The latest on the midterm elections.
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Biden, Obama, Trump Make Final Midterm Push in Pennsylvania
Swing-state Pennsylvania is the stage for a clash of presidents on Saturday as each party’s biggest stars work to energize voters just days before voting concludes in high-stakes midterm elections across the country.
Former President Barack Obama opens the day at a Pittsburgh rally with Democratic Senate hopeful John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania lieutenant governor who represents his party’s best chance to flip a Republican-held Senate seat on Tuesday. Obama and Fetterman will appear alongside President Joe Biden and gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro later in the day in Philadelphia.
Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, will finish the day courting voters in a working-class region in the southwestern corner of the state with Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz and gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano.
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Midterm Voters to Take on Colorado’s Soaring Housing Costs
Bloated housing prices in the past few years have crept into every corner of Colorado. In Rocky Mountain resort towns, wealthy newcomers gobble up the dwindling housing supply. In Denver, tenants owe an estimated $32 million in back rent. And in mobile home parks, the state’s last bastions of affordability, out-of-state investors are buying the land and hiking up lease prices.
Fed-up Coloradans have taken the crisis into their own hands and will vote Tuesday on a host of local and statewide ballot measures intended to rein in the soaring cost of housing.
The U.S. Census Bureau found that over half of all Colorado tenants are considered rent burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent in 2020. Colorado housing prices rank among the nation’s highest when accounting for how much its residents earn. The Denver metropolitan area alone saw home prices shoot up by 35 percent over the past two years, which was a larger increase than those in New York City and San Francisco, according to data from the real estate company Redfin.
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DeSantis to Rally Crowd: ‘Florida Is Where Woke Goes to Die’
With just four days until Election Day, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched a 13-stop “Don’t Tread on Florida” tour on Nov. 4, plotting a course from top to bottom, and from side to side across the state.
Appearing with his wife, Casey, he aimed to connect with voters one last time before Tuesday.
DeSantis appears to lead against his Democrat challenger, former Congressman Charlie Crist, by 11 points, according to a mid-October poll by Florida Atlantic University. The poll suggests DeSantis has an overall approval rating of 53 percent.
But he hasn’t been counting on that.
On Nov. 4, his campaign announced that its well-organized army of volunteers had knocked on the doors of two million homes to reach Florida voters.
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Biden Is ‘Not Buying’ That Democrats May Lose in Midterms
President Joe Biden said Friday he was feeling “really good” about Democrats’ chances in the midterm elections, even as he traveled to the Chicago area to support two House members who are facing more competitive reelection battles than expected.
“Folks, I’m not buying the notion that we’re in trouble,” he told the crowd at a political reception in a hotel for U.S. Reps. Lauren Underwood and Sean Casten. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super political action committee, or super PAC, aligned with the GOP House leadership, this week announced a $1.8 million ad buy against Casten, who represents an Illinois district that Biden won by about 11 percentage points in 2020.
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Nevada Secretary of State Declines to Lift Hand-Count Ban
Nevada’s secretary of state declined Friday to lift a ban on a rural county’s controversial early hand-count of mail-in ballots, saying a modified procedure the county clerk proposed still raises “concerns relating to the integrity of the election.”
Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske ordered Nye County last week to halt its hand-counting of ballots until after polls close on Nov. 8. Her order came after the Nevada Supreme Court issued an opinion siding with the American Civil Liberties Union’s objections to the reading of individual votes out loud.
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Lifelong NYC Democrat Urges to Vote Republican After Woman Raped Near His Art Gallery
“We urgently and desperately need change.” That was part of a New Yorker’s plea on Twitter regarding how crime is handled in his city.
Art dealer Eli Klein’s post was a reaction to the rape of the 43-year-old woman who was jogging along the Hudson River around 5:30 a.m. on Thursday.
“A woman was raped, beaten, and robbed across the street from my NYC art gallery this morning. She was just jogging when she was attacked by a stranger from behind,” Klein posted on Twitter.
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Officials Unveil Plan to Help Voters Who Cast Wrong Ballots
Nashville voters who cast ballots in the wrong congressional and state races will be able to submit a provisional ballot on Election Day, officials announced Friday as part of an agreement sparked by a lawsuit earlier that day.
The decision comes as election officials have scrambled for days to correct Davidson County’s voting system after The Associated Press reported first that nearly 200 Tennesseans had voted in the incorrect congressional races, while 16 cast votes in a wrong state Senate race and six cast votes in a wrong state House race.
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Nanette Holt, Efthymis Oraiopoulos, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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