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My Doppelgänger Trying to Attack AOC

Martin W. Dolan, New York candidate for Congress, lost his primary by a landslide. But first, he drove me insane.

Molly Spears and Marty Dolan attend Yorkville Ball at The Union Club on November 9, 2024, in New York City.

Two summers ago, my name was all over New York City, though not for the reasons I’d hoped. In June of 2024 a series of billboards—attack ads—appeared above Times Square. “Hey AOC!” they read, in Impact font. An unflattering photo of US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrapped across the boards’ corners. Superimposed over her profile was a blood-red circle evocative, depending on your age, of either the Soviet Union or a rifle’s laser sight. A laundry list of AOC’s political sins lined the right edge: “Rising Crime.” “Illegal Immigrant Chaos.” “Defunding Police.” Then, at the bottom: “Vote Democrat Martin Dolan now!”

In case it’s not obvious, I should clarify that the man who lent his name for these billboards is not me (Martin M. Dolan, b. 2001, Albany, New York). He’s also not my father (Martin E. Dolan, b. 1963, Albany, NY) or grandfather (Martin T. Dolan, b. 1925, Mayo, Ireland). This other Martin, Martin W. Dolan, the self-styled nemesis of AOC, was born in 1957 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He had a long career as an insurance executive on Wall Street before retiring to the suburbs of Westchester County. He reentered the public sphere in 2024, having reinvented himself as a pragmatic, fiscally oriented political hopeful. The office in his line of sight was New York’s 14th Congressional District, straddling the eastern Bronx and northern Queens, which Ocasio-Cortez has held since 2019.

While Martin W. Dolan’s name was being projected across Midtown, I was upstate, in my final semester of a master’s degree in English literature, and trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do next. I half-heartedly applied to jobs and full-heartedly tried to line up freelance writing gigs. I cold-e-mailed the left-literary magazines I admired to try, at the very least, to build some sort of rapport. The responses I got were politely uninterested. I blamed my lack of a network, that I didn’t know anybody, that no one recognized me. I had no idea that at the same moment I was trying to get my name out there, it was also being blown up across New York’s busiest thoroughfares, taking potshots at the closest thing the millennial left has to a patron saint.

Though my trouble landing writing gigs probably had more to do with my lack of experience than any confusion over the attack ads and associated New York Post articles, such cases of byline confusion do have a precedent. In the now-defunct Fine Print, Andrew Fedorov interviewed newspaper journalists who entered the industry just a tad later than their identically named would-be rivals. Julian E. Barnes, a national security correspondent, has had to clarify on multiple occasions that he is not Julian Barnes, the Booker Prize–winning novelist, who was born 20 years earlier. Alexandra Petri and Alexandra E. Petri tried to clarify that their names are even pronounced differently (‘pet-TREE’ vs. ‘PEA-try’), though that’s not the sort of thing that comes across easily in newsprint. The writer Naomi Klein, who doesn’t even share a last name with the once feminist, now conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolfe, wrote an entire book about this common mix-up and the unreality of the digital public sphere. (My favorite author doppelgänger is the pioneering Black comic-book writer initially known as Jim Owsley, who, 15 years into his career, decided to start publishing under the same name as the already established and successful........

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