President Donald Trump is campaigning in South Carolina for the second time this month to rally Republican support for Darline Graham as she spends the final days of the midterm election trying to fend off a robust challenge from Democrat Annie Andrews for a critical U.S. Senate seat. Senate races are often an afterthought in this Republican stronghold. But Andrews has mounted an unexpectedly competitive race against Graham, who is currently filling out the remaining months of her late brother Lindsey Graham’s term.
With a handful of campaign stops left on Trump’s schedule, the president converted a planned event in Kansas into a virtual tele-rally. Trump plans to hold more than 20 tele-rallies before Tuesday’s election day, according to the White House. GOP Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall faces an extraordinarily competitive race for reelection against Democrat and Methodist megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton.
In Alaska’s race for U.S. Senate, meanwhile, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy ordered an investigation into the Democratic candidate after revelations that her campaign appeared to be involved in recruiting another candidate with the same name as Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan. Trump called for the criminal prosecution of Mary Peltola and her campaign a day earlier.
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“So go out, vote as soon as possible,” Trump said as he wrapped up. “Vote on Election Day. Just get out. You got to vote.”
Trump will head back to Washington to help his wife, first lady Melania Trump, hand out candy at an early Halloween trick-or-treating event at the White House.
About half of registered voters say the economy, healthcare and the situation in Iran are each “extremely important” to their vote for Congress this year, according to a new Gallup poll.
The poll — conducted earlier this month — found the share of voters saying the economy is “extremely important” to their vote is roughly in line with Gallup’s measurement from 2022, as Americans worried about high inflation.
Democratic voters are more likely than Republican voters to say many issues are highly important to their vote, including the economy, healthcare and the situation in Iran. That heightened concern is typical for the party that’s out of power.
Pivoting to yet another marquee Senate contest as he rallied in South Carolina, Trump said Thursday that he feels Democratic Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola “actually should be removed from the ballot and prosecuted.”
Trump has called for the criminal prosecution of Peltola and her staff after revelations that her campaign appeared to be involved in recruiting another candidate with the same name as Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan.
Overnight, Republican Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy ordered an investigation into Peltola. Earlier Thursday, Trump cast doubt on whether Peltola would be seated in the Senate even if she won.
After he talked at length about North Carolina’s open Senate contest, Trump veered off the South Carolina campaign trail to comment on tight races in Michigan and Texas.
Saying Abdul El-Sayed is “definitely” part of the Muslim Brotherhood, Trump also said any Black or Jewish voters who supported the Democratic nominee were “crazy.” There is no evidence that El-Sayed, who is Muslim, has any affiliation with the group, an Islamic movement with branches that the U.S. government has designated as terrorist organizations.
And of Democratic Texas Senate nominee James Talarico, Trump said he “doesn’t want meat, oil or guns.”
Ultimately getting back to the state where he was rallying, Trump called South Carolina’s Democrat Annie Andrews “too crazy, too radical and too dangerous” to serve in the U.S. Senate.
Two minutes into his Rock Hill rally on Thursday, Trump pivoted to a neighboring state, delivering five minutes’ worth of comments on the North Carolina Senate race.
Trump in that contest has endorsed Republican Michael Whatley, who helmed the Republican National Committee during his 2024 campaign.
Most of Trump’s comments focused on his criticism of “terrible governor” Roy Cooper, now the Democratic Senate nominee.
Trump and Vice President JD Vance have stumped with Whatley multiple times during the general election campaign. Trump’s appearance in Rock Hill is just south of the border between the two Carolinas.
“I’m really here to talk about Darline,” Trump said, before talking more about Cooper.
The president’s planned campaign stop in Salina has been converted into a virtual tele-rally, according to a person familiar with the plans who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The White House said in a statement that the president is going to hold more than 20 tele-rallies before Tuesday’s election day.
“These events give him the opportunity to highlight his accomplishments and expand his reach across the country,” the statement said.
—By Michelle Price
The cancellation of Saturday’s event was confirmed Thursday by Danedri Herbert, the chair of the Kansas Republican Party.
The rally had been planned as an effort to help GOP Sen. Roger Marshall, who’s in an extraordinarily competitive race for reelection against Democrat and Methodist megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton.
Herbert did not immediately give a reason, but the director of the Salina Airport Authority told KSNW-TV that as saying it resulted from a scheduling issue. The rally was to have been held at 10:30 a.m. in a hangar at the airport in Salina, about 100 miles (177 kilometers) west of Topeka.
Trump had a rally for Marshall on Oct. 19 in Wichita, and his plans for a second rally had been seen as a sign of deep concern about Marshall’s chances of winning. JD Vance also headlined rallies for Marshall in the Kansas City area in September and in Topeka on Monday.
Speaking ahead of Trump at his second rally in South Carolina in two weeks, the interim GOP senator commended the president for having “delivered what Washington promised for decades” on law enforcement and border security.
But Democratic nominee Annie Andrews, Graham said, “would just throw it all away.”
Invoking occasional profanities in a style of speech that sounded reminiscent of her late brother, Lindsey Graham, Darline Graham decried “the liberals and socialists” she said were trying to turn her deeply conservative home state more purple.
She also called Andrews “crazy” and said her opponent was running “deceptive ads trying to hide her radical past and rewrite her record.”
Trump urged Graham to seek her late brother’s seat and has doubled down on his support of her as the race has appeared to tighten in the closing days.
He also rallied for her last week.
As the president made his way to a rally in South Carolina, he was asked whether Democratic nominee Mary Peltola would be seated to represent Alaska in the Senate if she wins.
“Well, you’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump responded. “It’s hard to believe that she could even be allowed to run.”
Republicans have made similar moves before. House Speaker Mike Johnson delayed swearing in Rep. Adelita Grijalva of Arizona after she won a special election in 2025, preventing her from supplying the last signature needed to force a House vote on releasing the Epstein files.
Vice President JD Vance didn’t go as far as the president did in calling for Mary Peltola, the Democratic Senate candidate in Alaska, to be prosecuted over her campaign’s alleged role in recruiting the non-incumbent Dan Sullivan onto the ballot.
But he said “I think we should certainly look into whether she committed election fraud.”
“I mean, she is a person who, for months now, has pretended that she has had nothing to do with the fact that they have put a fraudulent person, a person explicitly designed to confuse Alaska voters, on the ballot,” Vance told reporters ahead of his campaign trip Thursday to Texas. “She is trying to steal a Senate seat from the voters of Alaska, and it’s disgraceful.”
The president said he’s willing to talk to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva after the Brazilian President’s election victory over conservative Flávio Bolsonaro in a hotly contested race that bucked a trend of conservative electoral results in Latin America.
“I thought the election was a very great embarrassment to the people of Brazil,” Trump told reporters. “I watched the election. I didn’t take sides. I let it be. I was asked not to take sides by the president, the current president. I didn’t take sides.”
Experts on Brazil said Trump tried to sway the election by citing the prosecution of Bolsonaro’s father as he imposed steep tariffs on Brazil, sanctioning the Brazilian judges involved and designating two Brazilian gangs as terror groups to reinforce Bolsonaro’s tough-on-crime campaign.
Asked if Lula was the rightful winner, Trump demurred.
“I don’t want to come into it right now,” Trump said.
Republican mailers promoting a socialist Senate candidate in Ohio have begun portraying the Democratic candidate, Sherrod Brown, as a yes man for Donald Trump.
The continuing effort to pull support from Brown comes in the former three-term senator’s tight race against Republican Sen. Jon Husted. Federal disclosure reports show Enough Promises Ohio PAC, which sent out the fliers, received $2.5 million from Conservative Americans PAC. It has ties to Trump’s MAGA Inc.
The new mailers promote independent candidate Greg Levy over Brown with messages such as “When Donald Trump Asks... Sherrod Brown Always says ‘YES’” and “Stop Trump. Ditch Sherrod.”
Levy has condemned the mailers as “dirty tricks.” Brown’s campaign said Ohioans “won’t be deceived.” For months now, Husted and his allies have assailed Brown as a liberal beholden to Democrats.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has a few suggestions for Nicki Minaj after the Trump-supporting rapper called the governor an “evil woman” who “will not escape God’s wrath.”
“Well, maybe she ought to get outside and be offline a little more,” Hochul told reporters when asked about Minaj’s comments. “Stop going to Trump rallies because it’s kind of poisoning your mind.”
Hochul’s response came after Minaj fired off a tirade against the Democrat on X that also endorsed the governor’s Republican opponent, Bruce Blakeman.
Minaj has been amping up her relationship with the White House and spoke at a Trump rally in Michigan this week.
Democrats, election officials and voting rights groups have long worried that Trump would try again to overturn an election when his party is trailing.
It’s no longer hypothetical.
Academics believe the Department of Justice lawsuit seeking to preemptively contest a potential Republican loss in the Alaska U.S. Senate race is the first time since the Civil Rights era that the federal government has sued to halt certification of an election, a duty the Constitution places in the hands of states.
Democrats and other groups that oppose Trump have been running exercises for months to rehearse responses to election interference, and have lawsuits pre-written. They also plan to have tens of thousands of people monitoring the polls on Election Day.
So far, early voting has been quiet, with about 35 million Americans already casting ballots without any notable disruption.
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That means voters like Brent Chaplin — a 37-year-old who works in finance and accounting. He said he’s a registered Republican, “but it’s hard to be that right now.”
He said he cast his ballot for Annie Andrews for Senate, and encouraged voters to think beyond partisan politics.
“You just can’t go and say I’m a Republican, I’m just going to vote Republican,” said Chaplin, who voted for Trump in 2016. “You’ve got to put some brainpower into it and think about it. So hopefully it is a message to the powers that be to wake up, pick better candidates.”
Benjamin Updegraft, a 32-year-old software engineer, expressed frustration that the Senate seat might stay in the Graham family.
“The Senate is not an inherited position,” he said. “This is not a country where these noble titles are passed down between families.”
Annie Andrews has a request for voters in South Carolina who haven’t sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in nearly three decades: Just give me a chance.
“Let’s try something new for once,” Andrews said Wednesday. “If she doesn’t do what she says she’s going to do, you can fire me in six years. I promise that I won’t let you down, that I’m going to win you all over.”
Senate races are often an afterthought in this Republican stronghold. But Andrews, a pediatrician who previously ran unsuccessfully for Congress, has mounted an unexpectedly competitive race against the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was appointed by the Republican governor to fill the remaining months of her brother’s term.
Holding South Carolina is essential if Republicans have any hope of keeping their Senate majority. In a sign of the party’s anxiety, Trump is traveling again to the state to press the party faithful to show up for Sen. Darline Graham in her unexpectedly tight race against Democrat Annie Andrews.
The trip marks the second time this month he will have visited South Carolina, a state he won by nearly 18 percentage points in 2024.
“Big Rally in South Carolina for the wonderful Darline Graham, today,” Trump posted on social media Thursday morning. “She is fantastic. Lindsey is watching, and very proud of her!!!
When Democratic candidate David Crowley joined thousands of fans watching the Brewers win the World Series Wednesday night, the victory was particularly sweet: As the Milwaukee County executive, Crowley helped negotiate a deal in 2023 to have state, county and city money help pay for repairs at the Brewers’ stadium to keep them in Milwaukee through at least 2050.
“It’s not just brought together those who live in this community, but everybody across the state of Wisconsin,” Crowley told WISN-TV.
Crowley faces Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who celebrated the win by invoking the memory of Bob Uecker, the Brewers’ play-by-play announcer for 54 years.
“You know Ueck is smiling down on us tonight,” Tiffany posted on social media.
A parade celebrating the Brewers’ first World Series championship is set for Friday in Milwaukee, about five miles from where Crowley grew up.
While controversial, the situation in Alaska is not that unusual. Political parties often support extra candidates on the ballot to try to pull votes from their rivals. If state courts allow it, legal experts say, the federal government has no role challenging the results.
In Ohio’s Senate race, Republicans have been tied to an effort to boost a socialist on the ballot who would pull votes from Sherrod Brown, the Democratic candidate challenging Sen. Jon Husted.
And social media videos believed to be produced with artificial intelligence and linked to Russia are misusing real people’s names and photographs to spread disinformation about Brown and Texas Democrat James Talarico in the final stretch of midterm voting.
That’s what House Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday morning on Fox News Channel when asked about state and federal probes over whether Peltola’s campaign recruited a candidate with the same name as the GOP incumbent.
“This is an evil tactic,” the Louisiana Republican said. “They’re trying to confuse people, and we’re going to expose that.”
“That’s not Texas,” GOP Senate nominee Ken Paxton said Thursday as he characterized the promises of Democratic opponent James Talarico.
Appearing on Fox News Channel from a diner in his home state, the Texas attorney general called Talarico “a socialist who wants government control.”
Paxton urged party unity after a “tough primary” for Texas Republicans, calling himself “a constitutional conservative that will fight for free market, will fight for opportunity for Texans.”
Trump has stumped in Texas three times this month, calling Paxton “a good man” as he competes in the tight race that’s become one of the most expensive in the country.
The Labor Department report Thursday suggests layoffs remain low and most Americans enjoy job security.
Applications for jobless benefits are a proxy for layoffs, and economists watch them closely because they can provide signs of where the job market is headed. So far this year, claims have remained at historically low levels, never topping 230,000 in a single week.
But hiring has been lackluster: So far this year, employers — companies, government agencies and nonprofits — have been adding an average of 68,000 jobs a month, including a disappointing 29,000 last month. It’s better than in 2025 when monthly job creation averaged 9,700 as high interest rates and Trump’s unpredictable trade policies discouraged hiring.
Consumer spending has remained resilient and a surge in investment in artificial intelligence has lifted the GDP.
An inflation gauge closely monitored by the Federal Reserve accelerated last month, showing that prices remain elevated as Americans go to vote with affordability concerns a central issue.
Consumer prices rose 3.6% in September compared with a year earlier, the Commerce Department said Thursday, up from 3.4% in August. On a monthly basis, prices climbed 0.5%, up from 0.3% in August and the highest figure since May.
Annual inflation has worsened since the Iran war spiked oil and gas prices. U.S. oil prices still top $100 a barrel, up from less than $70 before the war. Polls show the inflation has soured most voters on the president’s handling of the economy. Trump’s campaign promise was gas below $2 a gallon. It currently averages about $4.25.
Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Adam Hamilton hugs a supporter of his campaign for the U.S. Senate against Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., after speaking at Washburn University, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, in Topeka, Kan. (AP Photo/John Hanna)
FILE - Mary Peltola, a Democrat running for the U.S. Senate seat in Alaska, addresses supporters at an election watch party on Aug. 18, 2026, in Anchorage, Alaska. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen, File)
FILE - This combination photo shows Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, left, in Palmer, Alaska, Aug. 17, 2026, and a candidate in Alaska's Senate race, Dan Sullivan, right, in Petersburg, Alaska, July 3, 2026. (AP Photos/Mark Thiessen/Becky Bohrer, File)
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms, center, joined by former President Barack Obama and Democratic candidate Sen. Jon Ossoff, walk off stage after a rally ahead of the Georgia Primary Election on Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, Morrow, Ga. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Shoemaker Center at Ohio University Chillicothe in Chillicothe, Ohio, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
