Politics

Two leading contenders for the GOP nomination for Michigan governor could be ruled ineligible for the primary ballot on Thursday, after the state’s elections bureau said they didn’t file enough valid petition signatures to qualify for the August contest.

In a recommendation that immediately shook up the governor’s race, board staff on Monday said former Detroit Police Chief James Craig and businessman Perry Johnson, along with three other lesser-known candidates, should be declared ineligible. A four-person, bipartisan Board of State Canvassers will vote on the recommendations Thursday, though candidates that don’t make the ballot could challenge the decision in court.

The candidates were among a 10-person field vying to take on Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for control of the battleground state in November.

Democrats challenged the GOP candidates’ petitions, alleging mass forgery and other issues. Another Republican candidate, Tudor Dixon, had also contested Craig’s voter signatures as fake. The bureau, however, said it discovered the fraud on its own review and didn’t process the challenges filed by the Michigan Democratic Party and Dixon.

Craig had been leading in most Republican primary polls, while Johnson has already spent millions of his personal fortune on the contest. Bureau staff also determined that three other lesser-known GOP candidates — Donna Brandenburg, Michael Brown and Michael Markey — did not turn in enough valid signatures. Brown withdrew from the race on Tuesday.

Candidates for governor were required to submit valid signatures from 15,000 registered voters to make the ballot. In a report released late Monday, bureau staff said multiple petition sheets for various candidates “displayed suspicious patterns indicative of fraud.” Some of the petitions for Craig’s campaign, for example, had signatures that all appeared to be written in the same handwriting.

Staff said that while it’s typical for petitions to include scattered instances of dubious signatures, “the Bureau is unaware of another election cycle” with such a “substantial volume” of fraudulent signatures, involving multiple candidates. They identified 36 petition circulators — or people who gather signatures and are often paid per signature — who submitted petition sheets made up entirely of invalid signatures. They gathered signatures for 10 candidates, including some seeking judgeships, the bureau reported.

The bureau said Craig submitted 10,192 valid signatures — well short of the 15,000 needed. It tossed 11,113 signatures, including 9,879 that were allegedly fraudulently collected by 18 paid circulators.

Staff said Johnson turned in 13,800 valid signatures. They threw out 9,393, including 6,983 that they said are fraudulent and were gathered by many of the same people who also forged signatures that Craig submitted.

Johnson’s campaign criticized the recommendations from the bureau, which is part of Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office, saying they don’t have the right to toss signatures gathered by “alleged forgers who victimized five campaigns.” Campaign consultant John Yob said the campaign would take the issue to court if necessary.

The bureau said it doesn’t believe specific campaigns or candidates were aware of what “fraudulent-petition circulators” were doing. Staff wrote that the bureau was working to refer the fraud to law enforcement for criminal investigation.

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BUTTE, Mont. (AP) — When Republican Ryan Zinke first ran for Congress, the former Navy SEAL faced false accusations amplified by Democrats that his military career had ended in disgrace.

After winning in 2014 and two years later getting picked as President Donald Trump’s interior secretary, Zinke is seeking a return to Congress and facing a near-identical smear campaign — this time from the right wing of his own party.

A website allied with one of his opponents accuses Zinke of exaggerating his military service — failing to mention two Bronze Stars that Zinke earned in Iraq — and of being demoted, which his service records refute.

It’s part of a broad campaign by some Republicans leading up to the state’s June 7 primary to thwart Zinke’s bid for a political comeback and advance a more conservative candidate for the general election.

The political dynamics reflect the sharp right turn the GOP has taken since Trump barnstormed across Montana’s electoral scene with repeated visits during the 2018 election in a failed attempt to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester.

Zinke’s status as a former Trump Cabinet member is simply not enough anymore for some in his party. They say he’s too liberal and too soft on guns and didn’t do enough to build Trump’s envisioned wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Zinke has also been dogged by problems of his own making, including recent revelations that he lied to a federal ethics official before his 2018 resignation from the Department of Interior.

This month came a disclosure from Politico that Zinke’s wife, Lolita, designated her family’s California home as her primary residence. That boosted long-standing suspicions that Zinke spends most of his time outside Montana.

His opponents see a chance to make inroads with Trump voters, who seemed a lock for Zinke when he entered the race last year and quickly secured the former president’s endorsement.

“He quit Montana,” said former state Sen. Albert Olszewski, one of Zinke’s four primary opponents. “He quit Trump.”

Zinke is still acting as the front-runner, referring to himself as the “battleship” and other candidates as “canoes” while speaking to a reporter on the sidelines of a dinner last week hosted by Butte-Silver Bow County Republicans.

“Everybody wants to shoot at the battleship. Nobody shoots at the canoes,” he said.

Zinke denies lying. But he doesn’t deny that his wife is a California resident, and he acknowledges holding fundraisers there. He said he spends “a couple days a quarter” in Santa Barbara.

The Montana House district that’s at stake was created last year to account for the state’s growing population and covers half the state — from Yellowstone National Park, north along the spine of the Rocky Mountains, to the Canadian border.

The district had been eliminated in 1993. Montana Democrats lost the state’s only other House seat a few years later, and over the last several election cycles, Republicans took control of every statewide office in Montana except Tester’s.

Trump won Montana in 2020 with a 16-point advantage. The notion that Zinke quit him could prove hard to sell after Trump held a recent telerally with Zinke supporters reiterating his support. Trump spoke less than four minutes and spent most of the time touting his own accomplishments.

Montana Democrats spent the past six years painting Zinke as extreme, and he suggested the attacks on him in the GOP primary for being too liberal could help if he advances to the November election. It offers a contrast, he said, so moderate voters know he’s not “crazy.”

Still, he’s got much in common with his fellow GOP candidates. He’s refused to acknowledge that President Joe Biden was legitimately elected and has called for harsher immigration policies. He’s also backed by the NRA.

Democrats and his Republican detractors alike have highlighted the numerous investigations Zinke came under while at the Interior Department and the large paychecks he received when he later worked in the private sector.

The questions surrounding Zinke’s conduct haven’t put a dent in his fundraising success. Through March 31, Zinke had raised $2.5 million, almost as much as all other candidates from both parties combined.

About 80% of Zinke’s campaign contributions came from out-of-state donors, Federal Election Commission data shows.

For Republican voter Jennifer Howell, Zinke’s outside support “speaks of corruption.”

“That means he’s bought by outside interests. Money talks,” she said before the Republican dinner in Butte, as Zinke spoke with other local members of the party just a few feet away. “To me, that’s rude in your face, like saying, ”I don’t need your money, Montana. I’ll get my money elsewhere.”

Later, as the dinner drew to a close, 70-year-old Barbara Jones passed a donation envelope to Zinke and thanked him for hosting her at his table.

Despite the attacks on him, Jones said Zinke had behaved “like an honorable man.” She also praised him for returning to Montana after linking up with a Washington lobbying firm when he first left the Cabinet.

But Jones hasn’t decided whom to support in the primary. She first wanted to learn more about Olszewski and Republican candidate Mary Todd, a pastor from Kalispell who contends her son was killed after refusing to help a Chinese-backed firm steal U.S. technology.

The $50 for Zinke, Jones said, was because “he paid for my dinner, so I wanted to pay him back.”

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Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter, https://twitter.com/ap_politics.

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Follow Matthew Brown on Twitter: @MatthewBrownAP

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A Somali police officer recently received an unexpected summons from the enemy. An unknown caller ordered him to report to a town outside the capital, Mogadishu, where the extremist group al-Shabab would settle a dispute between him and his brother. The caller assured the officer he would be safe even if he showed up in uniform.

Overcoming his fear, Khadar traveled to meet with a panel of four bearded men in an office made from iron sheets. The al-Shabab men wanted to know why he was denying his brothers a share of the land they inherited from their father.

“After an hour and a half of debate, the men directed me to distribute the inheritance among my brothers,” Khadar recalled in an interview with The Associated Press, withholding his last name for safety concerns.

Khadar complied, an extraordinary gesture to an armed group that continues to pose a deadly threat to his police colleagues and his government at large.

The al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab is projecting authority and asserting a wider role in public life in this troubled Horn of Africa nation, underlining the extent of the challenge Africa’s deadliest Islamic extremist group presents to the newly elected government of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. The threats range beyond regular attacks on places frequented by officials and include militant control of vast territory where federal officials don’t dare go and can’t even collect taxes.

The group, which seeks to create an Islamic caliphate out of Somalia, is also increasingly undermining authorities by offering a parallel justice system — enforced by the threat of violence — in a country where many have little faith in conventional courts.

Some people who spoke to the AP expressed a favorable view of al-Shabab, saying its mobile courts are not corrupt and that the group appears able to protect vulnerable people in ways the federal government cannot.

“You will get justice in al-Shabab courtrooms if you know you are doing the right thing,” said farmer Muallim Abdi, a father of eight children who lives in another al-Shabab-controlled village near Mogadishu. “But in the government-controlled areas it will take time, and the formal courts are corrupt.”

Abdi acknowledged that life under al-Shabab is “extremely difficult,” citing the children forced to join the group, the tax burden and the inability to enjoy private property. Last Ramadan, he said, al-Shabab asked residents to raise money to buy livestock to be slaughtered for the Eid feast, an unreasonable demand at a time when the riverbed was dry and some people were on the verge of displacement amid drought.

Al-Shabab “remains in a healthy financial position” thanks to illicit taxation as well as income derived from the ongoing sale of $40 million in charcoal stockpiles in the city of Kismayo, a U.N. panel of experts reported last year.

Al-Shabab’s tax code compels all those intending to buy or sell farmland to register with the group’s land office, through which sales can be finalized. Farmers are ordered to notify al-Shabab of the quantities they are harvesting.

“Once I harvested and sold 2,247 bags of onions but did not inform al-Shabab because I had an emergency to attend to,” Abdi said. “I was home when two men on motorcycles arrived. I was accosted for not telling them about the harvest. I was detained in a small, dark room and nearly suffocated.” There’s no room for appeal in the al-Shabab system.

Despite the $1,123 fine he paid, Abdi still sees al-Shabab in a positive light because later it ruled in his favor to settle a land dispute with a neighbor. Both claimants were summoned and told to prove ownership before a committee that found his papers authentic, he said.

“The public would rally behind al-Shabab if they stopped killing people,” Abdi said.

Al-Shabab, which has killed thousands of civilians in the last decade, is estimated to have anywhere between 4,000 and 7,000 fighters, according to the Mogadishu-based security think tank Hiraal Institute.

Although al-Shabab’s extortionate power has been a major concern among traders, some businesspeople said they feel more confident in its mediation of disputes.

“They are becoming more reliable, and the people are counting on them,” Hiraal Institute’s Samira Gaid said of al-Shabab’s court system.

Somalis from minority clans, a growing community, see al-Shabab courts as fair, she said.

Al-Shabab has seized even more territory in recent years, taking advantage of rifts among security personnel as well as disagreements between the government seat in Mogadishu and regional states.

Forced to retreat from Mogadishu in 2011, al-Shabab is slowly making a comeback from the rural areas to which it retreated, defying the presence of African Union peacekeepers as well as U.S. drone strikes targeting its fighters.

The militants in early May attacked a military base for AU peacekeepers outside Mogadishu, killing many Burundian troops. The attack came just days before the presidential vote that returned Mohamud to power five years after he had been voted out.

Al-Shabab’s strategy is to “bleed the system” while patiently waiting for the exit of foreign troops, said Gaid, the security analyst.

The restructured AU peacekeeping mission is set to wind down by the end of 2024, when Somali forces would take over security responsibilities.

American officials cited the heightened threat posed by al-Shabab in mid-May as President Joe Biden signed an order to redeploy hundreds of U.S. troops to Somalia. Somali authorities have welcomed the decision reversing a 2021 order to withdraw U.S. troops.

Mohamud has said securing Mogadishu will depend heavily on pushing militants out of the neighboring regions of Lower Shabelle and Middle Shabelle. That could be challenging.

Al-Shabab “has sharply increased its infiltration of state institutions, particularly security institutions,” said political analyst Abdi Aynte, a former government minister.

Rebuilding Somalia’s security system “isn’t an administrative problem but ultimately a political one,” with the new president needing to reform the security services in a way that’s accommodative of all competing groups, he said.

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An Associated Press journalist in Somalia contributed. Muhumuza reported from Kampala, Uganda.

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By Moira Warburton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Centrist U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar was clinging to a razor-thin lead early on Wednesday against progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros in a high-profile south Texas Democratic primary battle that illustrated sharp dividing lines over immigration and abortion rights.

The election on Tuesday in a district along the U.S.-Mexico border was the third contest between Cuellar, who has held the seat since 2005, and Cisneros, a 28-year-old attorney who failed to unseat him in 2020 but forced him to a runoff in the state’s March primary this year.

A tally by Edison Research showed Cuellar up by just 177 votes with 92% of the estimated vote counted. Major media outlets held off on calling the race.

Despite the slim margin, Cuellar declared victory. Cisneros, however, declined to concede, saying every ballot needed to be counted.

The race took on new urgency in recent weeks after a leaked Supreme Court opinion indicated that it could overturn a 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

Cuellar, 66, is the lone House Democrat to oppose abortion rights, and abortion-rights groups have spent at least $160,000 to bolster Cisneros’s campaign.

Cuellar has said Cisneros would risk public safety and hurt the local economy by cutting law enforcement funding in a district where many voters work for border patrol agencies.

Cisneros has since distanced herself from her previous call to eliminate U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Political analysts have said a Cisneros win could threaten Democrats’ chances to hold the seat in the Nov. 8 election, when Republicans hope to win control of the House of Representatives.

But Cuellar’s strength in the general election should not be a foregone conclusion, said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas in Austin.

“The reality is that Cisneros has come very close to unseating Cuellar twice at this point,” Blank said. “If he can’t defeat Cisneros, then I think the logic underlying that should come into question.”

Cisneros has benefited from increased name recognition and an FBI investigation that saw raids on Cuellar’s home and office.

Financial disclosures on Friday showed she has out-raised him by almost $1.4 million, and has around $400,000 more cash on hand than Cuellar.

The race is one of several midterm primary battles between incumbent House Democrats and progressive challengers.

In Oregon, Jamie McLeod-Skinner looks set to oust moderate incumbent Kurt Schrader, while in Pennsylvania progressive Summer Lee has a slight lead over Steve Irwin. Other progressive challengers like Nina Turner in Ohio have lost.

(Reporting by Moira Warburton in Washington; Additional reporting by Jason Lange and Tim Ahmann; Editing by Andy Sullivan, Alistair Bell and Edmund Klamann)

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By Alexandra Ulmer

ATLANTA (Reuters) – The crushing defeat of David Perdue in Tuesday’s Republican gubernatorial primary in Georgia likely delighted Donald Trump’s adversaries, who have been keeping scorecards to measure the performance of election candidates backed by the former president.

Trump has weighed in on November’s midterm elections like no former president, announcing more than 190 endorsements and holding rallies with his proteges. The success of his endorsees is seen as a key sign of his continued influence over the party as he hints at another run for the White House in 2024.

But political analysts and Republican strategists caution that any jubilation among Trump’s enemies over Perdue’s loss to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is short-sighted, and that any scorecard is a poor barometer for the state of Trumpism in the United States in 2022.

While Trump’s candidates have had mixed success so far this year in party primaries, many Republican voters still embrace Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, as well as his right-wing, “America First” populist ideology. And failure to win Trump’s endorsement has not stopped some Republican candidates from going hard-right to try to win over his base.

“In 2016, Trump was really the only candidate running as that sort of populist. Now it’s increasingly what most Republican primary candidates sound like,” said Republican strategist Alex Conant.

That underlines the continuation of the Trump-led metamorphosis of the Republican Party since he was voted out of the White House in 2020, even as some party leaders seek to move the party away from Trumpism, the strategists and analysts said.

“I think the No. 1 thing Trump has absolutely changed in the party is that Republicans don’t even try playing nice anymore. My side has become more angry,” said Republican strategist Chuck Warren.

THE PEOPLE’S MAGA

Trump’s kingmaker status was put to the test this month when several high-profile, Trump-backed candidates faced Republican primaries in Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia.

Around two-thirds of high-profile candidates backed by Trump triumphed in their contests in May, although some were running unopposed or against weak challengers. One race, the Republican senate contest in Pennsylvania between television personality Mehmet Oz, who received Trump’s endorsement, and former hedge fund executive David McCormick, has yet to be decided.

In another race on Tuesday, for Georgia’s secretary of state position, incumbent Brad Raffensperger narrowly avoided a run-off against Trump-endorsed Rep. Jody Hice.

In lobbying for the former president’s endorsement, both men cast aside their elite backgrounds to espouse the Trump-style populism that now resonates with Republicans.

The primary was shaken up by Kathy Barnette, a conservative political commentator, who came from nowhere at the 11th hour to tighten a race that had until then appeared to be a two-man contest. While she finished a distant third in the primaries, analysts said she was emblematic of how Trump’s Make America Great Again movement has expanded beyond his control.

“MAGA does not belong to President Trump,” Barnette said during a Republican debate last month, even as Trump spoke out against her. “Although he coined the word, MAGA actually belongs to the people.”

Republican voters in Pennsylvania also backed Trump-endorsed far-right candidate Doug Mastriano for governor, who supports abortion bans with no exceptions and backs Trump’s false claims of election fraud. Mastriano won his contest.

In North Carolina, Republican voters powered Trump-backed Representative Ted Budd, who voted to overturn Biden’s election win, to victory in the state’s Republican Senate nomination.

Georgia’s governor’s race, where Perdue was pummeled on Tuesday by Kemp, shows how the Republican Party has shifted to the right, irrespective of how Trump-endorsed candidates perform in these primaries.

While Kemp did not entertain Trump’s conspiracy theories of 2020 election fraud, he did enact sweeping voting restrictions, limited abortions and expanded gun rights.

But voters were only willing to follow Trump so far in backing flawed candidates in May’s nominating contests.

In North Carolina, voters ousted scandal-plagued congressman Madison Cawthorn despite Trump’s last-minute plea to give him “a second chance.” And in Nebraska, Trump’s choice for governor, Charles Herbster, lost amid accusations that he had sexually harassed several women.

With months of primaries still to come, it is much too early to know the final tallies on Trump’s scorecard.

But what is already clear, analysts say, is that Trump’s winning 2016 strategy to seize on the issues bitterly polarizing Americans is increasingly being emulated by Republican candidates this year and enthusiastically embraced by party supporters.

The spread of this right-wing populism may ultimately open the door for more challengers to Trump’s vice-like grip on the party ahead of the next presidential election, said Conant, the Republican strategist.

(Reporting by Alexandra Ulmer, Editing by Ross Colvin and Alistair Bell)

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By Moira Warburton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Centrist U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar seeks to hold off progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros on Tuesday in a high-profile south Texas Democratic primary battle that illustrates sharp dividing lines over immigration and abortion rights.

The election in a district along the U.S.-Mexico border is the third contest between Cuellar, who has held the seat since 2005, and Cisneros, a 28-year-old attorney who failed to unseat him in 2020 but forced him to a runoff in the state’s March primary this year.

The race took on new urgency in recent weeks after a leaked opinion indicated that the Supreme Court could overturn a 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

Cuellar, 66, is the lone House Democrat to oppose abortion rights, and abortion-rights groups have spent at least $160,000 to bolster Cisneros’s campaign.

Cuellar has said Cisneros would risk public safety and hurt the local economy by cutting law enforcement funding in a district where many voters work for border patrol agencies.

Cisneros has since distanced herself from her previous call to eliminate U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Political analysts have said a Cisneros win could threaten Democrats’ chances to hold the seat in the Nov. 8 election, when Republicans hope to win control of the House of Representatives.

But Cuellar’s strength in the general election shouldn’t be a foregone conclusion, said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas in Austin.

“The reality is that Cisneros has come very close to unseating Cuellar twice at this point,” Blank said. “If he can’t defeat Cisneros, then I think the logic underlying that should come into question.”

Cisneros has benefited from increased name recognition and an FBI investigation that saw raids on Cuellar’s home and office.

Financial disclosures on Friday showed she has out-raised him by almost $1.4 million, and has around $400,000 more cash on hand than Cuellar.

The race is one of several midterm primary battles Tuesday between incumbent House Democrats and progressive challengers.

In Oregon, Jamie McLeod-Skinner looks set to oust moderate incumbent Kurt Schrader, while in Pennsylvania progressive Summer Lee has a slight lead over Steve Irwin. Other progressive challengers like Nina Turner in Ohio have lost.

(Reporting by Moira Warburton in Washington; additional reporting by Jason Lange; Editing by Andy Sullivan and Alistair Bell)

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HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The national Republican Party is taking the side of celebrity heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania’s neck-and-neck GOP primary contest for U.S. Senate and opposing a lawsuit that could help former hedge fund CEO David McCormick close the gap in votes.

McCormick’s lawsuit was filed late Monday, less than 24 hours before Tuesday’s deadline for counties to report their unofficial results to the state.

In it, McCormick asks the state Commonwealth Court to require counties to obey a brand-new federal appeals court decision and promptly count mail-in ballots that lack a required handwritten date on the return envelope.

Oz, who is endorsed by former President Donald Trump, has pressed counties not to count the ballots and the Republican National Committee said it would go to court to oppose McCormick.

In a statement, the RNC’s chief counsel, Matt Raymer, said “election laws are meant to be followed, and changing the rules when ballots are already being counted harms the integrity of our elections.”

McCormick’s lawsuit is the first — but likely not the last — lawsuit in the contest between Oz and McCormick.

Oz led McCormick by 992 votes, or 0.07 percentage points, out of 1,341,037 ballots reported by the state as of Tuesday morning.

The race is close enough to trigger Pennsylvania’s automatic recount law, with the separation between the candidates inside the law’s 0.5% margin. The Associated Press will not declare a winner in the race until the likely recount is complete. That could take until June 8.

It’s not clear how many mail-in ballots that lack a handwritten date have been received by counties. Although he trails the vote count, McCormick has been doing better than Oz among mail-in ballots.

In an appearance Monday on a conservative Philadelphia radio talk show, McCormick insisted “every Republican vote should count” and said his campaign believes the federal court decision is binding on counties.

Ruling in a separate case late Friday, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the state election law’s requirement of a date next to the voter’s signature on the outside of return envelopes was “immaterial.” The lawsuit emerged from a county judicial election last year, and the three-judge panel said it found no reason to refuse counting the ballots in that race.

The ruling went against the position that Republicans in Pennsylvania have taken in courts repeatedly in the past to try to disqualify legal ballots cast on time by eligible voters for technicalities, such as lacking a handwritten date.

The state law requires someone to write a date on the envelope in which they mail in their ballots. However, the envelope is postmarked by the post office and timestamped by counties when they receive it.

Meanwhile, the state law gives no reason that a voter should date the envelope and does not explicitly require a county to throw it out should it lack a date.

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Follow Marc Levy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/timelywriter.

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Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ap_politics.

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By Alexandra Ulmer

ATLANTA (Reuters) -Georgia Republicans are expected to reject Donald Trump’s campaign to oust Governor Brian Kemp in Tuesday’s primary election, though polls show they are likely to back the former football star he has endorsed in their U.S. Senate primary.

The former president has backed primary challenges to Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for rejecting his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat, which he falsely claims was the result of widespread fraud.

While polls show Kemp with a strong lead and Raffensperger locked in a close race, another Trump endorsee, former football great Herschel Walker, looks set to easily snag the Republican nomination to run for U.S. Senate. Some party leaders worry his controversial past could doom his chances in the November midterm elections.

Republicans are expected to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives on Nov. 8, though polls and nonpartisan political ratings agencies suggest Democrats have a better chance of holding onto their razor-thin majority in the Senate.

The loss of either chamber would bring President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda to a halt and give Republicans the power to launch distracting and potentially politically damaging investigations.

Trump has made more than 190 endorsements since leaving office, most of which are for incumbent Republicans who face no serious primary opposition. While propelling some candidates in close contests to victory, his endorsement has at times fallen short. Trump’s pick for Nebraska governor, who was accused of groping multiple women, lost his primary race. His nominee for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania is in a race still too close to call a week after voting.

Opinion polls show Georgia incumbent Kemp well above the 50% threshold required to win the nomination outright and avoid a run-off against Trump’s hand-picked challenger, former U.S. Senator David Perdue, who has repeated Trump’s falsehoods about losing Georgia due to widespread voter fraud.

Mike Pence, who was Trump’s vice president, urged voters not to dwell on the past when he campaigned for Kemp on Monday, speaking at a rally in Kennesaw, Georgia.

“Elections are about the future. There are those who want to make this election about the past,” Pence said. “When you say yes to Governor Brian Kemp tomorrow, you will send a deafening message all across America that the Republican Party is the party of the future.”

Echoing other Kemp supporters, Brian Seifried, 52, a retired tech sales executive, said in an interview in Atlanta that he liked Kemp’s pro-business policies, his hard line on immigration, and his move to enact a sweeping set of voting restrictions after the 2020 election, even as he rebuffed pressure from Trump to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results.

“I was already a supporter of Kemp. I did not consider Perdue at all. President Trump’s endorsement did not have any sway over what I think is best for Georgia,” Seifried said.

Taking a page from Trump’s 2020 election tactics, Perdue on Monday told reporters that he might not accept defeat on Tuesday if he believed results were fraudulent, according to local media.

Perdue also criticized Democrat Stacey Abrams, who is expected to face off against Kemp in a rematch of the 2018 election, after she decried Georgia’s high incarceration and maternal mortality rates.

“She ain’t from here. Let her go back where she came from if she doesn’t like it here,” he said, adding later, “She is demeaning her own race.” Abrams, who is Black, was born in Wisconsin and moved to Georgia with her family as a child.

In other key Tuesday match-ups, U.S. Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, who lost Trump’s endorsement after saying it was time to move on from the 2020 election, is among those battling for a Senate seat. And Trump-era White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders is favored to win the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Arkansas.

In Texas, a Democrat-on-Democrat congressional runoff election pits Henry Cuellar, the sole House Democrat who opposes abortion rights, against progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros. [L2N2XC1QA]

POSSIBLE RUN-OFF

Walker, a former star running back at the University of Georgia and in the NFL, appears poised to win the Republican primary easily, with two-thirds of Republican voters supporting him, according to a Fox News poll published last week.

He would face incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock in a race that would invite scrutiny of Walker’s past, including allegations of domestic violence and his struggles with a mental health condition known as dissociative identity disorder.

More than 857,000 Georgians cast ballots during three weeks of early primary voting, a 168% increase compared with primaries in 2018, according to state officials.

Polling has suggested a tight race between Raffensperger, who drew Trump’s ire for resisting his demand to overturn his loss, and Jody Hice, the Trump-backed U.S. congressman seeking to become the state’s top election official.

Andra Gillespie, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, said she would not be surprised if the Raffensperger-Hice race went to a run-off. She said Raffensperger had shored up Republican support by pushing a ban on non-citizen voting.

“Even though he’s not endorsing the ‘Big Lie’ he’s made an effort to bolster his conservative credentials,” Gillespie said, referring to Trump’s claims about the 2020 election. “He has weathered the storm.”

FACTBOX-Seven races to watch in Georgia, Alabama midterm primaries, Texas run-offsFACTBOX-Power of Trump’s endorsements faces test in 12 U.S. midterm primariesTexas AG Paxton squares off against Bush in Republican run-off

(Reporting by Alexandra Ulmer, additional reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Editing by Scott Malone, Alistair Bell and Mark Porter)

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ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — U.S. Rep. Antonio Delgado will be sworn in Wednesday as New York’s next lieutenant governor, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced.

Hochul said Monday she will issue a proclamation for a special election to fill her fellow Democrat’s seat in upstate New York once he resigns. It remains unclear when that will be.

Once a seat becomes vacant, the governor has 10 days to announce a special election held 70 to 80 days later, according to state law.

Hochul said the special election will line up with the Aug. 23 primary for congressional and state Senate seats.

Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat, has been fulfilling the duties of lieutenant governor since the April 12 resignation of Brian Benjamin, who has proclaimed his innocence following his arrest in a federal corruption investigation.

Delgado has said he wants to leave his seat in Congress to take on the largely ceremonial role of lieutenant governor so he can fight for Hochul’s agenda and serve as a liaison between New Yorkers and local, state and federal partners.

The Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Law School graduate was first elected in 2018 as the first upstate New Yorker of color to Congress on campaign promises of universal access to Medicare and eliminating tax loopholes for the rich.

Hochul and Delgado have both faced criticism for leaving open a congressional seat at a time when Democrats are fighting to maintain their U.S. House majority and after state courts stuck down new political maps that Democrats had drawn to cement comfortable majorities for years to come.

Hochul tapped Delgado days after the state’s Court of Appeals rejected the congressional maps in a majority opinion that largely agreed with Republican voters who argued the district boundaries were unconstitutionally gerrymandered.

That decision struck down maps that would have reshaped Delgado’s swing 19th Congressional District into a safely Democratic district sweeping from the Hudson Valley up to Albany and west to Binghamton and Utica.

An upstate judge approved a final set of maps that creates an even more vast 19th Congressional District that stretches to Ithaca, in the Finger Lakes wine and tourism region. About 52% of voters in the newly crafted district voted for President Joe Biden in 2020, down from 52% in the Democrats’ failed maps.

Democrat Pat Ryan, who came in second to Delgado in the 2018 Democratic primary for the district, has said he’ll run to succeed him.

Republican candidates Brandon Buccola and Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro are also running for the 19th District seat.

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By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democratic and Republican U.S. Senate leaders introduced a resolution on Monday backing Sweden and Finland’s bids to join NATO, underscoring support for expanding the alliance despite growing nationalism in the Republican party.

It will take a two-thirds majority in the 100-member Senate to approve the expansion of the alliance, requiring “yes” votes from at least 17 Republicans along with every Democrat.

Many U.S. Republicans have been following the lead of former President Donald Trump – the party’s leader – toward more nationalist foreign policy. Trump accused NATO allies of not spending enough on their own defense and excessively burdening the United States.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted Finland and Sweden to apply to join NATO.

In the Senate, 11 Republicans voted “no” last week against legislation providing $40 billion to help Ukraine, with some saying they wanted the funds director to Americans.

Last month, 63 Republican members of the House of Representatives, nearly one-third of the full caucus, opposed a bill reaffirming U.S. support for NATO.

The top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell, and Jim Risch, the top Republican on the foreign relations panel, joined Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and committee chairman Bob Menendez and other senators in introducing the resolution.

“We fully support their application to become NATO members and are looking forward to their swift ascension in the coming months,” Menendez said in a statement.

McConnell referred to Finland and Sweden as “strong countries with formidable military capabilities” and said in his statement, “both nations’ robust defense funding means their accession would meaningfully bolster our pursuit of greater burden-sharing across the alliance. I fully support the Senate providing its advice and consent as quickly as possible.”

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; editing by Grant McCool)

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