The top Super Pac for Senate Democrats will pour more than $7m into two marquee races this cycle: Michigan and Maine.
The Senate Majority Pac has reserved $3.7m for its campaign in Michigan, to support the Democratic nominee , Dr Abdul El-Sayed, against the Trump-backed Republican, Mike Rogers. The group is also investing $3m in Maine, to boost Democrat Troy Jackson’s chances against Susan Collins – the five-term moderate GOP incumbent, who Democrats see as increasingly vulnerable in a cycle where anti-Trump sentiment has colored much of the election.
This comes after reports that the Senate Majority Pac has also paused ad spending in North Carolina and Georgia. Semafor was first to report on the updated spend.
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
Donald Trump traveled to Bullhead City, Arizona and Kalispell, Montana for campaign rallies today. In Arizona, Trump urged voters to elect Andy Biggs, a GOP congressman who’s running to unseat the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs. In Montana, Trump rallied for Kurt Alme, a Republican and the former US attorney for Montana, who is facing Alani Bankhead, a Democrat and a retired air force officer, as well as Seth Bodnar, an independent and US army veteran former president of the University of Montana.
The president traveled to campaign rallies today onboard the new Air Force One, a luxury Boeing 747-8 aircraft gifted by the Qatari government. Speaking about the plane during his appearance in Arizona, Trump said, “When you’re giving gifts, you take them, right?”
Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he feels personally betrayed by Donald Trump after it emerged that Ukraine’s military has had its access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite squeezed, raising doubts about long-term US support for Kyiv. The Ukrainian president, on a visit to London, accused Trump of picking the other side after more than four years of war, risking a breakdown in relations already strained by the US agreeing to buy diesel from Moscow.
The top Super Pac for Senate Democrats will pour more than $7m into two marquee races this cycle: Michigan and Maine. The Senate Majority Pac has reserved $3.7m for its campaign in Michigan, to support Democratic Senate nominee Dr Abdul El-Sayed. The group is also investing $3m in Maine, to boost Democrat Troy Jackson’s chances against Susan Collins.
Federal authorities investigating the Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar seized the Democratic lawmaker’s phone and have issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to some of her relatives, according to a person briefed on the inquiry.
The justice department has threatened California over alleged noncitizen voters. In a letter addressed to the California secretary of state, Shirley Weber, on Tuesday, the acting deputy attorney general, Trent McCotter, said the justice department gave Los Angeles county officials a “password-protected thumb drive” with names of people that the federal government “believes are likely noncitizens”.
US price increases reached an annual rate of 3.7% in September, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 3.4% in August. This final inflation report before the pivotal midterm elections comes amid polls showing widespread dissatisfaction with the Trump administration over the cost of living.
A record number of Georgians cast ballots in the first day of early voting this midterm cycle. According to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, there were 188,600 votes cast on Tuesday – an increase of more than 53,000 voters over the 2022 midterm election, which saw 134,962 early in-person votes.
Kamala Harris, the former vice-president and 2024 presidential nominee, will travel across the country in support of several Democrats facing competitive races in the final two weeks ahead of the November midterms, according to her office. During a podcast appearance yesterday, Harris said ‘I haven’t decided’ about a 2028 presidential run.
Before his rally speech, Donald Trump blamed Joe Biden for provoking the Russian invasion of Ukraine in remarks to a reporter back stage. “I have to make deals with people, so I don’t go around calling them names,” the president said. “I don’t go around mocking people. Part of the reason you have that war in the first place is Biden went around mocking Russia.”
Katie Zacharia, the new White House press secretary, told the New York Times on Wednesday that she misheard reporters who asked her on Tuesday where she had passed the bar exam.
When reporters asked Zacharia, as she left the White House with Donald Trump on Tuesday, where she had passed the bar exam, since she has described herself as a lawyer, she replied, oddly: “I moved to China”.
In a brief phone interview with the Times, she said: “I assumed the question was, ‘Where were you after law school?’
“That’s all I could hear over the sound of Marine One,” she said, of the helicopter that was about to bring her and the president to the airport for his flight to Alaska. “And, wanting to respect protocol, the distance behind the president, kept me from moving closer to hear the question.”
According to the Times, she added that when she first began appearing on television as a pro-Trump commentator, the president of Pepperdine law school, where she obtained her law degree in 2011, warned her not to call herself “attorney” or “esquire,” but said that using the term “lawyer” was allowed.
That answer suggests that Zacharia simply did not pass the bar exam in any US state, before or after moving to China to work in a Chinese law firm.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday night that Zacharia sat for the California bar exam after graduating from law school at Pepperdine in 2011, but failed to pass, according to a source it did not name.
Donald Trump began his remarks in Montana tonight focused largely on gun rights.
Kurt Alme, the Republican candidate for US Senate that Trump is campaigning for, has an A rating from the National Rifle Association, which endorsed him last month.
Donald Trump has arrived in Montana an hour after he was slated to appear. We’ll bring you newsworthy lines from his second campaign appearance of the day.
James Talarico downplayed a past remark about God being non-binary, after being questioned about his social stances.
In 2021, Talarico, a state legislator, came out against a bill restricting transgender athletes, saying then “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.”
His comments have since surfaced as fuel for his opponent Ken Paxton’s attack ads.
“When I said that, I was being provocative and I want to admit that and come clean about that,” Talarico said during the CNN town hall. “What I was saying is actually not controversial theologically: the idea that we can’t define God using human categories. Not only did I say that, but the late Charlie Kirk said that – the late Pope Benedict said that.
“Preachers often will say something shocking in a sermon to get your attention and that’s something I’m still learning how to do in a responsible way.”
Bill Clinton will join Democrats campaigning for the November elections when he joins David Jolly, who’s running for governor in Florida, next week.
Clinton will join Jolly, a former Republican congressman who’s now running on the Democratic ticket, at an interfaith event.
James Talarico, the Texas Democratic candidate for Senate, once again debunked rumors in the conservative media that he had a clandestine stint at a mental health facility.
Before his CNN town hall kicked off on Wednesday evening, Talarico said, as he has before, that he took a hiatus from in-person campaign appearances after coming down with the flu.
“My decision to stay home for a week sent my opponent and his conspiracy theorists spiraling. I opened up social media and learned I had apparently dropped out of the race, had flown to a mental hospital in Ohio – that I had died,” Talarico said.
“False claims got millions of views online and this is an example of what I call the ‘rage economy.’ Billionaires who own these platforms get rich. We all get angry and nobody’s life gets any better. Conspiracy theories don’t put food on the table, put gas in the tank, or improve our communities.”
Speaking to reporters in Arizona on Wednesday, Donald Trump was asked about the allegation that Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s relatives in Egypt once supported the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist opposition movement.
The president responded by lying that El-Sayed had called himself “a member of the Muslim Brotherhood”.
“Abdul, or as I call him, Mohammed El-Sayed, he’s a member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Trump said in a false statement posted on social media by the White House. “He said that years ago, he was a proud member,” the president continued, also falsely. “And you can’t have a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Congress, being on one of our security committees.”
Despite Trump’s blatant lie, there is no evidence that El-Sayed is or ever has been a member of the group. The allegation he was being asked to respond to, which has become a centerpiece of the Republican campaign against El-Sayed, is that his mother and members of her family in Egypt might have once had sympathy for the group, based on three tweets posted in 2012 and 2013 by the candidate’s half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, in response to political developments in Egypt after the revolution there.
The social media posts from El-Sayed’s half-sister were reported this week by the Washington Free Beacon, a partisan, rightwing news site funded by a major Republican donor. The rightwing site was invited to accompany Trump on his trip to Arizona on Wednesday by the White House.
On 24 June 2012, the day that a former Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohamed Morsi, was elected Egypt’s president, with the support of secular pro-democracy activists who celebrated in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Abdelhadi posted criticism of the Islamist group while saying that her family had supported it during its long years of opposition to the ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak.
The same day, as secular supporters of the revolution that deposed Mubarak expressed relief that Morsi had defeated a military-backed candidate, Abdelhadi also posted: “Had an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college.”
On 3 July 2013, when Morsi was deposed in a military coup by Gen Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, starting a bloody crackdown on Islamists and secular activists that lasts to this day, El-Sayed’s half-sister posted that she was praying for family members in Egypt who supported the Muslim Brotherhood.
El-Sayed, who was raised by his father and stepmother – and grandparents – told NBC News on Wednesday that his half-sister’s tweets did not contradict his repeated statement that he has no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. “I wasn’t raised by my mother,” El-Sayed said, adding that he has never talked to her about her days as a student activist in Egypt a decade before his birth in the US.
Donald Trump is scheduled to begin speaking soon at a rally in Montana.
Here, Kurt Alme, a Republican and the former US attorney for Montana, is facing Alani Bankhead, a Democrat and a retired air force officer, as well as Seth Bodnar, an independent and US army veteran former president of the University of Montana.
A Trump administration raid on Ilhan Omar’s home this week is part of an investigation intended to build a case to strip her of her US citizenship and deport her, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing US officials and other people familiar with the investigation.
During his second term, Donald Trump’s administration has aggressively pursued work to denaturalize US citizens. Since returning to office, the president’s administration has filed more than 200 lawsuits against people it is seeking to denaturalize. Previously, the government filed denaturalization cases fewer than a dozen times a year, the Journal reports, citing the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Kamala Harris said she has not decided whether she will run for president in 2028, the former vice-president told Keke Palmer during an interview on the actor’s podcast Tuesday.
At the end of the interview – which covered the midterm elections, the Trump administration and Black voters – Palmer asked whether Harris was considering a 2028 presidential run.
“I haven’t decided. I haven’t decided yet. I will, I promise,” Harris said.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
