Control of the Senate will hinge on a handful of competitive races this November, with nominees of both parties honing talking points to hammer their opponents.
In Georgia, a Republican congressman has sought to attack the incumbent Democratic senator on his immigration record. In Alaska, the Democratic challenger has emphasized the stock trades and ballooning personal wealth of the sitting Republican senator. And in Texas, the Republican nominee has highlighted statements his opponent has made about Christianity.
Here is a look at those claims.
What Was Said
“He voted against the Laken Riley Act when he had the chance to save lives.” — Representative Mike Collins, Republican nominee for Senate in Georgia, in a July social media post
“I worked across the aisles to get that done — with the exception of Jon Ossoff, who is the U.S. sitting senator here in Georgia who never lifted a finger to help get the Laken Riley Act across the finish line.” — Mr. Collins in an August interview on Newsmax
False. Mr. Ossoff was one of 12 Democrats who, in January 2025, voted yes on the Laken Riley Act, the first piece of legislation signed into law by President Trump upon his return to the White House. The law directs law enforcement to detain and deport unauthorized immigrants accused of specific crimes.
The legislation was inspired by the 2024 murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student in Georgia, by an immigrant who illegally entered the United States.
In 2024, right after Ms. Riley’s death, Mr. Collins introduced an earlier version that passed the House. But the Senate, controlled by Democrats at the time, never considered the legislation.
In 2025, Republicans had more success and the measure passed both chambers with bipartisan support. Some Democrats argued that the measure undermined due process and wasted resources, but Mr. Ossoff and other vulnerable Democrats backed the bill.
A spokesman for Mr. Collins’s campaign asserted that Mr. Ossoff did not help advance or build support for the legislation for nearly a year, and only voted for it after Republicans regained the majority in Congress.
Still, Mr. Ossoff ultimately did vote for the bill, breaking with most members of his party. Moreover, as the Senate debated the measure in 2025, Mr. Ossoff signaled his support and called for bipartisan backing in an interview with CNN, saying that “we have a prospect here of working across the aisle” and that “the whole country recognizes that we’ve had a crisis at our southern border.”
Asked why he voted for the law, Mr. Ossoff said in a local radio interview at the time that Ms. Riley and her family were his constituents and her death was preventable.
“I think that Georgians and the American public are rightly fed up and frustrated with the nonenforcement of immigration law,” he said. “Now, there were some changes I would have liked to have seen made. We’re going to have to be vigilant as we move forward, that we defend our borders and enforce our immigration laws, and also be mindful of the human and civil rights of all human beings in our country.”
Mr. Collins’s spokesman also cited an earlier procedural vote Mr. Ossoff cast.
In 2024, a Republican senator introduced a procedural motion to offer an amendment to an appropriations bill. The amendment proposed that no funding provided by the bill could be used “to grant any immigration status or other benefit” to unauthorized immigrants accused of certain crimes. That is not the same thing as the enacted version of the Laken Riley Act or Mr. Collins’s own version. Mr. Ossoff, along with all other Democratic senators, voted against the motion.
What Was Said
“Twelve years in the Senate, if you can’t get it done in that amount of time, go home. We don’t want people in there making a career out of quadrupling their personal wealth.” — Mary Peltola, Democratic nominee for Senate in Alaska, in a campaign video in August
“He’s ballooned his net worth, reporting nearly 100 stock trades while serving in office. He’s quadrupled his personal wealth.” — Ms. Peltola, during a convention in July
This needs context. Ms. Peltola was referring to Senator Dan S. Sullivan, her Republican opponent. The value of Mr. Sullivan’s assets have increased since he joined the Senate in 2015, and he is among the more prolific stock traders in the Senate. But the exact increase is unknown as the amounts are reported in a wide range. Moreover, it appears that a significant portion of his trading and net worth can be attributed to stocks he owns in his family’s company.
Members of Congress are required to report their assets and liabilities annually in ranges. While the maximum values of assets Mr. Sullivan reported almost tripled from 2014, when he won his first Senate campaign, to 2025, it is possible that his actual wealth increased less than that. (For example, if an asset increased by just $1, that could move the asset from a reporting range of $250,001 and $500,000 to $500,001 and $1 million.)
Mr. Sullivan disclosed in 2014 that he and his wife had assets between $2 million and $4.7 million. In his latest financial statement, filed in August for the 2025 calendar year, Mr. Sullivan reported assets between $4.1 million and $12.3 million.
The largest single asset Mr. Sullivan reported across the years was stock in RPM International, a chemical company founded by his grandfather; his father and brother both served as chief executive for the firm. The value of the company’s stock — the price of which doubled from 2014 to 2025 — accounts for a significant amount of Mr. Sullivan’s increase in wealth. In 2014, he reported owning RPM stock worth between $500,001 and $1 million. That grew to between $1 million and $5 million in 2025.
Nate Adams, a spokesman for the Sullivan campaign, said that several of the senator’s assets were inherited after the deaths of Mr. Sullivan’s mother in March 2019 and his father in November 2020, as well as his wife’s parents.
“That Mary Peltola would twist a family’s loss into a false insider trading smear says everything about the type of candidate she is and the type of campaign she is running,” Mr. Adams said.
Ms. Peltola has a point that Mr. Sullivan is more active than most senators in the stock market, having made at least 120 trades worth between $950,000 and $3.5 million in stock, according to a compilation by the website Quiver Quantitative of financial disclosure forms. But the transactions involving RPM International accounted for about a quarter to a third of that amount, between $329,000 and $810,000.
A spokesman for the Peltola campaign cited recent reporting by The Alaska Current that several of Mr. Sullivan’s trades of RPM stock were “suspiciously timed,” including sales of stock before the coronavirus pandemic roiled the global economy and before the company released weak earnings reports.
What Was Said
James Talarico “recently said about Christianity — he said that ‘I’m a Christian but I hate Christianity.’ I want you to think about that. Does that make any sense at all? ‘I’m a Christian but I hate Christianity.’ He also said that ‘God is nonbinary.’ Does anybody know what that means?” — Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas, Republican nominee for Senate, in a campaign video in July
This needs context. Mr. Talarico, a state representative and Mr. Paxton’s Democratic opponent, did make those statements, but as part of longer discussions about his faith. Mr. Paxton omitted the full context of those quotations, which may give a misleading impression of what Mr. Talarico was trying to convey.
Mr. Talarico made the first statement on a 2021 podcast hosted by Roberto Che Espinoza, a transgender activist and theologian. Both expressed frustration that conservative Christian theology tended to dominate politics, while they both adhered to a more “radical faith tradition,” as Mr. Talarico put it.
Mr. Talarico spoke of the country’s “spiritual crisis” and how the left had “ceded moral language to the right for the past, what, 40, 50 years.” But he argued that “the best movements for radical change in our country, in our world, were all spiritually grounded, right? Whether it was the civil rights movement, which was explicitly Christian, right, or Gandhi’s movement in India.”
As the discussion continued, the host observed that much of politics and policy have a “particular strand of Judeo-Christian theology attached to them,” referring to the theology of conservative Republicans.
Mr. Talarico responded: “Yeah, and you know, I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity. And I always get drawn back into it because nowhere else, in no other political philosophy, in no other economic theory, do I find anything as truly radical or revolutionary as the teachings of that barefoot rabbi, right?”
JT Ennis, Mr. Talarico’s press secretary, said in a statement that Mr. Talarico “obviously doesn’t hate Christianity.”
“James is a devout Christian who fights religious and political corruption when he sees it — because there’s nothing Christ-like about powerful people twisting the teachings of Jesus to justify hate, violence and greed,” he said.
Mr. Talarico made the second comment in a 2021 speech on the Texas House floor while opposing a Republican bill targeting transgender youth in school sports.
He said: “The first two lines of the Bible, the first two lines in Genesis use two different Hebrew words to describe God. One is the masculine Hebrew noun for divinity. The second is the feminine Hebrew noun for spirit. God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary. In Genesis 1:26, God speaks of God’s self in the plural, saying, ‘Let us make human beings in our image to be like us.’ That’s the infinite multitude of God, the masculine, the feminine and everything in between. Trans children are God’s children, made in God’s own image. There’s nothing wrong with them, nothing at all.”
Asked about the comment in a May interview on CBS, Mr. Talarico said that he was being “intentionally provocative.”
“What it means is that God can’t be defined by human categories,” he said. He added that he had made statements that “missed the mark” and that he regretted, but he said that Mr. Paxton was “intentionally clipping my cringey comments to distract from his career of corruption.”
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