Abdul El-Sayed’s Michigan primary victory is the latest win for progressives challenging establishment-backed Democrats – as it happened

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It’s worth noting that Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan was the latest win for progressives across the country, many of whom challenged establishment-backed Democrats in key races across the country.

Last month, Democratic socialist Melat Kiros unseated the long-serving US representative Diana DeGette in Colorado’s primary elections.

And in New York, Brad Lander, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who were all backed by mayor Zohran Mamdani, also won races in the June congressional primaries. Lander won his race comfortably, defeating the two-term Democratic representative Dan Goldman. Valdez won against Antonio Reynoso – the handpicked successor of Nydia Velázquez. And Chevalier toppled Representative Adriano Espaillat, the powerful five-term incumbent who chairs the congressional Hispanic caucus.

Despite progressive nominee Cori Bush’s loss in Missouri against pro-Israel incumbent Wesley Bell on Tuesday, Michigan insurgents in two key House races also claimed wins.

This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

• \n Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public-health official, won the Democratic nomination for the US Senate seat in Michigan, narrowly defeating Haley Stevens. He will now face Republican Mike Rogers in a must-win race for Democrats.
• \n Donald Trump launched a racist tirade against El-Sayed, mocking his Arabic name and claiming that his criticism of Israel’s killing and mistreatment of Palestinians could only be motivated by antisemitism. “He doesn’t love Israel. He doesn’t love Jewish people. He hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart and is not a fricking thing he can do about it,” Trump said.
• \n At a rally in Nevada, Trump praised Jim Marchant, an election conspiracy theorist who is running to oversee Nevada’s elections as its secretary of state.
• \n Faced with a malfunctioning teleprompter, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, joked at Trump’s expense: “Unlike a certain world leader, I do not view this as a conspiracy.”
• \n Robert F Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services has provided a copy of Dr Anthony Fauci’s phone to a Republican-led Senate panel investigating the doctor’s role as a senior advisor on the response to the Covid-19 pandemic to presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the Wall Street Journal reports. Kennedy, wrote a conspiratorial book attacking Fauci in 2021 that sold more than a million copies – thanks in part to blurbs from fellow non-scientists Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Alan Dershowitz and Tony Robbins.
• \n Bernie Sanders, the socialist Vermont senator who has backed a number of left-wing candidates in Democratic primaries this year, said on Wednesday that he is unlikely to endorse Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who has led in recent opinion polls of the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor.

Bernie Sanders, the socialist Vermont senator who has backed a number of left-wing candidates in Democratic primaries this year, said on Wednesday that he is unlikely to endorse Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who has led in recent opinion polls of the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor.

In an interview with Pod Save America, Sanders was asked about the Wisconsin primary by Jon Favreau. “I noticed you haven’t yet endorsed in the Wisconsin governor’s race. What’s your thinking there, and might you endorse?” Favreau asked.

“I don’t think so,” Sanders replied. “I met a Francesca a couple of years ago, I was in Wisconsin, and she seems very, very nice. But again, this is a race I’m just not that familiar with.”

“We have not gotten involved in many governor’s races,” he added. “I think we did one in Maine, with Troy Jackson. You know, obviously, my major concern right now is seeing that we have a Senate and a House that is going to stand up to Trump.”

“So, as of now, we have not been involved in that race,” Sanders went on, referring to his political movement which is pushing the Democratic party he caucuses with but never joined, to the left.

Ahead of next week’s primary election, Hong, a Wisconsin state lawmaker who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has been pressed to explain social media posts in 2020 in which she supported defunding and abolishing the police.

In the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in August of 2020, Hong wrote on Twitter: “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police.”

Two months later, after federal prosecutors said there was not enough evidence to charge the officers who shot Blake with excessive force, Hong posted: “How is 7 bullets in the back not excessive force. Police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option. My heart breaks for the trauma the Blake family and their community continues to endure. #BlackLivesMatter”

During an interview with Pod Save America earlier this week, Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, told Hong that “since Republicans will spend an ungodly amount of money um to defeat you, if you’re the nominee, to try to defeat you, I just want to make sure you have the best possible answers to what’s coming.”

He then asked her to explain how her views on policing “had evolved since 2020”.

“My views have only become stronger in that I’m serious about public safety, and I will not abolish the police,” Hong replied. “My views are that people are struggling right now and need basic eeds met and I want to focus on stopping violent crime and giving law enforcement the resources and the training that they need, but ensure that we are also holding accountable law enforcement that does not follow the law.”

“Do you still believe that police exist to uphold white supremacy?” Favreau asked.

“No,” Hong replied. “I’ve had more conversations with people who are more directly connected to the problems, and have learned that it is most important for a public servant like myself to make sure we’re looking at sensible, practical solutions.”

When Favreau asked Sanders on Wednesday if he thinks that it is risky for the Democrats to put forward DSA candidates who have talked about abolishing prisons and defunding or abolishing the police, the senator replied: “What you know as well as I do is that the right wing, that’s their job, right? They will take what one person said and put, you know, $80bn of TV ads on it and make the claim every Democrat supports that.”

No serious person that I know who is running for office believes in quote-unquote ‘defunding the police’,” Sanders continued. “I was a mayor for eight years, I worked very closely with cops. They have a very difficult job. Do we need police reform? Do we need to get rid of racism within police departments? Absolutely.”

“But nobody I know believes in ‘defunding the police’, he added.

“But a lot of this stuff, as you well know, is what the right wing plays on, and multiplies on Fox 10 times a day and through their ads,” Sanders said. “But most of the serious candidates that I know and support do not support those things.”

While delivering remarks, in English and French, about a drive to build affordable housing in Toronto on Wednesday, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, broke off from his prepared remarks to say: “I would now like to inform you that ‌the teleprompter has ceased to function.”

As the audience laughed, Carney ad-libbed a jibe about Donald Trump. “Unlike a certain world leader, I do not view this as a conspiracy,” the prime minister said, to more laughter.

Last year, after his address to the United Nations general assembly was marred by technical mishaps – including a malfunctioning escalator, sound system and teleprompter – Trump suggested that he had been the victim of “triple sabotage at the UN”.

Later in the event, Carney also said that Canadian trade negotiators were talking with US counterparts to find some way to avoid the implementation, in two weeks, of new tariffs imposed by Trump on a broad range of imports from Canada, on everything from alcohol and cement to hockey sticks.

Carney’s mockery of Trump on Wednesday was not the first time he has made fun of the American president. Speaking in Ireland in June, Carney did a brief impression of Trump as he joked about having been presented with a ceremonial key to the White House during a visit to Washington.

Moments after Nevada’s Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, stepped off stage at the midterm campaign rally hosted by Donald Trump on Wednesday, the president praised an election conspiracy theorist who is running to oversee Nevada’s elections as its secretary of state, Jim Marchant.

The transition was awkward because Marchant won the Republican nomination for the office in June, narrowly defeating a candidate endorsed by Lombardo who is not an election-denier.

“A very special man, I wish you’d get him in office, because he’s incredible, I’ve known him so long and he’s got to get in, he just has to,” Trump said. “He had a big victory with spending very little money because everyone respects him, Jim Marchant, he’s a candidate for secretary of state.”

Marchant, who has spread baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud in Nevada for years, and previously said he would not have certified Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, is attempting to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Cisco Aguilar, in a rematch of the 2022 election the Democrat won by just 23,000 votes.

Jon Ralston, the chief executive of the non-profit Nevada Independent, noted with amazement Trump’s endorsement of “an unhinged conspiracy theorist who said he didn’t even trust the results of his own primary he won”.

In a speech laced with anti-Muslim animus, Donald Trump just accused Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for the US Senate from Michigan, who is Muslim, of being motivated by deep-seated antisemitism.

El-Sayed, who narrowly won the Democratic primary in Michigan despite $30m in negative ads paid for by groups linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), has campaigned with Jewish supporters, but strongly condemned Israel’s killing and mistreatment of Palestinians.

According to Trump, El-Sayed is “a hater of Jews and a hater of Israel”.

“Just say this guy hates Jews. Somebody said, ‘Oh, that’s a little strong.’ No, he hates Jews and he hates Israel,” Trump said. “He’s a man of hate.”

The president then mockingly pronounced El-Sayed’s name, clearly stressing its Arabic origins, eliciting boos from his supporters in Nevada, just as his earlier reference to “Barack Hussein Obama” had. At another point in the speech, Trump also made a sarcastic reference to “the lovely Islamic Republic of Iran”.

Earlier on Wednesday, as other Republicans released frankly racist statements attempting to cast El-Sayed as a Muslim extremist, El-Sayed addressed Jewish Americans in comments carried live by Fox News.

“To my Jewish American sisters and brothers, one of the most indelible memories of this campaign will have been the opportunity to break bread with you at seder,” El-Sayed said, “and listening to sisters and brothers who said, ‘I want to join this movement because Aipac doesn’t speak for me; because I understand that self-determination for one people does not require the quenching of self-determination for another people; that unless all of us are free, none of us are free,’ I want to tell you the great gift that you’ve given me.”

“I want you to know,” he continued, “that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.”

Apparently referring to these comments, which were carried live on the president’s favorite network, Trump said: “Now he’s going around saying, ‘No, I love everybody … ’ He doesn’t love everybody. Put him in office, you’re going to find out what he loves. He doesn’t love Israel. He doesn’t love Jewish people. He hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart and is not a fricking thing he can do about it. There’s not a thing he can do about it ’cause he hates them.”

The idea that many non-Jews hold a deep-seated, unreasoning, anti-Jewish animus is a frequent claim made by Israeli politicians, including Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“When I watch Abdul,” Trump said later in the speech, “he’s full of shit.”

Donald Trump is now speaking to supporters in Nevada, and so far he is giving a standard campaign rally speech, running through his standard boasts about how well he is doing and repeating false claims he has made again and again.

The president began by claiming that he had won Nevada in the 2024 election “in a landslide”. In fact, he won the state by 46,008 votes over Kamala Harris. Four years earlier, Trump had lost the state to Joe Biden by a similar if slightly smaller margin of 33,596 votes.

In a speech that was billed as a presidential address on the economy, but is in effect a midterm campaign rally for Republican candidates that support him, Trump went on to repeat a series of false claims, including: his wildly inflated estimate that $19tn has been invested by foreign businesses since he returned to office; “the economy is the greatest economy we’ve ever had by far”; the fiction that “25 million poured through our southern border” during the Biden administration.

Trump also told his entirely invented tale that “the king of Saudi Arabia” told him last year: “a year ago your country was dead; it was a dead country. We never thought it was coming back. And now you have the hottest country anywhere in the world.”

In fact, during his visit to Riyadh in 2025, Trump told the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the US was “the hottest country in the world”, a claim that he previously made at least a dozen times in public comments during his first term, starting with rally speeches ahead of the 2018 midterms, and has repeated dozens of times since.

Lawyers for Donald Trump asked a federal judge in Miami on Wednesday to pause an earlier order that requires financial information for 400 of his business entities to be disclosed to the BBC, as the British broadcaster works to defend itself from Trump’s $10bn defamation suit over the editing of a documentary in 2024.

The earlier discovery order granted the broadcaster’s lawyers access to the financial information because, as the British legal writer David Allen Green explains, Trump had claimed that the editing of his speech to supporters on 6 January 2021, before they stormed the Capitol, had caused him massive reputational harm that cost his businesses vast sums of money. Framing the case that way let the BBC argue that it had a right to discovery on the actual state of Trump’s businesses.

As Courthouse News reports, Trump’s lawyers now want to narrow the scope of his defamation claim against the broadcaster to prevent the full disclosure of his financial affairs.

Life for Trump’s lawyers has not been made any easier by the fact that the president has, on at least five occasions since December, falsely claimed that the BBC did not just misleadingly edit his remarks from that day, but “used AI” to put words in his mouth that he did not say.

The actual BBC edit at issue spliced together two parts of Trump’s remarks that were actually spoken 54 minutes apart, but made no use of AI and the words were spoken by him, and were not, as he has claimed again and again, “AI generated”.

• \n Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination for the US Senate seat in Michigan, beating Haley Stevens in a bitter competition that became a referendum on the changing face of the Democratic party. El-Sayed won the race by a single point, fewer than 15,000 votes, according to the Associated Press. He will now face Republican nominee Mike Rogers – who ran unopposed – for a key battleground seat that is vital for Democrats to retain in order to achieve their lofty goal of reclaiming the majority in the upper chamber of Congress. More here
• \n Democrats quickly coalesced around El-Sayed following his narrow victory, urging their fractured coalition to back him with the goal of keeping the seat blue. Stevens said she has offered her “full support” to El-Sayed, while the Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, said there is “nothing more important” than “uniting” and moving forward. More here
• \n Meanwhile, Republicans wasted no time painting El-Sayed as a vote for “complete insanity”. Rogers, the GOP nominee, said the Senate race was now about “whether Michigan has a future built on common sense – or whether we hand the keys to the most fringe extremists in the nation”. Donald Trump, for his part, said El-Sayed’s win was “great news” for Republicans, calling him a “communist loser”.
• \n Further down ballot, progressive Donavan McKinney beat incumbent Shri Thanedar in a closely watched Democratic primary for Michigan’s 13th congressional district. It was a contest that mirrored many of identity battles facing the party this midterm cycle.
• \n By a vote of 51-44, mainly along party lines, the Senate confirmed Erica Schwartz to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), after the agency has gone without a permanent director for almost a year. The previous Senate-confirmed leader – Susan Monarez – was ousted by Robert F Kennedy Jr last August, after they clashed over the health secretary’s vaccine policy.

By a vote of 51-44, mainly along party lines, the Senate confirmed Erica Schwartz to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), after the agency has been without a permanent director for almost a year.

Tim Kaine of Virginia was the only Democrat to join all Republicans and vote yes on Schwartz’s nomination.

Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, congratulated the progressive Democrats he endorsed, who won in Michigan’s closely watched primary elections –including the Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed.

“Congratulations to Will Lawrence, Donavan McKinney and Dr Abdul El-Sayed on their historic victories last night,” Sanders said.

The senator highlighted El-Sayed’s victory, commenting on his success despite the funding disparities between El-Sayed and his rival, Haley Stevens.

“Abdul took on the entire billionaire class, faced more than $60 million in spending against him, and WON,” Sanders added in his statement on social media.

During a press conference at the Department of Justice earlier today, the acting US attorney general, Todd Blanche, avoided siding with Donald Trump or the US attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, over her decision to dismiss vandalism charges at the reflecting pool against Olympic canoeist David Hearn.

Blanche said that he did not want the “message” to be that “because Trump expressed appropriate frustration at the damage done to the reflecting pool” that Pirro is not “working every day to combat violent crime and to make the city safe”.

These comments come as Blanche awaits the final vote in the Senate for his confirmation as attorney general. Two key Republican holdouts, senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, said they would now vote for Blanche’s nomination after he said in writing that a planned $1.8bn slush fund for Trump’s allies was dead. However, Susan Collins, a moderate Republican senator from Maine, said she would note vote to confirm Blanche – citing the creation of the so-called “anti-weaponization fund” as part of her reasoning.

Blanche is hoping to gain the votes of two other GOP lawmakers in order to shore up his position – Lisa Murkowski and Bill Cassidy.

Cassidy, the outgoing senator from Louisiana who lost his primary earlier this year to a Trump-backed challenger, said in a radio interview on Wednesday that he had still not made his decision. “I’ve got to be convinced that he is an attorney general who just happens to have once been President Trump’s personal attorney, as opposed to President Trump’s personal attorney who is now the attorney general,” Cassidy said. “I think there’s a big difference between the two.”

Michigan GOP Senate nominee Mike Rogers released a statement urging general election voters to make the “simple” choice between “common sense and complete insanity”, following Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow primary win for the Michigan US Senate seat.

“This election isn’t just about choosing a Senator. It’s about deciding whether Michigan has a future built on common sense – or whether we hand the keys to the most fringe extremists in the nation,” said Rogers, who ran unopposed on Tuesday, and is gunning for the open seat after narrowly losing the 2024 Senate race to Elissa Slotkin.

In Michigan’s 13th congressional district – which includes parts of Detroit – Donavan McKinney beat incumbent Shri Thanedar in a closely watched Democratic primary that mirrored many of identity battles facing the party this midterm cycle.

McKinney, 34, a state lawmaker who received the backing of many progressives in Congress, including the Michigan representative Rashida Tlaib and the independent senator Bernie Sanders, won his race by almost four points, and successfully ousted the two-term Thanedar, 71, who was endorsed by the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries.

While some of Thanedar and McKinney’s platform policies overlap, Thanedar’s win in 2022 marked the first time the majority-Black Detroit area has not had a Black representative in Congress in years.

McKinney, who was recruited by Justice Democrats – a progressive Pac – was also endorsed by some House Congressional Black caucus members, despite party leadership backing Thanedar.

The new nominee was also outspoken about the war in Gaza – calling it a “genocide” while campaigning to end military aid to Israel. McKinney also campaigned alongside Abdul El-Sayed, who went on to win the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s open US Senate seat.

“They spent an unprecedented amount of money to beat us” Abdul El-Sayed said, after officially winning the Michigan’s Democratic nomination for US Senate.

El-Sayed remarked on the millions in outside spending while holding his first press conference in downtown Detroit as the newly minted nominee. “But it turns out the commercials are the part of the television show most people don’t want to watch,” he added.

“We took on a machine. You’re not supposed to be able to beat $70m dollars of outside spending – a record amount of money spent in a campaign against a Democrat in a primary in any campaign,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be able to beat that. And what we showed is that the power of our many is greater than the power of their money.”

State and national Democrats have begun to coalesce around Abdul El-Sayed after he narrowly won the primary for the Michigan US Senate seat.

One of Michigan’s Democratic senators, Elissa Slotkin, congratulated El-Sayed and said there is “nothing more important” than “uniting, keeping this seat blue, flipping the House and Senate, and providing a real check” on Donald Trump.

Others in the party have also urged the fractured coalition to work together in the short runway until November to retain a vital seat for Democrats to have any chance at reclaiming the majority in the upper chamber.

“I urge folks to come together – the stakes are high, and we need Abdul in the Senate to stand up for all Michiganders and the country we love,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Marlyand.

Meanwhile, Mallory McMorrow, who also ran in the Michigan Senate Democratic primary before suspending her campaign in July, said that El-Sayed has her “full endorsement and support”.

McMorrow’s name still appeared on Tuesday’s ballot, and she wracked up more than 60,000 votes – all of which El-Sayed hopes to absorb in November.

“This was a brutal primary,” McMorrow said. “Trump and Mike Rogers are counting on us staying divided. Let’s prove them wrong by beating Mike Rogers and taking our country back.”

In Las Vegas, Donald Trump has weighed in on the results from the Democratic primary for Michigan’s US Senate seat.

After Abdul El-Sayed won the party’s nomination, the president called it “great news” for Republicans in a post on Truth Social.

Trump went on to call El-Sayed a “communist loser who hates Jews and Israel”, despite the Democratic nominee’s frequent denunciations of antisemitism.

The president also noted that Stevens “was not expected to do nearly as well as she did”.

“Now, the Dumocrats crazy policies will only get worse!” Trump wrote.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) has said it now looks forward to working with Abdul El-Sayed in the wake of his primary victory in Michigan.

The main campaign arm for Senate Democrats had backed Haley Stevens in the bitter race for the nomination, but praised El-Sayed for his “energetic campaign that inspired thousands of Michiganders across the state”.

In a statement Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, and Kristen Gillibrand, chair of the DSCC, said that Democrats are united by a “common purpose” in this midterms cycle, “putting a check on Donald Trump by defeating his Republican enablers and taking back the Senate”.

They called Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee who ran unopposed in his primary, “a rubber stamp” from the president, and accused him of backing the same “reckless agenda that has driven up costs for working families”. Rogers lost his bid for Senate to Democrat Elissa Slotkin in 2024 by fewer than 20,000 votes.

Haley Stevens has conceded in the hotly contested Democratic Senate primary in Michigan. The Asssociated Press called the race a short while ago.

“I love Michigan and am so proud to have put up my hand to serve. I spoke with Abdul a few moments ago to offer him my full support as we work to defeat Mike Rogers this November,” she said on social media.

Stevens’ saw a deluge of outside spending to boost her campaign, including more than $30m from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), a pro-Israel lobby group.

Abdul El-Sayed has won the Democratic nomination for the US Senate seat in Michigan, beating Haley Stevens in a bitter competition that became a referendum on the changing face of the Democratic party.

El-Sayed won the race by a single point, fewer than 15,000 votes, according to the Associated Press. He will now face Republican nominee Mike Rogers – who ran unopposed – for a key battleground seat that is vital for Democrats to retain in order to achieve their lofty goal of reclaiming the majority in the upper chamber of Congress.

The Democratic primary became a proxy battle between the establishment and progressive wings of the party, with El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former state public health official, receiving the backing of many leaders on the left flank. Meanwhile Stevens, a serving US congresswoman who flipped her district blue in 2018, received support from party leaders – including the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer – and was supported by tens of millions of dollars in outside Pac funding from the pro-Israel lobby. The latter was a point on which El-Sayed hammered on the campaign trail in Michigan, the birthplace of the uncommitted movement – which saw a sizeable portion of Arab-American voters eschew Kamala Harris in 2024 over the Biden administration’s stance on the Israel-Gaza war.

“This was always going to be the many versus the money, and tonight, we have shown that Michiganders want money out of politics, money in their pockets, and Medicare for all. We are building a coalition that is fired up and ready to go beat Mike Rogers,” said El-Sayed’s campaign manager, Alia Kapasi, in a statement.

A quick update on the marquee Democratic primary race for US Senate in Michigan.

Haley Stevens is trailing Abdul El-Sayed by fewer than 15,000 votes, according the Associated Press, whose count the Guardian uses on election night.

As of now, 96% of the votes have been counted in this extremely tight race. El-Sayed’s campaign has, nonetheless, started its victory lap and sent out emails noting that he has won.

Chuck Edwards, a Republican congressman from North Carolina, has withdrawn from his reelection campaign after the House ethics committee reported determined that he had “fostered a hostile work environment and engaged in sexual harassment” by giving gifts and lavishing attention on two young female staffers.

“After much prayer and reflection, I’ve decided to withdraw from my re-election campaign,” Edwards posted on X. “I will complete my current term. Serving Western North Carolina has been the honor of my life. Thank you for your trust, prayers, and support. God bless WNC and America.”

The Guardian’s Chris Stein reports that the bipartisan ethics panel began investigating the second-term congressman earlier this year after receiving complaints. The report approved by Democratic and Republican committee members determined that there “was substantial reason to believe” Edwards broke House rules by singling out the two unidentified aides for special treatment that made them uncomfortable and harmed relations with other employees.

More here:

In more election news: Missouri’s top election official on Tuesday rejected a citizens’ petition seeking a statewide referendum on a redistricting plan backed by Donald Trump, the Associated Press reports.

Republican secretary of state, Denny Hoskins, said that the petition was void because congressional redistricting plans cannot be subject to voter referendums and “challenging a congressional map is unconstitutional under Missouri law”.

Missouri joined Texas last year in responding to Trump’s call to redraw congressional districts to the GOP’s advantage. The new map dramatically reshapes the Kansas City-based fifth congressional district that has been long-held by Democratic representative Emanuel Cleaver. Under the new map, the district stretches into rural central Missouri, giving it a Republican tilt.

Republicans already hold six of Missouri’s eight congressional seats.

People Not Politicians, the group sponsoring the referendum drive, had submitted more than 300,000 signatures to the secretary of state’s office in December calling for a statewide referendum on the plan. The group said it would contest Hoskins’ decision in court.

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of US politics.

The race for the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan remains too close to call early on Wednesday with Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public health official, holding a narrow lead over congresswoman Haley Stevens.

At around 5am local time, El-Sayed had 49.5% of the vote and Stevens 45.78%, with more than 95% of votes counted.

Both addressed supporters, saying the vote count could continue well into the day.

“We knew that this was going to be a close race, and that’s exactly what we’ve got,” Stevens said. “I am feeling fired up, and you should be too.”

The bitter and expensive campaign attracted national attention not just because the general election for the seat will help decide which party controls the Senate. It also became the most notable proxy battle between the Democratic Party’s establishment and progressive wings.

Candidates from the left-flank – including democratic socialists – have found surprising success in the party’s US House primaries, including in New York and Denver, in areas that tend to veer farther left. A progressive victory in Michigan would be significant for the movement.

The winner of Tuesday’s race will face the Republican nominee, former representative Mike Rogers, in November, to succeed the retiring Democratic senator Gary Peters. Rogers ran unopposed in the Republican primary.

In other developments:

• \n Also in Michigan, Jocelyn Benson clinched the Democratic nomination in the governor’s race and will face the John James, who won the Republican contest. Benson, the state’s secretary of state, will take on James, a congressman who received an endorsement from Donald Trump, to replace the term-limited Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, in November.
• \n Further down ballot, William Lawrence, a progressive, won a competitive three-way Democratic primary race in Michigan’s seventh congressional district. Lawrence, a community organizer who co-founded the Sunrise Movement, will now challenge Republican incumbent Tom Barrett, who has bucked his own party while in office, after he flipped the key battleground district red in 2024.
• \n Meanwhile in Washington state, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the two-term centrist Democrat, has advanced to the general election for her competitive US House seat. She’ll face the Republican candidate and state senator, John Braun, who is backed by Trump. The state votes on single ballots – meaning the top two finishers, regardless of party, advance to November’s contest. More here.
• \n And in Missouri, Democratic congressman Wesley Bell won his primary in the St Louis area on Tuesday, ending the progressive former representative Cori Bush’s bid for a comeback. Bell’s victory blunted the momentum pro-Palestinian candidates have shown in recent elections. In this deep-blue district, this also makes Bell the favorite to win a second term in the November election. More here.
• \n Also in the midwest, Cindy Holscher, a state senator, won the Democratic nomination in Kansas’s gubernatorial race. She beat two other Sunflower state politicians to advance to the general election. Ty Masterson, the Trump-backed Kansas state senate president, clinched the GOP nomination in a crowded race. It’s set to be a fierce competition, as Republicans are angling to retake the governor’s mansion from Democratic control.

Key events

• 1h agoClosing summary
• 1h agoBernie Sanders says he is unlikely to endorse Francesca Hong in Wisconsin governor's race
• 4h agoAs his teleprompter glitches, Canada's prime minister, Mark Carney, mocks Trump
• 4h agoTrump praises election conspiracy theorist running to oversee Nevada's elections
• 5h agoIn racist rant, Trump claims Abdul El-Sayed 'hates' Jews 'with a passion that burns in his heart'
• 5h agoIn Nevada, Donald Trump praises Donald Trump
• 6h agoTrump's lawyers fight disclosure of his financial records to BBC in defamation suit
• 7h agoHere's a recap of the day so far
• 8h agoSenate confirms Erica Schwartz to lead CDC after almost a year without a permanent director
• 8h agoBernie Sanders congratulates El-Sayed on primary win and taking on 'the entire billionaire class'
• 8h agoTodd Blanche rides the fence in Pirro-Trump reflecting pool battle
• 11h agoMike Rogers urges voters to make the choice between 'common sense and complete insanity' after El-Sayed's primary win
• 11h agoInsurgent Democrat ousts incumbent in Michigan House primary
• 11h ago'We took on the machine': El-Sayed celebrates triumph over outside spending after clinching Democratic nomination in bitter Michigan Senate primary
• 12h agoDemocrats rally around El-Sayed ahead of crucial November election
• 12h agoTrump calls El-Sayed primary win 'great news' for GOP
• 13h agoCampaign arm for Senate Democrats backs El-Sayed following primary victory
• 13h agoHaley Stevens concedes in acrimonious primary battle, offers 'full support' to El-Sayed in November
• 13h agoAbdul El-Sayed clinches Democratic nomination in bitter fight for Michigan US Senate seat
• 14h agoStevens trails El-Sayed by fewer than 15,000 votes
• 16h agoRepublican Chuck Edwards withdraws reelection bid following censure recommendation
• 16h agoMissouri's top election official rejects referendum on Trump-backed redistricting plan
• 17h agoMichigan Senate Democratic primary race remains too close to call

Closing summary

This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

• Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public-health official, won the Democratic nomination for the US Senate seat in Michigan, narrowly defeating Haley Stevens. He will now face Republican Mike Rogers in a must-win race for Democrats.
• Donald Trump launched a racist tirade against El-Sayed, mocking his Arabic name and claiming that his criticism of Israel’s killing and mistreatment of Palestinians could only be motivated by antisemitism. “He doesn’t love Israel. He doesn’t love Jewish people. He hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart and is not a fricking thing he can do about it,” Trump said.
• At a rally in Nevada, Trump praised Jim Marchant, an election conspiracy theorist who is running to oversee Nevada’s elections as its secretary of state.
• Faced with a malfunctioning teleprompter, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, joked at Trump’s expense: “Unlike a certain world leader, I do not view this as a conspiracy.”
• Robert F Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services has provided a copy of Dr Anthony Fauci’s phone to a Republican-led Senate panel investigating the doctor’s role as a senior advisor on the response to the Covid-19 pandemic to presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the Wall Street Journal reports. Kennedy, wrote a conspiratorial book attacking Fauci in 2021 that sold more than a million copies – thanks in part to blurbs from fellow non-scientists Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Alan Dershowitz and Tony Robbins.
• Bernie Sanders, the socialist Vermont senator who has backed a number of left-wing candidates in Democratic primaries this year, said on Wednesday that he is unlikely to endorse Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who has led in recent opinion polls of the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor.

Bernie Sanders says he is unlikely to endorse Francesca Hong in Wisconsin governor's race

Bernie Sanders, the socialist Vermont senator who has backed a number of left-wing candidates in Democratic primaries this year, said on Wednesday that he is unlikely to endorse Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who has led in recent opinion polls of the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor.

In an interview with Pod Save America, Sanders was asked about the Wisconsin primary by Jon Favreau. “I noticed you haven’t yet endorsed in the Wisconsin governor’s race. What’s your thinking there, and might you endorse?” Favreau asked.

“I don’t think so,” Sanders replied. “I met a Francesca a couple of years ago, I was in Wisconsin, and she seems very, very nice. But again, this is a race I’m just not that familiar with.”

Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist running to be Wisconsin’s governor, spoke at a protest last month in Madison, Wisconsin, after a police officer shot and killed a man. Photograph: Kayla Wolf/AP

“We have not gotten involved in many governor’s races,” he added. “I think we did one in Maine, with Troy Jackson. You know, obviously, my major concern right now is seeing that we have a Senate and a House that is going to stand up to Trump.”

“So, as of now, we have not been involved in that race,” Sanders went on, referring to his political movement which is pushing the Democratic party he caucuses with but never joined, to the left.

Ahead of next week’s primary election, Hong, a Wisconsin state lawmaker who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has been pressed to explain social media posts in 2020 in which she supported defunding and abolishing the police.

In the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in August of 2020, Hong wrote on Twitter: “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police.”

Two months later, after federal prosecutors said there was not enough evidence to charge the officers who shot Blake with excessive force, Hong posted: “How is 7 bullets in the back not excessive force. Police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option. My heart breaks for the trauma the Blake family and their community continues to endure. #BlackLivesMatter”

During an interview with Pod Save America earlier this week, Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, told Hong that “since Republicans will spend an ungodly amount of money um to defeat you, if you’re the nominee, to try to defeat you, I just want to make sure you have the best possible answers to what’s coming.”

He then asked her to explain how her views on policing “had evolved since 2020”.

“My views have only become stronger in that I’m serious about public safety, and I will not abolish the police,” Hong replied. “My views are that people are struggling right now and need basic eeds met and I want to focus on stopping violent crime and giving law enforcement the resources and the training that they need, but ensure that we are also holding accountable law enforcement that does not follow the law.”

“Do you still believe that police exist to uphold white supremacy?” Favreau asked.

“No,” Hong replied. “I’ve had more conversations with people who are more directly connected to the problems, and have learned that it is most important for a public servant like myself to make sure we’re looking at sensible, practical solutions.”

When Favreau asked Sanders on Wednesday if he thinks that it is risky for the Democrats to put forward DSA candidates who have talked about abolishing prisons and defunding or abolishing the police, the senator replied: “What you know as well as I do is that the right wing, that’s their job, right? They will take what one person said and put, you know, $80bn of TV ads on it and make the claim every Democrat supports that.”

No serious person that I know who is running for office believes in quote-unquote ‘defunding the police’,” Sanders continued. “I was a mayor for eight years, I worked very closely with cops. They have a very difficult job. Do we need police reform? Do we need to get rid of racism within police departments? Absolutely.”

“But nobody I know believes in ‘defunding the police’, he added.

“But a lot of this stuff, as you well know, is what the right wing plays on, and multiplies on Fox 10 times a day and through their ads,” Sanders said. “But most of the serious candidates that I know and support do not support those things.”

Rumors that Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Maga congresswoman from Georgia, was about to announce the creation of a new political party with fellow exiles from the Trumpist movement, including Tucker Carlson, Thomas Massie and Joe Kent, appear to have been greatly exaggerated.

However, the former congresswoman did unveil a different new venture this week: a Cameo account, where, for $150, her fans can now book Greene to deliver “unforgettable” video messages for friends or relations celebrating “a milestone birthday, an anniversary, or a long-awaited reunion”.

Robert F Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services has provided a copy of Dr Anthony Fauci’s phone to a Republican-led Senate panel investigating the doctor’s role as a senior advisor on the response to the Covid-19 pandemic to presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Kennedy, a lawyer with no scientific training, wrote a conspiratorial, 500-page book attacking Fauci in 2021 that sold more than a million copies for a rightwing publisher – thanks in part to blurbs from fellow non-scientists Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Alan Dershowitz and Tony Robbins.

The chair of the Senate panel, Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, confirmed the report on social media.

“Hopefully, this device will address many of the questions he refused to answer at last week’s hearing,” Johnson added.

As his teleprompter glitches, Canada's prime minister, Mark Carney, mocks Trump

While delivering remarks, in English and French, about a drive to build affordable housing in Toronto on Wednesday, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, broke off from his prepared remarks to say: “I would now like to inform you that ‌the teleprompter has ceased to function.”

As the audience laughed, Carney ad-libbed a jibe about Donald Trump. “Unlike a certain world leader, I do not view this as a conspiracy,” the prime minister said, to more laughter.

Last year, after his address to the United Nations general assembly was marred by technical mishaps – including a malfunctioning escalator, sound system and teleprompter – Trump suggested that he had been the victim of “triple sabotage at the UN”.

Later in the event, Carney also said that Canadian trade negotiators were talking with US counterparts to find some way to avoid the implementation, in two weeks, of new tariffs imposed by Trump on a broad range of imports from Canada, on everything from alcohol and cement to hockey sticks.

Carney’s mockery of Trump on Wednesday was not the first time he has made fun of the American president. Speaking in Ireland in June, Carney did a brief impression of Trump as he joked about having been presented with a ceremonial key to the White House during a visit to Washington.

Trump praises election conspiracy theorist running to oversee Nevada's elections

Moments after Nevada’s Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, stepped off stage at the midterm campaign rally hosted by Donald Trump on Wednesday, the president praised an election conspiracy theorist who is running to oversee Nevada’s elections as its secretary of state, Jim Marchant.

The transition was awkward because Marchant won the Republican nomination for the office in June, narrowly defeating a candidate endorsed by Lombardo who is not an election-denier.

“A very special man, I wish you’d get him in office, because he’s incredible, I’ve known him so long and he’s got to get in, he just has to,” Trump said. “He had a big victory with spending very little money because everyone respects him, Jim Marchant, he’s a candidate for secretary of state.”

Marchant, who has spread baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud in Nevada for years, and previously said he would not have certified Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, is attempting to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Cisco Aguilar, in a rematch of the 2022 election the Democrat won by just 23,000 votes.

Jon Ralston, the chief executive of the non-profit Nevada Independent, noted with amazement Trump’s endorsement of “an unhinged conspiracy theorist who said he didn’t even trust the results of his own primary he won”.

In racist rant, Trump claims Abdul El-Sayed 'hates' Jews 'with a passion that burns in his heart'

In a speech laced with anti-Muslim animus, Donald Trump just accused Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for the US Senate from Michigan, who is Muslim, of being motivated by deep-seated antisemitism.

El-Sayed, who narrowly won the Democratic primary in Michigan despite $30m in negative ads paid for by groups linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), has campaigned with Jewish supporters, but strongly condemned Israel’s killing and mistreatment of Palestinians.

According to Trump, El-Sayed is “a hater of Jews and a hater of Israel”.

“Just say this guy hates Jews. Somebody said, ‘Oh, that’s a little strong.’ No, he hates Jews and he hates Israel,” Trump said. “He’s a man of hate.”

The president then mockingly pronounced El-Sayed’s name, clearly stressing its Arabic origins, eliciting boos from his supporters in Nevada, just as his earlier reference to “Barack Hussein Obama” had. At another point in the speech, Trump also made a sarcastic reference to “the lovely Islamic Republic of Iran”.

Earlier on Wednesday, as other Republicans released frankly racist statements attempting to cast El-Sayed as a Muslim extremist, El-Sayed addressed Jewish Americans in comments carried live by Fox News.

“To my Jewish American sisters and brothers, one of the most indelible memories of this campaign will have been the opportunity to break bread with you at seder,” El-Sayed said, “and listening to sisters and brothers who said, ‘I want to join this movement because Aipac doesn’t speak for me; because I understand that self-determination for one people does not require the quenching of self-determination for another people; that unless all of us are free, none of us are free,’ I want to tell you the great gift that you’ve given me.”

“I want you to know,” he continued, “that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.”

Apparently referring to these comments, which were carried live on the president’s favorite network, Trump said: “Now he’s going around saying, ‘No, I love everybody … ’ He doesn’t love everybody. Put him in office, you’re going to find out what he loves. He doesn’t love Israel. He doesn’t love Jewish people. He hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart and is not a fricking thing he can do about it. There’s not a thing he can do about it ’cause he hates them.”

The idea that many non-Jews hold a deep-seated, unreasoning, anti-Jewish animus is a frequent claim made by Israeli politicians, including Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“When I watch Abdul,” Trump said later in the speech, “he’s full of shit.”

In Nevada, Donald Trump praises Donald Trump

Donald Trump is now speaking to supporters in Nevada, and so far he is giving a standard campaign rally speech, running through his standard boasts about how well he is doing and repeating false claims he has made again and again.

The president began by claiming that he had won Nevada in the 2024 election “in a landslide”. In fact, he won the state by 46,008 votes over Kamala Harris. Four years earlier, Trump had lost the state to Joe Biden by a similar if slightly smaller margin of 33,596 votes.

In a speech that was billed as a presidential address on the economy, but is in effect a midterm campaign rally for Republican candidates that support him, Trump went on to repeat a series of false claims, including: his wildly inflated estimate that $19tn has been invested by foreign businesses since he returned to office; “the economy is the greatest economy we’ve ever had by far”; the fiction that “25 million poured through our southern border” during the Biden administration.

Donald Trump delivered remarks to supporters at Red Rock Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada on Wednesday. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Trump also told his entirely invented tale that “the king of Saudi Arabia” told him last year: “a year ago your country was dead; it was a dead country. We never thought it was coming back. And now you have the hottest country anywhere in the world.”

In fact, during his visit to Riyadh in 2025, Trump told the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the US was “the hottest country in the world”, a claim that he previously made at least a dozen times in public comments during his first term, starting with rally speeches ahead of the 2018 midterms, and has repeated dozens of times since.

Trump's lawyers fight disclosure of his financial records to BBC in defamation suit

Lawyers for Donald Trump asked a federal judge in Miami on Wednesday to pause an earlier order that requires financial information for 400 of his business entities to be disclosed to the BBC, as the British broadcaster works to defend itself from Trump’s $10bn defamation suit over the editing of a documentary in 2024.

The earlier discovery order granted the broadcaster’s lawyers access to the financial information because, as the British legal writer David Allen Green explains, Trump had claimed that the editing of his speech to supporters on 6 January 2021, before they stormed the Capitol, had caused him massive reputational harm that cost his businesses vast sums of money. Framing the case that way let the BBC argue that it had a right to discovery on the actual state of Trump’s businesses.

As Courthouse News reports, Trump’s lawyers now want to narrow the scope of his defamation claim against the broadcaster to prevent the full disclosure of his financial affairs.

Life for Trump’s lawyers has not been made any easier by the fact that the president has, on at least five occasions since December, falsely claimed that the BBC did not just misleadingly edit his remarks from that day, but “used AI” to put words in his mouth that he did not say.

A comparison of the original and edited footage shows how the BBC selectively edited a Donald Trump speech, resulting in the organisation being accused of making it appear clearer that he encouraged the US Capitol attack.

The actual BBC edit at issue spliced together two parts of Trump’s remarks that were actually spoken 54 minutes apart, but made no use of AI and the words were spoken by him, and were not, as he has claimed again and again, “AI generated”.

Here's a recap of the day so far

• Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination for the US Senate seat in Michigan, beating Haley Stevens in a bitter competition that became a referendum on the changing face of the Democratic party. El-Sayed won the race by a single point, fewer than 15,000 votes, according to the Associated Press. He will now face Republican nominee Mike Rogers – who ran unopposed – for a key battleground seat that is vital for Democrats to retain in order to achieve their lofty goal of reclaiming the majority in the upper chamber of Congress. More here
• Democrats quickly coalesced around El-Sayed following his narrow victory, urging their fractured coalition to back him with the goal of keeping the seat blue. Stevens said she has offered her “full support” to El-Sayed, while the Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, said there is “nothing more important” than “uniting” and moving forward. More here
• Meanwhile, Republicans wasted no time painting El-Sayed as a vote for “complete insanity”. Rogers, the GOP nominee, said the Senate race was now about “whether Michigan has a future built on common sense – or whether we hand the keys to the most fringe extremists in the nation”. Donald Trump, for his part, said El-Sayed’s win was “great news” for Republicans, calling him a “communist loser”.
• Further down ballot, progressive Donavan McKinney beat incumbent Shri Thanedar in a closely watched Democratic primary for Michigan’s 13th congressional district. It was a contest that mirrored many of identity battles facing the party this midterm cycle.
• By a vote of 51-44, mainly along party lines, the Senate confirmed Erica Schwartz to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), after the agency has gone without a permanent director for almost a year. The previous Senate-confirmed leader – Susan Monarez – was ousted by Robert F Kennedy Jr last August, after they clashed over the health secretary’s vaccine policy.