02c U.S. Politics – Election

News Source
EXCERPT:

The United States Supreme Court handed down two opinions which continue its precedent of protecting women and girls from the ongoing incursion of “trans women” into their athletic endeavors. NBC’s coverage of those rulings can best be described as mournful.

Watch the report in its entirety, as aired on NBC Nightly News on Tuesday, June 30th, 2026 (click “expand” to view transcript):

HALLIE JACKSON: To that other landmark ruling now, this one a win for President Trump- with the conservative majority ruling states can ban transgender women and girls from playing on female sports teams. Here’s Stephanie Gosk.

STEPHANIE GOSK: Tonight, President Trump calling it a “big win” while civil rights advocates slam it as a blow to transgender rights. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority upholding state laws banning transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams in public schools. Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing: “allowing only biological females to play on women’s and girls’ teams can reduce the risk of physical injury and ensure fair competition.” But the ACLU representing the two transgender athletes in the case calling it “devastating.”

JOSHUA BLOCK: It’s not just about winning trophies; it’s about learning life lessons.

GOSK: 27 states currently ban transgender women and girls from participating in female sports, with an NBC News poll last year showing over 75% of Americans support those bans.

Macy Petty Charles celebrating today’s decision. She competed against a transgender athlete and hopes more states would pass bans.

MACY PETTY CHARLES: I would hope that it would embolden every state to protect those female athletes and I hope that they themselves are emboldened today to take action- to speak up for what they know is right.

News Source
EXCERPT:

A Fox News poll published Tuesday shows the 2026 Maine Senate race remains tight, with incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins holding a narrow lead over Democrat Graham Platner.

The poll shows that among registered voters, Collins receives 50 percent support to Platner’s 47 percent. The race shifts among the most engaged voters. Platner leads Collins 53 percent to 44 percent among those who say they are extremely motivated to vote, fueled by higher enthusiasm among Democrats.

About 76 percent of Democrats say they are highly motivated to vote, compared to 61 percent of Republicans. The poll also found voters have concerns about both candidates, but worries about Platner run deeper. Roughly one-third of independents said they are extremely concerned about Platner’s judgment, while 30 percent said the same about Collins having served too long.

News Source
EXCERPT:

Washington — Republican hardliners continue to hold up most legislation on the House floor as they dig in on their demands for the Senate to pass President Trump’s voting regulations bill, the SAVE America Act.

On Tuesday, the holdouts blocked Speaker Mike Johnson’s plan to merge the SAVE America Act with the annual defense policy bill, known as the National Defense Authorization Act, before sending it over to the Senate. The conservative members sank a party-line procedural vote that would have set up final votes for the defense bill and other legislation.

Fourteen Republicans, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, voted against moving forward. Scalise, from Louisiana, switched his vote in a procedural move so that leadership can bring up the measure again.

News Source
EXCERPT:

The Alaska Supreme Court has delivered the final blow to Republicans’ efforts to keep a Senate challenger by the same name as incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) off the ballot.

In a short order handed down Monday, the court affirmed a ruling from a superior court that Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. must appear on the Aug. 18 primary ballot for U.S. Senate.

‘The only reason he is running is to deceive voters and manipulate Alaska’s election system.’

News Source
EXCERPT:

Far-left Texas Democrat James Talarico is tied with Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a shocking new Senate poll, raising alarms that Democrats may have a path to threaten a reliable GOP stronghold.

Democrats have not won a U.S. Senate race in Texas in nearly four decades.

However, a New York Times/Siena survey released Tuesday found Talarico and Paxton tied at 47 percent support among likely Texas voters.

The race is one of a handful that could determine whether Republicans keep control of the Senate.

The Columbian Trump, Abelardo de la Espriella, has won a close election against his leftist opponent, Senator Ivan Cepeda. The victory was by less than 1%. The election is being contested, but the U.S. has already thrown its support behind the pro-U.S. de la Espriella.

Go Deeper

Judge Sparkle Sooknanan Blocks Trump Admin’s Voter-Screening Database › American Greatness amgreatness.com
News Source
EXCERPT:

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from implementing a voter-screening database that combined citizenship records with Social Security information. The ruling argued the effort violated federal privacy protections and resulted in inaccurate information being shared with states.

In a 75-page decision, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan halted the administration’s revised SAVE database, a system developed by the Department of Homeland Security as part of an effort to strengthen election integrity and identify non-citizens on voter rolls.

“The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

News Source
EXCERPT:

The Los Angeles mayoral primary election raised an eyebrow for voters and onlookers alike. This is California, after all.

While incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass secured her spot on the ballot for the city’s general election in November, Republican Spencer Pratt was not so fortunate.

Pratt lost out on the second-place spot needed to advance over Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The story of Pratt’s defeat unfortunately sounds all too familiar with positive results early on, only for mail-in ballots for Raman to come in just when they were needed.

It’s not just mere suspicion that something was off. One woman working in a ballot processing center spoke out on social media platform X about what she personally witnessed.

Jennifer Callahan made an X post with a few important notes.

“Signatures only need to be 40% accurate (!) this is the setting the machines are set at for LA County (called the ASV),” she wrote.

News Source
EXCERPT:

New York’s socialist wing is issuing warnings to the Democrat establishment after a sweeping primary victory gave NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his allies a stronger grip on the party’s future in the city.

Following Tuesday’s elections, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the Democratic Socialists of America signaled that the far-left movement intends to use its victories to pressure Democrat leaders and shape the party’s direction heading into the 2026 midterms.

In a post-election call clipped by Manhattan Institute analyst Stu Smith, a DSA leader said socialist politicians now represent more than three million New Yorkers across multiple levels of government.

Zohran Mamdani went three-for-three in his effort to win U.S. House nominees for his anti-American socialist movement, his new world order, the progressive state.  Bernie Sanders also endorsed the same far-left candidates. He is becoming the center of the real power of the Democratic Party as it completes its transition from an American leftist party to an anti-American communist party.

Go Deeper

News Source
EXCERPT:

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson has won the GOP runoff for the state’s governor race.

He was endorsed by President Trump after advancing to a runoff with Lt. Governor Pamela Evette last month.

Decision Desk HQ called the race:

News Source
EXCERPT:

Texas Democrat James Talarico is facing fresh scrutiny after newly leaked audio reveals that the Senate candidate once described himself as “a Christian who hates Christianity” during a podcast discussion with progressive religious activists.

The remarks were made during a 2021 appearance on the “Activist Theology” podcast but were leaked online by the Republican National Committee on Tuesday.

The audio is now drawing attention as Talarico attempts to present himself as a faith-driven Democrat in his bid to defeat Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in November’s closely watched Senate race.

News Source
EXCERPT:

Anyone who is a big fan of socialism, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and who hates Israel has to be loving what played out on Tuesday in the three House primary races where the mayor made an endorsement.  All three of the candidates he backed, Brad Lander in NY-10, Claire Valdez in NY-07, and Darializa Avila Chevalier in NY-13, have moved on to the general election, where they are likely to be victorious in the heavily blue gerrymandered districts.

Of the three, Avila Chevalier’s victory was the narrowest, with her barely squeaking by five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who is the Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. He’s also the co-chair of the House Latino-Jewish Caucus, which might have been one thing that helped sink his reelection bid, considering the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas sentiment that has taken root in the Big Apple under Mamdani’s “leadership.”

News Source
EXCERPT:

Lander’s victory comes as there has been a wave of Mamdani and Democrat Socialist of America-backed candidates challenging members of Congress.

Mamdani-backed candidate Brad Lander has won his congressional primary against Democrat incumbent Dan Goldman, who has voted to impeach President Donald Trump twice during his stint in Congress.

Lander’s victory comes as there has been a wave of Mamdani and Democrat Socialist of America-backed candidates challenging members of Congress.

News Source
EXCERPT:

A self-described socialist who previously called for abolishing police, seizing private property, eliminating borders, ending deportations, and nationalizing industries has defeated a five-term Democrat incumbent in New York City, marking another major victory for the growing far-left movement aligned with NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old anti-American community organizer, doctoral student, and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won Tuesday’s Democratic Party primary in New York’s 13th Congressional District.

According to election results, Chevalier secured roughly 49.4 percent of the vote, defeating Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), who received approximately 45.9 percent.

News Source
EXCERPT:

 

Texas is the Democrat Party’s white whale. Every election cycle, the party convinces itself this is finally the year the state turns blue, and every election cycle, Texas tells it to pound sand. It got fooled again in 2024, when polling suggested that the state was within reach. It wasn’t. Donald Trump won Texas by 14 points, and no amount of wishful thinking from Democrat strategists changes the fact that a state like Texas isn’t about to send a Trump-endorsed candidate’s creepy opponent to the Senate.

News Source
EXCERPT:

An Ohio voting-rights group is insisting it did nothing to justify the “swarms” of FBI agents who fanned out across the state on June 12, searching offices and visiting the homes of employees and volunteers with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative.

Meanwhile, the FBI hasn’t given any public hint of its reasons for the action or shown that they were justified.

“We’ve done nothing wrong,” Rev. Michael Harrison Sr., chairman of the collaborative’s board, said in an interview on MS Now. “In the midst of having done nothing wrong, there’s nothing to find, and there are no charges to be filed.”

The collaborative says it has registered more than 600,000 Ohioans to vote. It focuses particularly on traditionally disempowered groups. Its leader said the FBI effort didn’t come as a complete surprise.

“Whenever you’re doing the right thing, there will always be pushback,” he said during the MS Now interview. “Whenever you’re providing opportunity for the marginalized or left out, there will always be some level of pushback.”

News Source
EXCERPT:

 

Donald Trump would never have been president without rural America. One of the greatest contradictions, or some would say con jobs, in American history was pulled off as a New York City creature passed himself off as relatable and sharing the concerns of rural America.

To anyone with a discerning eye, it was clear that Trump didn’t understand or care about rural America. Even rural Americans would admit this fact on occasion, but they liked Trump because he talked about them, and he played on their mistrust of elites by selling himself as an outsider who had been inside enough to confirm their suspicions about “the swamp.”

News Source
EXCERPT:

Public domain U.S. Congress image via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped and resized for WLTR coverage.

The Democratic advantage heading into the 2026 midterms just took a major dive.

A fresh Economist/YouGov poll still shows Democrats ahead on the generic congressional ballot, but the cushion they enjoyed earlier this cycle is shrinking fast.

That is the kind of trend line that ruins a party’s year.

News Source
EXCERPT:

 

Uh oh. Josh Kraushaar, a center-left reporter who specializes in Congress, recently acknowledged the obvious about the 2026 battle for the U.S. Senate:

This is an extraordinarily tough Senate map for the Democrats. Even though the party is in a very historically favorable national environment, the reality is it would take a tsunami for Democrats to win more than two Senate seats.

This is what I have been saying for a while. The Republicans have a 53 to 47-seat majority in the Senate, with 35 seats up this year. The Democrats need a net pick up of four seats to win control. But only two Republican seats – Maine and North Carolina – are in competitive states. The other 20 GOP seats are in states Donald Trump won by double digits. That almost never happens in Senate elections, let alone twice. In the 2025 Virginia elections, the Democrats won a landslide, but they didn’t carry a single district where Trump won with that margin.

The Democrats also must not lose any of their own competitive seats. And in the blue wave of 2018, the Democrats lost Florida. This year, they could lose Georgia, Michigan, and/or New Hampshire.

News Source
EXCERPT:

Republicans in Georgia just proved that one thing can overcome the power of President Donald Trump’s endorsement: an endless stream of cash.

Health care executive Rick Jackson defeated Trump-backed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones in Georgia’s GOP gubernatorial primary Tuesday, with the help of over $100 million of his personal wealth.

Jones’ loss is a major upset for the president in a marquee battleground state, and it follows several high-profile Trump losses in 2022, when his candidates either lost their primaries or the general election. The result is also a rare blunder for Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who joined Trump in endorsing Jones to be his successor ahead of Tuesday’s primary, after months of sitting on the sidelines of the race.

News Source
EXCERPT:

Washington — Rep. Mike Collins will face off against Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in November as Republicans look to Georgia to deliver a key GOP victory that could determine control of the Senate.

Collins won the Republican Senate runoff in Georgia on Tuesday night, CBS News projects, defeating Derek Dooley, a former college football coach.

The contest went to a runoff after no candidate secured 50% of the vote in last month’s primary, where a third candidate, Rep. Buddy Carter, was eliminated. Collins, the owner of a trucking business, has represented Georgia in the House since 2023 and finished first in the runoff with almost 41% of the vote. Dooley, an attorney who coached football at the University of Tennessee and is the son of legendary University of Georgia football coach Vince Dooley, won around 30% of the vote last month.

News Source
EXCERPT:

Tuesday on MS NOW’s “The Briefing,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said that if Democrats win the majority in the midterms, they will subpoena private-sector people who worked with President Donald Trump in his second term.

Host Jen Psaki asked, “Should the Senate be, should the Democrats be in the majority and decide to investigate or look into Patel? I mean, you are one of the many people who have been targeted by Trump’s Justice Department under Trump’s direction, as we’ve all seen it. One another person, who announced yesterday that he was being targeted is, of course, Governor Gavin Newsom. I know you spoke with some of my colleagues about that last night, but I wonder, as we’re thinking about because we’ve been talking about the Georgia races tonight, we’ve been talking about politics as we think about if Democrats have the majority next year, you’re on the Judiciary Committee. Trump is still going to target his political enemies. He’s not going to stop. He’s going to have people in the Department of Justice that does that. What changes what kind of Senate majority do to kind of hold them to account or even stop that?”

Schiff said, “Well, we’ll of course, to oversight of the administration. But judging from his first term, when we subpoenaed, for example, administration officials in the Russia Ukraine investigations, they basically stonewall the subpoenas. In fact, Trump was impeached in that first impeachment, not just for trying to extort Zelensky to get him to help cheat in the election, but also because he was stonewalling, congressional subpoenas. So I don’t think we can expect a whole lot from the administration, but we can subpoena the private sector and they will need to comply. So all of the crypto deals and meme coin deals, the UFC fight, all the back channeling on the Paramount SkyDance, and Warner Brothers mergers, whether there are promises made of changing editorial content, all of that kind of corruption, potential corruption, we will be able to look into.”

Follow Pam Key on X @pam

News Source
EXCERPT:

Over the last decade, California became a national leader in voter accessibility and security, expanding options for when and how ballots can be cast while also strengthening election safeguards.

But those reforms came at a cost: speed. And in a political climate where unsupported conspiracies about election fraud can run rampant on social media — pushed, at times, by top political leaders — some fear the slow vote count is becoming a liability.

Election outcomes in recent years have become more drawn out in California, most recently taking about a week to determine the gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral candidates advancing to November’s runoff after hotly contested primaries. And in prior years, it’s taken even longer to determine tight U.S. House or state Senate seats.

News Source
EXCERPT:

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli — President Trump’s loyalist federal prosecutor in Los Angeles — has not been shy in recent days about his intention to ferret out voter fraud in California’s primary election and criminally charge those responsible.

He has announced that his office “has multiple election fraud investigations underway” in coordination with the FBI, urged Californians on social media to submit evidence of “potential election fraud” directly to his office, and said flatly he “will be charging some people” with election fraud — just as soon as California certifies its vote count and his office “can prove some of the allegations.”

Essayli’s public callouts and promises are highly unusual and in direct conflict with Justice Department guidance on ballot fraud investigations at the federal level, which states federal prosecutors should not publicly pursue such claims amid of vote counting.

The Justice Manual — which regulates the actions of federal prosecutors nationwide — says the department “should not engage in overt criminal investigative measures in matters involving alleged ballot fraud until the election in question has been concluded, its results certified, and all recounts and election contests concluded,” in part because doing so “runs the risk of chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities and of interjecting the investigation itself into ongoing campaigns and the adjudication of any ensuing election contest.”

News Source
EXCERPT:

The Justice Department defended its authority to ensure “fair” elections in California after it launched multiple election fraud investigations coupled with litigation over voter registration.

California has long been known for liberal practices such as ballot harvesting, with a universal mail-in voting system that allows ballots to arrive a week after Election Day, and no voter ID requirements.

“The Department of Justice has statutory authority to enforce our nation’s election laws, including through requesting state voter rolls and monitoring returns when candidates for federal office are on the ballot,” Justice Department spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre told the Daily Signal.

News Source
EXCERPT:

Chuck Schumer has served as a punching bag for angry Democrats for more than a year — taking flak on everything from his 2026 recruiting to his handling of government funding talks.

But with about five months until the midterm elections, the Senate minority leader is gently starting to punch back — pointing out how some of his bets are paying off as his party moves within striking distance of taking back the majority in November.

“There’s no victory lap to take in June,” he said in an interview in his Capitol office suite.