Latest in 2022 election news
- NBC's 2022 midterm elections guide: Everything you need to know.
- President Joe Biden delivered a speech near the Capitol on Wednesday evening about threats to democracy in a final midterms push.
- A new Wisconsin poll shows GOP Sen. Ron Johnson and Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes in a statistical dead heat. The same poll last month from Marquette Law School had Barnes trailing by 6 points.
- As of Wednesday afternoon, 29,058,443 ballots have been cast nationwide. NBC News is tracking the early vote here. Plan your vote here.
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Mastriano challenges Shapiro to 'stare me in the eyes and call me an antisemite'
PITTSBURGH — Pennsylvania’s Republican nominee for governor, Doug Mastriano, challenged Democratic rival Josh Shapiro to call him an antisemite to his face at a rally Wednesday at a suburban hotel, an event that later featured rallygoers starting a “lock him up” chant aimed at Shapiro, the state attorney general.
Mastriano, speaking before a crowd of a few hundred, challenged Shapiro to debate him in the final days of the campaign. Debate negotiations fell through earlier after Mastriano said he would agree only to a format that involved both candidates’ choosing their own moderators.
“They deserve to see it," Mastriano said of a debate. "I'd like to see that gentleman stare me in the eyes and call me an antisemite. What a ridiculous notion. What a ridiculous assertion. It’s so easy for Josh to call me names.
“Be a man, face me eyeball to eyeball,” he continued before he mocked Shapiro’s height. “I’ll give you a box so you don’t have to look up at me.”
Mastriano previously came under fire for a campaign payment to the far-right social media site Gab, whose founder has made antisemitic remarks. The alleged shooter in the 2018 killing of 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue posted antisemitic rants on Gab before the shooting.
Amid the firestorm, Mastriano posted a statement saying, “I reject anti-Semitism in any form.” He later drew scrutiny for saying the Jewish day school Shapiro, an observant Jew, attended was a “privileged, exclusive, elite” school. A top campaign adviser would later call Shapiro “at best a secular Jew,” while Mastriano’s wife said late last month that “as a family we so much love Israel, in fact I’m gonna say we probably love Israel more than a lot of Jews do.”
At Wednesday's rally, Mastriano said: “How do you respond to somebody who says you’re antisemitic? Like, how do you respond? You’re on the defense right away. There’s no way you can win.”
Mastriano criticized Shapiro for defending Covid shutdowns early in the pandemic and for rising crime in the state, saying the state attorney general “has blood on his hands.”
“He doesn’t care about anything but his own political ambition,” Mastriano said. At one point, some rallygoers began chanting of Shapiro: “Lock him up.”
“That’s the only thing the radical left and the media is going to report on now,” Mastriano said to laughs.
Unlike other Republicans in critical swing state races, Mastriano is getting buried in the polls. Surveys that show Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Mehmet Oz locked in a neck-and-neck battle for the state’s open Senate seat show Shapiro with, in some cases, as much as a double-digit lead.
Wendy Bell, a former local news anchor who is backing Mastriano and spoke at the rally, described the polling disparity as “amazing.”
“Everybody else has Republicans winning, and somehow you’re still 9 points down,” she said. “This doesn’t make sense to us, right?”
Trump asks Florida judge to block lawsuit from N.Y. AG seeking re-election
Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday asked a judge in Florida to block a lawsuit against him, his children and his company filed by New York State Attorney General Letitia James.
In his lawsuit, Trump accused James of "boasting" about her attacks against him as she seeks another term as attorney general.
“Now up for reelection as Attorney General, she is campaigning once again on the promise that if reelected she will continue her vitriolic and obsessive pursuit of President Trump,” the lawsuit said.
The former president claims James began intensifying her attacks against him in September during her re-election campaign and specifically targeted him to "rev up her political base" and engage in a "plot" to seize control over his business and financial affairs when she filed a civil lawsuit against him alleging years of fraud and an effort to inflate his net worth to obtain favorable loan agreements.
In final stretch, candidates sharpen their appeals to ‘ticket-splitting’ voters
ATLANTA — Trailing in the polls, Stacey Abrams is trying to tie her GOP rival, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, to the less popular Republican on the ballot: Senate hopeful Herschel Walker.
At their final debate Sunday, Abrams said Kemp “refuses to defend us, and yet he defended Herschel Walker, saying that he didn’t want to be involved in the personal life of his running mate,” referring to allegations from women that Walker pressured them to have abortions. “But he doesn’t mind being involved in the personal lives and the personal medical choices of women in Georgia.”
In Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for the Senate who’s clinging to the slimmest of leads in recent surveys, is trying to link Republican opponent Mehmet Oz to Doug Mastriano, the far-right candidate for governor trailing Democrat Josh Shapiro by a wide margin.
“You roll with Doug Mastriano!” Fetterman interrupted to say at one point in their only debate last week, as Oz was discussing abortion as a matter between “women, doctors, local political leaders.” The next morning, Fetterman ran an ad arguing that “Oz would let politicians like Doug Mastriano ban abortion without exception” and called him “too extreme for Pennsylvania.”
Pence stumps for GOP Senate candidate Ted Budd in North Carolina
RALEIGH, N.C. — Former Vice President Mike Pence stumped in North Carolina on Wednesday in the final days before the midterm elections with Senate candidate Ted Budd, calling him one of the “strongest conservative voices” in the House, where he has served for the past six years.
“I’m here to say just one thing and one thing only, and that is that North Carolina and America need Ted Budd in the United States Senate,” Pence said after he and Budd answered questions about the economy and education from state GOP Chairman Michael Whatley before a few dozen Republican activists.
Earlier Pence attended a luncheon fundraiser for Budd, who is in a highly competitive race with Democratic rival Cheri Beasley. The race is one of several that could determine whether Democrats hold on to power in the narrowly divided Senate.
Pence became a leading target of former President Donald Trump’s ire after he refused to help him block certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s win while Pence served as the presiding officer of the formal proceedings on Jan. 6, 2021. The anger spilled over to Trump supporters, who considered him a turncoat.
Latinos could have record number of seats in Congress following midterm vote
The House could have a record number of Latino members after next week’s election, with one Latino group projecting they will grab as many as 45 seats.
Currently, 38 members of the House are Latino.
“We think we’ll have a very robust new class of Latinos overall,” said Arturo Vargas, the executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund.
To reach that number, 34 Latino incumbents would have to be re-elected or be succeeded by Latinos, and 11 Latinos running for seats not held by Latinos would also have to win.
Biden calls midterms a ‘defining moment’ for democracy amid political violence and voter intimidation
President Joe Biden said Wednesday the midterms are a “defining moment” for democracy as threats of political violence and voter intimidation loom over the upcoming elections.
In closing remarks days before the midterms, Biden again called election deniers an existential threat to democracy, tying the Jan. 6 insurrection to last week’s attack on Paul Pelosi. Prosecutors have said the alleged attacker was looking for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., when he attacked her husband with a hammer.
“We must with an overwhelming voice stand against political violence and voter intimidation, period. Stand up and speak against it,” Biden said in a roughly 20-minute speech near the Capitol. “We don’t settle our differences in America with a riot, a mob or a bullet or a hammer. We settle them peacefully at the ballot box. We have to be honest with ourselves, though. We have to face this problem. We can’t turn away from it. We can’t pretend it’s just going to solve itself.”
Biden’s remarks in part echoed warnings he has made about the threat posed by those who spread false information about the validity of the 2020 elections and his argument that many Republican supporters of former President Donald Trump are promoting “extremism.”
Abrams campaign sees massive turnout as key to victory in Georgia
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ campaign manager, Lauren Groh-Wargo, said in an interview that internal data shows more registered voters in Georgia are likely to vote for a Democrat than a Republican — a change from 2018, when Abrams lost to Gov. Brian Kemp.
“We know if that if every single registered voter voted in Georgia, Stacey would win,” Groh-Wargo said.
The Abrams campaign said that in the final stretch before Election Day, it is focusing its efforts on low-income and rural areas, as well as younger voters, the group with the lowest early voting turnout thus far. Overall early voting numbers are also driving where Abrams makes campaign stops by Tuesday, with the campaign aiming to have her hit counties where turnout is “underperforming.”
“This is going to be a close election. We’re in a 50-50 state,” Groh-Wargo said. “We are fighting for every vote.”