The Trump administration pressed for a criminal investigation into the decisive race for the United States Senate in Alaska and said, on Saturday (the 31st), that it will likely take to the Supreme Court its challenge to thousands of mail-in ballots in California, as the midterm campaign for control of Congress entered its final weekend.
In Alaska, federal prosecutors are investigating whether aides to Democratic candidate Mary Peltola helped recruit a retired professor, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., to run for the seat because he shares the name of the incumbent Republican senator, Dan S. Sullivan. The tightly contested race is seen as crucial to Democrats’ hopes of winning the Senate in Tuesday’s election (the 3rd).
This is one of 35 Senate races, along with all 435 House seats, that will decide whether Trump’s Republicans will maintain control of Congress during their final two years in office.
Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate and a narrow edge in the House. Losing either chamber would allow Democrats to block Trump’s agenda and start investigations into a government that, so far, has operated with broadly aligned Republican majorities.
Early voting set a record. More than 51 million Americans have already voted in person or by mail, according to the University of Florida’s Elections Lab, surpassing the nearly 46 million who voted before Election Day in the 2022 midterm elections.
In California, a federal appellate court ruled, earlier this week, by 2-1, that the Department of Justice failed to justify its emergency request to force the state to discard mail ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters who, according to the government, are likely not citizens.
“I hesitate to give a definitive answer, but I think the Supreme Court will probably be the next to weigh in on this case,” said Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter to Fox News on Saturday, adding that any petition for Supreme Court review would be filed before Tuesday’s election.
Trump has been campaigning intensely in several states over the past month, but will spend Saturday at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. He resumes campaigning on Sunday in Kansas and Iowa.
Investigation in Alaska Intensifies
The lead U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor in Alaska, U.S. Attorney Michael Heyman, told reporters on Friday that a recent New York Times article claiming there was an attempt to recruit Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. led to an uptick in FBI resources dedicated to the case.
Heyman said he had assigned several prosecutors to the case and that the investigations were proceeding “intensely and rapidly.”
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Peltola aides worked with the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee’s team to recruit Sullivan Jr.
Heyman called him a “phony candidate,” but refused to say what crime might have been committed.
Peltola and her campaign committee denied involvement in any attempt to recruit the second Sullivan. The retired professor denied coordinating with Peltola’s campaign.
The department had already filed the civil suit, but, according to Heyman, “when the New York Times story was published, those additional details accelerated what we had already been doing.”
Division Among Democrats in Michigan
In Michigan, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers in another tight Senate race, El-Sayed’s feud with the opponent he defeated in the primaries, Congresswoman Haley Stevens, has rekindled.
El-Sayed’s campaign asked Stevens not to participate in her events until Election Day to “not distract from the campaign’s central issues,” a person familiar with the matter said.
Stevens supported El-Sayed but demanded that he condemn an ad by an outside group blaming Israel for high food prices and apologize for earlier statements about Israel.
“It certainly does not help El-Sayed’s campaign to have a visible and ongoing division within the party right before Election Day,” said Matt Grossman, a political scientist at Michigan State University.
Polls show El-Sayed has broadly consolidated Democratic support.
Trump Administration Broadens Pressure on States
The U.S. government, in addition to trying to block the counting of votes from more than 20,000 California voters who, it claims, may not be citizens, filed a civil suit against about 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking unredacted voter rolls.
The legal maneuvers alarmed state election authorities. Under the Constitution, states have primary authority over how elections are conducted.
The issue of mail-in voting has been the subject of a series of court battles this year. In September, the Supreme Court rejected a Trump administration attempt to tighten rules ahead of the elections.
On Friday, a federal judge ordered the Department of Justice to stop threatening to sue California election officials who disobeyed its directives.
Sean Morales-Doyle, of the Brennan Center for Justice, said these measures, although with little chance of success in court, aim to “create uncertainty, sow fear, distrust, and chaos,” in the hope of pressuring authorities such as Alaska’s lieutenant governor “to do something they should not do.”
Still, 76% of U.S. voters are confident that their votes will be counted accurately, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted from September 30 to October 5, with nearly identical levels of confidence among Republicans and Democrats.
