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It’s been a week since the Maine Senate primary, with the Bernie Sanders-backed Graham Platner easily winning the nomination over two other Democrats, including Schumer-backed Gov. Janet Mills, who had suspended her campaign in April but reminded folks after the sexting scandal broke that she was still on the ballot and that the votes would count.
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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.”
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Republicans have competitive primary runoffs to decide U.S. Senate nominees in Georgia and Alabama. The Georgia winner will face Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in the fall, while the Alabama victor will be a heavy favorite to be the solidly Republican state’s next senator. The GOP also has very close gubernatorial nomination contests in Georgia and Oklahoma. In Georgia, the primary runoff looks to be on a knife’s edge, while the Oklahoma primary looks certain to go to a runoff — but which two candidates will advance? Democrats have a competitive primary for mayor in the District of Columbia. The contest has two leading candidates, with the winner almost certain to become the dark-blue city’s next leader (Decision Desk).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Rebecca Bennett, a Democrat nominee for Congress in New Jersey, was caught on audio claiming she stopped going to church specifically because she could not stand sitting in the same pews as people who voted for President Donald Trump.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that it obtained audio from a February campaign event of Bennett, a Navy veteran and healthcare executive running against Republican incumbent Rep. Thomas Kean Jr. for the state’s 7th Congressional District. In the clip, Bennett answers a question about how she deals with invocations of her patriotism being considered a “right-coded way of presenting yourself.”
“I will say I use that word intentionally, and the reason that I do it is because, so, I grew up in the Presbyterian Church, and after Trump got elected, I stopped going to church for the first time in my life because I was like, ‘I cannot sit in this room of people,’” she responded. “At the time, I was stationed somewhere that was pretty conservative. I was still in the military at the time. I was like, ‘I cannot sit in this church full of people who voted for Trump.’ And then, ultimately, I decided they do not get to decide what Christianity looks like, and to me, it’s the same thing about (how) they do not get to decide what patriotism is. You do not get to wrap yourself in the flag while you are literally murdering Americans in broad daylight.” (The audio ends before Bennett elaborates on which Americans were “murdered in broad daylight.”)
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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.
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As more and more revelations come to the fore about Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, who just won the Democrat primary this week, many Democrats seem to have adopted a simple mantra regarding his campaign: Vote for the Nazi: It’s important.
The saying echoes a slogan from campaigns past — one that supporters of Republican Sen. Susan Collins, Platner’s opponent in the general election, would do well to employ against Platner. The slogan demonstrates how Democrats will embrace a candidate — any candidate — so long as that person opposes President Trump.
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The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results.
Progressive city council member Nithya Raman has advanced to a November runoff against Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, setting up an unexpected matchup between two Democrats and former political allies to run the struggling city of nearly four million people.
The outcome means Spencer Pratt, a Republican and former reality television personality from The Hills, is out of the running. His candidacy had drawn national attention because of his celebrity and willingness to challenge liberal governance in a city dominated by Democrats, but the buzz did not translate into enough votes to make the runoff.
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Sens. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and Ed Markey (Mass.) are just the latest high-profile Democrats to throw their support behind scandal-plagued Senate candidate Graham Platner.
The progressive oyster farmer from Maine won the Democratic nomination Tuesday night, a result that was widely expected after Gov. Janet Mills (D) suspended her campaign in April. Despite Mills still appearing on the ballot, Platner managed to secure 72% of the vote share, setting up a general election against five-term incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R).
‘In November, Maine voters will elect Graham Platner, and we will win a Senate majority.’
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Since he came down the escalator 11 years ago, Donald Trump’s personal conduct made him uniquely unfit for office and Americans had a moral obligation to oppose him, so said Democrats. Character mattered in politics, they told us.
But on Tuesday, nearly 150,000 Mainers sent a different message. Democrats handed Graham Platner a landslide primary victory, a decisive win for the man who had a Nazi tattoo. And to be clear, Platner wasn’t the only candidate on the ballot. Incumbent Gov. Janet Mills and former Democrat Senate nominee in 2024 David Costello were on the ballot as well. And yet it was a landslide victory for Platner.
Platner spent 18 years bearing a Nazi tattoo and only had it removed when it became ever so slightly (emphasis on slightly) politically inconvenient. He also said women worried about rape should not “get blacked out, f*cked up around people” they aren’t “comfortable” with. He also allegedly said that if someone ever broke into his home, he would “rape them … [but] not in a sexual way, not in a gay way.”
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Democrats cannot even admit that California’s elections are secure, and that is the biggest problem.
On Thursday, a reporter asked House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries about reports that homeless people in Los Angeles had been paid to vote for Democrats with cash or drugs. She asked if those reports changed his thoughts about election integrity, which Jeffries had previously said was not an issue in the Golden State. Rather than acknowledging the reports, or even clarifying that bribing individuals to vote is a form of election fraud, Jeffries immediately dismissed the claim as a “far-right conspiracy theory” meant to “try to convince the American people that there’s evidence of fraud in California.”
Reporter: “There are homeless people on Skid Row admitting they were bribed with cash and drugs to vote Democrat in elections…”
Hakeem Jeffries: “I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s part of some far-right conspiracy theory to convince people there’s fraud in California.” pic.twitter.com/e05kY2zvof
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) June 11, 2026
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Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic Socialist running for New York’s 13th Congressional District against incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, is not only a radical Leftist backed by Zohran Mamdani, but a peddler of a COVID theory pushed by the ChiComs that claimed COVID originated in France.
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Sometimes you just have to choose the lesser of two evils, and President Trump’s recent decision reflects that.
On Wednesday, President Trump announced he has endorsed Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine’s upcoming Senate election.
Collins has been labeled by many conservatives as a RINO after she voted to Impeach Trump in 2021 for “inciting an insurrection.”
While taking questions from the press inside the Oval Office, Trump was asked if he would be endorsing Collins, who is running against Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, to which Trump responded that he would be supporting her despite the two having different ideologies.
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David Flippo, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who earned President Donald Trump’s support, won the GOP primary to replace retiring Nevada Rep. Mark Amodei.
The race in Nevada’s 2nd District was a proxy war between Trump and prominent state Republicans, many of whom backed former state Sen. James Settelmeyer, including Amodei and GOP Gov. Joe Lombardo. Flippo ended up emerging victorious on Wednesday from a crowded, 13-person Republican field.
The victory continues Trump’s 2026 hot streak in GOP primary endorsements, marred only by a hiccup in last week’s Iowa gubernatorial primary. Trump backed Flippo in a Truth Social post in late May, less than two weeks before Election Day.
Flippo campaigned as a hardliner on immigration and transgender issues, and he slammed Settelmeyer as a “woke liberal” in ads. But Settelmeyer’s opponents took issue with Flippo, a longtime Las Vegas resident who only recently purchased property in Reno, attempting to run the state’s lone safely Republican district.
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There can be only one reason not to count votes on a single election day: fraud. Allowing votes to be accepted and “counted” for days, or, as in California, months after election day, enables one essential Democrat cheating tactic: Democrats get to know the total of Republican votes, so they know how many Democrat votes they’ll have to manufacture to win.
This is compounded by ballot harvesting, ballot drop boxes, and mail-in ballots sent to everyone, including the dead, illegal aliens, and people who haven’t lived in the state for years. Accepting those ballots prior to election day allows Democrats not only to accept and count illegal ballots, but to suppress Republican ballots. Ballots destroyed and never counted can’t be discovered in audits, which they violently resist. Add in allowing anyone to register to vote with just about anything with someone’s name on it, and you have an anti-Republican—as in our constitutional republic—single-party state.
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Legacy media don’t describe. They exist to prevent description, corralling and deflecting. In the famous description from Iowahawk, “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”
Four states held primary elections on June 9, and on the morning of June 10, they were either ahead in their count or about as far along in their count of ballots as California, which held its primaries on June 2. These screenshots from live election results at the NBC News website are both from Wednesday morning at 9:30 PT:
California counts far more slowly than anyone else in the country, and California’s results have the most remarkable tendency to drift: What the outcome looks like on election night has nothing to do with the final outcome. Famous 2010 election outcome summarized in a single headline about the 2010 state’s attorney general race: “When Kamala Harris lost on election night, but won three weeks later.”
The Florida Supreme Court has ruled no challenges to the new GOP voting district map will be considered before the 2026 election. Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) responded, “The Florida Supreme Court has REJECTED the challenge to the state’s redistricting plan and new map. This assures that the recently enacted map will be in place for the 2026 election.”
Graham Platner, a Democratic Party contender for Maine’s U.S. Senate seat, has officially won his party’s nomination to run against incumbent Senator Susan Collins (R-ME).
