Alaska governor orders investigation into Democrat’s Senate campaign – live

With days until the midterm elections, a new poll from CNN places Democrats well in the lead in key Senate races in Texas and Michigan, while projecting tighter contests in Kansas and Maine.

In Texas, the poll found 49% of likely voters would back James Talarico, the Democratic nominee, over Republican Ken Paxton, who netted just 43%.

In Michigan, it found Democrat Abdul El-Sayed had received support from 49% of likely voters compared with 42% for his opponent, Mike Rogers.

The poll found no clear winner in the Senate contests in either Maine or Kansas. Maine was once viewed as Democrats best chance to flip a Senate seat, as they aimed to oust Republican incumbent Susan Collins. But the race has been marred by the late replacement of the original Democratic nominee, populist Graham Platner, with Troy Jackson, after Platner dropped out following allegations of sexual misconduct.

Kansas has been a far more unexpected battleground, with Democrat Adam Hamilton mounting a stiff challenge against Republican Roger Marshall in the normally deep-red state.

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary, has jettisoned the top planner in the US military, the Associated Press and other outlets have reported.

The firing, the latest in a string of shake-ups in top staff at the Pentagon since Trump launched the war in Iran in February, comes as the Trump administration is reportedly mulling new, escalated military action in Iran after the midterms.

The removed planned was Army Lt Gen Brett Sylvia, who served on the joint chiefs of staff as head of strategy, plans and policy.

Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent running against Mary Peltola – as well as the man with the same name Peltola’s campaign allegedly recruited to run against him – spoke on Fox News about the revelations surrounding Peltola’s purported ballot-stacking scheme.

“She and her team, and at the highest levels of the DSCC, spent over a year scheming in a secret operation to trick Alaskans to get them to throw away their vote,” Sullivan said.

“It’s an outrage,” he added.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Peltola, despite her insistence to the contrary, had knowingly recruited a man who shared Sullivan’s name to join the race.

“Mary Peltola has looked Alaskans in the eyes for the past year and a half and lied to them,” Sullivan wrote in a post to social media.

In a statement posted to social media, Lisa Murkowski, the senior Republican senator from Alaska, condemned Mary Peltola’s effort to peel votes away from her opponent, Dan Sullivan, by recruiting a candidate into the race with the same name.

But she stopped well short of Donald Trump’s calls to disqualify Peltola from the ballot or to criminally investigate her.

“While some may try to write this off as just how politics works now, ballot-stacking should have no place in our electoral process,” Murkowski wrote. “Run and win on your merits: your views, your policy ideas, and your accomplishments.”

Murkowski, a moderate Republican who has broken with Trump on a number of occasions, just yesterday endorsed a Democratic candidate in the state governor’s race.

Peltola continued: “By contrast, recruiting candidates to manipulate the field and influence voting outcomes is simply wrong. Alaskans deserve the honest truth from Mary and her campaign – what has been revealed is a pattern of lies and coverups and a culture of deception that belongs nowhere in our elections or among our elected officials.”

After rallying in Ohio yesterday, Donald Trump will head east to Rock Hill, South Carolina, to stump for an unexpectedly at-risk Republican incumbent in the deep red state.

Senator Darline Graham, the sister of the late South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, was appointed to finish out her brother’s term after his death earlier this year. She’s running to win a full term in the seat, but has found herself in a narrow race against Democratic nominee Annie Andrews.

South Carolina represents the latest in a series of typical Republican strongholds where Trump has traveled in the weeks leading up to the midterms, as the GOP fears losing races it might have normally thought of as safe wins.

An investigation has been launched in Alaska into whether Democratic candidate Mary Peltola’s campaign for Senate should face criminal charges or civil penalties.

Republican governor Mike Dunleavy ordered the inquiry into whether Peltola’s campaign recruited candidates to draw votes from the state’s Republican incumbent.

It follows a New York Times report claiming the Democratic candidate’s campaign was involved in recruiting a retiree named Dan J Sullivan to enter the race against senator Dan S Sullivan.

“Deliberately tricking voters into casting their ballots for someone else strikes at the integrity of our elections,” he said in a post on X. “Anyone or any organization found to have broken the law must be held accountable.”

Republicans condemned the presence in the race of two candidates named Dan Sullivan – one the two-term US senator, the second a retiree living in south-eastern Alaska with scant political experience – calling the newcomer a ploy by Democrats to cost the incumbent re-election by splitting his supporters.

Peltola’s campaign has denied involvement with the other Dan Sullivan, but the NYT reports that her officials together with the party’s campaign arm, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), worked to find other people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska, and encourage them to run.

Their reporting is based on interviews with Peltola’s former campaign manager and other sources, together with documents and text messages related to the recruitment effort.

Donald Trump has demanded that Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola and a rival sharing the name of Alaska’s Republican incumbent be removed from next week’s election ballot, accusing Democrats of an illegal scheme to confuse voters.

His call followed a New York Times investigation reporting that Democratic operatives seeking to defeat Republican senator Dan Sullivan had secretly recruited so-called “spoiler” candidates, including one also named Dan Sullivan, in an effort to draw votes away from the sitting senator.

“It has just been determined that the Democrats in Alaska illegally searched for, and recruited, a man named Dan Sullivan,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

He accused Democrats of committing perjury by making false statements under oath in federal court, and demanded that the incumbent be allowed to run without either Peltola or the “FAKE Dan Sullivan” on the ballot.

He told reporters later that Peltola and any other alleged accomplices should be prosecuted. “To me, that’s voter fraud at the highest level,” he said.

Senator Sullivan expressed outrage at the confusion, which mushroomed into a major campaign headache for Peltola six days before the 3 November election.

“The candidate I’m running against had a scheme for over a year to try to trick Alaskans that shows total contempt for the people of the state,” the senator told Fox News host Sean Hannity.

“She’s been cheating and lying to Alaskans.”

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.

The ruling from US district judge David Carter, nominated to the federal bench by Bill Clinton, comes about two weeks after the justice department delivered a USB drive to election officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento that it said contained the names of 20,000 non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls. There are more than 23 million registered voters in California and non-citizen voting is extremely rare.

“This case is about the right of every American citizen to vote in a free and fair election,” Carter wrote in his Wednesday evening ruling. “Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch.”

“In bringing this lawsuit, the Executive would have this Court believe that it reigns as a sole sovereign,” Carter continued. “But California and its people are sovereign, too.”

The justice department gave 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. The department refused to provide more details about its methodology and Los Angeles officials found preliminary indicators the list was inaccurate. The justice department then sued California on 15 October to try and force the state to sequester the ballots and verify citizenship.

Around lunchtime on Tuesday, a Rolls-Royce stopped at the intersection of Beverly Drive and Dayton Way in Beverly Hills, California. Local people in athleisure walked past Balenciaga, Dior and Prada boutiques, as visitors on Hollywood bus tours ogled nearby Rodeo Drive, where Burberry and Louis Vuitton shops meet at a celebrated street corner.

Up the street, across from the upmarket Erewhon grocery store – home to $21 smoothies – a few diners sat outside an American landmark: the Cheesecake Factory.

The beloved restaurant chain began here in Beverly Hills in 1978; now it has hundreds of locations across the US and Canada. And this week, it’s become the US’s latest surreal culture-war touchstone.

It started when Barack Obama, campaigning for Democrats in Ohio, made a joke that hit Donald Trump right in the real estate. Referring to his successor’s remodeling obsession, the former president said: “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. Just gold everywhere.”

The joke was about maximalism: Saddam had 100 palaces and loved gold plating, and the Cheesecake Factory, while affordable for many, offers swanky surroundings that a curmudgeon might describe as over the top. While the Beverly Hills restaurant has a fairly staid interior, a nearby location at Los Angeles’s Grove mall has a grand staircase, floral paintings on the ceilings and an ornate balcony.

Obama’s comments got a laugh at the rally – which surely contained many Cheesecake Factory customers – and went viral. It’s likely the former president knew he would touch a nerve, given Trump’s twin fixations on remodeling and on Obama himself.

Then the backlash began.

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

Donald Trump and the former president Barack Obama have continued to trade barbs on the campaign trail, with less than a week to go before congressional races that could shift the balance of power in Washington.

While Donald Trump has been on a weeks-long campaign blitz ⁠that has exposed Republican concerns about losing control of ⁠Congress for the final two years of his presidency, ​Obama had kept a relatively low public profile until the past week.

However, the former Democratic president has taken a more prominent role in recent days, delivering speeches criticizing Trump, which appear to have got under the skin of the current occupant of the White House.

“These are not serious people,” he said of Donald Trump and the Republican party, speaking at a Wednesday campaign rally in suburban Atlanta. “And we’re all paying the price for their lack of seriousness.”

Obama has offered pointed criticism of Republican candidates and Donald Trump in a style that has been unusual for the former president.

He continued to do so on Wednesday, again invoking the image of Trump’s gilded renovations of the White House and noting Trump’s strident reaction to his crack last week likening it to Saddam Hussein decorating a Cheesecake Factory.

“The Saddam Hussein thing didn’t bother him. But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory,” Obama said. “I mean, it’s all crazy, but this is the crazy part: they mobilized a whole government response to that joke.

“The White House even called the secretary of the treasury,” the former president continued. “The guy who is trying to figure out how to lower inflation … they told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory.”

Trump, meanwhile, defended his White House decor and said Obama left the property deteriorated.

“The White House, I think, is the number one symbol of our country, and we can’t have a White House with broken windows, with broken stone that hasn’t been painted in 30 years,” ⁠he said at a rally in Ohio.

Thirty-five of the 100 Senate seats and all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are being contested next Tuesday. Nonpartisan analysts generally favor Democrats’ chances of capturing a majority in the House, with the contest ⁠for the Senate seen as very close.

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In other developments:

• A federal judge declined to order California election officials to segregate 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.

• Jason Turkish, who is engaged to Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens, appeared at a campaign event for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers in Michigan and told reporters he was voting for the Republican, not Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who narrowly defeated Stevens in the Democratic primary.

• A heckler disrupted Trump’s speech in Ohio by shouting “Trump went on the Jeffrey Epstein plane!” The president then congratulated himself for banning his friend of at least 17 years from his beach club. “I threw Jeffrey Epstein out of a club like 20 years ago, because I thought he was a whack job,” Trump said.