Polls in Florida have begun to close as we await results in three primary elections tonight. Polls in Wyoming will remain open until 7pm local time (9pm ET), and polls in Alaska will remain open until 8pm local time.
We’ll bring you the results in Florida’s governor and Senate races as the Associated Press calls them.
Pia Dandiya has won the Democratic nomination for Florida’s 22nd congressional district. Her race, like many others in Florida, was affected by the state’s efforts to gerrymander its districts earlier this year.
As my colleague Richard Luscombe reported from Florida this month: Dandiya, a professional educator dipping her toe for the first time into the often tenebrous world of electoral politics, originally declared her candidacy for Florida’s 21st congressional district, where she was mounting a long-shot campaign to unseat the Republican congressman Brian Mast, an army veteran who bills himself as “Florida’s America first fighter”. But then Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida and Donald Trump loyalist, intervened. In the consequent Democratic shuffle of candidates, she switched to Florida’s newly configured 22nd - an open seat that Democrats see as one of their best opportunities to reclaim the House majority in November.
“Redistricting, to me, represents what people just hate about politics, that it seems like a solution in search of a problem instead of actually solving the problems that are keeping people up at night,” Dandiya said during a meeting over coffee in south Florida last month. “I would argue that most families are not staying up at night worried about the congressional lines across the state, but they are staying up at night wondering how they’re going to make ends meet, about whether we are handing our children a country, that we are leaving them in good hands.”
Debbie Wasserman Schultz has won the Democratic nomination in Florida’s 20th congressional district. Wasserman Schultz, 59, an 11-term congresswoman and former chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), has faced criticism from African American leaders over her decision to run as the sole white candidate in a majority-minority district where she is not a resident. This followed the creation of gerrymandered congressional maps by Florida Republicans that broke Wasserman Schultz’s current seat into five shards. She decided against running in the 22nd district, where she lives, and chose instead to compete in the deep blue 20th, which has been represented by Black Democrats for more than 30 years.
The Associated Press has begun calling results in Florida’s primary House races. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has won the Democratic nomination and Brent Andersen has won the Republican nomination in the 20th congressional district. Mike Beltran has won the Republican nomination for Florida’s 14th congressional district. Leela Gray is the Democratic nominee in the 13th congressional district. Rachel Grage won the Democratic nomination and John Rutherford won the Republican nomination in the fifth congressional district. Pia Dandiya is the Democratic nominee in Florida’s 22nd congressional district. LaShonda Holloway won the Democratic nomination in the fourth congressional district. Maria Elvira Salazar won the Republican nomination in the 27th district. James Pericola is the Democratic nominee for the 11th district.
The US Department of Justice has issued subpoenas as federal prosecutors in Alaska investigate whether Dan J Sullivan entered a Senate race there to take votes from the incumbent, also named Dan Sullivan, NBC News reports. My colleague Chris Stein has more on the tale of the two Dan Sullivans running against each other in Alaska’s primary today.
A federal judge in Texas has ruled that Biden-era restrictions on “ghost guns” are unconstitutional - after gun rights groups asked the court to reconsider the case on different grounds after the US supreme court upheld the restrictions last year. The US district judge Reed O’Connor, who was appointed by George W Bush, said the 2022 rule infringes on a person’s right to make or repair personal firearms. “Self-manufacture of firearms in America was common and indeed foundational to establishing our nation,” O’Connor wrote. The Biden-era regulation requires manufacturers of firearm parts, including “ghost guns”, to mark products with a serial number and conduct background checks on purchasers. Ghost gun products are typically bought online and may be quickly assembled at home, without the serial numbers ordinarily used to trace guns or background checks on purchasers required for other firearms.
An Illinois man allegedly impersonated doctors - and evidently referred to himself online as “$hotboy1” - is facing criminal charges that he secured unauthorized prescriptions for Ozempic and Mounjaro pharmaceutical drugs that facilitate weight loss and are taken by some for cosmetic rather than legitimate medical reasons. Rodney Greer purportedly launched the alleged scheme in early 2023, according to court filings from federal prosecutors and a US justice department news release issued on Monday. In exchange for obtaining the illicit prescriptions for what are known as GLP-1 medications, customers of Greer would pay him money, federal prosecutors in Manhattan contended. Greer, who allegedly also went by the name Christian Marchand, pleaded not guilty to the four-count indictment that accused him of wire fraud, healthcare fraud and aggravated identity theft. Greer’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a social media post, Donald Trump claimed Census Bureau records of non-citizen voting prove he won the 2020 election, despite evidence that non-citizen voting is extremely rare. Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed that he won the 2020 election and blamed practices such as mail-in voting, which he participates in, for his loss. “The Census Bureau has begun checking the Voter Records from 2020 against their Citizenship Records. On the first 128,000,000 Voters, the Census Bureau proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally! The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION! We must pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” Trump wrote on his social media platform today. The Guardian could not independently verify the Census Bureau page Trump cited, which claimed to be “a beginning analysis by the U.S. Census Bureau”. However, 24,000 non-citizen votes represents just 0.01875% of the 128 million votes the bureau has counted so far. Joe Biden won the popular vote in the 2020 election by more than 7 million votes. “There is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome,” according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, which published an explainer on non-citizen voting this summer, after Trump said thousands of non-citizens are registered to vote in the United States. In an article published this summer, Reuters found that “federal prosecutors have charged just 129 people under a federal ‘voting by aliens’ statute created by Congress in 1996.” More than two-thirds of those prosecutions were filed during Trump’s terms in office. “In none of the cases did prosecutors allege a coordinated effort to influence an election. And no defendant was accused of being paid to vote. Instead, many appear to stem from voter confusion, miscommunication with election officials or administrative errors,” Reuters reported.
North Korean state media has reported that the country will continue to exercise its “right to self-defense” and condemned the US and South Korea’s Ulchi Freedom Shield joint exercises. KCNA, the state news agency, wrote in Korean that “the already tense situation on the Korean Peninsula is once again reaching the ‘imminent threshold’ of war” and called the United States and South Korean militaries “warmongers”.
The Trump administration said on Tuesday it plans to rescind the “roadless rule” that has protected old growth forests in the US for 25 years, potentially opening up almost 45m acres of national forests to road construction, drilling and logging. Conservationists had feared the announcement was coming since last summer after Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, targeted a rule brought in by Bill Clinton’s administration, describing it as “overly restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development. On Tuesday the US Forest Service, an agency inside the Department of Agriculture, formally announced it had filed the proposal to rescind in its entirety the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule.
The man accused of attacking a woman and security guard at a New York City synagogue during Shabbat services Friday has been charged with hate crimes in Manhattan federal court, prosecutors said. Larry Montes, who is already facing state-level hate crime charges, allegedly struck a 63-year-old woman as security was trying to boot him from Central Synagogue. He allegedly spat at, and head-butted, a security team member and damaged synagogue property, authorities said. Montes is charged federally with two counts of committing hate crimes and one count of damage to religious property resulting in bodily injury, according to Manhattan federal prosecutors.
Democratic senator Jon Ossoff called Donald Trump a “draft-dodging, crook president” during a campaign appearance today, continuing a feud with the president that escalated this week. Ossoff is currently running for re-election to his Senate seat in Georgia, and his criticism of the president has received viral attention on social media. Appearing alongside Arizona senator Mark Kelly and former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords today, Ossoff added that Trump “has plunged our nation recklessly into a war he knows not how to end or to win, tried to imprison this man, who embodies American heroism”. On Sunday, during a campaign appearance in Atlanta, Ossoff similarly attacked Trump’s handling of the US-Israel war on Iran. “While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings,” Ossoff said. “He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the amir of Qatar.” Ossoff appears to have been referring to Natalie Harp, Trump’s executive assistant, who has drawn scrutiny on social media for her closeness to the US president. The White House quickly criticized Ossoff on Monday, with the president calling him “Pee Wee Herman” and White House communications director Steven Cheung writing on social media that Ossoff is “a radical, extremist Dumocrat”.
Brendan Carr, head of the Federal Communications Commission, defended the agency’s investigation into the Walt Disney Corporation and ABC during an interview with Reuters today. “Disney seems to be a little nervous about what the record’s showing,” Carr said, adding that he has made no final decisions on whether to begin the process of revoking Disney’s ABC licenses. “We haven’t made a decision about when we’re making a decision,” he said.
A Massachusetts woman who told police that she brought homemade firebombs to the US Capitol to kill Scott B