been covering the midterm campaigns, and Amy Gardner, a deputy editor on the Politics desk.

Dang, so they're really asking their own people to justify why they did their jobs? Yep. 

Gardner said they published it as soon as they nailed it down, that it had nothing to do with being an "October surprise."

Gardner said: 

And second, once the story was nailed down, not publishing would have been a more overt act of putting our finger on the scale of this election. Publishing what we knew, and letting readers decide how they felt about it all, was the only ethical option.

Exactly. She further replied: 

It’s not unprecedented for campaigns or major parties to find decoy candidates with the same name as a major-party contender. But it is rare, and that’s what made the candidacy of Dan J. Sullivan unusual. We’ve also written extensively about other ballot-stacking efforts, by both parties — including in Alaska this year. Dan J. Sullivan’s candidacy also became a subject of interest in the Alaska political world and beyond, and questions were being raised when he barely campaigned. There is also the fact that the Peltola campaign so vigorously denied it, for so long. That made it a bigger story, in the end.

Translation? Yeah, it's a story if the Peltola campaign isn't telling the truth to the voters. 

Browning noted that yes, while the former campaign manager cited in the story could have a grudge, they also had a lot of other information to back up the story. 

And we had a lot of evidence to back up what she told us. We presented a detailed list of our reporting to the Peltola campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and they did not provide any explanation for any of it.

Of course they didn't. 

Gardner concurred, saying they had "dozens of text messages showing senior campaign aides and national Democratic operatives conversing about the plan." They also spoke to the other prospective candidates the Democrats tried to recruit in similar ways as they used with the second Dan Sullivan. 

The comments in response to the explanation story? I did a quick perusal; the readers were still mad at them, really not getting it. 

People found the anger amusing.