• 3 days to go : President Donald Trump won’t hold in-person campaign events today, instead planning telerallies to try to reach more voters. While he reinstated events in Iowa and Kansas on Sunday, he complained yesterday that his voice was wearing down and he wasn’t sure more rallies would help.
• Michigan divisions : Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign has asked primary rival Haley Stevens to stay away from his remaining events, a source tells CNN. That calls into question a previously expected joint appearance Sunday in Detroit.
• What happens in Alaska: Ranked-choice voting and mail-in balloting across the state means a critical Senate race could take weeks to resolve. Now, ramped-up federal and state investigations into Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign could create new complications.
CNN’s Decision Desk delivers projections behind Election Night in America. Jennifer Agiesta takes you behind the scenes of the desk ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
CNN's Jennifer Agiesta takes you behind the scenes of CNN's Decision Desk ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign has asked his former primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, to skip all campaign events in the race’s closing days, a person familiar with the matter said.
That means a planned Sunday show of unity — with the two appearing at a Detroit church with South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn — is now likely to exclude Stevens. It would have been her first time appearing alongside El-Sayed since their heated August primary.
Politico first reported that the El-Sayed campaign had asked the congresswoman to stay away from events. Stevens did not immediately respond to a request for comment about her plans.
Criticism: State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who also ran in the Senate primary but dropped out four weeks before the election, was sharply critical of Stevens , casting her actions as disruptive to Democrats’ chances of defeating Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers and retaining a Senate seat that is crucial to the battle for majority control of the chamber next Tuesday.
GOP rival tries to court Democrats: Meanwhile, Rogers on Friday accused El-Sayed of “vile racism and antisemitism” and said Democrats who backed Stevens have “a home with us.”
President Donald Trump rallied supporters in Daytona Beach, Florida yesterday evening, just days before the midterm election. It was his second rally in the state in a week, after appearing in Fort Myers last Friday.
Florida has trended very Republican in the Trump era. A New York Times/Siena poll released earlier this week showed that the Senate race in the state is not nearly as competitive as in some red states with margin-of-error races.
Catch up on what he said at the rally:
‘Does it matter?’: Further explaining why the rallies in Iowa and Kansas were canceled and then restored to his schedule, Trump said he had questioned whether his presence would even matter.
Alaska Senate race: While Trump said Attorney General Todd Blanche would make his own decision about whether Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola should be prosecuted, the president made his own wishes very clear. He was alluding to the criminal probe into whether Alaska Democrats sought to confuse voters by recruiting a candidate intended to siphon votes from Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan.
Warning to GOP: Trump urged Florida Republicans to play from behind, warning them not to get too confident ahead of Tuesday.
CNN’s Julia Benbrook, Kit Maher and Aleena Fayaz contributed reporting.
President Donald Trump will hold rallies tomorrow in Kansas and Iowa, he announced Friday, just hours after the White House said he was scrapping the events and opting for a slew of virtual engagements instead.
Trump has insisted he got calls from people in both Iowa and Kansas urging him to reinstate the in-person rallies.
“They said, ‘If you could go it would be better than a telerally.’ And I tried to talk them out of that and I said, ‘What about a telerally?’ But they asked me,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, just before departing for a campaign event in Daytona, Florida.
“So I’m going to do two on Sunday,” he added. “And I was a little bit concerned about Saturday because college football. It’s Iowa, Kansas.”
How we got here: Trump originally had a rally in Salina, Kansas, planned for Saturday and another in Dubuque, Iowa, on Sunday.
Those were shifted to telerallies on Thursday, in a confounding last-minute strategy shift that was covered critically in the media, leading to Trump becoming irritated at how the cancellations were being received. The rallies were subsequently revived Friday morning.
The president insisted Friday that the telerallies are a successful medium for him, saying he’s “unbelievable” and “it only seems to work for me.”
Trump still plans to stump for several candidates via telerally, and said Friday that he’d call into quite a few of them the day before the election.
