Raw Story

During the 1990s and 2000s, Republicans typically enjoyed double-digit victories in statewide races in Texas.

But in 2018, incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) defeated Democratic challenger Beto O'Rourke by only 2 percent. And in 2024, Cruz has been warning fellow Republicans that a victory by Rep. Colin Allred (D-TS) cannot be ruled out.

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In a front-page editorial published on Sunday, Allred picked up an endorsement from the Dallas Morning News — Texas' largest daily newspaper.

The editorial criticized Cruz for promoting "the politics of division," noting that he "could have supported the peaceful transfer of power in the 2020 presidential election" but didn't.

The Morning News’ editorial board wrote, "He instead was the first senator to rise in objection to certifying the electoral vote and one of just six to do so. His actions were a catalyst for what became one of the worst days in our nation's history."

The day the Morning News was referring to was January 6, 2021, which found a mob of Donald Trump supporters violently attacking the U.S. Capitol Building in the hope of preventing Congress from certifying now-President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory.

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The editorial praised Allred's willingness to work with Republicans, arguing that the Texas congressman has "demonstrated over time that both the words and action of bipartisanship matter to him."

Costas Panagopoulos, who teaches political science at Northeastern University in Boston, believes that the Texas Senate race is very much in play for Allred.

According to Panagopoulos, recent polls "suggest the race is tied or even that Allred may be ahead."

Panagopoulos told Newsweek, "Texas voters have had reservations about Ted Cruz for years. He only squeaked by narrowly to win reelection in 2018."

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An Arizona County elections official has agreed to plead guilty after she refused to certify the 2022 election in which Kari Lake lost to Katie Hobbs.

The Washington Post reported Monday that Peggy Judd, who helps lead Cochise County southeast of Phoenix, was indicted last year for allegedly "flouting the state’s deadlines" for the 2022 election certification.

She and another Republican colleague, Thomas Crosby, were both charged with "conspiracy and interfering with an election officer."

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Judd now admits that she “knowingly” refused to perform her duty in failing to certify the election results by the Nov. 28, 2022 deadline, said the Post

“I voted to delay the canvass during a public Cochise County Board of Supervisors meeting. I knew that the canvass would be delayed if one other supervisor voted with me," Judd's statement read.

Judd is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and her lawyer told the judge that she hopes to complete her term in office and then, “Go on a mission and put this behind her.”

Read the full report here.

The Washington Post reported that Vice President Kamala Harris has a huge cash advantage over Donald Trump in the 2024 race after bringing in $1 billion in fewer than three months on the campaign trail.

Meanwhile, a political action committee (PAC) that has been largely funding Donald Trump's legal woes has run out of money — and owes more than it is bringing in.

"Save America, the leadership PAC that Trump has used to pay his legal bills and those of some of his associates, raised $1.4 million in September and spent $4 million, most of it on lawyers, demonstrating how the former president’s legal problems have continued to strain campaign resources," said the report.

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It has less than $2 million cash on hand with nearly $5 million in legal bills, the Post reported.

A March report showed that Trump was shelling out $90,000 a day in legal fees, but none of it was his own personal money. Instead, it came from donors and supporters.

Read the full report here.

A deep dive into special counsel Jack Smith’s massive legal filing that exposed new evidence in Donald Trump's election subversion case reveals the legal strategy behind the prosecution of the former president and the possibility of a key government witness – former Vice President Mike Pence.

MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin noted in an analysis published Friday that while the exhibits to Smith’s immunity brief remain under wraps, “snippets of witness statements give clues about his litigation strategy if the federal election interference case survives.”

Alternating between playing it safe and taking risks is what Rubin, a former litigator, said she gleamed of Smith's likely approach at trial after poring over the 1,889 pages released by Judge Tanya Chutkan Friday.

She found that the first volume “of 720-plus pages is excerpted testimony and interviews from the House Jan. 6 committee’s investigation.” She went on to list in alphabetical order the officials and campaign staffers whose interviews are included in the filing.

“What’s most interesting about this group collectively — but also advisable in the wake of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling — is that the vast majority of these witnesses were not executive branch employees, but instead were private citizens, campaign staff or state officials Trump tried to influence,” Rubin wrote for MSNBC.

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She added, tellingly: “But, of course, those are just the witnesses whose statements we can see. And while Volume 3 of the appendix contains the cover and several highlighted pages from Pence’s book 'So Help Me God,' actual testimony from Pence is nowhere to be found. Or is it merely hiding in plain sight?”

Rubin said the bombshell legal filing has nearly “100 pages of fully sealed material between the apparent end of the excerpt of” former Trump senior campaign adviser Jason Miller and then-adviser Katrina Pierson.

“And alphabetically, what, or rather who, falls between them? Pence,” she wrote.

Reading between the lines, Rubin said she believes Smith “has ample testimony from Pence about his many post-election conversations with Trump about its outcome — and whether either of them had any reason to doubt or try to change it.”

While that could pose legal troubles for Trump, according to Rubin, “the bigger determining factor seems to be the outcome of this election.”

Former President Donald Trump "whiffed" and made a tactical error that could cost him, a Democratic strategist noted on CNN on Friday night.

Chuck Rocha, founder of Nuestro PAC, told panelists on "NewsNight" that Trump rebuffed an opportunity to make amends with voters of former primary foe Nikki Haley, whom he defeated following a bitter rivalry.

Trump emphasized during a "Fox and Friends" interview that he soundly defeated the former South Carolina governor the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador in the Trump administration. When asked whether he feels Haley can help him defeat Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump stressed he "beat Nikki [Haley] badly."

" Nikki Haley and I fought and I beat her by 50, 60, 90 points!" he boasted. "I beat her in her own state by numbers that nobody's ever been beaten by! I beat Nikki badly! I beat everyone else too badly! I mean, frankly, I set records, both in speed and in the magnitude of the win... I beat everybody by numbers that has never happened before and they keep talking about Nikki, Nikki."

Trump then emphasized, "Nikki is in, Nikki is helping us already."

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Rocha said Trump had a "great strategic opportunity" that "as a strategist, he really whiffed on."

"There's somebody watching Fox News and that's Nikki Haley voters," he said. "And they literally served him up a softball to say something nice about Nikki Haley and he could not help himself. And he went down the rabbit hole of how he whooped her in the primaries and she's no good."

Haley received 76,000 votes in Wisconsin, noted Rocha, and President Joe Biden only won the state by fewer than 20,000.

"Every one of those votes are like gold," he said. "As a strategist, they vote like it's their job. If they vote in the primary, I promise you they're coming back to vote in the general."

Watch the clip below or at this link.

Former President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk are "addicted" to chasing adulation on social media, CNN correspondent Donie O'Sullivan told Anderson Cooper on Friday evening — and the extent to which that obsession is driving misinformation and potentially influencing voters should not be overlooked.

This comes as Musk, who owns Tesla Motors, SpaceX and X, has essentially taken over voter outreach campaign operations from the Trump campaign, in ways that are plagued with glitches and may not be entirely legal.

"It is remarkable the amount of just things that aren't true that [Musk] is pushing out," said Cooper, noting that he has lately been pushing attacks on Dominion Voting Systems, the company that forced a legal settlement from Fox News for conspiracy theories about rigging the 2020 presidential election.

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"Exactly," said O'Sullivan. "It's just — but I really think the role that Twitter, now called X, such a pivotal role it's played in both Trump's life, in terms of basically getting him into the White House, giving him that megaphone, and now of course, Musk."

"Both of these guys have gotten — they got addicted, right?" O'Sullivan continued. "They got addicted to the likes and shares and the retweets, and it's manifested in different ways. Musk ended up buying the platform. But yeah, you can really see that, and Musk does this thing all the time ... where something would be totally ridiculous and Musk just responds to it, says 'interesting' and immediately that gets posted, that gets elevated to potentially 200 million of his followers every single day."

"Musk has, obviously, a lot of business interests that rely on U.S. government contracts, connections," added O'Sullivan. "I mean, he's putting a lot of stock in Trump's going to get reelected. It would obviously benefit him hugely."

Watch the video below or at the link here.

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