Friday, October 09, 2026
Fiery Senate Debates in Maine, Michigan and Georgia: Five Takeaways
Fiery Senate Debates in Maine, Michigan and Georgia: Five Takeaways
“Candidates in Maine, Michigan, and Georgia traded personal attacks during Senate debates. Democrats linked Republicans to Trump policies; Republicans faced defensive questions on tariffs and war. El-Sayed and Rogers exchanged terror and war claims; Ossoff and Collins clashed over bigotry; Jackson accused Collins of corruption, which she denied.
Candidates in three of the races that could determine control of the Senate engaged in bitter and personal attacks.
A trio of debates in key Senate races on Thursday night underscored how fraught the midterms have become, as candidates in Maine, Michigan and Georgia traded personal and heated attacks.
In Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat, said former Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican, was a warmonger, while Mr. Rogers tried to tie Dr. El-Sayed, a Muslim, to terrorism.
In Georgia, Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, called Representative Mike Collins, a Republican, a “bigot.”
And in Maine, Senator Susan Collins demanded a public apology after her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, accused her and her husband of profiting from the Iran war.
Here are five takeaways from the debates across three states that could determine control of the Senate.
Democrats tied their opponents to Trump.
In all three debates, Democrats said that Republicans marched in lock step with the unpopular president.
Again and again, Mr. Jackson charged Ms. Collins with failing to use her power to oppose Trump administration policies that have hurt Maine, including the war in Iran and tariffs. “We are in a crisis now,” he said of energy prices, “because she and her Republican colleagues would not stand up to Donald Trump.”
In Georgia, Mr. Ossoff asked Mr. Collins repeatedly how President Trump’s tariffs have helped Georgians, at one point calling them the “Mike Collins-Donald Trump tariffs.” Mr. Ossoff argued that economic pain for farmers and increased health care premiums for consumers were both “predictable,” but Mr. Collins still voted for Trump-backed policies that contributed to them.
“Whatever Donald Trump says, Mike Collins does,” Mr. Ossoff said. “Doesn’t matter what it is. Doesn’t think for himself.”
And in Michigan, Dr. El-Sayed accused Mr. Rogers of being “a guy who wants to be a sock puppet for the Trump administration,” especially over the war in Iran, which has pushed gasoline prices higher.
Debate questions put Republican candidates on the defensive.
You can usually tell who is winning debates based on the questions. Candidates on offense get to talk about issues that are good for them, while those on defense are trying to change the subject to more favorable territory.
The problem for the Republican candidates in Thursday’s debates — along with their compatriots running for offices across the country — is that the issues core to voters’ concerns this year are not good for them. Moderators asked about high gas prices, Mr. Trump’s tariffs, the Iran war and immigration raids — all topics that forced Republicans to defend unpopular Trump administration policies or explain why they are now skeptical of stances they previously supported.
There were no questions across the three debates about transgender athletes in youth sports, a topic that often divides Democrats and that Mr. Trump and the super PACs he controls have used to attack Democratic candidates.
In the Michigan debate, Dr. El-Sayed was not asked about his association with Hasan Piker, the left-wing streamer who campaigned with him during the primary but has since kept his distance. In Maine, Mr. Jackson was not asked whether he is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has endorsed his bid and backed his run for governor earlier this year.
Rogers tried to link El-Sayed to terror groups. El-Sayed called Rogers desperate.
It took just 20 seconds into his first answer, about the federal gas tax, for Dr. El-Sayed to attack Mr. Rogers for backing the war in Iran.
There would not be a single exchange during the debate that did not include a personal attack, with the two men frequently interrupting each other. The two argued about second homes — Mr. Rogers’s in Florida and Dr. El-Sayed’s overseas. Dr. El-Sayed, who was quicker on his feet and a smoother talker, got the best of Mr. Rogers on many of these exchanges, frustrating the former congressman.
Their jousting continued when they were off the air.
“In 30 years of doing debates, I’ve never seen it continue during the commercial, but it did,” said the moderator, Rick Ablin, of the Grand Rapids NBC affiliate.
Perhaps the nastiest, most personal exchanges came when Mr. Rogers tried to tie Dr. El-Sayed to terror organizations. He said the man running to be the first Muslim in the Senate is “bought off by Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, those people who are supporting you, pour that money into your campaign.”
There is no evidence Dr. El-Sayed has support from terror groups.
When he got a chance to speak uninterrupted, he called Mr. Rogers desperate.
“He wants this to be about anything but his own record,” Dr. El-Sayed said.
Accusations of Nazism and hatred flew in Georgia.
Mr. Ossoff began the Georgia Senate debate saying it would be the “trial of Mike Collins.” Then, he set out to prosecute his case.
He accused the Republican congressman of hiring “half the Third Reich,” referring to past Collins aides who have espoused white nationalist and antisemitic views. He slammed him for reposting a video in 2024 of white male students taunting and jeering a female Black student with racist and profane remarks.
“If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery,” Mr. Ossoff said, “Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.”
Mr. Collins said that he has “condemned racism, antisemitism, hate.” And he tried to turn the tables on Mr. Ossoff, who is Jewish, by criticizing the Democrat’s support for Dr. El-Sayed, whom Mr. Collins claimed “hates Israel” and “loves Iran.”
Mr. Ossoff, who is the more polished debater, tied every policy problem to Mr. Trump, while Mr. Collins, who owns a trucking company, leaned into his experience to suggest he was more in touch with regular Georgians.
Jackson accused Collins of corruption. She accused him of lying.
Mr. Jackson shifted his approach for the second Maine Senate debate of the week. He devoted far less attention to questioning Ms. Collins’s support for abortion rights and her vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined the conservative Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade. Instead, he honed his attacks on rising costs, including the drastic increase in heating oil prices, and accusations that Ms. Collins is abusing her position for personal gain.
“Ever since I was a young boy, I watched power and corruption hold people back,” Mr. Jackson said of reports that the F.B.I. last year shut down an inquiry into corruption allegations against an adviser to Ms. Collins.
That prompted a sharp response from Ms. Collins. She repeatedly charged Mr. Jackson — whom she called “Troy” throughout the debate — with lying about her record. “These allegations are absolutely false, and they’ve been proven false.” She also accused Mr. Jackson of running “false ads” about the issue.
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
Reid J. Epstein is a Times reporter covering campaigns and elections from Washington.
Patricia Mazzei is a national political correspondent for The Times, based in Miami.“
How Trump’s Revenge Campaign Descended Into Turmoil
How Trump’s Revenge Campaign Descended Into Turmoil
“Trump’s revenge inquiry into a “grand conspiracy” collapsed after Joseph diGenova and Kurt Olsen quit. Todd Blanche now oversees the effort via Aakash Singh; prosecutors pursue narrower cases amid staffing losses in Florida.
The president’s allies have sought to prove a “grand conspiracy” through a sprawling Justice Department inquiry. It has buckled under staffing shake-ups, internal disputes and trouble finding evidence.
Joseph diGenova, the man assigned by the White House to lead the investigation into those who investigated President Trump, was walking out of Chuck’s Seafood near the beach in Fort Pierce, Fla., and toward his Tesla last month when his cellphone buzzed.
It was his boss, Attorney General Todd Blanche. And he was spluttering mad.
Mr. Blanche had been cautiously supportive of Mr. Trump’s decision to call Mr. diGenova, 81, out of retirement in April to kick-start the so-called grand conspiracy case, the Justice Department’s most expansive effort to pursue people the president considers his enemies.
Now the attorney general, having soured on Mr. diGenova, was livid that he had lashed out at two prosecutors sent from Washington to help move the case along. Mr. Blanche ordered him to his office on Sept. 11 — or else, according to people briefed on the exchange.
Assuming he would be fired, Mr. diGenova quit, dealing the latest blow to a troubled investigation central to the president’s vengeance agenda. More trouble was to come.
Soon after, a top diGenova deputy, Kurt Olsen, also quit. It turned out he had failed a polygraph test about his contacts with foreigners, which imperiled his security clearance, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Olsen said he complied with all requirements regarding foreign contacts and had not resigned over his clearance, but declined to say more.
Still, the dual departures laid bare months of dysfunction. They also offered fresh evidence that Mr. Trump’s demands for revenge have divided the Justice Department, diverted resources from other investigations and continued the erosion of the principle that politics must be kept strictly separate from federal law enforcement.
A New York Times examination of the inquiry, based on more than 20 interviews with current and former officials, found that it was star-crossed from the outset.
The theory of the grand conspiracy case is a bedrock of Trumpist politics: that the various investigations into Mr. Trump, spanning nearly a decade, were all part of a nefarious scheme to take him down. That is, there was an ongoing plot stretching from the investigation into ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign to the two prosecutions overseen by the special counsel Jack Smith into his mishandling of classified documents and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
To date, Mr. diGenova and others involved in the case have found it difficult, and time-consuming, to meet the standards of evidence and jurisdiction needed to prove anything close to a conspiracy in a court of law.
Still, the pressure has not relented. The dozen prosecutors still pursuing the inquiry are fast-tracking narrower cases against some chief targets that could be brought quickly, according to people briefed on their work. Leadership of the effort has defaulted back to Washington, and is now being directly overseen by one of Mr. Blanche’s top deputies, Aakash Singh, those people said.
A Justice Department official said leaders in Washington had “full confidence” in the prosecutors now working on the case and would act to uphold the law should “evidence of misconduct present itself.”
Even if charges are never filed, Mr. Trump has already instilled fear in — and imposed steep financial costs on — potential targets, in his view giving them a taste of what he experienced when he was under investigation.
Two targets have borne a particular brunt: James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director fired by Mr. Trump in the early stages of the Russia inquiry, and John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director who played a role in instigating that investigation.
Inside the Justice Department, another price is being paid.
The investigation has upended the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida, one of the most important in the country, which has been plagued by staff departures and low morale under its Trump-appointed leader, Jason A. Reding Quiñones, according to current and former prosecutors. The problems with the grand conspiracy case have exacerbated what officials in Washington have described as a growing lack of confidence in Mr. Reding Quiñones by his superiors.
The office once had more than 200 lawyers. It is now slightly more than half that size, after a spate of firings and resignations.
Prosecutors have watched the case play out with embarrassment and horror. Many have been so unwilling to join the investigation that Mr. Reding Quiñones, an Army reservist, was forced to bring in military lawyers to backfill the ranks.
The chief of the office’s criminal division has been sidelined. The office’s health care fraud unit has been decimated. Many prosecutors say the office feels leaderless, and are worried that a place once known for big drug and white-collar cases has pivoted to politics.
Even furniture has been repurposed to equip the inquiry’s two work spaces, one on the fifth floor of the main Miami office and the other up the coast in Fort Pierce.
A Winding Path
It is not clear who coined the term “grand conspiracy,” or when it became shorthand for the catchall investigation. July 2025 is as good a place to start as any.
That is when John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, issued a criminal referral of Mr. Brennan to the F.B.I., accusing him of lying to Congress about an intelligence assessment in early 2017 that determined Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.
The case was sent to David Metcalf, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, but it quickly stalled as prosecutors struggled to make headway. Career prosecutors threatened to revolt if the office went forward.
By fall, Mr. Blanche, then the department’s second-in-command, plucked the case from Mr. Metcalf and gave it to Mr. Reding Quiñones, who was close to the right-wing influencers clamoring for a wide-ranging prosecution of the president’s opponents.
Loudest among them: Mike Davis, a media-savvy lawyer who has relentlessly promoted the case as the best way to prove that Mr. Trump has been undermined by the establishment from the moment he took office.
Mr. Davis, a former Senate aide adept at hurling social media thunderbolts that catch Mr. Trump’s eye, aimed high. He pushed the idea that the inquiry should expand to include targets like former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Davis was among those arguing to steer the case to Mr. Reding Quiñones in the president’s home state. The move made tactical sense. Prosecutors could avail themselves of a grand jury in the Fort Pierce courthouse where the only sitting judge is Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee who issued several rulings favorable to the president, especially in the classified documents case against him.
Mr. Trump, impatient to see splashy results, cheered and coached from the sidelines, even posting a fake video showing Mr. Obama being arrested in the Oval Office.
But the move to Florida did not translate into immediate success.
One big problem, in the view of Mr. Blanche’s aides, was Mr. Reding Quiñones, whom they viewed as a feckless and inexperienced manager not capable of running the day-to-day operations of his office, let alone the grand conspiracy case.
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Moreover, they felt that Mr. Reding Quiñones spent too much time in Washington and too little in Florida. To address that concern, Mr. Singh recently removed him from the attorney general’s advisory committee, which meets at department headquarters, to refocus his energies on Miami, according to two people with knowledge of the move.
But he was hardly the only problem.
By early 2026, the case had landed on the desk of Maria Medetis Long, a respected national security prosecutor in Miami, who approached the inquiry with an open mind. She eventually determined that the evidence did not support indicting Mr. Brennan, according to people familiar with her account. In April, she put her findings in writing. She was suddenly removed from the case.
Since then, the investigation has expanded beyond Mr. Brennan. The flurry of grand jury subpoenas issued since last year, hailed as bombshells by Trump-friendly news outlets, hints at its breadth.
Prosecutors have demanded documents from other officials connected to the Russia investigation, including James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence; Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy director of the F.B.I.; Peter Strzok, a former F.B.I. counterintelligence agent; and Lisa Page, a former lawyer at the bureau.
They have also issued subpoenas demanding testimony from Daniel C. Richman, who is a longtime confidant of Mr. Comey’s, and several F.B.I. agents who took part in the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach club and residence, a key investigative step in the classified documents case.
The prosecutors also want testimony from Mr. Brennan. But amid the recent turmoil, they pushed back his appearance from its initial date on Oct. 15 to at least early December.
Fumbling for Evidence
Enter Mr. diGenova, who as U.S. attorney in Washington four decades ago led investigations of the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard and Marion Barry, the city’s mayor.
He was a familiar presence in the capital, known as one of the more dulcet crooners to perform in musical skits at the annual Gridiron Club dinner.
But in recent years, Mr. diGenova has established himself as a stalwart and aggressive Trump defender who embraced unsubstantiated claims about the 2020 election championed by his close friend Rudolph W. Giuliani.
In early 2025, with the help of Mr. Davis, he secured an assignment in Miami as the head of that office’s civil rights division, where he intended to investigate Mr. Trump’s adversaries.
But Pam Bondi, the attorney general at the time, vetoed his hiring, according to two former department officials. Department officials thought he was too old for such a demanding job when his name came up a year later. Ms. Bondi, on the verge of being fired, argued that he had not been in a courtroom for many years.
Mr. Trump, then 79, thought otherwise.
He instructed Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, and Mr. Blanche to sign him on.
Mr. diGenova showed up for his first day at work with a 190-page memo on how to proceed, listing more than 50 “overt acts” in the conspiracy he wanted to investigate. They started with what he saw as the original deep-state sin — a December 2016 meeting in the White House that he believed to be the linchpin of the conspiracy against Mr. Trump.
At that meeting, Mr. Obama and his aides authorized the intelligence assessment that eventually showed Russia had interfered in the election Mr. Trump had just won. The participants have denied that anything illegal took place.
One of Mr. diGenova’s first moves reflected an understanding of the daunting challenges of proving his theory. He asked his predecessor, Ms. Medetis Long, to rejoin the investigation. She turned him down, according to the people familiar with her account. He also made it known that he was looking for cooperating witnesses among the targets of the inquiry, even though Mr. Brennan and Mr. Comey were unlikely to help him.
By May, he had begun hiring staff, including his wife, Victoria Toensing. He immediately encountered problems securing volunteers from either Miami or Washington.
Few career agents or attorneys wanted anything to do with it. As of now, most of the prosecutors on the team are military lawyers or were dispatched from other offices.
Among those who signed on: An F.B.I. agent who had investigated a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election had been hacked by Italian satellites and who was part of a special team assembled by Kash Patel, the bureau’s director. There were a largely unknown prosecutor from Fargo, N.D., and a Stanford law professor best known for having written memos justifying the use of torture during the global war on terrorism.
There was a young Justice Department official sent to Florida from Washington who had served as a clerk to Judge Cannon. And then there was Mr. Olsen, a longtime election denier who had no experience in working on criminal cases.
The case that Mr. diGenova hoped to build involved a wide array of targets — not only Mr. Brennan, Mr. Comey and others from the Russia inquiry, but also the prosecutors led by Mr. Smith, the special counsel.
He quickly confronted hurdles. The first: Any crimes arising from the Russia investigation, which ended in 2019, already fell outside the five-year statute of limitations, and had no obvious connection to South Florida. Other problems emerged.
Just as Mr. diGenova was settling in, Jack Eckenrode, an F.B.I. veteran best known for having gone after Mr. Brennan and Mr. Comey during the Russia inquiry, questioned a central premise of the investigation — that the court-approved search of Mr. Trump’s residence was a politically motivated intrusion that tainted everything that followed.
Mr. Eckenrode, part of a special squad assembled by F.B.I. leaders, told Mr. diGenova that Judge Cannon had already ruled that the search of Mar-a-Lago was lawful. That finding, he said, made it difficult to use the search as evidence of a conspiracy connecting Washington to Florida, according to people briefed on the exchange.
Mr. diGenova disagreed — he thought that point was legally irrelevant — and he called Mr. Patel, who pulled Mr. Eckenrode off the case, one of those people said.
By this time, Mr. diGenova was also becoming frustrated with the resources given to his inquiry. There were never enough lawyers, he told Washington, and the ones he had were so young that he had to block off time to teach them the basics, like grand jury presentations.
In late summer, Mr. Reding Quiñones agreed to set aside $1 million from the office’s allocated budget to build a secure facility in Fort Pierce to review classified materials.
Mr. Blanche’s staff rejected the idea.
Why waste money? There was already a facility nearby run by the F.B.I., they said, according to people with knowledge of the exchange.
Escalating Pressure to Indict
Under the clash of personalities was a deeper divide on how best to move forward.
Mr. diGenova, who wanted to take aim at big-name targets, told one associate he believed that Mr. Blanche was less interested in proving the conspiracy to destroy the president than in securing rapid box-checking indictments of low-level players to keep Mr. Trump happy.
Mr. Blanche, he told that person, was so anxious to maintain his position that he did not want to tell Mr. Trump the truth: A successful investigation needed time.
The attorney general acknowledged the inquiry’s complexities on a podcast earlier this year. “I’m not suggesting that we don’t have that evidence,” he told Sean Hannity of Fox News. “I’m saying when you talk about the challenges, that’s the challenge.”
Mr. Blanche had his own complaints. His team thought Mr. diGenova was too scattered, too combative and too slow, according to three current and former officials. It did not help that around this time Mr. diGenova and Ms. Toensing left for a long-planned vacation to France.
By early September, Mr. Blanche dispatched two prosecutors from Washington to Florida to move things forward. During a heated meeting, they peppered Mr. diGenova’s staff with questions about its work before the grand jury.
The coda came when members of Mr. diGenova’s team offered him a readout of their closed-door meeting with the two prosecutors: Washington would now be running things.
Mr. diGenova, infuriated, said he would instruct U.S. marshals to remove the prosecutors from the grand jury room if they showed up there to interfere, the officials said.
Mr. Blanche responded with a profanity-laced phone call and summoned Mr. diGenova to Washington. The attorney general wanted to recount his grievances in person, but never actually planned to fire Mr. diGenova, according to a person close to Mr. Blanche.
He never got that chance.
Alan Feuer is a reporter for The Times who covers the effects President Trump has had on the courts, the Justice Department and the broader rule of law.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.“
Thursday, October 08, 2026
Election Dispatches:What Tonight’s Senate Debates in Michigan, Maine and Georgia Say About the Midterms
Election Dispatches:What Tonight’s Senate Debates in Michigan, Maine and Georgia Say About the Midterms
“Debates in Georgia, Michigan, and Maine reflect midterm dynamics: Jon Ossoff leads Mike Collins; Abdul El-Sayed faces Mike Rogers amid Trump’s attacks; Susan Collins counters Troy Jackson, backed by Obama. Trump’s policies and voter shifts shape outcomes.
Election Countdown
26 days
What We’re Covering Today
The trifecta of Senate debates scheduled for Thursday night represent three distinct political landscapes shaping the final weeks before the midterm elections. The first one, an example of the Democrats’ confidence, is in Georgia, where Senator Jon Ossoff has proved to be such a formidable candidate in his race against Representative Mike Collins that Republicans have moved some TV advertising away from the state.
The second, a far-left test case, is in Michigan, where Democrats are running Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate that some in the party fear is too progressive to win a general election. Polls show him narrowly ahead of former Representative Mike Rogers. And the third political reality, a proving ground for the G.O.P. establishment, is in Maine, where Senator Susan Collins, a Republican who has survived many a challenge, is showing signs of strength in the final sprint against the Democratic nominee, Troy Jackson, who was endorsed by former President Barack Obama in a video released Thursday morning.
President Trump attacked Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, by calling him “Mohammad” in a post on Truth Social, in an effort to emphasize Dr. El-Sayed’s Muslim faith. Mohammad is an alternate spelling for both the name of the founder of Islam and part of El-Sayed’s full given name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. “Mohammad goes back to the days of the Jihad,” Trump wrote.
El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim to serve in the Senate if elected, replied on X that Trump “knows my name is Abdul.” He added: “He thinks he can use my name and my faith to distract us from the suffering his policies are inflicting on us at the pump, at the grocery store, and at the doctor’s office.”
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan will appear with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the state’s Democratic Senate nominee, in Grand Rapids ahead of tonight’s debate, per El-Sayed’s campaign. Whitmer endorsed El-Sayed’s opponent, Representative Haley Stevens, in the bitterly divisive Democratic primary, and this will be her first appearance with her party’s nominee.
Both of Michigan’s Senate candidates are fighting significant vulnerabilities with voters heading into the first of two scheduled debates tonight. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat, has angered some Jewish Democrats with his left-wing positions on Israel policy, while former Representative Mike Rogers has been trying to distance himself from President Trump’s tariff policy — which he supported earlier in his campaign.
The debate will be in Grand Rapids, the hub of western Michigan, a part of the state that had long been friendly for Republicans but has become increasingly Democratic during the Trump years.
Michigan is key to both parties’ hopes of winning a Senate majority. Democrats must retain the seat being vacated by Senator Gary Peters and flip at least four Republican-held seats to take control, while if Republicans win in Michigan it makes their path of keeping control far easier.
As the Senate race in Maine heats up, the state is getting cold.
And for many Maine voters, chilly weather could present a particular challenge this year: New England’s northernmost state is singularly reliant on heating oil, and the price of the product is surging because of President Trump’s war with Iran, which has clogged a vital oil shipping corridor.
The second debate in the race between Senator Susan Collins of Maine and her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, scheduled for 8 p.m. Eastern tonight, comes ahead of two more debates next week. On Tuesday night, Jackson targeted Collins over her vote to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Collins tried to separate herself from President Trump, saying she was “not exactly his favorite senator,” and assailed Jackson for misrepresenting aspects of her record.
The debate schedule in Maine is unusually frenetic. Troy Jackson, the Democrat, is trying to introduce himself to voters, and the experienced incumbent, Senator Susan Collins, is trying to appear more senatorial than her rival, a newcomer to national politics. Strategists in both parties said Jackson performed better than they expected in the first debate. But each debate offers another test for Jackson, who can speak in a halting style and has recently made comments in unscripted settings that have forced him to apologize or backtrack.
Former President Barack Obama endorsed Troy Jackson, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, in a video Jackson’s campaign released this morning. “In this economy, we need a fighter like Troy,” Obama says in the video, pointing to Jackson’s background as a logger and his efforts as a state lawmaker to “raise wages, lower the cost of prescription drugs and provide free lunch to every student in the state.”
Not long ago, Georgia looked like it might be one of the tighter Senate contests of the midterms: Georgia remains a difficult state for Democrats to win, and Jon Ossoff is the only Democratic incumbent seeking re-election in a state that President Trump won in 2024. But the race has tilted away from Republicans in recent months, so the pressure will be on the Republican challenger, Representative Mike Collins, to show during tonight’s debate that he is still in the fight.
President Trump’s deep unpopularity has been difficult for Representative Mike Collins to outrun — he made a point of running as the MAGA candidate in the Republican primary — and so has the high cost of living fueling voter frustration across the country. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican who has backed Collins, recently extended the state’s gas tax suspension, which may have at least spared Collins more $4-plus gas signs around the voter-rich metro Atlanta area.
Representative Mike Collins, the Republican challenger in Georgia’s Senate race, will have to find a way to speak to independent voters, as polls suggest he trails Senator Jon Ossoff with that group in particular. Ossoff, for his part, has cultivated a reputation for delivering a strong rally speech with the kind of zingy lines that can go viral as social media video clips. He will be expected to do the same on the debate stage, in a less controlled environment.
| Poll | Margin |
|---|---|
Emerson College Oct. 3-5Added 5h ago | Hochul +13 52% Kathy Hochul (D) 40% Bruce Blakeman (R) |
CNN/SSRS Sept. 29 - Oct. 56h ago | Brown +6 49% Sherrod Brown (D) 43% Jon Husted (R) |
CNN/SSRS Sept. 29 - Oct. 56h ago | Acton +8 50% Amy Acton (D) 42% Vivek Ramaswamy (R) |
CNN/SSRS Sept. 29 - Oct. 56h ago | Hinson +2 45% Ashley Hinson (R) 43% Josh Turek (D) |
The Democratic candidate for Senate in South Carolina, Annie Andrews, is airing a new ad responding directly to attacks on her past stances on transgender issues. In the direct-to-camera spot, Dr. Andrews, a pediatrician, says she does not support “biological men playing women’s sports, and I don’t support and haven’t ever performed gender surgery for minors.” She accuses her opponent, Senator Darline Graham, of “lying about me.”
Andrews has supported prescribing puberty blockers and hormone treatment for children, but has said she opposes gender-transition surgery for those under 18. She previously argued against a bill that barred transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports.
Graham has called her “one of the most radical people that has ever been the nominee for a statewide office in South Carolina.” She has accused Andrews of believing “boys should be allowed to compete in girls’ sports.”
If Democrats make big gains in the midterm elections in four weeks, it may not only be because their most loyal voters come out in force, or because their candidates have converted Republican voters to their cause.
Instead, the Democrats’ dream blue wave could come from Republicans who sour on President Trump and stay home. It already has a name: the red undertow.
Representative Ashley Hinson, the Republican nominee for Senate in Iowa, and her Democratic opponent, State Representative Josh Turek, sparred politely but sharply at their first televised debate over the war with Iran, Medicaid cuts, taxes and congressional stock trading.
The debate on Wednesday in Johnston, Iowa, came a week before early voting begins in a red state that has become increasingly competitive as President Trump’s approval ratings have sunk. Polls including a recent New York Times/Siena survey show a neck-and-neck race that could decide control of the Senate. The two candidates will debate on Tuesday night for a second and final time.”
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