Midterm Elections Live Updates: Trump to Visit Iowa and Kansas; El-Sayed and Stevens Feud in Michigan

“I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today,” Ms. Stevens said in a video she posted on social media, not long after she arrived with Mr. Rogers at Perfecting Church, a Black church in Detroit. “I don’t belong in Abdul’s campaign.”

The Michigan race has become a source of discomfort for Democrats in the final days of a campaign season that has otherwise put Republicans on defense, trying to stave off Democratic advances in deeply conservative corners of the country. President Trump was scheduled to travel on Sunday to Iowa and Kansas, two conservative states that have turned into Senate battlegrounds.

Nationally, the Senate battle is a tossup, but strategists in both parties say Democrats are in a strong position to reclaim the House. The party that holds the White House typically loses seats in Congress in midterm elections.

Republicans have been weighed down by high prices and Mr. Trump’s unpopularity but are trying to exploit the Democratic infighting to flip the Senate seat in Michigan.

Dr. El-Sayed was attending a church service in Detroit that was intended to be a unity gathering with Ms. Stevens, whom he narrowly defeated in the primary in August, in an effort to move past her recent criticisms of him. But that plan fell apart this weekend, with Ms. Stevens and Dr. El-Sayed publicly feuding over U.S. policy on Israel.

On Saturday, Dr. El-Sayed urged Ms. Stevens to stay away from the event, while an adviser to Representative James E. Clyburn — a South Carolina Democrat who was taking part in the event — said Ms. Stevens was still welcome.

Just before Dr. El-Sayed took the stage, Ms. Stevens showed up at Perfecting Church in Detroit with Mr. Rogers.

The messy fight between Democrats escalated hours before Mr. Trump was scheduled to speak in Dubuque, Iowa, in the afternoon, before a rally in Salina, Kan. He won both states by double digits in 2024, but elevated gasoline, diesel and fertilizer prices, which were driven up by the Iran war, have rattled their agriculture-heavy economies.

Democrats believe they have a chance to ride voters’ economic discontent to Senate victories in both states. In Iowa, Representative Ashley Hinson, a Republican, faces Josh Turek, a Democratic state lawmaker. In Kansas, Senator Roger Marshall, a Republican, is trying to fend off the Rev. Adam Hamilton, a centrist Democrat.

Mr. Trump, who spent Saturday holding tele-rallies in Florida, shrugged off the political headwinds facing his party, telling reporters that “the country has never done better.”

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Alaska: Senator Dan S. Sullivan, an Alaska Republican, said on CNN that he would accept the results of his race against his Democratic challenger, Mary Peltola, whose campaign was said to have been involved in recruiting a candidate to siphon votes from the incumbent. But he also suggested, without offering specifics, the race could somehow be “stolen” as he urged Alaskans to turn out and vote.

• Wealth tax: California voters are considering a proposition that would charge a one-time, 5 percent tax on the wealth of residents worth more than $1.1 billion. At stake is a potential revolution in U.S. taxation. Read more ›

• TV ads: Almost half the political spending in the midterm elections has been directed toward local television. Though broadcast TV may not be what it once was, some consultants still see it as a key to reaching voters. The election may show whether that calculus is shifting. Read more ›

• New England power broker: Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, is facing a difficult path to re-election. Her political career has been a lesson in the accrual and use of power. Read more ›

In that scenario, the suit also demands an investigation into whether voters who selected the retired teacher actually intended to vote for the senator. It’s not clear how an investigation into anonymous ballots would be conducted.

Legal observers gave the case little chance of succeeding given that the U.S. Constitution places control of elections in the hands of the states, not the federal government.

In her ruling, released Sunday morning, Chief Judge Sharon Gleason of U.S. District Court in Alaska echoed the right of states to control their elections.

Judge Gleason, an appointee of President Obama, wrote that she did not see how the federal government’s proposed solution to any confusion — separating out ballots filed for Daniel J. Sullivan and investigating whether people who supported him meant to rank Senator Dan S. Sullivan instead — would solve that problem or even work given the right to a secret ballot is a core principle of American democracy.

The federal government, she wrote, “offers no rebuttal to the concerns regarding preservation of the secrecy of voting and provides no explanation of how its request for ballot segregation and a court-ordered investigation by law enforcement officers into certain voters’ intent could be implemented while preserving the secrecy of the ballot.”

The administration’s lawsuit accuses Daniel J. Sulivan of trying to “dupe Alaska’s voters into believing that he is Senator Sullivan.” Daniel J. Sullivan has said he voted for Democrats in the last three presidential races and for Mary Peltola, the current Democratic Senate nominee on the ballot, in her 2022 and 2024 campaigns for Congress.

The suit also notes that he switched his party affiliation from Independent to Republican only when he filed to run, and that his campaign website uses the same dark blue and yellow color scheme as the incumbent’s.

A New York Times investigation revealed that a Democratic operative connected to Ms. Peltola’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee enlisted Daniel J. Sullivan to run as part of a broader effort to recruit independent and third-party candidates who might peel votes away from the incumbent.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, has ordered a criminal investigation into the Peltola campaign even as the state elections division, overseen by his lieutenant governor, also a Republican, fought the Trump administration’s civil lawsuit.

Ms. Peltola and national Democrats have denied any connection to Daniel J. Sullivan’s candidacy, and they joined the civil case as additional defendants along with national Democrats and the League of Women Voters..

In its defense in the Justice Department’s lawsuit, lawyers with the state of Alaska noted that state courts had already rejected an attempt by the state’s elections agency to take Daniel J. Sullivan off the ballot and that the final ballot was designed to differentiate between the two men: It lists the senator as “Dan S. Sullivan” and notes his party affiliation and incumbency, and the other man is “Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.” with no party affiliation included.

Alaska also uses ranked choice voting in the general election, meaning voters who were confused by the existence of two Dan Sullivans could simply rank both candidates.

Lawyers for the state and Democrats also argued against the federal government’s proposed solution to any confusion, which was to block certification of the election results and segregate ballots cast for Daniel J. Sullivan for further investigation.

Judge Gleason had already expressed skepticism of the Trump administration’s case in a ruling last month agreeing to a speedy hearing. In that order, she noted that the federal lawsuit came after Alaskans had already begun casting ballots for November and nearly four months after the Alaska Supreme Court directed the state Division of Elections to include Daniel J. Sullivan on the ballot.

This is a breaking story and will be updated.

The video went online while Ms. Stevens appeared with Mr. Rogers at a Black church in Detroit on Sunday morning. In the video, she said she “does not stand with Dr. Abdul’s campaign,” nor with Hasan Piker, a left-wing streamer with whom Dr. El-Sayed campaigned in the primary and from whom he later distanced himself.

Ms. Stevens, a moderate supporter of Israel who during the primary clashed bitterly with Dr. El-Sayed, an outspoken progressive critic of the country, also cast the Senate race as a referendum on hate in politics.

Miles away, Dr. El-Sayed was at a church service with other Democratic leaders, an event that had been intended to display party unity. On Saturday, Dr. El-Sayed had publicly urged Ms. Stevens to stay away from that gathering, deepening days of growing tension between the two Democrats.

Dr. El-Sayed’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ms. Stevens had endorsed Dr. El-Sayed immediately after the primary in August, when he beat her by less than a percentage point.

But since then, their relationship has grown ever more contentious.

Last week, Ms. Stevens demanded that Dr. El-Sayed denounce an ad from an outside group that she has argued amounts to “fear-mongering about Israel.” But on Thursday, Ms. Stevens said that she planned to campaign with Dr. El-Sayed this weekend.

Those plans, however, were upended when she issued a statement on Friday morning demanding an apology for comments Dr. El-Sayed had made about Israel.

Dr. El-Sayed pushed back, saying she was no longer welcome.

“I don’t want any distractions,” he told reporters on Saturday. He added, “It seems as though other folks are more interested in making this race about things that it’s not about.”

Ms. Stevens had said as recently as Wednesday on CNN that she would vote for Dr. El-Sayed and the full Democratic ticket.

Her reversal caught other Democrats by surprise.

Ms. Stevens’s chief of staff, Justin German, announced Sunday that he and “many members of her team” had resigned over the decision. “This election is too important to sow division or stand on the sidelines,” he wrote in a statement, adding that staff members had been “shocked and heartbroken” by Ms. Stevens’s decision.

Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, said that he had been “blindsided” by Ms. Stevens’s decision, and that she had told him in a phone call around 10 p.m. on Saturday night that she was still behind Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

Mr. Raskin recalled in an interview that he had pressed Ms. Stevens. “I just want to be very clear about that: You’re supporting the whole ticket, including Abdul?” he recalled asking her. “And she said yes.”

Addressing reporters after the service, Ms. Stevens said that she “woke up this morning and I decided to go to church and I am here with the person that I am voting for, for United States Senate. And that is Mike Rogers.”

Dr. El-Sayed attended the service without Ms. Stevens at Greater Emanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ on Sunday morning. Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan and Senator Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland also attended, and Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, introduced Dr. El-Sayed at the event.

Ms. Stevens had strong support from Black voters in Detroit during the primary, and Dr. El-Sayed has worked to gain their support during the general election. Mr. Rogers has also campaigned heavily in Detroit.

Early this month, Ms. Stevens expressed confidence that Black voters would support Dr. El-Sayed over Mr. Rogers, telling CNN that Black voters “know that our Republican nominee, he’s certainly not going to lift a finger for Social Security and Medicare, and, you know, a host of issues that are on the ballot.”

On Wednesday, however, Ms. Stevens suggested in another CNN interview that Black voters were wavering on whether to support Dr. El-Sayed, an Egyptian American who has struggled to bridge tensions between Black and Arab American voters in the Detroit area.

“I’m hearing from Black voters, and I still want the Democratic Party to have these coalitions in it,” Ms. Stevens told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. She called on Dr. El-Sayed to “make people who are in my coalition feel comfortable coming to the polls.”

Ms. Stevens and Mr. Rogers sat together in the second pew at Perfecting Church, a prominent Black church in Detroit, on Sunday morning. Mr. Rogers’s wife and Jason Turkish, Ms. Stevens’s fiancé, also attended. Mr. Turkish has endorsed Mr. Rogers.

He’ll stand with them

Paxton only looks at his ambition

The hero of this corrido, a traditional Mexican narrative ballad, was James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas. The song was an ad commissioned by Lone Star Rising, a super PAC backing Mr. Talarico, and it was performed by Latin Grammy winner Salvador “Chava” Chavez.

In the race for Senate, Texas culture has become its own battleground.

From cowboy boots to a “Friday Night Lights”-inspired bus tour and an appearance at a Kacey Musgraves concert, Mr. Talarico has embraced familiar Texas touchstones on the campaign trail. His Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, has drawn on the oil industry, conservative values and cowboy mythology.

Mr. Paxton has leaned heavily on traditional imagery of Texas.

One advertisement celebrates the state’s oil and beef industries, accompanied by images of pump jacks and cowboys on horseback. Other ads have attacked Mr. Talarico over his past comments about reducing meat consumption and his positions on gender identity, presenting him as a candidate whose values are fundamentally at odds with those of Texas.

The cultural shorthand is clear. Mr. Paxton’s Texas is a place of oil fields, cattle ranches and traditional values, a state whose identity is something to be defended against change.

Both he and Mr. Talarico are making a case not just for how Texas should be governed, but for what it means to be Texan.

“James Talarico belongs in California, not Texas,” Mr. Paxton wrote on X earlier this month, echoing attacks on the campaign trail that have cast the eighth-generation Texan as out of step with his home state.

But it was Mr. Paxton who spent part of his childhood in California, where his father was stationed with the United States Air Force, a point that Mr. Talarico has seized upon.

“I believe anyone can be a Texan,” Mr. Talarico said at an October rally in Plano. “It doesn’t matter if you’re an eighth-generation Texan like me, or a California transplant like Ken Paxton.”

He added, “What makes a Texan is not in the boots or in the truck; it is deep in the heart.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Talarico has made a point of flexing his Texas bona fides: He is rarely seen without his Lucchese cowboy boots and drives a Chevrolet Colorado pickup with a bumper sticker that says “Less Honkin’ More Tonkin.’”

His campaign tour, “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts” is a reference to the beloved TV series “Friday Night Lights,” which immortalized small-town Texas football. And after a nearly 10-day absence last month that he attributed to the flu, he made his first public reappearance at Austin City Limits, the city’s signature music festival.

“Texas is a very proud state,” said Sharon Jarvis, a political communication researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. “You can see just how proud they are, how important these symbols are, and the rhetorical work that these symbols do.”

Earlier this year, during a surprise appearance with Barack Obama, Mr. Talarico’s seemingly innocuous taco order — potato, egg, and cheese — sent the internet into a tailspin. Mr. Talarico has also made appearances at a Whataburger, the state’s most loved fast-food chain.

Mr. Paxton’s supporters, meanwhile, have drawn upon a different set of cultural references, invoking the Alamo and the state’s frontier mythology to challenge Mr. Talarico’s Texas credentials.

At one October rally, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick recited lyrics from a Marty Robbins song about the Alamo, summoning one of the state’s most enduring symbols of sacrifice and independence. Mayes Middleton, a Republican state senator, took aim at Mr. Talarico’s cowboy boots, accused him of wearing a zip-up pair. They were not.

In Texas, where the distinctions between Wranglers and Levi’s jeans, or the amount of dirt on one’s boots (Mr. Paxton also wears Luccheses), function as subtle cues of cultural legitimacy, even the smallest decisions can become politically fraught.

Take “The Great Tamale Incident.”

In 1976, President Gerald Ford, campaigning for re-election, stopped at the Alamo in San Antonio, where he was offered a plate of tamales. He proceeded to bite into it without removing the corn husk, a culinary faux pas that would come to haunt him.

Mr. Talarico, by contrast, has sought to make room for a more expansive definition of Texas identity.

“We’re this big mash-up of all these different people, all these different cultures, all these different friends,” he said during his stump speech in Plano earlier this month. “Think about Tejano music. If you’re listening to a Selena song, you’re hearing Spanish vocal styles from Northern Mexico, but you’re also hearing polka dance rhythms from Czech and German immigrants.”

In a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in nearly four decades, these cultural touchstones may serve yet another function: to make the prospect of Democratic representation feel a little more familiar.

Jesus Jiménez and Lauren McGaughy contributed reporting.

Mr. Bisignano, who also serves as the chief executive of the I.R.S., signed his name on a similar email sent out by the I.R.S. on Thursday, copies of which were also reviewed by The Times.

“Last year, President Donald J. Trump signed into law the Working Families Tax Cuts, landmark legislation that ushered in a new era of tax relief and prevented the largest tax increase in American history from taking effect,” Mr. Bisignano wrote in the other email, continuing, “Hardworking Americans like you are keeping more of what they earn because of President Trump’s historic tax cuts.”

The I.R.S. email says that it is “for informational purposes and does not constitute a communication about a taxpayer’s specific situation,” adding that the I.R.S. “does not generally send e-mails to taxpayers.”

Several legal experts said the emails’ praise of Mr. Trump, coupled with their timing just days before a pivotal election, potentially violated the Hatch Act, an 87-year-old law meant to prevent employees of the executive branch from using their positions to influence the results of partisan elections.

Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said the emails seemed to function as “propaganda” rather than as public service announcements providing practical information.

“They’re doing it just before the election to persuade people that President Trump is doing a good job,” Richard W. Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, said in a phone interview on Saturday, adding that he thought the emails were inappropriate.

Ms. Clark said the messages were reminiscent of a television ad campaign by the Trump administration this fall that promoted his presidency. Some experts said the campaign could have violated the Hatch Act and additional statutory prohibitions on the use of appropriated funds for publicity or propaganda.

The Social Security Administration and the I.R.S. did not respond to requests for comment.

There have been similar attempts to fool the electorate with same-name candidates under other election systems in Alaska and elsewhere.

“I mean, there it is,” said Judy Eledge, a longtime conservative activist in Alaska and chairwoman of the campaign for Ballot Measure 2, the effort to repeal Alaska’s current electoral system that voters will decide next week alongside the race for U.S. Senate. “They’ve done our work for us.”

A similar referendum two years ago lost by 737 votes. Backers of the system still say it encourages bipartisanship and gives voters an extra layer of protection against dirty tricks and bogus candidates by offering multiple choices.

“This situation is actually an object lesson in why you need ranked choice voting: You can’t have a spoiler when voters have multiple options,” said Joelle Hall, a longtime labor leader working against Ballot Measure 2.

But that argument got much more difficult to make after The New York Times reported a successful effort by Democrats to recruit a candidate named Dan Sullivan to appear on the ballot alongside Senator Dan Sullivan, the incumbent Republican whom Ms. Peltola, a former Democratic House member, hopes to defeat.

Besides Ms. Peltola and the two Sullivans, another name is on the ballot, Gerald Heikes, a conservative Republican and frequent candidate who said he too was recruited to run for the Senate by an outsider. A liberal political action committee is promoting Mr. Heikes in hopes of siphoning still more votes from the incumbent.

So two of the four choices may be on the ballot because of skulduggery.

Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy, a conservative Republican leaving office in December, told Fox News this week that “we wouldn’t be having this conversation if we didn’t have ranked choice voting.”

Under current law, candidates for state and federal office in Alaska compete in one open, nonpartisan primary, with the top four advancing to November. Voters rank them in order of preference. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place finisher is eliminated and those votes are redistributed according to voters’ next choices. The process repeats until someone wins a majority of the remaining votes.

Ballot Measure 2 would return Alaska to primaries open only to voters registered to a particular party. That would be followed by a traditional general election where voters choose just one candidate. The initiative would also repeal campaign-finance disclosure requirements adopted with the current system. Proponents of the current system have made the loss of that transparency the heart of their argument to voters.

Even before the controversy over the two Dan Sullivans, the ballot measure was emerging as a proxy fight in a broader national battle over how America votes. Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, and Jeff Yass, a billionaire, donated heavily to the repeal effort, while Michael Bloomberg, Marc Merrill and Kathryn Murdoch, themselves deep-pocketed donors, backed the campaign to keep the system.

The Times investigation has put proponents for the ranked-choice system in the awkward position of arguing that this kind of attempt to mislead could happen under any voting system because it’s comparatively easy for people to file to run in Alaska.

“This has nothing to do with ranked-choice voting,” said Scott Kendall, an Anchorage lawyer who designed the system. “It’s just a dirty trick.”

Ms. Peltola’s effort to unseat Senator Sullivan is critical to Democratic hopes of retaking the chamber. In response to the allegations of chicanery, Vice President JD Vance told reporters Thursday, “It seems to me that you have an election, the person who wins the most votes should win.”

President Trump said on a Kansas City radio broadcast, “You need about a 190 I.Q.” to understand the system,” though each ballot has fairly simple instructions and the state elections division, overseen by a Republican lieutenant governor, took pains to differentiate the candidates: Dan S. Sullivan is identified on the ballot as the incumbent and a registered Republican, while Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. has no identification next to his name.

Proponents of ranked-choice voting say it just gives voters more than one chance to decide who they support — and a simple solution, supporters note, to any confusion about which Dan is which: Rank them both.

Alaskans who rank Daniel J. Sullivan or Mr. Heikes first could still help Senator Dan S. Sullivan win, provided they also rank him ahead of Ms. Peltola. Only if they rank Ms. Peltola higher, or leave the incumbent off their ballots entirely, could the maneuver deprive him of votes he might otherwise receive.

Alaska Republicans have a history of refusing to rank their choices, and the senator’s latest radio ad features a catchy jingle encouraging people to rank “Dan S., Daniel, Gerry, just don’t rank Mary.”

“Republicans can be very stubborn,” Ms. Eledge said. “Some of them don’t like the system, so they don’t use it.”

That approach could be even more consequential in the race for governor, also on this year’s ballot.

A Democrat hasn’t won the job since 1998, but Democratic candidates finished first and second in the top-four August primary, which featured 17 candidates — 12 of them Republicans.

The second-place Democrat dropped out to clear a path for the other, a former state legislator, Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins. The top Republican finisher, Bernadette Wilson, urged the other two Republicans on the November ballot to do the same, but they refused. Earlier this month, President Trump backed Ms. Wilson and called on the other two Republicans to leave the race.

It all has some conservatives worried their voters will ignore repeated party instructions to “rank the red” and instead list only one candidate.

A similar approach helped Ms. Peltola defeat two Republicans, Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III, in a 2022 U.S. House race. The combined first-choice vote share for the two Republicans exceeded Ms. Peltola’s. But about a fifth of Mr. Begich’s voters only ranked him. When he fell out of the race, Ms. Peltola expanded her lead to win.

Polls have shown Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins leading the governors race, and he has promised to build a politically balanced cabinet and work closely with Republicans and independents in the legislature, which has been governed by a bipartisan coalition.

Proponents of the current system say its repeal could make such cooperation more difficult, by bringing back partisan primaries, which favor the extremes in both parties and gives Republican and Democratic leaders far more power to keep members focused on the party line.

That’s exactly what Ms. Eledge and other opponents of the current system want.

She’s eager, for example, to punish Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, for her recent cross-party endorsement of Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins.

If Ballot Measure 2 passes, Ms. Eledge predicted, “she won’t run again.”

She added, “she knows she wouldn’t make it out of the primary.”

Of course, Ms. Murkowski could do what she did in 2010 when she lost the Republican primary to a hard-line conservative: launch a successful write-in campaign, without ranked-choice.

That vision could still come to at least partial fruition if Proposition 40 passes. But the path through California to a federal wealth tax, a progressive dream for years, now looks like it could be a circuitous one, if not a dead end.

Polls have shown limited support for Proposition 40, which would charge a one-time, 5 percent tax on the wealth of Californians worth more than $1.1 billion. Some recent surveys suggest the ballot measure may even fail. Billionaires have blanketed California’s airwaves with ads claiming that the tax could expand to apply to everyone.

Democrats and labor unions, meanwhile, are divided over the tax. Groups representing teachers, doctors and firefighters warn that Proposition 40 could wind up harming the state budget in the long run if it drives entrepreneurs away from California. Many Democrats across the country have kept their distance from the proposal, as they assess its popularity and the potential problems with a federal version of a wealth tax.

However the Nov. 3 vote turns out, the proponents and opponents of the billionaire tax agree that its importance goes well beyond California. At stake is a potential revolution in U.S. taxation. The once-radical concept of taxing wealth may soon gain a foothold in the nation’s most populous state. Or it may be dealt a surprising setback in a popular vote, puncturing the hope that such a policy would draw broad support.

“The whole country is watching what you are doing here,” Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, told a crowd of supporters in California last month.

For decades, the United States has relied on taxes on income — largely the wages people earn working — to fund federal and state governments. Money made on stocks, bonds and other holdings is generally only taxed when the assets are sold, and the paper gains become cash income. But as the nation’s richest people have seen the value of their financial portfolios soar, progressive policymakers have sought to tax their assets before they are sold, by creating a wealth tax.

During the last competitive Democratic presidential primary, in 2020, progressive candidates such as Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, made wealth taxes a central part of their platforms. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. eventually endorsed a plan, called the billionaire minimum income tax, that would have taxed unrealized gains, a form of wealth taxation. Donors to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign pushed her to drop the Biden plan once she took over the Democratic ticket in 2024.

Passage of Proposition 40 in California, especially by a healthy margin, could make the idea of a wealth tax more palatable to Democrats who run in the party’s next presidential primary. Some progressive candidates are likely to adopt a wealth tax as part of their platform in any case. But a strong showing for the idea in California could convince others to put a version of the idea on their agendas.

A loss or even a narrow victory could have the opposite effect. An internal document from a group opposing the tax said it seeks to “chill wealth tax efforts nationally” by defeating Proposition 40, according to previous reporting by The New York Times.

Some potential Democratic presidential candidates have already taken a stance on Proposition 40, including Representative Ro Khanna of California, who has campaigned in favor of the tax, and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who has opposed it. Mr. Newsom has said he supports raising other taxes on billionaires at the federal level.

“If Prop. 40 goes down in California, I think it’s going to make, not all of the candidates, but it’s going to make a few of the 2028 candidates rethink how they slot that into their presidential policy agenda,” said Zach Moller, the senior director of the economic program at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “If it goes the other way, maybe that makes it seem like it’s a better idea.”

A wealth tax would be a fundamental change in the tax system, raising complicated questions for tax collectors. That includes how to value holdings, like privately owned businesses, that may not have an existing price. Even for billionaires who derive their wealth from the publicly traded stocks of companies they founded, collecting the tax could be complicated if they do not have enough cash to pay it without selling many of their holdings.

The economists and tax lawyers who crafted the California billionaire tax believe that their design has resolved those issues, creating a blueprint for federal and other state policymakers.

“If California enacts a wealth tax, it will begin raising substantial revenues by 2027, and by 2028 we will have actual numbers and data and experience,” said David Gamage, a tax law professor at the University of Missouri who helped draft the tax. “And it will be a lot harder for the opposition to make all these absurd claims, because there will be real experience on the ground we can look to.”

But there are several key differences between the California billionaire tax and what a federal wealth tax could look like. Proposition 40 is a one-time tax, while a federal version would likely be an annual levy. Then there is the fact that much of the revenue from the California billionaire tax would be dedicated to backfilling cuts to the state’s Medicaid program, a consequence of a law President Trump signed last year.

Funneling the receipts from the billionaire tax toward a specific purpose, rather than feeding them into the overall budget like a federal wealth tax likely would, has fractured the idea’s support in California. Some unions have objected to the fact that the tax would not help with the state’s other funding needs. And the head of the health care workers union that sponsored the ballot initiative, Dave Regan, is a polarizing figure in California politics.

As a result, some progressives in Washington appear to be hedging their bets about the outcome of the referendum. Opponents of the tax have also put other initiatives on the ballot that could cancel out Proposition 40 even if it passes, further scrambling the potential meaning of the results next week.

“The unique nature of this tax design, the unique nature of California—I don’t know how much people in other states or at the federal level will glean from the outcome here, either for good or bad,” said Bharat Ramamurti, who worked in Mr. Biden’s White House and is a former aide to Ms. Warren.

The California plan and a potential federal wealth tax also differ in how easy they would be to avoid — and how susceptible they are to legal challenges.

State-level taxes are comparatively easy to escape by moving to another state, while a federal wealth tax could apply to U.S. citizens even if they leave the United States. Several high-profile billionaires, including the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, took steps to leave California before the tax’s residency deadline at the start of the year. Those departures could reduce the revenue collected by the tax, as well as leave California without the income taxes that the departed billionaires would have paid the state over time.

Josh Rauh, an economist at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, has estimated that the billionaire tax could end up costing California more money than it generates. Mr. Rauh, who opposes Proposition 40, said in an interview that he thinks the flight of billionaires, as well as the possible legal challenges to the tax, would ultimately set a bad precedent for wealth taxation, if it passes.

“I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as proponents might think to put in a wealth tax and collect the wealth,” he said.

A federal wealth tax, while not facing the same challenge of potential tax flight, would come with an arguably more serious risk of legal challenges. Progressives and other liberal tax experts worry that the current, conservative-led Supreme Court would rule that a federal wealth tax is an unconstitutional “direct tax.” Those concerns have only grown more acute after several Biden initiatives, including the cancellation of student debt, were thrown out by the Supreme Court. Some, like Mr. Gamage, still believe a wealth tax would be constitutional.

Whether it’s through a wealth tax or another mechanism, Democrats in California and on the presidential campaign trail will keep trying to raise taxes on the rich. Lorena Gonzalez, who leads the California Federation of Labor Unions, said the campaign in California had brought attention to the concentration of wealth and power among billionaires, setting the stage for more proposals to address the stratification of the economy.

“I mean, shoot, put a bigger tax on yachts,” she said. “The point is: Should we tax billionaires? Should we do some massive taxes on billionaires to unrig the economy? Ultimately that’s not going to stop with this vote.”

A funny thing happened, though, as Mr. Sununu took questions about health care, housing and transportation policy from Chamber of Commerce types as they picked at caprese sandwiches. Ms. Smith found herself impressed as Mr. Sununu wove facts and experience into his answers, lifting the energy of the room.

“He’s very substantial,” she said.

But before Mr. Sununu left the function room at the Atlantic Grill in Rye, N.H., Ms. Smith, an independent voter, told him she still couldn’t vote for him.

“Because of Trump, I can’t,” she said. “I told him I can’t take the risk.”

Mr. Sununu, 62, has turned his comeback Senate campaign into a test of a tricky premise: that in 2026, it is possible to be both a Republican and independent of President Trump. Selling this idea is critical for any hope of success in a purple state that has never really warmed to the president. And as he trails Representative Chris Pappas, a Democrat, in the polls, he’s running out of time to convince the Debra Smiths of the world to buy it, particularly in a race that is considered critical to determining the balance of power in the Senate.

He is trying. He once wrote an opinion essay that carried the headline “Trump is a loser.” He has insisted in a television ad that he has never even met the president. He rattles off a laundry list of their policy differences to anyone who will listen. And, perhaps more than any other Republican running for Senate right now, he has asked voters to do something that strains the American political imagination: Consider what happens after Mr. Trump.

“In two years, the president will leave office,” he said on a debate stage last month. “And my question is, where do we go next?”

The unsaid part of his bet is that, deep down, voters want a political future that looks like the past.

A New Hampshire dynasty

New Hampshire Republicans have lost every race for the House and the Senate since the dawn of the Trump era, often by quite a lot, even as they have won office at the state level. But the party saw a ray of hope in the Sununu name, which is synonymous with the flinty, establishment Republicanism that used to be a lot more common in New England. Mr. Sununu’s father, John H. Sununu, served as governor for three two-year terms in the 1980s before serving as chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush.

National Republicans had tried unsuccessfully to convince Chris Sununu, Mr. Sununu’s charismatic younger brother and a former governor, to run for the Senate in 2022 against the incumbent Democrat, Maggie Hassan. By early 2025, they were seeking to lure John E. Sununu into the 2026 race. But when Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the longtime Democratic incumbent, announced she would retire, Chris Sununu coyly hinted he might run for the Senate after all. A person familiar with the recruiting efforts said that national Republicans checked in to gauge how serious he was — nobody wanted two Sununus on the ballot, after all — but Chris ultimately demurred.

Today, the campaign signs dotting the state’s landscape read, simply, “Sununu Senator,” without specifying which one is actually running. Democrats have conducted private polling to see if voters know which family member is on the ballot. They say confusion abounds.

One reporter’s text message meant for John E. Sununu recently made it, instead, to his father.

“You have reached the old ancient former Gov. of New Hampshire,” came the reply, which concluded, “not the young dynamic Sen.”

The current candidate says there is no confusion. “Voters absolutely know who I am,” he said.

Mr. Sununu first ran for Congress 30 years ago and held the seat currently occupied by Mr. Pappas for three terms. He won his Senate seat in 2002, in a strong year for Republicans in the wake of Sept. 11, and lost it to Ms. Shaheen in the wave that accompanied the election of Barack Obama in 2008. (He then pursued a lucrative career working at a lobbying firm and sitting on corporate boards.)

On the campaign trail, he tells war stories from another era. He can be trusted to stand up to Mr. Trump, he says, because he stood up to President George W. Bush, insisting that the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, include more protections for civil liberties. He can be trusted to be bipartisan, he says, because he cosponsored legislation with Hillary Clinton. He was the first Republican to call for the firing of Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general for Mr. Bush. (Mr. Gonzales resigned in 2007 after a standoff with congressional critics over the Justice Department’s handling of terrorism investigations and the firing of U.S. attorneys.)

“I think all of those things reinforce a reputation for independence and for directness and honesty,” he said in an interview.

And did his family name help?

“Sure,” he said, quickly changing the subject to how, in 2024, he endorsed former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina for president over Mr. Trump.

Endorsed by the president

In February, Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Sununu, saying he would work “tirelessly to advance our America first agenda.”

It was a signal to the party to ignore Mr. Sununu’s primary opponent, another former Republican senator named Scott Brown. But it gave Mr. Pappas his biggest attack line: that, for all his claims of independence, Mr. Sununu is as beholden to Mr. Trump as anyone in a Republican Party that has shown total fealty to the president. Mr. Pappas has also depicted him as squishy on Mr. Trump, saying that Mr. Sununu’s opposition to the war in Iran, for instance, has bloomed only alongside its unpopularity.

Mr. Sununu has tried to keep his focus on his state.

“My focus has been on New Hampshire, on the economy, jobs, affordability, and that message has resonated, and that’s why this is a race that a year ago people didn’t think would be competitive,” Mr. Sununu said.

A New York Times/Siena University poll released in late September found Mr. Pappas with a five-point lead — a sign that Mr. Sununu is running significantly more competitively than the state’s last two Republican Senate nominees. One of them, Corky Messner, lost to Ms. Shaheen by nearly 16 percentage points in 2020; the other, Don Bolduc, lost to Senator Maggie Hassan by 9 points. (In a twist, Mr. Bolduc has endorsed Mr. Pappas.)

In that poll, Mr. Sununu’s favorability rating was slightly higher than Mr. Pappas’s, at 45 percent to 43 percent. And 48 percent of voters said Mr. Sununu would better handle issues related to the cost of living; 46 percent said that about Mr. Pappas.

But 60 percent of voters disapproved of Mr. Trump, and 54 percent said they wanted a candidate who would provide a check on him.

‘Existential threat’

As he spoke to the Seacoast Chamber Alliance late last month, Mr. Sununu seemed, at times, to be inhabiting a kind of Brigadoon where there was no President Trump.

He called for term limits in Congress, lamented the unbalanced state of the federal budget and eagerly parried questions about Social Security, going deep into the weeds.

Mr. Pappas had addressed the group first. When he finished, Jimmy Dykes, an independent voter from the coastal town of Hampton, asked why the congressman had not been more visible in that community. But Mr. Dykes said he was planning to vote for Mr. Pappas, anyway.

He associated Mr. Sununu with the wars that began during his tenure in Congress, those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and said he simply couldn’t trust him to deal with Mr. Trump, who he believes is an “existential threat.”

Mr. Dykes was, however, considering voting for Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican who has also stayed well away from Mr. Trump. She used to have the job Mr. Sununu wants but narrowly lost re-election to the Senate the night Mr. Trump was elected in 2016. Now, she appears to be cruising to re-election as governor — becoming one of her party’s bright spots in a difficult year.

Mr. Sununu, for his part, declined to say what he thought the Republican Party should look like after Mr. Trump is gone. But does he want to help shape it?

“Absolutely.”

Bayliss Wagner contributed reporting.

Advertisers, following the changing viewing habits of Americans, have increasingly shifted their marketing dollars to social platforms, streaming channels and other digital media. Yet when it comes to federal and state races, politicians and PACs are brushing aside concerns that TV ads are costlier to produce and less efficient in targeting prospective voters — and are showering local stations with billions of dollars.

This election will show how much that calculus still holds in a transformed media environment.

“I think the Democrats and Republicans are both spending a disproportionate amount of their budgets on broadcast TV at this point,” said Danielle Butterfield, a Democratic strategist and the executive director of Priorities USA. “Because you can see so clearly what’s happening on the other side, there’s this muscle memory needing to chase and match.”

Political consultants and television executives argue that while broadcast TV may not be what it once was, those ads can reach a larger swath of the population more quickly than through other media. And that audience watching their nightly news programs, not to mention their favorite sitcoms, dramas and football games, is a devoted one.

“Local anchors and reporters are trusted, familiar voices,” said Gregg Siegel, senior vice president of national sales at Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the country’s largest owners of local TV stations. “They don’t just cover the communities they serve. They live there, raise their families there and are part of the fabric of those communities. That connection creates a level of credibility that is difficult to replicate on other platforms.”

The amount of money being spent on political advertising this election cycle is staggering, helping to boost the bottom lines of the biggest local broadcasting companies like Sinclair, Nexstar Media Group, Gray Media, Tegna and the E.W. Scripps Company.

The research firm S&P Global projects broadcast television advertising this year to be 15 percent higher than the last nonpresidential election year in 2022. And political ad revenue alone is expected to account for 16.3 percent of total broadcast revenue for the year, which would be a record for a nonpresidential election year.

During this election cycle, total political advertising is expected to reach $11.6 billion by Election Day, according to AdImpact; $5.6 billion (48 percent) is flowing to broadcast. That dollar figure is even higher than the one during the 2024 presidential race, when $5.3 billion was spent on broadcast advertising, still 48 percent of the total.

That growth is an outlier in the overall advertising market, where TV’s share continues to shrink as do the overall dollars. In 2024, for example, TV made up 15 percent of all ad spending in the United States, according to the research firm eMarketer. This year, projections envision that figure to be 10 percent.

Nowhere is the broadcast TV blitz more evident than in Texas, where more than half a billion dollars will be spent in the Senate runoff, primaries and general election campaigns.

Oscar Rodriguez, the president of the Texas Association of Broadcasters, said stations in all 20 media markets across the state were seeing ad buys, rather than just a few individual markets. “This is an election where clearly every single vote is going to matter,” he said.

In the tight Senate race between Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate, and James Talarico, his Democratic opponent, $220 million had been spent on broadcast ads through Oct. 28, more than half of the total spending, according to AdImpact. The Paxton campaign and its Republican allies account for most of the broadcast TV outlays, and much of that has been supported by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man with deep business ties to Texas.

Nick Maddux, a senior adviser to Mr. Paxton, said that it was most efficient for the campaign to spend money on linear television because of federal rules that ensure candidates (and at least for now, political parties and joint fund-raising committees) get low-cost TV ad rates.

The campaign’s statewide ad onslaught in October resulted in some ad breaks airing three Paxton spots for every one Talarico ad.

“You go big and fast,” Mr. Maddux said.

Luke Warford, a Democratic political consultant in Texas and chairman of the Travis County Democratic Party, said the Talarico campaign had focused more on building Mr. Talarico’s brand on social media. But the campaign and its Democratic allies have still spent heftily on broadcast TV, devoting 45 percent of their budgets to the medium through Oct. 28, according to AdImpact. (Republicans are at 60 percent.)

Advertising on television can be a blunt force approach to reaching prospective voters, particularly in House races where viewers are often bombarded with ads for candidates in districts not their own. Danilo Yanich, a University of Delaware professor who runs the school’s Local Television News Project, said that’s a trade-off campaigns and PACs will take. “They’ll tolerate those inefficiencies because they’re not sure which voters they will not reach if they try to do those directed kinds of advertising campaigns.”

“Local television viewers are very serious voters,” he added.

And the people who watch broadcast television are often those who vote.

“The kinds of people who tend to be very likely to vote in midterm elections tend to lean older,” Joshua Kalla, a professor of political science at Yale, said. “And those people still watch a whole bunch of broadcast TV.”

There’s another incentive driving this advertising strategy: money. Consultants and media buying firms typically take up to a 15 percent commission on their ad buys, which, given some of the multimillion dollar spends, can quickly add up.

Aaron Evans, a Republican campaign consultant, said that while broadcast had historically “been the beast that moves the numbers,” it was getting less effective every election cycle.

“The thing that is making that industry really outlast its effectiveness is the fact it’s been a cash cow for these consulting firms for decades,” he said.

Some political operatives bemoan what they see as an outdated approach to advertising. During this year’s primaries, several candidates who were vastly outspent on TV ads still prevailed, including Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who triumphed over his Democratic rival, Haley Stevens, in Michigan.

Ms. Butterfield, the Democratic strategist, pointed to internal research from Priorities USA that found that 83 percent of registered voters reported in using YouTube and 82 percent used streaming services in a single week in September, while just 61 percent said they watched linear TV. She said that ads on digital platforms, which were much cheaper than TV ads, could see a higher reach and have a more targeted impact.

“The biggest difference between a broadcast television strategy and a digital strategy is how much the campaign actually uses the internet to not just broadcast and shout at a voter, but understand where that voter is, what they care about,” she said.

Mr. Warford, the Democratic political consultant, said Tuesday’s vote would help answer a question about the broadcast television-heavy ad strategy in support of Mr. Paxton. “Is there an amount of money that can save an incredibly weak candidate in a tough environment at the end?”

Voters generally cannot track their ballots in the mail, Mr. Scott said, but his office notifies voters when it receives their ballots. For ballots to be counted in Florida, they must be received by 7 p.m. on Election Day.

“People are asking, ‘Why is it taking so long for my ballot to get back?’” Mr. Scott said in a phone interview on Saturday. “At this point, even if the mail was running normal — which it’s not — it’s way too late to put your ballot in the mail.”

Mr. Scott added that the problem was likely more serious than what voters have told his office. “For every person that’s saying this,” Mr. Scott said, “there are 50 or 100 who aren’t.”

Mr. Scott, an elected Democrat, said he started growing concerned about the Postal Service’s handling of mail ballots in Broward County late last month, when the bulk of mail ballots were sent out to voters there who requested them. The county, home to about 1.1 million active voters, is often a swing county in Florida — including, famously, during the 2000 presidential election.

“I started getting calls from community leaders saying everyone got ballots except people in Hallandale Beach,” Mr. Scott said, referring to a city in southern Broward County that has more than 25,000 eligible voters. “When I looked it up, they were right.”

Mr. Scott said that he then alerted a Postal Service liaison, who said the agency would look into the problem, but that nothing more came of it. He said a vast majority of mail ballots for the city were subject to significant delivery delays.

“The Postal Service is dramatically degraded from what it used to be,” Mr. Scott said. “It is different. It is worse.”

The Postal Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.