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Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign announced that it received $2.4m in donations on Sunday, the day that Haley Stevens announced she would now pull her support from the Democratic nominee and back Republican Mike Rogers.
El-Sayed’s campaign that the amount is a single-day fundraising record for his Senate bid. His staff also noted that more than 26,000 people contributed for the first time on Sunday.
In the four hours after Stevens defected on Sunday, Politico reported that El-Sayed’s campaign raised $1.2m, which was already its second-highest day of donations.
Key events
42m ago
Trump administration appeals California ballot case to supreme court
3h ago
El-Sayed campaign reports record-breaking fundraising day after Stevens pulls endorsement
3h ago
New polling shows El-Sayed with lead in Michigan Senate race
4h ago
Stevens on 11th-hour endorsement of Mike Rogers: ‘This is just a weight off my shoulders’
5h ago
Nancy Pelosi: Stevens' 'horrific' endorsement of Republican 'dangerously betrays' Michigan
7h ago
El-Sayed: 'At the end of the day, I actually don't think about Haley Stevens'
7h ago
Democrats condemn Haley Stevens' 'betrayal' following Republican endorsement
Ariana Baio
A federal judge has dismissed criminal charges against two former FBI officials who were accused of lying about their involvement in the investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of former president Joe Biden.
Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said prosecutors failed to show probable cause that the two former officials, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, had knowingly made false statements.
Faruqui also suggested prosecutors purposefully brought the charges at a sensitive time, just 10 days before the midterm elections.
The judge said during the hearing:
double quotation markWhat has transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization. I will not bury my head in the sand and pretend I cannot read a calendar.
The judge criticized federal prosecutors for rushing the prosecution and making “critical mistakes”. Faruqui said that some of the former officials’ statements were not actually false and others could be attributed to “honest mistakes of memory”.
My colleague Ariana Baio has the story:
Chris Stein
in Wever, Iowa
On a Monday afternoon in late September, Donald Trump gathered Iowa Republicans in the Oval Office to make a big announcement: the firm Mesabi Metallics would invest $15bn to make the midwestern state the site of the largest steel mill in the country.
One month later, and just days before the midterm election, word has spread in the small town of Wever, population 142, that the mill will be built somewhere nearby. And that’s been about it – no shovels in the dirt, workers on a job site or machinery on the dirt roads leading down towards the Mississippi River.
Ask about the project in town, and the reaction isn’t enthusiasm, but skepticism.
“More jobs,” Missy Pollpeter, 52, said of the project’s potential as she dined at the Green Bay Bar and Grill, Wever’s only restaurant. “If they bring it here,” her husband, Mike Pollpeter, 60, said as he finished a burger.
On paper, a steel mill seems like a great development for a corner of Iowa that has a long history both of manufacturing and the disinvestment that has struck so much of the industrial midwest. According to the White House, the project would create 6,000 jobs during its construction and then 1,750 when it is complete, and generate $95bn in economic activity.
What people can’t get over is how the project was debuted, and who was announced it. The president made the plan public just over a month before tomorrow’s midterm elections, when Iowa will play a major role in determining if Democrats regain control of Congress amid Trump’s downbeat approval ratings. Wever itself lies in a congressional district that is viewed as the most competitive in the state.
And then there’s the fact that Trump has a history of making proclamations that don’t quite pan out.
You can read Chris’s dispatch here:
A day before the midterm elections, the justice department has asked the supreme court to force Califronia election officials to set aside 20,000 mail ballots, that the administration claims were submitted by noncitizens.
This is the government’s latest attempt to block the Golden state from processing the votes, after the justice department gave California officials just 48 hours to review the list and said it would sue the state if officials did not sequester ballots from those whose citizenship it could not confirm.
Last week, a federal judge declined to order California election officials to segregate and not count ballots from people the Trump administration claimed were non-citizens, rebuffing a legally thin request from the justice department that appeared designed to cast doubt over the results of the midterms.
A reminder that there are more than 23 million registered voters in California and non-citizen voting is extremely rare.
As I noted earlier, the latest polling from the New York Times/Siena College shows Democrats leading in key Senate races ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. One of the major battlegrounds is the competition in Texas, where Democratic state representative James Talarico has a seven-point lead against Republican challenger Ken Paxton, the scandal-ridden attorney general who has Donald Trump’s endorsement.
My colleague David Smith reports from Austin on Talarico’s meteoric rise, and how he stands a chance of winning a Senate seat that has eluded Democrats for almost 40 years.
Read his full dispatch here:
In an interview with CNN, Debbie Dingell, the Democratic congresswoman from Michigan, addressed the anger directed at Haley Stevens, her colleague, after the representative announced she would endorse Republican Mike Rogers in the state’s bitter US Senate race.
“I have been worried about her because I know it’s really hard to be in these kinds of circumstances. I talked to her multiple times last week,” Dingell said. “And I was shocked. I can’t lie about that.”
Various reports noted that just hours before Stevens made her announcement pulling her support for Abdul El-Sayed, she spoke to Dingell on the phone and assured her that she would still be backing the Democratic nominee in the upcoming election.
“I was very shocked at what she [Stevens] did, but the hate and the anger in this country right now is very scary and it’s coming from all sides,” Dingell added in the interview.
When asked specifically what was worrying Dingell about Stevens’ decision, the congresswoman said that it was clear “she has had some hurt feelings”.
Dingell added: “It’s very difficult to lose an election. There are many people that respect her. She was feeling torn. She has a very significant Jewish community that itself was torn on this issue. She’s had a lot of people saying many things to her.”
While Dingell said that she wouldn’t “speculate” about what changed for Stevens and why she ended up backing Rogers, she noted just how hard it has been to quiet the vocal frustration from within her party towards Stevens.
“I tried to get many of my colleagues to focus on tomorrow’s election because this is a distraction. It’s been a distraction for 10 days and focus on what the real issues are,” Dingell said. “But there are a lot of people that don’t understand what she did and are very, very angry and you’ve heard those words and seen those statements.”
She noted that the way the four-term congresswoman went out “has probably permanently hurt her” and her future within the Democratic party.
While Donald Trump will rally in Washington DC today, his vice-president, JD Vance, will be in Rome, New York, to stump for Republican House candidates in competitive races in the state.
This includes, Anthony Constantino, the sticker company exec and rapper trying to keep Elise Stefanik’s seat in Congress red, and Kailee Buller, who served as a senior official at the agriculture department and is trying to flip her district.
Vance will be joined by the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, on the trail today, and the pair will head to Ohio later for another set of campaign events.
Chris Pappas is stopping himself from getting too excited ahead of Tuesday’s midterm election.
“I take nothing for granted,” said the four-term US representative and Democratic nominee for New Hampshire’s open Senate seat. “This is a very purple, competitive state. Elections are never in the bag here.”
The race to replace the retiring Democratic senator Jeanne Shaheen has emerged as a source of 11th hour anxiety for the party.
In their attempt to gain four seats and reclaim control of the Senate, Democrats can’t afford to lose one they already hold. But September polling showing Pappas virtually tied with his Republican opponent, former senator John Sununu, rattled party strategists and raised the prospect that New Hampshire could become an unexpected battleground.
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