Things are getting even more controversial in Alaska, where the campaign for Democratic candidate Mary Peltola is facing a new accusation that it helped recruit an outside contender for the Senate race. And now President Donald Trump is calling for Peltola to leave the race and be prosecuted.
Critical midterm elections that could shift power in Washington are less than a week away and both parties are scrambling to win over voters. On Wednesday, that meant a pair of presidents — Trump and former president Barack Obama — were hitting key swing states.
Here’s what else you may have missed from the campaign trail on Wednesday:
Two presidents on the midterm campaign trail
The highest office in the country might not be on the ballot, but presidents are out campaigning anyway.
In Georgia, Washington Post politics reporter Praveena Somasundaram was with Obama while he made the third stop of his midterm campaign blitz. This time, Obama boosted Sen. Jon Ossoff (D), who is seeking reelection to his Senate seat, and Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic candidate for governor.
Obama told voters that Trump was responsible for the high prices they face. He also devoted several minutes to the kerfuffle over The Cheesecake Factory, which started when the former president mocked Trump’s attempts to remake White House decor at a rally last weekend, saying “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory.”
Trump defended his renovations at his own rally two days later and called the Cheesecake Factory “a very successful company.” The White House also posted a fake menu from the restaurant online, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ate at the restaurant.
“They mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke. Not to inflation, but to that joke,” Obama said Wednesday, adding later: “This is what I mean when I say these are not serious people. They don’t have solutions to actual problems, so they’d rather have the media, and you, talking about the Cheesecake Factory.”
Ossoff is favored to win his race against Republican Rep. Mike Collins, and Bottoms is locked in a close race with Republican Rick Jackson, a billionaire health care executive.
Obama is the highest-profile surrogate Democrats are deploying in the home stretch. Republicans are also rolling out the star power.
Trump traveled to Ohio on Wednesday evening for his third campaign stop in the state, which he won by 11 points in 2024.
The Post’s White House bureau chief, Isaac Arnsdorf, tracked the rally, where Trump appeared with Republican Senate candidate Jon Husted and gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Trump repeated his calls for Peltola to be prosecuted and discussed a controversial ad Ramaswamy released earlier this month. The ad features video of Donna Arthur, the estranged mother of Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, calling her daughter a liar. The ad faced widespread criticism; Acton and her brother were removed from Arthur’s home as children after a grand jury indicted Arthur’s second husband on a charge of raping Acton.
“Vivek was treated very unfairly,” Trump said. “The mother said that Amy Acton, the daughter, is a liar, that she’s no good, that she lied about the opponent. How the hell is that his problem?”
Husted, a former lieutenant governor who took over the seat from Vice President JD Vance, faces a closely fought challenge from former senator Sherrod Brown (D). And high-quality polls show Ramaswamy trailing Acton, a former public health official.
Where did all these Dan Sullivans come from, anyway?
A report in the New York Times on Wednesday alleges that members of Peltola’s team were involved in a push to find a “spoiler” candidates for the race, including one candidate who has a similar name to Peltola’s incumbent competitor. Trump said Wednesday at Joint Base Andrews that Peltola should leave the race.
“I think she should be prosecuted criminally,” he added.
A spokesperson for Alaskans for Mary said the campaign had no involvement with either Dan Sullivans’ campaigns.
“Mary got in this race because Alaskans deserve a champion who is fighting to lower their costs and put Alaska first, and no tweet or threat from any DC politician will keep her away from that fight,” the campaign said in a statement.
In Alaska, the ballot lists two candidates named Dan Sullivan for the consequential Senate race, as well as Peltola and a fourth candidate. One Sullivan, Dan S., is the current U.S. senator and a Republican. The other, Dan J. Jr., is a retired teacher from rural Alaska running without a party affiliation listed.
The Times report found that Democrats, with help from Peltola team members, sought out alternative candidates to add to the ballot, including Dan J. Jr.
Washington Post politics reporter Matthew Choi has been in contact with Sen. Sullivan’s campaign, as well as Peltola’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee after the report was published.
Both Alaskans for Mary and the DSCC denied they were involved with Dan J. Jr.’s campaign, and sought to push attention onto Republicans, whom they say have a “long history of recruiting and propping up candidates in an attempt to boost their own campaigns.”
Sen. Sullivan’s campaign said in a statement that Peltola and her campaign “colluded” with the DSCC and other operatives “to recruit a candidate to deliberately deceive and confuse voters, and then repeatedly lied about it.”
The multiple Sullivans were already drawing controversy; the Justice Department sued last week to preemptively block certification of the results of the race if Peltola wins, saying Dan J. Jr.’s candidacy is a bid to mislead supporters of Sen. Sullivan into voting for the wrong candidate. Lawyers for Alaska election officials have moved to throw out the suit.
In recent months, the Justice Department has moved aggressively to try to prosecute several people Trump considers political enemies.
He earlier posted online that, given the report, “Dan Sullivan should be allowed to run without either Mary Peltola or FAKE Dan Sullivan on the Ballot.”
Continuing the news fest in Alaska, Choi also reports that the state’s other Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, has endorsed Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins in the governor’s race.
Caught on camera at the polls
Two conservative activists, James O’Keefe and Cam Higby, were charged Wednesday in Minnesota with felony identity theft and unlawful voting. The complaints say the pair posted hidden-camera videos showing themselves applying for ballots under other people’s names in the August primary.
The complaints from Minnesota prosecutors do not allege that the men cast ballots, according to Post reporter Patrick Marley and researcher Aaron Schaffer.
Higby said he was trying to “expose vulnerabilities” in how Minnesota runs elections.
Democratic ad spending pushes into deep red territory
House Majority PAC, the top super PAC behind Democratic House candidates, has expanded their advertising buys into deep red districts, Post politics reporter Dan Merica has confirmed.
The super PAC has poured money into red districts in Florida, Nebraska and New York and upped their spending in Colorado, highlighting how the race for control of the House is being fought in deep red districts that have historically backed Republicans.
Advertising spending is spiking overall in the days before voting ends. Competitive Senate and gubernatorial races saw some of the largest increases in advertising spending over the last week, according to Washington Post data reporter Lydia Sidhom’s analysis of data from the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
Between Oct. 20 and 27, $749 million was spent in competitive federal and governor’s races.
FEC filing system is finally back up
The Federal Election Commission’s electronic filing system came back online late Wednesday afternoon, after going dark Monday night.
The system — where campaigns, parties and PACs report their fundraising and spending — is especially busy in the weeks leading up to an election. House and Senate candidates must report contributions or loans of $1,000 or more within 48 hours in the 20 days before an election.
The FEC said in a post on X that work was continuing to restore the FECNotify service, HTML presentation of reports and the electronic fling search system.
The FEC, which is badly diminished while awaiting Senate confirmation for commission members, did not say what caused the outage.
Other nuggets you may have missed
- Fewer than half of voters think their member of Congress deserves another term, according to a poll by Gallup published Wednesday.
- These are the seven races that will decide control of the Senate.
- Trump declined to accept the midterm election results unconditionally on Tuesday.
- Here’s why Washington is so obsessed with the Cook Political Report.
- The Post asked AI chatbots to make voter guides. They invented races.
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