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    Late Lawsuit Could Shape Political Ad Wars in Final Days of Campaign

    House Democrats are suing to stop Republicans from using a legal loophole to bolster their Senate candidates.A legal battle is playing out in D.C. federal court that could determine how much money the Democratic and Republican Parties can pump into advertising in pivotal congressional races in the final week of the 2024 campaign and beyond.At issue is what Democrats say is a potentially illegal political advertising strategy that Republicans have used in recent weeks to try to overcome a significant fund-raising deficit in states with critical Senate races, such as Arizona and Pennsylvania.With less than two weeks until Election Day, House Democrats’ campaign arm has sued the Federal Election Commission for failing to stop the Republicans and are seeking a ruling to either bar the practice or clear the way to use it themselves.A hearing on the matter is set for Monday, and both parties expect a ruling as soon as Tuesday, either blocking or allowing the practice in the critical last stretch before Election Day.Here’s what to know:Democrats have been dominating Republicans in fund-raising in key Senate races.Continuing a recent trend, Democratic Senate candidates have been trouncing their Republican rivals in fund-raising battles in pivotal races across the country.In Ohio, Senator Sherrod Brown has raised about four times as much money as his Republican challenger, Bernie Moreno. In Montana, Senator Jon Tester has raised about three times as much as Tim Sheehy. And in Arizona, Representative Ruben Gallego has raised more than twice as much as Kari Lake.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Voters Drive a Rise in Ticket Splitting

    In the 2022 midterm elections, former President Donald J. Trump endorsed dozens of candidates down the ballot, positioning himself as Republicans’ undisputed kingmaker.But in the competitive races critical to his party’s hopes of regaining control of the Senate, his picks all fell short — leaving the chamber in the hands of Democrats.This year, even with Mr. Trump himself on the ticket, the Senate candidates he has backed to flip the seats of Democrats in key battlegrounds are running well behind him, according to recent New York Times and Siena College polling.Across five states with competitive Senate races — Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan — an average of 7 percent of likely voters who plan to support Mr. Trump for president also said they planned to cast a ballot for a Democrat in their state’s Senate race.Arizona has the highest share of voters who intended to split their tickets: Ten percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters said they would vote for Representative Ruben Gallego in the race for the state’s open Senate seat.While the dynamics are not identical, many of the races feature long-serving Democratic senators who have been able to chart a moderate course, even as Mr. Trump and his brand of politics won support in the state.Trump Runs Far Ahead of Senate Republicans in Times/Siena PollsAmong likely voters

    Source: New York Times/Siena College pollsBy Christine ZhangWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Bernie Moreno Under Fire Over Comments About Suburban Women

    Bernie Moreno, the Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, is facing criticism over demeaning remarks he made last week against women who support abortion rights, including from Nikki Haley, the former Republican presidential candidate and one of the most prominent women in her party.Speaking on Friday at a town hall in Warren County, Ohio, Mr. Moreno characterized many suburban women as “single-issue voters” on abortion rights, suggesting that older women should not care about abortion because they were too old to have children.“It’s a little crazy, by the way — especially for women that are like past 50,” Mr. Moreno said, drawing laughter from the crowd. “I’m thinking to myself: I don’t think that’s an issue for you.”In a social media post on Tuesday morning quoting Mr. Moreno’s remarks, Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, addressed the Senate candidate: “Are you trying to lose the election? Asking for a friend.”Ms. Haley, who was former President Donald J. Trump’s top rival in the Republican presidential primaries this year, has endorsed his candidacy even as she has offered advice and criticism to him and the party from the sidelines.In interviews on Fox News, Ms. Haley has said that the party needs a “serious shift” to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris, saying this month that Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, “need to change the way they speak about women.”“You don’t need to call Kamala dumb,” Ms. Haley said, adding that “she didn’t get this far, you know, just by accident” and that “she’s a prosecutor. You don’t need to go and talk about intelligence or looks or anything else.”She added that “when you call even a Democrat woman dumb, Republican women get their backs up, too.”Democrats have embraced abortion rights as an issue that they see as advantageous to them, spotlighting Mr. Trump’s bragging about appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to end the constitutional right to abortion enshrined in Roe v. Wade, and pinning their hopes of winning control of the Senate on abortion initiatives. Voters, by a wide margin, say they trust Ms. Harris to handle abortion over Mr. Trump. More

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    Trump Gets a Lift From Arizona Ticket-Splitters Backing a Democrat for Senate

    Representative Ruben Gallego, the Democratic candidate for Senate, leads in this key contest, a New York Times/Siena College poll found, while Kamala Harris trails Donald Trump.Former President Donald J. Trump appears to be benefiting from ticket-splitters in Arizona, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Monday, a finding that highlights his strength with Latino and younger voters as well as the unique weaknesses of the Republican nominee for Senate.The poll found Representative Ruben Gallego, the Democratic candidate for Senate, leading Kari Lake, a close ally of Mr. Trump’s, by six percentage points, even as Mr. Trump has opened up a five-point lead in the state over Vice President Kamala Harris.Such a scenario would represent a notable degree of ticket-splitting, perpetuating a trend captured by surveys throughout this election cycle. Democratic Senate candidates in a number of swing states, including Arizona and Nevada, have consistently polled ahead of the top of the ticket, especially when President Biden was the party’s standard-bearer. As Ms. Harris’s nomination has made the election more competitive, the gap between her and those down-ballot Democrats has narrowed — but the trend persists in most races in swing states.“Donald Trump creates his own weather, and he has a coalition supporting him like no other Republican nominee in our lifetime — perhaps ever — in Arizona,” said Stan Barnes, a former Republican state lawmaker who is now a political consultant there. He pointed to the support Mr. Trump has garnered from young people and voters of color, who traditionally lean Democratic, in surveys this year. “He’s breaking out of that rule, and it does not translate down-ballot,” he said.In 2022, Ms. Lake angered many traditionally Republican voters during her divisive governor’s race, feuding with the governor at the time, Doug Ducey, a conservative Republican, and angering supporters of Senator John McCain, who died in 2018, by saying her political rise “drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine.” She further alienated some Republicans by filing a series of lawsuits after she lost her election, claiming that it had been stolen.This year, she has tried to change tactics, courting the moderate wing of the Republican Party in Arizona. But old grievances die hard.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Eric Hovde and Tammy Baldwin Will Face Off in Wisconsin in Key Senate Race

    Eric Hovde, a wealthy businessman, won the Republican nomination for Senate in Wisconsin on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, setting up a key race this fall with Senator Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic incumbent.The race was called with just 4 percent of the vote counted, with Mr. Hovde holding large leads on his challengers: Charles Barman, a construction superintendent, and Rejani Raveendran, a nurse and midwife studying at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.Ms. Baldwin’s seat is one of more than a half-dozen held by Democrats that Republicans are targeting this year. To regain control of the Senate, Republicans need to flip just one or two — depending on whether the party wins the presidency — and they are almost guaranteed to pick up one seat in West Virginia, where Senator Joe Manchin III is not running for re-election.Mr. Hovde, the multimillionaire founder of H Bancorp and the chief executive of a real estate development company, has had several false starts in his political career. He financed a failed Senate campaign in 2012 with $5.8 million from his personal fortune before ultimately losing the Republican primary. He later considered other runs for Senate and governor, but decided against them.Senator Tammy Baldwin during a campaign event in Richland Center, Wis., in June.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesMr. Hovde is one of several Republican Senate candidates this year who are in a position to self-fund their campaigns, allowing the party to devote more of its resources elsewhere. Mr. Hovde has so far pumped at least $13 million of his own money into the campaign.He has presented his wealth as a positive, saying it means he doesn’t need “special-interest money” and can be more independent, and pledging to donate his Senate salary to charity if he is elected.Ms. Baldwin, who was uncontested in the Democratic primary, has sought to cast him as out of touch with regular Americans, and as a carpetbagger because he owns property in California and has split his time between there and Wisconsin. He has been registered to vote in Wisconsin since 2012.He also drew criticism this year for suggesting that “almost nobody in a nursing home” is mentally competent to vote, saying he had gained expertise regarding nursing homes because the bank he owns lends to them.Like several of her fellow Democratic Senate candidates, Ms. Baldwin — who has the advantage of incumbency, even though Wisconsin is a competitive state — appears to be running ahead of her party’s presidential ticket. A New York Times/Siena College poll this month found her leading Mr. Hovde by eight percentage points, outstripping Vice President Kamala Harris’s four-point lead over Donald J. Trump in Wisconsin.Chris Cameron More

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    Hawaii U.S. Senate Primary Election Results 2024

    Source: Election results are from The Associated Press.Produced by Michael Andre, Camille Baker, Neil Berg, Michael Beswetherick, Matthew Bloch, Irineo Cabreros, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Leo Dominguez, Andrew Fischer, Martín González Gómez, Will Houp, Junghye Kim, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Jasmine C. Lee, Alex Lemonides, Ilana Marcus, Alicia Parlapiano, Elena Shao, Charlie Smart, Jonah Smith, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Additional reporting by Felice Belman, Kellen Browning and Patrick Hays; production by Amanda Cordero and Jessica White.
    Editing by Wilson Andrews, Lindsey Rogers Cook, William P. Davis, Amy Hughes, Ben Koski and Allison McCartney. Source: Election results are from The Associated Press. More

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    JD Vance queda bajo el foco por críticas a los ‘momentos más débiles’ de Simone Biles

    Mientras muchos aplaudían a la campeona olímpica por haber priorizado su salud mental en 2021, el hoy candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia dijo en ese momento que los medios celebraban la debilidad.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El senador JD Vance, de Ohio, candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia, está siendo objeto de un nuevo escrutinio debido a declaraciones que hizo en el pasado, afirmando que la gimnasta estadounidense Simone Biles, quien el jueves ganó otra medalla de oro en los Juegos Olímpicos, había mostrado debilidad al retirarse de la edición anterior del evento por un problema de salud mental.Durante una aparición en Fox News en 2021, Vance cuestionó que Biles estuviera recibiendo elogios por haber salido de la competición en los Juegos de Tokio.“Creo que el hecho de que intentemos alabar a las personas, no por sus momentos de fortaleza, no por sus momentos de heroísmo, sino por sus momentos más débiles, hace que nuestra sociedad, digamos, terapéutica, se vea muy mal”, dijo Vance, quien en ese momento se postulaba para el Senado.Ahora que tanto Vance como Biles se encuentran de nuevo bajo los reflectores, los demócratas estaban ansiosos por destacar estos comentarios. Aida Ross, vocera del Comité Nacional Demócrata, afirmó el jueves que Vance no estaba “en posición de hablar de los ‘momentos más débiles’ de nadie”.“Mientras el resto del país celebra la actuación del equipo femenino de gimnasia de EE. UU. en los Juegos Olímpicos, JD Vance se enfrenta a su momento más débil en medio de un lanzamiento lleno de tropiezos que lo ha hecho el candidato a vicepresidente más impopular en décadas”, dijo.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Embattled Democrats Express New Hope With Harris at Top of Ticket

    Incumbents who had feared President Biden would drag them down to defeat say the electoral environment has improved rapidly since he left the race.Senator Martin Heinrich, a two-term Democrat from New Mexico, was not on anyone’s watch list of incumbents facing serious re-election trouble given the reliable partisan tilt of his state, which has not voted for a Republican for Senate since 2002 or a Republican presidential candidate since 2004.But in the weeks after President Biden turned in a disastrous debate performance against Donald J. Trump last month, Mr. Heinrich was among the Democrats privately panicking. Polls showed New Mexico slipping into an expanding universe of potentially winnable states for the former president — foretelling an electoral disaster for Mr. Biden and trouble in the senator’s own re-election race.So Mr. Biden’s decision last weekend to exit the race took a weight off the shoulders of Mr. Heinrich and other Democratic incumbents, who now describe a sense of hope and momentum overtaking the doom and gloom that had permeated their party since late June.“It just feels like a completely different world than a week ago,” said Mr. Heinrich, who is facing a challenge from Nella Domenici, the daughter of the state’s last Republican senator, Pete Domenici, a popular figure and household name in New Mexico. “Across the board — engagement, social media, anecdotal — everything feels different. I feel better about the broad momentum.”Mr. Biden’s withdrawal is still fresh, polling is only beginning to come in and Democrats still face significant challenges in holding their thin Senate majority and gaining control of the House.But lawmakers who just days ago were bracing for what they feared would be a November wipeout say the ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket has stabilized races and given Democrats a fighting chance. Instead of running from awkward questions about Mr. Biden’s age, mental acuity and fitness, Democrats are hoping to benefit from a surge of grass-roots support for Ms. Harris.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More