vice president Kamala Harris and his new running mate will hold a rally in Arizona as part of their tour of electoral battlegrounds, visiting a state where Harris bypassed a prominent Democrat in favor of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Arizona Senator Mark KellyA former astronaut and gun control advocate, he was a leading candidate for running mate.
Meanwhile, former president donald trump is visiting Montana for a rally in support of Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy. The former president hopes to remedy some unfinished business from 2018, when he repeatedly campaigned in Big Sky Country in a failed attempt to unseat incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester.
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Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is expressing confidence that the Republican Party will be able to win a majority in the November elections because the party has avoided nominating the types of weak candidates who have lost tough races in the past.
“What is the key to winning a Senate election in a competitive state? Quality of candidate,” McConnell told conservative voters Friday at “The Gathering,” an annual convening hosted by influential radio host Erick Erickson. “I’m not going to mention names,” McConnell said, “but over 10 or 15 years, in four or five cases, we haven’t had candidates who appeal to a competitive state.”
The Kentucky Republican was referring to candidates like Herschel Walker, the controversial 2022 candidate who lost to Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock in a year when Republicans won every other statewide election in the state.
The Republicans need to win just two additional seats to gain a majority in January, and they are expected to win West Virginia, where Joe Manchin, the Democrat-turned-independent, is retiring. Democratic Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana are running in states that former President Trump won twice and is expected to win again.
“We need to look at the Senate as an insurance policy against what these people will do to the country,” McConnell said. The longest-serving Senate leader in history, McConnell is leaving your leadership position in the new Congress that will meet in January.
Vice President Mike Pence confirmed Friday that he will sit out the presidential race in November. But he explained his decision with a complex mix of praise and criticism of Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump — and made it clear that he is not even remotely interested in supporting Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
“I cannot support President Trump’s continued assertion that he should have set aside my oath to support the Constitution and act in a way that would have overturned the election,” Pence said at a rally of conservative activists hosted by radio personality Erick Erickson .
Trump argued that Pence should have used his power to preside over the Electoral College to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
“President Donald Trump was not just my president, he was my friend,” Pence said, adding that this is “part of what made the way our administration ended so much more difficult.”
Pence said several times that he was proud of the Trump administration’s accomplishments and praised Trump for his response to his nearly assassination.
But the former vice president criticized the direction the Republican Party took under the former president in his bid for a comeback. He was especially critical of the Republican Party’s support for tariffs, the more isolationist role of the US on the world stage, and the abandonment of the demand for a national abortion ban.
“The fact that we have a platform that has made no mention of the national debt, advocated massive taxes at our borders and abandoned the commitments we have to our allies around the world is troubling,” Pence said, explaining the Republican Party’s current identity as “a populism disconnected from conservative principles”.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, once seen as Donald Trump’s most threatening rival in the Republican Party’s presidential primaries, says Democrats are manufacturing the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, “from nothing”.
“This is all fabricated,” DeSantis said on radio host Erick Erickson’s annual conservative town hall, “The Gathering.”
DeSantis, who regularly complained about the national political media during his failed run for the White House, repeated the approach Friday, arguing that the “corporate media” is exaggerating Democratic enthusiasm since President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Harris.
“They are trying to create a cultural phenomenon around this candidate and her running mate,” DeSantis said.
He had an especially harsh assessment of Walz, criticizing his fellow governor as a leftist masquerading as a man with Midwestern values.
DeSantis mocked Walz’s joke about conservative opposition to abortion rights and LBGTQ civil rights. “This is coming from the guy who set up a COVID tip line, encouraging Minnesotans to gossip about their neighbors.”
Republican elected officials and conservative commentators have criticized Walz in recent days for the way he has governed during the coronavirus pandemic.
For all his criticism, however, DeSantis does not believe his running mate choices – Walz or Sen. J.D. Vance for the Republicans – will affect the outcome in November.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp insists he is not messing with Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump intra-party attacks about Kemp’s refusal to help overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The Republican governor called Trump’s recent attacks on a campaign rally in Atlanta and on the Truth Social platform “a lot of noise” and jokingly compared Trump to a tropical storm.
“This big storm passed through the state this week — and now we’re dealing with Tropical Storm Debby,” Kemp said at conservative radio host Erick Erickson’s annual “The Gathering” conference in Atlanta’s Buckhead area.
Kemp repeated his pledge to support the GOP nominee and renewed his warnings that Republicans should stop focusing on the 2020 election and the false claims that Biden won in Georgia and nationally because of fraud.
“We are going to use our political operation to win Georgia, despite the grievances of the past,” Kemp told Erickson, adding that the efforts would “help Republicans move up and down the ticket.”
Of course, Kemp’s political operation focuses on Georgia’s competitive legislative districts, which are key to maintaining Republican majorities in the statehouse, meaning that potential Republican voters in other areas of the hotly contested state may not be reached by the organization. Kemp before November.
Throughout the discussion with Erickson, Kemp did not say Trump’s name.
For one brief moment this weekFierce competition for swing voters in the swing state of Wisconsin has converged on the runway at the tiny Chippewa Valley Regional Airport.
Minutes after the vice president Kamala Harris landed with his new running mate Tim Walz for his first campaign stop in the state, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance arrived. He crossed the runway to check Air Force Two, narrowly missing Harris.
The political-type close encounter could be dismissed as a coincidence if it happened anywhere other than Wisconsin, one of a small number of states that will not only determine the winner of the presidential race but could also shape the balance of power in Congress. . But it sent a much stronger signal that both parties understand the importance of a region that can tip the balance of power in many ways.
vice president Kamala Harris and his new running mate will hold a rally in Arizona on Friday as part of their tour of electoral battlegrounds, visiting a state where Harris bypassed a prominent Democrat in favor of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Arizona Senator Mark KellyA former astronaut and gun control advocate, he was a leading candidate for running mate. He won two tough races in politically divided Arizona.
By bypassing Kelly, Harris may also have missed a chance to win over people like Gonzalo Leyva, a 49-year-old landscaper from Phoenix. Leyva plans to vote for former President Donald Trump, a Republican, but says he would have supported a Harris-Kelly ticket.
“I prefer Kelly by about 100 times,” said Leyva, a longtime Democrat who became an independent at the start of Trump’s term. “I don’t think he’s as radical as the other guys.”
With control of the Senate potentially at stake, Donald Trump will visit Montana on Friday in hopes of remedying some problems. unfinished business since 2018, when he repeatedly campaigned in Big Sky Country in a failed attempt to unseat Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Tester.
Tester has tried to convince voters that he is aligned with Trump on many issues, mirroring his successful strategy from six years ago. While that worked in a non-presidential election year, faces a more critical test this fall with Tester’s opponent, former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehytrying to link the three-term incumbent with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
If Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, are elected this fall, not only would a Black woman lead the country for the first time, but a Native woman would also govern a state for the first time in US History.
Peggy Flanagan, lieutenant governor of Minnesota and citizen of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, is prepared to serve as the state’s next governor if Walz steps down to accept the role of U.S. vice president. Her rise to power has been closely watched by indigenous people in Minnesota and across the country, who see her as an advocate for policies that positively affect Native Americans.
