US primary elections: Georgia on track to see record turnout – live

The Guardian’s Kari Paul is anchoring our live blog on the shooting at Robb elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Governor Greg Abbott has said the gunman shot and killed 14 students and one teacher.

Joe Biden is expected to deliver remarks on the shooting later tonight, when he returns to Washington from Tokyo. Kari will have the latest updates as we learn more. Follow along:

Fourteen students and one teacher were shot and killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, according to the state’s governor, Greg Abbott.

Abbott said the gunman, identified as 18-year-old Salvador Romas, had “shot and killed incomprehensibly 14 students and killed the teacher … the shooter, he himself is deceased and it is believed responding officers killed him”.

The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said Joe Biden had been briefed on the shooting and would speak about the tragedy when he returns to the White House tonight. The president was returning from Tokyo when news of the shooting broke.

The shooting comes months before the US is set to mark the 10-year anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school, which resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six adults.

In the decade since the Sandy Hook shooting, no major gun control legislation has passed Congress. Thousands of mass shootings have occurred in the years since, including one earlier this month in Buffalo, New York.

The Guardian will have a separate live blog to cover the latest news from Uvalde as we continue to provide updates on today’s primaries.

Texas is also holding primary runoff races today to determine nominees in a number of key statewide and congressional races.

In Texas’ 28th congressional district, Democratic incumbent congressman Henry Cuellar is facing a serious political threat from progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros.

Neither of the two candidates finished above 50% in the district’s 1 March primary, forcing them into today’s runoff.

The Guardian’s Alexandra Villareal reported on the race this week:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} Texas-28 is a heavily gerrymandered, predominantly Latino congressional district that rides the US-Mexico border, including the city of Laredo, before sprawling across south-central Texas to reach into San Antonio. During the primary election in March, voters there were so split that barely a thousand votes divided Cuellar from Cisneros, while neither candidate received the majority they needed to win.

Now, the runoff on 24 May has come to represent not only a race for the coveted congressional seat, but also a referendum on the future of Democratic politics in Texas and nationally.

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, House majority whip, James E Clyburn, and House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, have thrown the full-throated support of the Democratic establishment behind Cuellar, while endorsements from progressive icons such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have elevated Cisneros as a rising star on the national stage.

‘If Cuellar wins, this is a story of how the Democratic machine and the old system is still strong in the district. And if Jessica Cisneros wins, the narrative is this is another successful Latina politician … carrying the community forward,’ said Katsuo Nishikawa Chávez, an associate professor of political science at Trinity University.

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, pointed to the expected record turnout in Georgia to dispute Democratic criticism of the state’s new voting law.

That law, which was signed by Governor Brian Kemp last year, imposed significant restrictions on absentee voting in Georgia. Voting rights activists argued that the law was an overt attempt to suppress turnout, particularly among Black voters.

Speaking at a press conference on Capitol Hill, McConnell said the record turnout disproved Democrats’ claims that Republicans are attempting to limit access to the ballot box across the country.

“There’s no effort in America, in any state in America, to suppress voting,” McConnell told reporters.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 19 states passed 34 laws restrict­ing access to voting last year, as Donald Trump continued to spread the “big lie” of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Senate Republicans have also repeatedly blocked Democratic voting rights bills since Joe Biden took office.

The polls in Georgia are scheduled to close in less than three hours, and the state is on track to set a new record for voter turnout in a midterm primary election.

Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said on Twitter, “We are on a solid path to surpass the record for midterm primary turnout. The previous record was 2018 with approximately 1,162,000.”

This year’s Georgia primaries have attracted nationwide interest because of Donald Trump’s endorsements in the gubernatorial and secretary of state races.

Trump has endorsed David Perdue, who is challenging incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp, and Jody Hice, who is running against current Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

The two races are being closely watched to determine if the former president’s endorsement has enough sway with Republican primary voters to oust two incumbents.

The blog will be closely following the results once polls close in Georgia, so stay tuned.

Thanks for joining me today. I’m handing over the blog now to my colleague Joan E Greve, who will guide you through the next few hours as polls close and results begin to come in from the five states holding their primaries today.

Here’s some of the races we looked at:

• In Georgia, it’s a day of reckoning for Donald Trump, where his big lie-supporting endorsee David Perdue takes on incumbent Republican governor Brian Kemp. The former president’s power is also being put to the test in the race for secretary of state between incumbent Brad Raffensperger and his pick congressman Jody Hice.
• In Texas, the incumbent Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar faces a stiff challenge from progressive Jessica Cisneros.
• In Alabama, congressman Mo Brooks is looking to show that a Republican can not only survive having the endorsement of Trump taken away in his race, but actually thrive without it.
• In Arkansas, former Trump mouthpiece Sarah Huckabee Sanders is expected to win the Republican nomination for governor easily. The former white House press secretary could follow her father Mike Huckabee into the governor’s mansion in November.

And elsewhere:

• The deadlocked Republican senate primary in Pennsylvania could be heading for the supreme court, with party leaders backing TV doctor Mehmet Oz in a legal fight with challenger David McCormick over mail-in ballots.
• In her new memoir, Kellyanne Conway lavishes abuse on Steve Bannon, calling the former White House strategist a “leaking dirigible” and an “unpaternal, paternalistic bore of a boor” more concerned with his own image than serving Donald Trump.
• A Maryland man who draped himself in a far right-affiliated flag and sprayed a fire extinguisher at police during the deadly Capitol attack on January 6 has been sentenced to nearly three years in prison, according to federal court records.

Please stick with us through the rest of the afternoon and evening for all the developments in the primary election races.

In the battle for control of the Democratic party, progressives are increasingly confident they are winning. That’s how they explain the record sums of Super Pac money targeting their candidates in nominating contests for safely Democratic seats.

“There’s a set of people who are uncomfortable with a new brand of politics,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the progressive Working Families party. “They’re trying to set the clock back. But the genie’s outta the bottle.”

So far this election cycle, progressives have a mixed record. But a stronger-than-expected showing in last week’s primaries has energized the movement and set the stage, they hope, for even more success this summer.

In Pennsylvania, state representative Summer Lee overcame a deluge of outside spending to win her congressional primary. Lee was declared the winner after three days of counting. She tweeted: “$4.5 mill” with a fire and trash can emoji.

Oregon progressives cheered the victory of Andrea Salinas, who also went up against a crush of big money in one of the most expensive House Democratic primaries in the country. Meanwhile, the seven-term Oregon congressman Kurt Schrader, whose conservative politics drew the left’s ire, appears to be on the verge of losing his seat to progressive challenger Jamie McLeod-Skinner, though results have been delayed by a ballot-printing problem.

And in what will be one of the cycle’s most competitive Senate races, John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s iconoclastic, liberal lieutenant governor, beat Congressman Conor Lamb, a rising star of the center-left.

The next test of progressive political power comes today, in a Texas runoff election between Congressman Henry Cueller, a conservative Democrat backed by party leadership, and Jessica Cisneros, a progressive immigration lawyer endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.

And after that, there are competitive intra-party primaries in Illinois, New York and Michigan.

“We’re not doing any victory laps,” Mitchell said. “If anything, those losses and the wins have redoubled our commitment and focus.”

Read the full story:

The Wisconsin Republican party says it has recovered all $2.3m stolen by hackers before the 2020 presidential election.

A chunk of the money, $600,000, was recovered by the FBI and given back to the party last month, the state party chair Mark Jefferson said Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.

The party’s bank was able to get back $1.5m through its fraud until, and the rest was reimbursed through insurance payouts and donations, Jefferson said.

Officials contacted the FBI two weeks before election day in 2020 after they noticed money intended for suppliers of campaign materials, including Donald Trump hats, was being siphoned to the hackers.

Trump lost Wisconsin to Joe Biden by fewer than 21,000 votes.

Mallory McMorrow remembers the sting of being slandered by a colleague for wanting to “groom” and “sexualize” young children. “I felt horrible,” she says. But instead of shrugging it off or trying to change the subject, as Democrats are often criticised for doing, the state senator from Michigan decided to fight back.

In just four minutes and 40 seconds, McMorrow delivered a fierce, impassioned floor speech at the state capitol that went viral on social media and earned a laudatory phone call from the US president.

She also offered a blueprint for how Democrats can combat Republicans intent on making education a wedge issue. The New Yorker magazine described her as “a role model for the midterms”. The New York Times newspaper added: “If Democrats could bottle Mallory McMorrow … they would do it.”

It was quite an ovation for a 35-year-old serving her first term in elected office. McMorrow, who previously worked as a car designer and branding and design consultant, is among a generation galvanised by resistance to Donald Trump and his red meat populism.

Soon after Trump’s election as president in 2016, she saw a video of middle school students chanting “Build the wall!” at another student; the school happened to be the polling place where she had voted. She felt motivated to go into politics and was elected in 2018 to the state senate for the 13th district, which covers suburbs just north of Detroit.

But the Michigan senate has been under Republican control since before McMorrow was born. In a time of acrimony and division, it was never going to be an easy ride.

Republican Lana Theis opened the latest senate session with an invocation that was part prayer, part Make America Great Again (Maga) battle cry: “Dear Lord, across the country we’re seeing in the news that our children are under attack. That there are forces that desire things for them other than what their parents would have them see and hear and know.”

McMorrow was among three Democrats who walked out in protest at the apparent reference to how schools address sexual orientation, gender identity and critical race theory – the target of Republican laws across the country.

She also tweeted criticism of the prayer, prompting Theis to lash out in a fundraising email: “These are the people we are up against. Progressive social media trolls like Senator Mallory McMorrow (D-Snowflake) who are outraged they can’t teach can’t groom and sexualize kindergarteners or that 8-year-olds are responsible for slavery.”

Grooming, a term used to describe how sex offenders initiate contact with their victims, has recently become a Republican buzzword and nods to QAnon conspiracy theories that hold Democrats run a pedophile ring. It is no less hurtful for being so preposterous.

Read the full story:

An independent commission is recommending new names for nine Army posts that commemorated Confederate officers. If approved, Fort Bragg in North Carolina would become Fort Liberty, and Fort Gordon in Georgia would become Fort Eisenhower.

The recommendations are the latest step in a broader effort by the military to confront racial injustice, most recently in the aftermath of the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the Associated Press reports.

The list recommends naming bases for the first time after women and Black soldiers.

Fort Polk, Louisiana, would be renamed Fort Johnson, after Sgt William Henry Johnson, a Black medal of honor recipient who served in the first world war.

Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia would be renamed Fort Walker, after Mary Edwards Walker, a doctor who treated soldiers in the Civil War and later received a medal of honor.

As recently as 2015 the Army argued that the Confederate names did not honor the rebel cause but were a gesture of reconciliation with the South.

But following Floyd’s killing and subsequent racial unrest, the Pentagon and Congress pushed to rename military posts and other federal assets such as roads, buildings, memorials, signs and landmarks that honored rebel leaders.

My colleague Sam Levine has this look at one of the most consequential races of today’s primary elections, for Georgia secretary of state.

Incumbent Brad Raffensperger, who famously resisted Donald Trump’s demand to “find” him enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state is facing a tough battle for reelection. Sam has been talking to Georgia voters:

Today Georgia voters are casting ballots in what I believe is the most important primary election this year: the Republican primary for secretary of state.

Last week, we published a story from reporting I did earlier this month about the race between incumbent Brad Raffensperger, the Republican who became nationally known for refusing to overturn the election results, and his Trump-backed challenger and big lie peddler, Congressman Jody Hice. There has already been record turnout during early voting, and polls show a close race between Hice and Raffensperger.

Jay Williams, a Republican strategist in Georgia not affiliated with either campaign, told me Raffensperger had made a strategic error in pushing back on Trump and predicted Hice would win.

“He’s branded. And I think it’s gonna be difficult for Republicans to be able to go out and vote for the guy,” he said. “If you don’t have a big stick, don’t go after someone who has a bigger stick than you. He’s the president, he’s just not a big enough guy to go after him.”

Several polls over the last year have shown that the vast majority of Republicans believe Joe Biden’s victory was not legitimate. I was curious to see whether that belief was translating into who they were voting for. Would voters kick Raffensperger out of office for saying the election was legitimate?

To my surprise, I didn’t find a huge amount of momentum for Hice, who has said the 2020 election was stolen and tried to overturn it. Instead, I found a lot of voters who said they supported Trump, but were also voting for Raffensperger.

“I felt that under all that pressure, he did a good job. I know it upset Trump, and I’m a Trump person, but fair is fair,” said Carolee Curti, 82, who voted for Raffensperger in Rome, which is in the heart of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s deeply Republican district in north-west Georgia.

“I think something happened, but I don’t know anything like everybody else. I don’t know that Raffensperger did anything bad either,” said Judy C, 80, who declined to give her full name after she cast her vote for Raffensperger in Lawrenceville, an Atlanta suburb. “Trump, excuse me, he should keep his mouth shut.”

Another Republican voter, age 78, who only gave only his first name, Bob, said he had automatically ruled out voting for anyone who said the election was stolen. “If you claim the last election was fraudulent, I’m not voting for you,” he told me.

“If you asked people to go illegally to try and overthrow the election, I’m not voting for you.” He declined to say whom he voted for, but said it was probably safe to say he didn’t cast a ballot for Hice.

Read more:

The FBI claims an Islamic State sympathizer living in Ohio plotted to assassinate George W Bush, but confidential informants helped federal agents foil the plan, according to court records.

Details of the alleged scheme to kill the former president are laid out in a warrant that the FBI obtained in March to search the accused operative’s cellphone records, a 43-page document that was only unsealed in recent days.

NBC News reported that the man named in the warrant – Shihab Ahmed Shihab – had been arrested.

A spokesperson for Bush said in a statement Tuesday that the former president was unworried.

“President Bush has all the confidence in the world in the US Secret Service and our law enforcement and intelligence communities,” said the former president’s chief of staff, Freddy Ford.

A spokesperson for the FBI declined comment on the investigation, which Forbes was first to report Tuesday. Shihab could not be reached.

Read the full story:

The deadlocked Republican senate primary in Pennsylvania could be heading for the supreme court, with party leaders at state and national level throwing in with celebrity TV doctor Mehmet Oz.

Officials are opposing a lawsuit that could help Oz’s opponent, former hedge fund chief executive David McCormick, close the gap in votes. One week after last Tuesday’s primary, Oz leads by 997 votes, or 0.07% of 1,341,184 ballots cast.

McCormick filed a lawsuit late Monday, the Associated Press said, less than 24 hours before today’s 5pm deadline for counties to report unofficial results to the state. He wants the state Commonwealth Court to require counties to obey a new federal appeals court decision and promptly count mail-in ballots that lack a required handwritten date on the return envelope.

Oz, who is endorsed by former president Donald Trump, has pressed counties not to count the ballots and the Republican National Committee and state party officials said they would go to court to oppose McCormick.

Trump, meanwhile, has urged Oz to declare victory before counting is completed.

RNC chief counsel Matt Raymer said in a statement: “Election laws are meant to be followed, and changing the rules when ballots are already being counted harms the integrity of our elections”.

McCormick is doing better than Oz in mail-in ballots and has insisted that “every Republican vote should count”.

A recount is virtually certain, which could push the official result as late as 8 June.

Donald Trump’s onetime attorney Rudy Giuliani testified to the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack at length on Friday but declined to discuss the involvement of congressional Republicans in efforts to overturn the 2020 election result, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The move by Giuliani to refuse to give insight into Republican involvement could mean his appearance only marginally advanced the inquiry into his ploy to have the then vice-president, Mike Pence, unlawfully keep Trump in office after he lost to Joe Biden.

However, he did potentially pique the committee’s interest by discussing two notable meetings at the White House involving Trump that took place just weeks before the Capitol insurrection.

Giuliani asserted privilege and the work-product doctrine to decline to respond when asked to detail the roles played by House and Senate Republicans in the scheme to stop Congress’s certification of Biden’s victory on 6 January 2021, the sources said.

The panel was not expecting Giuliani to divulge damning information against Trump, since committee counsel had agreed with Giuliani in advance that he should not have to violate legitimate claims of privilege he might have as the former president’s attorney.

But Giuliani’s refusal to engage with questions about House and Senate Republicans frustrated the select committee, the sources said, not least because Giuliani personally urged them to object to Biden’s victory to delay its certification.

Full story: