•What are the biggest issues driving you to Tuesday’s midterms? Contributing pundits in the left and right columns weigh in with their thoughts on the subject. It’s not too late for you to voice your opinion – Email your COMMENTS to editors@thehustings.news and please indicate your political leanings – right or left – in the subject line.
Democrat Backs Michigan Republican – After months of support for Abdul El-Sayed, who beat her in the Democratic primary for US senator from Michigan, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) has withdrawn her endorsement and thrown her support to El-Sayed’s Republican rival, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R).
Stevens told Politico Sunday that Rogers didn’t promise her anything and that she made her decision “this morning.”
Several House Democrats told Politico they were considering kicking Stevens out of their caucus, while El-Sayed responded; “I actually don’t think about Haley Stevens.”
That appears to be the proper attitude: The latest New York Times/Siena polls, taken October 23-November 1, shows El-Sayed leading Rogers in the race 53% to 42%.
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Trump v. the Midterms – President Trump has lost his bid to control Alaska’s race for US Senate, The Wall Street Journal reports, with a federal judge throwing out his Justice Department’s lawsuit Sunday that would block state officials from certifying election results if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan lost to Democratic challenger Mary Peltola, because a retired teacher also named Dan Sullivan is running in the rank-choice election as an independent. Last week The New York Times reported that the Democratic Party set up independent Dan Sullivan as a spoiler for Republican Dan Sullivan.
Peltola has denied knowledge of the scheme.
However, consensus among legal scholars and pundits is there is no potential law broken in a party’s backing of a spoiler. And on Sunday, an NYT front page outlined how common the scheme is among both parties.
Republicans have spent more than $2.2 million backing a socialist candidate for US Senate, where former Sen. Sherrod Brown, a centrist Democrat, is trying to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted.
A Republican group in Virginia has sent out mailers highlighting the Democratic-leaning positions of a “radical centrist” running in a competitive House race, according to the newspaper, and in Nebraska, Democrats and Republicans are helping third-party/independent candidates take votes from incumbent Sen. Pete Ricketts (R) and his Democratic challenger, Dan Osborn.
DOJ’s ‘competitive authoritarian’ efforts … President Trump’s ‘competitive authoritarian’ efforts via his Justice Department include a plan to send more than 1,000 election monitors to polling stations in every state. The Atlantic notes that the DOJ has been sending monitors for more than 60 years, but until now they watched polls to make sure Black voters and other minorities were not impeded from casting ballots.
Earlier this year, FBI officials seized ballots from 2020 (for the election Trump is still challenging), has gathered material from Arizona and has questioned election officials in Wisconsin, the magazine reports. None of this has uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud.
So the midterms are in the clear? … In its own monitoring of Trump administration efforts to stifle the midterms, the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University reports that since the president has no authority over elections, “these efforts have been thwarted at every turn. His executive orders and overreach were blocked by courts, the SAVE Act died in the Senate, and state and local authorities still run elections according to the law, not the president’s whims. Trump’s plot to seize control of the midterm elections appears to have been defeated.”
But wait … This assessment comes after more money has been spent on midterm elections than in any previous year, including from individual contributions, dark money and ex-DOGE chief Elon Musk’s out-in-the-open $446 million in contributions to Republicans (The Guardian), including $150 million alone to Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton.
Looming over this, the Justice Department in recent days has reminded election officials in all 50 states to preserve materials from their election, The Atlantic notes.
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Trump’s WSJ Lawsuit Dismissed – In Miami, US District Judge Darrin Gayles threw out for the second time President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. This time, the judge dismissed the case with prejudice, which means Trump cannot file it again.
The lawsuit claimed Trump had been defamed by a WSJ article identifying him as the author of a birthday poem, outlined by a drawing of a woman’s curves, to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Judge Gayles said Trump’s allegations “are conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the article, and often irrelevant” to his argument that the WSJ published the 2025 news story with actual malice, which is the standard required to prove defamation cases.
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This Beats a Campaign Rally – On Thursday, President Trump cancelled weekend campaign rallies scheduled for Saturday and Sunday in Kansas and Iowa, only to later reschedule them both for Sunday.
On Saturday, Trump attended his own Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, The Washington Post reports. The party had a jungle theme, “with guests in sequined leotards, face paint, and cheetah, leopard and tiger-print dinner jackets. Circus performers hung from the ceiling.” –Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa-30-