The Latest: Trump pushing to keep red-state Senate seats in GOP hands
President Donald Trump told Texans they'd better accept data centers in their communities and floated making Venezuela the 51st state as he stumped for Republican Ken Paxton on Wednesday, while Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico said a “corruption crisis” plagues U.S. politics.
Social media videos believed to be produced with artificial intelligence and linked to Russia are misusing real people’s names and photographs to spread disinformation about two Democratic Senate candidates in the final stretch of midterm voting.
And Republicans have spent an estimated $183 million on television ads focused on transgender-related attacks against Democrats as Americans go to vote, betting that struggling GOP candidates can leverage the divisive cultural issue to overcome concerns about Trump’s leadership and the state of the economy.
Here's the Latest:
The Georgia Democrat has been fighting uphill financially running against billionaire Republican nominee Rick Jackson.
The healthcare magnate has spent more than $200 million of his personal fortune to run for governor. But Bottoms is trying to turn his wealth against him by tying “Slick Rick Jackson,” as she calls him, to Trump and his billions.
“Two out-of-touch billionaires who want to keep getting rich off the backs of taxpayers,” she said.
Jackson’s healthcare employment firm has for years held lucrative government contracts.
Bottoms also mocked Jackson from initially saying he wouldn’t attend a Trump rally in Georgia last Saturday and then changing his schedule.
“I guess Trump called Slick Rick and told him to pull out his matching suit and tie,” she said.
Early in his remarks as he took the stage in Chillicothe, Ohio, Trump was interrupted by a protester shouting about Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump rarely brings up Epstein, his former friend, but remarked on it Wednesday. He repeated comments he made last year saying that he threw Epstein out of his Florida club about two decades ago.
“That was a great thing I did, I must tell you,” Trump said.
He added: “I threw Jeffrey Epstein the hell out of Mar-a-Lago.”
After he was interrupted by two more protesters, Trump returned to his remarks and pivoted immediately into praising Ohio Sen. Jon Husted’s physique.
Georgia Democrats’ gubernatorial nominee and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms told a boisterous crowd that the election is about creating opportunity for “every Georgia community” and rejecting a “wannabe dictator and billionaire sidekick.”
That was her nod to Trump and her opponent, Rick Jackson, who’s said he wants to be the president’s “favorite governor.”
Bottoms, 56, promised to expand Medicaid, raise teacher pay, pause data center construction, expand affordable housing and support small businesses.
No Black woman in the U.S. has been elected governor. Bottoms didn’t mention that barrier. But she mentioned some famous Georgians from history.
She cited the civil rights icon and late Atlanta congressman John Lewis and former President Jimmy Carter and their emphasis on democracy.
And rather than note Martin Luther King Jr., she quoted his wife, Coretta Scott King, “who said there comes a time when time itself is ready for a change.”
Hundreds of Iowans gathered for a MAHA rally in Clive, Iowa, to celebrate Republican candidate for governor Zach Lahn. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will also take the stage.
Lahn made Iowa’s cancer crisis and questions about agrochemical safety a dominant part of his campaign, and he won the June GOP primary with the support of a burgeoning MAHA grassroots movement in Iowa’s small towns and rural communities.
A Steak ’n Shake eatery was outside the venue, and attendees enjoyed grass-fed steak burgers and fries. Plenty of green MAHA merchandise was stacked on tables, including hats and bumper stickers.
Signs read: “Make Iowa Healthy Again” and “Make Iowa water safe for kids again.” Lahn has explicitly linked the high levels of nitrates in Iowa’s waterways from agricultural runoff to Iowa’s high cancer rates.
The response is raising concerns among lawmakers that the military and even its independent inspector general are reluctant to confront the influence that SpaceX chief Elon Musk has over defense communications.
Ukrainian officials reported this month that their connection speeds to Starlink and its military-grade version, Starshield, were throttled, affecting their ability to intercept Russian attack drones.
A bipartisan group of senators asked the Pentagon inspector general to investigate. In a response obtained by The Associated Press, the watchdog said those concerns are better answered by the Air Force.
An inspector general’s office spokeswoman says it determined that “the matters raised were best addressed by” the Pentagon, which referred a request for comment to the watchdog.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called it “concerning that the Inspector General has apparently decided not to investigate satellite communication disruptions that Ukraine relies on to protect its civilians.”
Former President Bill Clinton will return to the campaign trail on Friday, swinging through Mississippi to stump for Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom.
Mississippi hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1982 but both parties have started paying more attention to this year’s race, sensing that Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith may be vulnerable.
The 80-year-old Clinton has returned to campaigning in recently, appearing last week in Florida with David Jolly, the Democrat running for governor.
Other high profile Democrats who have visited Mississippi lately include former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Trump held a rally with Hyde-Smith on Monday.
Jason Turkish told The Detroit News that he believes Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is an antisemite and will back his Republican opponent in Michigan’s crucial U.S. Senate race.
Turkish is engaged to marry Haley Stevens, who narrowly lost the Democratic primary to El-Sayed. She has endorsed her former rival.
Turkish said El-Sayed has made life more dangerous for Jews by referring to Israel’s war in Gaza as a genocide. He is Jewish and a Democrat, according to the newspaper.
“We have never seen a candidate for U.S. Senate act so recklessly toward the safety of Jews in the community as we have seen from Abdul,” Turkish told the newspaper.
El-Sayed, who would be the country’s first Muslim senator, has denounced antisemitism while fiercely criticizing Israel for its military operations in Gaza.
Asked about Turkish’s comments while campaigning in the Detroit area Wednesday, he said he is trying to build a large coalition against the Trump administration.
The Georgia senator, who doubles as the senior minister at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, is rousing the capacity crowd at a metro Atlanta arena as if it’s his Sunday morning congregation.
The election is “about the character of the country” and “spiritual wickedness in high places,” Warnock said, blasting Republicans from Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson to Georgia’s leading Republican candidates.
“They have made Jesus a victim of identity theft,” he said of Republicans who’ve backed healthcare cuts alongside tax breaks for corporations and wealthy individuals.
He specifically called out Johnson for his public piety.
“You can’t pray over the people” and then “prey on the people,” said Warnock, a potential 2028 presidential candidate.
He added that Trump’s second presidency “is a crime syndicate operating out of the Oval Office.”
Warnock is speaking ahead of Georgia’s Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms and former President Barack Obama.
The Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan told reporters after an event in a Detroit suburb that he wanted U.S. tax revenue to be spent “to build schools and opportunity here, rather than sent abroad to drop bombs on anybody.”
“I don’t think we should be funding foreign militaries generally,” El-Sayed said. “That’s Israel. It’s also Egypt. It’s also Saudi Arabia and Qatar and UAE,” referring to the United Arab Emirates.
His answer was in response to a question about a controversial ad published by Rebellion PAC, which El-Sayed disavowed, that features two people saying they can’t afford groceries because their money needs to go to Israel’s military.
“That has nothing to do with our campaign,” El-Sayed said. “It’s certainly not what I want to be talking about right now.”
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs says the Justice Department’s list of 405 supposed noncitizen voters in the state is “deeply flawed.”
The DOJ on Monday sent Hobbs a letter asking him to make sure election officials don’t count any ballots turned in by those people unless the state can confirm they’re valid voters. It followed a similar request in California and was the Trump administration’s latest attempt to sow doubts about the election.
Hobbs responded Wednesday, saying a cursory review reveals that many on the list are U.S. citizens, not registered to vote or have inactive registrations. Hobbs said that without proof of ineligibility, it would be “irresponsible and illegal” not to process ballots from registered voters.
The DOJ said the 405 suspected noncitizens had voted more than 1,500 times. Hobbs’ office noted that one person on the list last voted in 1994. The state has processed more than 113 million ballots since then.
The Federal Election Commission says access has been restored to a website for online filing of campaign finance disclosures.
The website was taken offline without explanation on Monday. The website for searching already-filed reports was unaffected by the outage.
Hecklers yelled “go home” and “you lied about your citizenship” while filming the Democratic candidate for Senate before being escorted out by security.
The crowd chanted “USA” to drown out the protesters and El-Sayed led the crowd in singing a short snippet of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” by Steam.
El-Sayed is speaking to a crowd of about 120 in a live music venue in Wyandotte, Michigan, a southwest suburb of Detroit that sits along the Detroit River.
Asked about Bolsonaro’s assertion that he won the presidential elections in Brazil, the U.S. president said he would not comment.
Instead, Trump said he has given Bolsonaro a “pass” to come into the country.
“I won’t get involved,” Trump said. “It was a very strange election, that’s for sure.”
The president made the comments in response to a New York Times report that Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign was involved in an effort to recruit a second Dan Sullivan to run against Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan in a bid to confuse voters.
Trump, making the comments to reporters on Wednesday as he prepared to fly to Ohio, called it “voter fraud at the highest level.”
“It turned out it was a scheme by the Democrats. That’s what they do best: They cheat,” Trump said.
Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton responded Wednesday to waves of GOP television ads that suggest he protected a predator.
Hamilton, who is in a tight race against Republican Sen. Roger Hamilton, is senior pastor of the nation’s largest United Methodist Church. Republicans are highlighting two cases of an adult leader’s alleged sexual abuse of teenage boys at annual church camps in 2005 and 2006.
“They’re desperate and they are twisting the truth,” Hamilton said after a Topeka campaign stop.
The church investigated the 2005 incident but didn’t report it to authorities, and the man returned in 2006. After the second incident was reported, the local prosecutor did not pursue criminal charges.
The church has since required all incidents to be reported. Hamilton said the church should have gone to authorities in 2005 and he made a mistake in not personally checking to see that the man didn’t return in 2006.
A lawsuit filed Tuesday against Cobb County election officials says about 2,900 voters are “on the brink of disenfranchisement” because they haven’t received the ballots they requested. The county contracted with Fort Orange Press, based in Albany, N.Y., to mail out the ballots.
The company did not immediately respond Wednesday to messages seeking comment.
The lawsuit alleges that ballots reported as “issued” after Oct. 5 have experienced an “unprecedented lag” and says the “only plausible explanation is a breakdown in the out-of-state private vendor’s ability to deliver ballots to voters in a timely fashion in accordance with state law.”
A lawyer for Cobb County said in an email that the county disagrees with the scope of the problem but agrees there were some ballot delivery delays. He said a notice was put on the county website instructing affected voters how to request a new absentee ballot to be delivered by express mail with prepaid return express delivery.
The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday announced that goods by the Chinese biotech company BGI are prohibited from entering the U.S.
BGI Group, based in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, is a genomics and biotech company that develops genetic sequencing technologies for research, healthcare and commercial use, the federal agency said. It has controlling stakes of BGI Genomics and MGI Tech. All three are added to a blacklist by the Department of Homeland Security under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
The law that took effect in 2022 bans imports of goods made with forced labor in China’s ethnic Xinjiang region.
BGI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told U.S. President Donald Trump in a telephone call that Turkey was monitoring developments in the Strait of Hormuz and Yemen and supporting diplomatic efforts to resolve the issues, according to the Turkish presidential communications office.
During Wednesday’s call, Erdogan also told the U.S. president that Turkey was ready to help revive negotiations between Ukraine and Russia aimed at ending the war.
The two also discussed efforts to strengthen ties between Turkey and the United States ahead of the next year’s centenary of their diplomatic relations, the communications office said in a statement.
A State Department official says Secretary of State Marco Rubio has pulled down plans to travel with President Donald Trump to a midterm campaign event in Ohio later Wednesday.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Rubio’s schedule had never been formally released, said “as often happens, schedules change and the secretary is no longer traveling with the president today.”
The official gave no reason for the cancellation of the trip, which would have been Rubio’s second campaign-related journey with Trump in two days.
On Tuesday, Trump coaxed Rubio onto the stage in Corpus Christi, Texas, and his top diplomat made very brief nonpolitical comments about how he was honored to serve the country and work for Trump.
Secretaries of state have traditionally avoided domestic politics for protocol and legal reasons and Rubio appeared to tread a fine line at the Texas event, which coincided with an announcement of a major delivery of crude oil from Venezuela, an issue on which he has been intimately involved.
—- Matthew Lee
A federal judge on Wednesday said the Trump administration can’t run its government-funded pro-Trump ads for now, siding with Democrats who had sued over the TV spots.
The Democratic National Committee had argued the ads were illegal government-sponsored propaganda.
U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan’s temporary restraining order has little practical impact before the election because the administration was already ordered to temporarily stop airing the ads in a different case.
But the ruling is another blow against the administration in its efforts to promote Trump’s political message in the final stretch before the midterms.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has met with counterparts from Australia, Japan, India and other nations in the Philippines for annual defense talks among Southeast Asian countries.
Speaking at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations conference, Hegseth said the U.S. would defend its interests and its allies in the region, while their respective navies would keep cooperating.
“These are not symbolic things, they are concrete demonstrations of what serious partners do,” Hegseth said. “Serious partners train together, learn together, plan together and build the confidence and competence necessary to prevent conflict.”
Hegseth met with Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh to discuss the progress of a defense partnership, which has included information sharing and a recent joint exercise, the Pentagon says. Hegseth also met with Philippine Secretary of National Defense Gilberto Teodoro Jr. to discuss recent military cooperation.
© Copyright The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
