Democrats flip six more House seats, taking lead to nearly 100
The Democrats have flipped another six House seats, extending their lead over the Republicans in the lower chamber 253 to 157, with 25 races left to call. Here are the latest results:
Utah’s fourth congressional district: Republican congressman Mike Kennedy won re-election for a second term, over Democrat Jonny Larsen.
Washington’s fourth congressional district: Republican Amanda McKinney defeated Democrat John Duresky in a race to replace retiring Republican congressman Dan Newhouse.
New York’s seventeenth congressional district: Democrat Cait Conley defeated Republican congressman Mike Lawler to flip a seat in New York’s Hudson Valley.
New Jersey’s second congressional district: Cape May mayor Zack Mullock, a Democrat, defeated four-term incumbent Jeff Van Drew, a Republican who was first elected as a Democrat in 2018 before switching parties after voting against the first impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019.
Arizona’s sixth congressional district: US marine veteran Democrat JoAnna Mendoza beat two-term Republican incumbent Juan Ciscomani.
Colorado’s fifth congressional district: Democrat Jessica Killin, a former Army captain, beat first-term incumbent, Republican Jeff Crank, who was criticized by relatives of Virginia Giuffre for refusing to meet them.
North Carolina’s ninth congressional district: Democrat Richard Ojeda beat two-term Republican incumbent Richard Hudson in a seat that has been red for the last 14 years.
Ohio’s 10th congressional district: Democrat Kristina Knickerbocker beat veteran Republican congressman Mike Turner.
Key events
Republicans hold House seats in Utah and Washington
Republicans held on two House seats in the West on Thursday, as congressman Mike Kennedy won re-election for a second term in Utah’s fourth congressional district, and Amanda McKinney won a seat representing Washington’s fourth congressional district, to replace retiring Republican Dan Newhouse.
The viral ads that propelled Scott Colom’s Senate campaign in Mississippi
As his narrow lead in the Mississippi Senate race expanded on Thursday, Democrat Scott Colom told NBC News that his party had all but abandoned the state before his campaign.
“First of all, let’s not give them too much credit; they haven’t been trying,” Colom said. I’ve been in Mississippi for 15 years, most of the time the Democrats conceded the state. And my frustration with that is, 38% of the population is African American; they’re very loyal Democrats. They vote 90-95% Democrat. There’s a lot of white rural Democrats across Mississippi.”
“That’s a shame, right, because morally, how could you not compete in a state where people are denying folks health care? How could you not compete in a state where folks are, you know, getting betrayed on tariffs? Farmers are getting betrayed, consumers, small businesses. How could you not compete in a state where voting rights are being attacked left and right?” he added. “When you say, ‘Listen, I can’t win those voters’, what you’re saying is ‘I don’t care enough about those voters’. And when you show voters you don’t care, they don’t show up. So what I did is I showed up, and turns out when you show up, people start to believe.”
Colom’s Senate campaign, which benefitted from very little help from the national party, was propelled, in part, by a series of viral ads that he thanked his campaign’s content creators for producing this week, as his lead in the vote count expanded.
One ad, released in mid-October, racked up more than 20 million views across social networks. It seized on a remark by the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, who tried to dodge a question from a TV anchor about the high price of beef by saying: “You have so many proteins to choose from”.
The ad, which begins with that gaffe, then cuts to three Mississippi voters responding to the senator. “Pick another protein?” a man grilling burgers says. “Shit, I’d rather pick another senator instead.”
“Pick another protein?” a woman eating says next. “She done lost her damn mind. I’d rather pick another senator.”
“Pick another protein?” a woman in a grocery store says. “What the f-”.
According to Colom, the idea for the ad came from Patrick Gaspard, a former US ambassador to South Africa and adviser to president Barack Obama and it was directed and edited by Ryan Sayles. Sayles, Colom wrote this week, “should be considered the breakout-star of this cycle. He’s going to be a giant in the media consultant game. He did GAME CHANGING work with SO little.”
Another comedic ad, a Halloween parody of the film Sinners called Sinators, was written and directed by Colom’s twin brother, Andrew Robert Colom, who also starred in it along with the candidate.
At the end of the campaign, Colom starred in a much more serious ad, showing the candidate at the Mississippi home where the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered in 1963 for registering Black voters.
“I’ve been a prosecutor for 10 years and unfortunately I’ve stood in a lot of houses where something terrible happened,” Colom says in the ad. “This isn’t any house. This isn’t any tragedy. This is where Medger Evers died. He fought for this country and Normandy. He came home to Mississippi and they wouldn’t let him vote. So he organized, helping other people register.”
“He was killed for helping Mississippian vote,” Colom says at the end of the ad. “On Tuesday, use your vote and honor everyone who died for that right.”
Democrat Scott Colom expands lead in Mississippi Senate race as provisional ballots are counted
In Mississippi, Democrat Scott Colom’s lead in the race for US Senate expanded to 1,813 votes over incumbent Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith as a small number of provisional or affidavit ballots were counted on Thursday.
Up to up to 20,000 outstanding ballots remain to be counted in the state, including late-arriving mail ballots that are valid if they were postmarked by election day and arrive by 10 November, and an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 affidavit ballots, which are those set aside from the initial count due to technical errors, like a lack of photo ID or an incorrect home address, that voters have until next Tuesday to correct. Such errors on ballots can often be corrected through a process known as curing.
Colom told reporters earlier on Thursday that he is “very confident” that the remaining ballots will add to his lead. “Anybody out there who does an analysis of this knows where this is going. The affidavits always move in the Democrat’s favor in Mississippi.”
“I am overwhelmed by the outpouring of support for my campaign as we fight to make sure every lawful ballot is counted,” Colom wrote on social media. “My campaign, alongside the DSCC and Elias Law Group, Lisa Ross, and our great team of local attorneys, are leading the effort to ensure every eligible voter is heard and I am confident that when votes are counted, we will flip this seat.”
The Mississippi Republican Party chair, Mike Hurst, disagreed. “We believe if the laws are followed to a T and these 20,000 outstanding ballots are counted, that senator Cindy Hyde-Smith will be reelected,” Hurst said at a news conference.
When he was pressed to say whether that meant he would accept a Colom win, should the count go go in the Democrat’s favor, Hurst said: “Let me be clear: there is no election-denying going on here. If the laws are followed and the voters spoke, that is it and Mississippi Republicans will accept that.”
Sam Levin
Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, commuted the death sentences of more than 500 people on the state’s death row on Thursday, a move that ensures they can never be executed under future administrations.
The Democrat’s mass commutation at the end of his term has converted all of the state’s death sentences to life without the possibility of parole, the largest clearing of any US death row in modern history.
The move comes after the failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee sparked global outrage and renewed calls for a nationwide pause on capital punishment.
His decision affects 529 men and 19 women who were sentenced to death in the state, making up the largest death row in the western hemisphere, the governor said in a letter announcing his decision.
“I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us,” he wrote. “I know we cannot execute people in our imperfect legal system and remain true to our core values, first among them justice and human decency.”
Newsom, considered a probable candidate for president in 2028, has long opposed the death penalty and issued a moratorium on executions in 2019. He also dismantled the state’s physical death row chamber in the infamous San Quentin prison, transferring people with death sentences to other facilities where they had more freedom of movement and access to programs – for some, a dramatic change after decades isolated in solitary cells.
Opponents of Trump’s triumphal arch flood live hearing with calls to block it
In the ninth month of a war with Iran he started but has been unable to finish, Donald Trump was struggling on Thursday to win public support for the grand triumphal arch he plans to build in Washington DC.
A virtual hearing of the National Capital Planning Commission on Thursday, currently in progress, has been flooded with calls from critics demanding that the federal panel withhold approval for what they called a “crazy project”, “a monument to be erected to a deranged despot” and something more suited to a circus than the nation’s capital.
The approval by a commission stacked with Trump loyalists would clear a hurdle to breaking ground on the project, which the administration has said it could begin constructing within a day of the vote.
The proposed 250-foot (76-meter) tall gilded arch still faces legal challenges, but the Trump-appointed chairman of the commission offered a gushing appraisal of the monument and praised Trump for wanting to build it.
“President Trump understands as president and a superb builder that it’s important to our national identity to display who we are through grand monuments,” said Mark Paoletta, the commission’s chairman.
Over the last month, Guardian reporters have been answering your questions in a series of reader conversations from how immigration and the economy’s impact on voters, to who is spending the most on campaigns.
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Democrat Cait Conley defeats Republican Mike Lawler to flip House seat in New York’s Hudson Valley
In New York’s Hudson Valley, Democrat Cait Conley has defeated Republican congressman Mike Lawler to pad her party’s House majority.
Conley, an Army combat veteran who served on the National Security Council, unseats Lawler, one of the few Republicans to win a congressional district in 2024 that also voted for Kamala Harris in the presidential race.
Lawler, who is not Jewish but represented a district where one in five residents are Jewish told reporters in May that Republican senator Rand Paul’s son William had drunkenly accosted him at a bar in Washington, saying in “a 10-minute diatribe about Jews” at the Tune Inn Restaurant & Bar, “that he hates Jews and hates gays and doesn’t care if they die”.
Lawler added that Paul told him that he thought he was Jewish. When the Irish and Italian Catholic corrected him, Paul reportedly said: “Oh wow, I’m so sorry for calling you a Jew.”
Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign confident she will win US Senate seat as late vote comes in
In an email to reporters on Thursday, Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign expressed confidence that she is on track to extend her current 637-vote lead in the US Senate race as tens of thousands of early and absentee ballots are counted, mainly from areas of the state that have favored her in the past.
“The numbers are clear: when every vote is counted, Mary Peltola will be elected as Alaska’s next United States Senator,” Peltola’s campaign manager, Cheryl Bruce, said in a statement. “Tens of thousands of early votes and absentee ballots are still outstanding, and the data shows that these will break for Mary and extend her lead. Despite Sullivan pushing fictitious paths to victory that exclude the voices of thousands of Alaskans, every Alaskan’s vote will be counted, and Mary will win this race.”
The campaign estimates that her lead will be large enough to prevent the incumbent Republican senator, Dan Sullivan, from overtaking her even with second-place votes in the ranked-choice system Alaska uses if no candidate obtains a majority.
“Data suggests that the bulk of outstanding votes are from Anchorage and rural Alaska, both of which have broadly favored Mary in the current count,” the campaign argues in the email.
The Peltola campaign’s estimate matches data analysis from the New York Times, which also reports that, in a surprising twist, more of the voters who backed the other Dan Sullivan, an independent candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan who was reportedly recruited by allies of Peltola to take votes from the incumbent, “ranked Ms. Peltola as their second choice rather than Mr. Sullivan.”
After the incumbent Republican senator’s campaign claimed on Wednesday that he was on track to win, Lakshya Jain, a data analyst who co-founded Split Ticket, called that claim “false”.
“Alaska Senate is >95% likely to go to Peltola at this point,” Jain wrote on social media. “Sullivan is completely screwed given what’s left.”
Trump seems to acknowledge next president will be able to remove gold from Oval Office walls
As reporters were being hustled out of the Oval Office on Thursday, and the White House live feed cut out, Donald Trump was asked if the proclamation he signed, “to preserve the Oval Office as a national monument” would prevent his successor from undoing the gilded decor he has added to it.
“Does the next president get to take down this gold stuff?” the reporter asked.
“He can do whatever he wants but very carefully,” Trump replied. “He’s got to be very careful.”
The exchange was captured on video posted by a correspondent for the far-right, partisan network Real America’s Voice.
Rubio spokesman denies report that US secretary of state might resign
A spokesman for the US state department on Thursday called reports that Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, is thinking about resigning “completely baseless fake news”.
The spokesman, Dylan Johnson, a former Trump campaign official who previously served in the White House communications office, rejected reports from both the Independent and Bloomberg News that Rubio is considering stepping down ahead of a potential run for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination.
“This is complete and total fake news based on the word of anonymous sources, befitting a tabloid,” Johnson told Bloomberg.
“This fake news is nothing more than a fabricated hoax being peddled by anonymous sources with no factual information,” new White House spokesperson Beni Rae Harmony said. “Secretary Rubio is a fearless fighter for President Trump and the MAGA movement.”
Harmony, 24, is a far-right media figure who was hired by the White House last month despite having posed for a holiday photograph in 2021 wearing a “Fuck Joe Biden” T-shirt and holding a rifle.
Democrat Zack Mullock flips House seat on the Jersey shore
Zack Mullock, the Democratic mayor of Cape May, New Jersey, has defeated Republican congressman Jeff Van Drew, to add another seat to the incoming Democratic majority in the House.
Van Drew was first elected to congress as a Democrat in the 2018 midterms, defected to the Republican party after voting against the impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019 and was re-elected three times as a Republican before being toppled by Mullock in the South Jersey district.
Trump says he met Russian envoy at White House but no one from Ukrainian delegation
Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he met with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, at the White House on Thursday but did not meet any of the senior Ukrainian officials who were also present for an event hosted by the first lady, Melania Trump.
As our colleague Andrew Roth reports, at the event to celebrate a ceasefire in an embattled Ukrainian town, Dmitriev, the sanctioned head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund who regularly negotiates for Moscow, was seated next to Davyd Arakhamia, the head of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party and a chief negotiator for Ukraine.
Asked what he discussed with Dmitriev, the president replied: “I can’t tell you what I discussed, but I’m just telling you there’s going to be an agreement.”
“It’s going to be a big agreement, and it’s going to involve more than Ukraine,” he continued. “It’s going to be a very big. It’s going to involve more than Ukraine. And I could even say it might involve all of Europe. It’s going to be a big, beautiful agreement and everyone’s going to be thrilled.”
Asked by another reporter if he met with anyone from the Ukrainian delegation, Trump replied: “No, just with the head person of Russia.”
‘Los Angeles, I am deeply honored to be your next mayor,’ Nithya Raman says in victory post
Democrat Nithya Raman declared victory in the Los Angeles mayoral race on Thursday, in a social-media video posted after the incumbent, Democrat Karen Bass, conceded.
Raman, a progressive urban planner who has served on LA’s city council since 2020 campaigned with the support of the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
“Los Angeles, I am deeply honored to be your next mayor,” Raman said. “Thank you to the thousands of people who knocked on doors, sent texts, made phone calls, convinced their neighbors to believe in the promise of this big, beautiful, joyful city that we get to call home.”
“I also wanted to pay tribute to Mayor Karen Bass, someone who has given decades of her life to making this city what it is today; from her time as an emergency room nurse to starting Community Coalition, to her leadership in Sacramento and DC, and then becoming the first woman mayor of Los Angeles.” she said.
”I love this city and I love its people, and I cannot wait to get started on building a better future with all of you,” the mayor-elect added.
Trump tries to preserve his gilded Oval Office decor through executive order declaring it a national monument
Having apparently not gotten the message from voters, or Barack Obama, that his obsessive focus on transforming the White House into a version of Mar-a-Lago is deeply unpopular, Donald Trump on Thursday took action: signing an executive order declaring the gilded Oval Office and redecorated Cabinet Room “a national monument”, which, he said, “will make it impossible for anybody ever to destroy this incredible space”.
“I just thought it was very important that nobody be allowed to come in and take it down and, try and do something with it” Trump said. The landmark status, he said, would make it “in theory, impossible to knock down, change in any meaningful way”.
The executive action by Trump suggests that he is determined not to accept the criticism from Obama at campaign rallies last month that the president is more focused on home improvement projects than finding solutions to the high prices that plague Americans.
“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” Obama told voters. “I’m not making this up. He, the President of the United States, is spending time supergluing gold medallions to the mantel in the Oval Office,” Obama said in Atlanta late in the campaign. “He is literally doing arts and crafts while we are fighting a war and trying to deal with out-of-control prices.”
After being asked by a reporter about the criticism, Trump once again invoked a racist trope by suggesting that the nation’s first Black president is unclean.
“Obama doesn’t know about dirt and filth, and he doesn’t know about crack stone, and he doesn’t know about broken windows. He’s probably fine with them, but I’m not”, Trump said.
Source: www.theguardian.com
