Days after the US Department of Justice threatened election officials in all 50 states with possible prosecution unless they preserve election records — the latest push by the Trump administration to cast doubt on the validity of the upcoming midterm elections — a federal judge on Friday ordered the DOJ to reach out to the officials again, this time to rescind the threat. The DOJ must contact…
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At long last, the Palm Beach County GOP has finally pulled its support for a Florida candidate accused of sexually abusing a child.
It seems the MAGA movement may not be completely immune to shame.
Palm Beach Republicans have been under pressure over their continued association with Mike Caruso, who was serving as the county’s clerk of the circuit court and comptroller before his August arrest on charges including kidnapping, molestation and child abuse. (Caruso has pleaded not guilty to the charges.)
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended him from his position and suggested that his administration was unaware of any allegations of misconduct when it appointed Caruso.
On Monday, the Palm Beach GOP released a voter guide with Caruso as one of its preferred candidates, but his name was removed later in the day after his inclusion on the list was rebuked by DeSantis, Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Jolly and even Evan Power, the head of the Florida Republican Party.
In a post on X, the Palm Beach GOP wrote:
For the record, our guide originally listed every Republican nominee, as Florida Statute requires. As soon as we were permitted to remove the nominee running for a constitutional office, we did.
But that justification doesn’t seem to account for why the party felt the need to put out a voter guide that included someone accused of child molestation. The most obvious question: “Why not wait?”
UPDATED: PBC REPUBLICAN VOTER GUIDEFor the record, our guide originally listed every Republican nominee, as Florida Statute requires. As soon as we were permitted to remove the nominee running for a constitutional office, we did.It is LEGAL to take this guide with you
ALLAGASH, Maine — When the pandemic kept much of the world indoors, Troy Jackson came out of lockdown to officiate Ronnie Pelletier’s wedding. This fall, Pelletier plans to vote for Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
In Jackson’s hometown of 234 people, deep in the northern Maine wilderness, nearly everyone knows the Democrat challenging Collins for her Senate seat, and that familiarity cuts both ways.
To some of his neighbors, Jackson is the rare politician who is truly one of them. To others, like Pelletier, he’s a reliable neighbor who may not be ready for Washington.
Louie Pelletier (no relation to Ronnie) has known Jackson since grade school. Her sister has been Jackson’s partner for more than 40 years. She’s firmly in the first camp.
“Troy’s strong point has always been that he connects to everyday people,” she said. “We know he’s one of us.”
That sense of authenticity is at the heart of the case Jackson is making to the rest of Maine. For voters watching the price of groceries, housing, heat and electricity climb, the question this fall is a familiar one: Who can make life more affordable?
Collins, the five-term incumbent Republican and chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, has a record of bringing federal money home to the state. Jackson, a fifth-generation logger and former president of the state Senate, is comparatively unknown statewide. But he has spent his short campaign arguing that his greatest advantage is exactly what sets him apart from Collins: He’s a rough-around-the-edges Mainer who may lack a polished political persona but knows firsthand what it’s like to go days without heat or running water.
Jackson’s race was always going
For the second installment of MS NOW’s “The Voter Files,” we convened four groups of Detroit-area voters in Dearborn, Michigan, to hear how they plan to vote in the state’s open Senate race between Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.
In Maine, the subject of our first installment, Sen. Susan Collins’ long tenure has kept the Senate race local. Michigan’s Senate race is fully nationalized. The voters we heard from were Black Democrats from Wayne County, swing voters from Macomb County, Muslim Americans from Dearborn and Jewish Democrats from Oakland County, and they talked about the race in the language of fear. They fear that worsening economic instability is eroding their long-term security. The Muslim and Jewish participants are far apart on El-Sayed, but both are also concerned about their physical safety, and they described that fear in strikingly similar terms.
“What has changed? A lot of divisiveness, a lot of violence, a lot of race baiting,” said one Wayne County voter. “I’ve been a poll worker since 2004, and what I’ve been seeing at the polls now is a lot of people coming in angrier.”
Writing off Rogers, waiting on El-Sayed
Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed dominated the deliberations, with each group expressing a distinct, unfulfilled desire for what they need to see and hear from the Democratic candidate before they vote for him. Though Rogers came within about a third of a percentage point of winning Michigan’s other Senate seat in 2024, the voters we spoke with — in theory, he only really ever stood a chance with the Macomb swing voters — overwhelmingly dismissed him. “Carpetbagger” and “Florida” were the words
The Trump administration declined to invite election observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to witness the midterms, blocking monitors from the regional security group for the first time in more than two decades.
Their absence comes as Democrats and election integrity experts have raised concerns about potential election meddling after the Department of Justice announced plans to send its own monitors.
Washington joins only Russia and Belarus in its decision to exclude OSCE observers.
The OSCE called the U.S. decision “regrettable” and Human Rights Watch said the move “fuels fears of serious human rights concerns around the upcoming elections.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told MS NOW the administration’s decision “risks undermining public trust in America’s safe and secure election system.”
“The Trump administration’s decision not to invite international observers to the United States is deeply antithetical to the spirit of freedom, democracy and transparency that defines our elections,” she said, adding that the U.S. should hold “itself to the same standards that we would expect of any other democracy.”
Asked why the U.S. did not invite observers this year, a State Department spokesperson said OSCE “should focus its limited resources on elections where it can have the greatest impact.”
The OSCE has observed every federal election in the U.S. since 2002. OSCE monitors typically visit some polling stations and issue a report about how the elections were conducted, among other activities.
Monitors do not interfere and have no enforcement power, with their access to polling stations decided by each state.
OSCE observers were invited to observe the 2018 midterms during Trump’s first term and more recently
President Donald Trump reportedly demanded that a series of ads promoting his presidency be paid for with taxpayer money instead of his own massive political war chest. An understandable response after a cumulative five years and nine months of Trump’s narcissistic behavior in office would be a weary “of course he did.” But the $20 million in funding set aside to bring MAGA propaganda to millions of American households should not be treated as just another example Trumpian self-aggrandizement, especially given how many supposed adults in the room signed off on what seems to be blatant public corruption.
The Wall Street Journal first reported last week that the ads, each of which discloses that it was “paid for by the U.S. government,” were funded out of the Department of Homeland Security. The New York Times reported Saturday that the president “personally instructed” Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought to “come up with the money” for the ads “from within the government.”
The $20 million in funding set aside to bring MAGA propaganda to millions of American households should not be treated as just another example Trumpian self-aggrandizement.
According to the Times, Vought then shifted the money to U.S. Customs and Border Protection under “a budget category called One Big Beautiful Bill Commemorative Events.” Federal contracting records showed that, a day later, a Maryland-based firm called LMD was hired to produce the ads. CNN reports that LMD has a total of 12 ads in the hopper, though only three had aired as of Monday, while the Times also reported that another firm, LMO, purchased the airtime used to disseminate them.
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