Election Updates: As Trump searches for a running mate, Ben Carson can’t be counted out. (2024)

In his first TikTok video since announcing he was joining the platform, Donald Trump appears with Logan Paul, the YouTube personality, boxer and wrestler. Mimicking the macho staredowns in wrestling performances and combat sports, Paul and Trump approach each other as if preparing to fight — until they are inches from each other’s faces — before embracing in a hug.

Eugene Young, a Democratic House candidate in Delaware, announced that he had suspended his campaign, easing the path of State Senator Sarah McBride, the leading primary candidate, to win in September. Delaware’s single at-large district is heavily Democratic, and if McBride wins the primary, and the general election in November, she will be the first openly transgender person elected to Congress.

On a talk radio show on Tuesday, Kari Lake, the leading G.O.P. Senate candidate in Arizona, addressed the recent controversy over her speaking at a campaign event in front of a Confederate flag hanging in a store. She was “not the flag police,” she said, and didn’t “even know” it was there. “What about these people who are actually holding a Ukrainian flag or standing in front of a Hamas flag or a B.L.M. flag — that’s OK?” she said.

Hillary Clinton waded into one of Democrats’ fiercest House primaries on Wednesday, endorsing George Latimer in a June 25 contest with Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York. The race has turned on Bowman’s criticism of Israel, reigniting old tensions in the party. Senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s 2016 rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, is supporting Bowman.

Representative Sylvia Garcia, Democrat of Texas, spoke at a gathering of Democrats and activists in Washington to mark the 12th anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has protected people brought unlawfully to the United States from deportation. Garcia blasted President Biden’s recent order on asylum: “We know that enforcement-only policies will not work and have never worked.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, appearing on the “Cancel This Conspiracy” podcast, cast herself as a fierce upholder of the Second Amendment. “We can’t strip people of their liberties ever,” she said. “And, yes, we have massive issues in this country around gun safety, but we actually have bigger issues around mental health.” Gun-control advocates have criticized Mr. Kennedy.

A federal grand jury on Tuesday indicted an Arizona man on gun and hate crime charges, with authorities accusing him of planning a mass shooting against Black people in Atlanta to incite a “race war” ahead of the presidential election. Mark Adams Prieto, 58, targeted Atlanta because he thought Black people moving to the city was making Georgia more politically liberal, according to a criminal complaint.

A new Marist Poll this month in Pennsylvania, a battleground state, offers another warning sign for Biden: He is winning just 68 percent of Black voters, with Trump pulling in 23 percent. In 2020, Biden won 92 percent of Black voters in the state and Trump took 7 percent, according to exit polling.

Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking in a Rolling Stone interview, praised her predecessor, Mike Pence, for his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, when he rebuffed then-President Donald J. Trump’s calls to stop the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president. “Listen, I respect and applaud him for having the courage to do what he did that day,” she said.

After meeting with some of the United States's largest Bitcoin mining companies yesterday, Donald Trump said on Truth Social on Wednesday that he wanted “all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA.” The statement married his America First foreign policy agenda with his recent push to win the backing of the crypto industry by portraying Joe Biden as hostile to cryptocurrency.

President Biden’s campaign is trumpeting a positive inflation report that raised hopes the Federal Reserve might cut interest rates before November’s election. But for many voters, the damage to Mr. Biden over high prices has already been done. Polls consistently show Americans trust former President Donald J. Trump to do a better job managing the economy than Mr. Biden.

Royce White, a Republican candidate for Senate in Minnesota who has been endorsed by the state party, on Tuesday criticized “out of control” crime in Minneapolis in a post on social media that included a map with green dots spread across the city. But the image was not showing crime incidents: It was actually a map of drinking fountains in the city, as pointed out by local reporters and others online. White has edited the post to use a different map.

The woman in Senator Jacky Rosen’s ad says: “Now I live in Nevada, and I cannot watch Sam Brown take away our rights here, too.” Mr. Brown, a Republican candidate whose wife has spoken publicly about her own abortion, has said he would not support a federal ban.

Senator Jacky Rosen, Democrat of Nevada, had an ad ready when, as expected, Sam Brown won the Republican primary on Tuesday to challenge her. It highlights Mr. Brown’s support for a 20-week abortion ban when he ran for the Texas legislature in 2014, and features a woman who had to leave Texas to get an abortion when she learned her fetus had a fatal condition.

Two House Democrats in semicompetitive Las Vegas districts now have Republican opponents after Tuesday’s primary. Representative Dina Titus will face Mark Robertson, an Army veteran, and Representative Susie Lee will take on Drew Johnson, a tax analyst. The G.O.P. primary in another district is still too close to call, with former North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee in a tight contest with Air Force veteran David Flippo.

Paul Ryan, the Republican former House speaker, told Fox News on Tuesday that he would not vote for former President Donald J. Trump because “if you put yourself above the Constitution, as he has done, I think that makes you unfit for office.” He also said that he wouldn’t vote for President Biden because they differ on policy, and that he would write in a “conservative Republican” whom he had not chosen yet.

Ben Carson as Trump’s running mate? Don’t count him out just yet.

Last week, Mr. Trump again highlighted the possibility of running with Mr. Carson, saying on Newsmax that he was among “many great people.”

And behind closed doors, Mr. Trump has spoken warmly of Mr. Carson, reflecting an odd-couple political friendship between the belligerent Republican leader and the soft-spoken doctor who ran against him in 2016.

That personal connection, which has deepened over the years, is why Mr. Carson continues to linger as a potential choice for Mr. Trump’s running mate even as the race shows signs of narrowing to a few top candidates including Doug Burgum, Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance.

Few people close to the former president give Mr. Carson much chance of being chosen. But given Mr. Trump’s unconventional approach and history of last-minute decisions, a surprise is possible — and in the wide universe of unlikely but he-just-might-do-it picks, Mr. Carson is probably the leading contender.

Mr. Carson, for his part, said during a CNN interview last month that if asked to join the ticket, he would “prayerfully consider it.”

“Trump has this amazing ability to speak directly to people’s hearts and minds without any filter or political correctness,” Mr. Carson said.

Still, their relationship has been complicated at times. During Mr. Trump’s criminal trial in New York, one of his former White House advisers, Hope Hicks, testified that he had thanked the publisher of The National Enquirer for a 2015 story claiming Mr. Carson had left a sponge in a patient’s brain. “This is Pulitzer-worthy,” Ms. Hicks said she recalled Mr. Trump as saying.

“My advice to Dr. Carson would be not to be his running mate,” Armstrong Williams, a friend of Mr. Carson’s who served as an informal adviser on his 2016 campaign, said in an interview, suggesting that the job could be grueling. “But if he sees his friend is going to have a tough road ahead, he’ll do anything he can to make that journey and that process easier for him.”

In a statement, Mr. Carson said that he and Mr. Williams had known each other for years, but that Mr. Williams was not a spokesman “or adviser to me on any political matters.”

For Mr. Trump’s close allies, the case against Mr. Carson is rather clear.

He turns 73 in September, which is not helpful in a year when voters are worried about the advanced ages of both major presidential candidates.

Mr. Carson is also a fellow Floridian — he and Mr. Trump both live in Palm Beach County — and Mr. Trump is concerned about a constitutional provision that would pose an obstacle to a presidential ticket with two contenders from the same state. (Mr. Carson also spends much of his time in Virginia, Mr. Williams said.)

During Mr. Carson’s first foray into public service, working as secretary of housing and urban development in the Trump administration, he was often surrounded by scandal.

That rocky tenure, paired with his penchant for wildly eccentric statements, would seem to undercut Mr. Trump’s current preference for disciplined campaigners who present little risk of unwanted distractions for a campaign dealing with plenty. (Mr. Carson has equated Obamacare with slavery and suggested that sexuality was a choice by pointing to criminals who “go into prison straight, and when they come out, they’re gay.”)

But Mr. Trump has been intrigued by the idea of adding a Black man to his presidential ticket as a way to increase his gains among Black male voters, according to three people familiar with the process. He has also discussed picking Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the chamber, and Representative Byron Donalds, the only Black Republican in Florida’s congressional delegation.

Mr. Trump has talked about announcing his pick before the Republican National Convention in mid-July, or possibly even during the event. That leaves more than a month for him to vacillate over contenders, potentially creating an opening for an out-of-the-box choice.

Additionally, he seems to genuinely like Mr. Carson. Their friendship, according to people close to both men, is as real as it is perplexing.

For Mr. Carson, the inception moment in his friendship with Mr. Trump was the few minutes of painfully awkward television during a 2016 Republican primary debate when he was introduced to the audience but stopped and waited just offstage instead of walking to his lectern. Mr. Trump followed his lead and also stopped, even as other contenders walked quickly past the two men.

Mr. Carson viewed Mr. Trump’s decision to stop not as shared confusion but as camaraderie, Mr. Williams said.

Mr. Carson, who has campaigned for Mr. Trump this election cycle, has ramped up his public profile lately with a series of TV interviews that have doubled as marketing opportunities for his new book, “The Perilous Fight.” Published last month, the book lays out his views on incorporating biblical family beliefs into American culture.

Mr. Trump has spoken tenderly about uncomfortable moments with Mr. Carson.

During a speech in February at the Black Conservative Federation gala in South Carolina, Mr. Trump recalled feeling “a little bit nervous” during the 2016 campaign about Mr. Carson’s rise in the polls. But Mr. Trump said he had been put at ease by Mr. Carson, recalling that his rival told him before another primary debate: “You have nothing to worry about. God put you in this position. You’re going to win.”

“I was confused because I’m ready to go into a debate stage — and he’s doing so good and he made that statement,” Mr. Trump said in South Carolina, adding, “He’s been a great friend of mine.”

Taylor Robinson contributed reporting from New York.

Western governors give bipartisanship a try. At least for a few days.

Not everybody laughed.

As the Western Governors’ Association marked its 40th anniversary this week in Olympic Valley, Calif., the organization did its best to maintain a tradition that has long been its hallmark: the increasingly lost art of governing across party lines.

Under sunny skies and a snowcapped Sierra Nevada, experts from the private sector to members of the Biden administration presented on disaster management, opioids and carbon capture. Aides rushed between meeting rooms. Eight governors appeared on a panel examining the organization’s longstanding culture of consensus — but seven of them were no longer in office.

“We used to have this bumper sticker — ‘Bipartisanship Happens,’” Steve Bullock, the former Democratic governor of Montana, said. “But bipartisanship doesn’t just happen. It takes work.”

As battle lines have hardened around the 2024 election, that earnest ambition has faced increasingly powerful headwinds. Some 72 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats regard people in the other party as a lot or somewhat more immoral than other Americans, according to a 2022 poll by the Pew Research Center. In 2016, just 47 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of Democrats felt that way.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, a Democrat and the new chair of the Western Governors’ Association, said at the Tahoe meeting that the political climate was “poisonous for this country.”

“When everything is all or nothing, my way or the highway, it doesn’t produce collaboration,” she said. “I’m worried about it.”

In Olympic Valley, over beers at the anniversary celebration, Mr. Bullock, the Montana Democrat, and the Republicans Matt Mead and Butch Otter, the former governors of Wyoming and Idaho, said they built alliances a decade ago on wildfire costs and sage-grouse habitat that grew into friendships. They became so close, they said, that the two Republicans later refused their party’s requests to campaign against Mr. Bullock, who was governor from 2013 to 2021.

“I told them, one, he’s a friend,” Mr. Mead said. “Two, I think he’s doing a good job for the state of Montana. And three, if you want to have the kind of camaraderie that leads to cooperation and results, I can’t campaign against these guys.”

In 2014, when the three friends were part of the core membership of the Western Governors' Association, a photo of the annual meeting featured 10 sitting governors from both parties, representing more than half of the 19 member states. (The group also includes three territories.)

This year, only five participated in the full event. Four were Republicans: Gov. Joe Lombardo of Nevada, Gov. Brad Little of Idaho, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Mr. Gordon of Wyoming, the outgoing chair. Ms. Lujan Grisham, who was being sworn in to succeed him, was the only Democratic governor who stayed at the conference for more than a couple of hours.

Mr. Newsom stopped by, but only to welcome the 300 or so attendees on the first night, most of them policy staff members, consultants and members of the organization’s youth leadership program. On an outdoor patio at the Everline Resort & Spa, Mr. Newsom and Mr. Gordon thanked each other and briefly acknowledged the association’s history of bipartisanship.

Mr. Newsom, a rising Democratic star, has campaigned aggressively for President Biden. Mr. Gordon was censured in April at the Wyoming Republican Party’s convention despite an approval rating above 70 percent, in part because he was perceived by the party base as insufficiently hard-line.

The two men, while cordial, spoke separately and very briefly. Reporters were asked not to take photographs.

The political backdrop was as hard to miss as the mountains behind them. Just weeks before, Mr. Lombardo had publicly accused Mr. Newsom of contributing to higher gas prices, a claim the California governor’s office called “a stunt to appease Governor Lombardo’s Big Oil donors.” The year before, Mr. Little had tweaked Mr. Newsom on social media, labeling him the “so-called ‘Idaho Realtor of the Year’” because so many Californians had moved to his state.

After California and four other states sued major oil companies in a groundbreaking lawsuit, Republican governors, including Mr. Burgum, Mr. Little and Mr. Gordon, went to the Supreme Court, accusing California of trying to unconstitutionally “dictate the future of the American energy industry.”

Ms. Lujan Grisham credited Mr. Newsom, who was in the midst of intense budget negotiations two hours away in Sacramento, for even his limited face time. Only eye-to-eye personal contact, she said, can counteract the hostility that has gripped American politics.

At the conference, she and the Idaho governor, Mr. Little, bonded over their frustration with the federal obstacles to improving nursing homes and home health care. Mr. Gordon of Wyoming had her back as she grilled a representative of the Federal Emergency Management Agency over disaster assistance for states.

Offline, the other governors mused about her reputation as a prankster. (“Plastic co*ckroaches,” she giggled, when asked for her go-to icebreaker. “I just put it in their hand and say, ‘Hold this for a minute.’”)

“It’s not just showing up at a meeting,” she said. “We have lunch together. We have breakfast together. We have dinners together. We spend time together. It makes a difference.”

Sam Brown wins the Nevada G.O.P. Senate primary, and will face Senator Jacky Rosen in the fall.

With 89 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Brown had about 60 percent, lapping the crowded primary field. His closest rival, Jeff Gunter, a former U.S. ambassador to Iceland, had about 15 percent. Jim Marchant, a former state assemblyman, was at roughly 7 percent, and Walter Grady, an Air Force veteran who goes by Tony, had 6 percent.

In his victory speech, delivered to ebullient supporters in a Reno hotel, Mr. Brown said he was focused on holding Ms. Rosen and President Biden accountable for their policies, and giving a beleaguered electorate something to hope for.

“It is tonight that we continue to deliver hope that the American dream is not dead,” Mr. Brown said. “And the American nightmare under Joe Biden and Jacky Rosen begins to end tonight.”

The victory was a redemption of sorts for Mr. Brown, who ran for Senate in 2022 after moving to Reno, Nev., from Dallas in 2018, but lost in the Republican primary to Adam Laxalt, the state’s former attorney general. This time, he was the pick of the Republican establishment from the start, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the Senate, backed him early and worked to clear the field of competitors.

They did not quite manage that. Roughly a dozen Republican challengers vied for the right to face Ms. Rosen, a low-profile Democrat running for re-election in a battleground state where recent elections have been decided by narrow margins.

But most gained little traction, and as Mr. Brown crisscrossed the country raising money and rallying support from prominent Republicans, the other candidates failed to come close to his fund-raising totals. He also earned the endorsem*nt of the state’s Republican governor, Joe Lombardo.

Mr. Brown ran as though he was already in the general election, skipping debates with his Republican opponents, avoiding tying himself too closely to the hard-line conservative wing of the party, and keeping his focus trained on Ms. Rosen, who clinched the Democratic nomination on Tuesday.

Ms. Rosen took aim at Mr. Brown after his victory Tuesday evening, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which works to elect Democrats to the Senate, was quick to publish a digital advertisem*nt bashing him.

“My opponent is a MAGA extremist who will say anything to get elected,” she said in a statement, rattling off a list of issues, like abortion, that she plans to attack him on. “Voters will have a clear choice in this race between a senator who always puts Nevadans first and a politician who only moved here a few years ago just to run for office.”

In the primary, Mr. Brown was slow to back Mr. Trump’s latest bid for the White House, a hesitation that did not go unnoticed among some Republicans, and Mr. Trump waited until the race’s final days to endorse him.

Rivals sensed an opening from the right, and in April, Mr. Gunter tried to shake up the race, announcing a multimillion-dollar advertising effort playing up his MAGA credentials while slamming Mr. Brown as insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump. The attacks forced Mr. Brown and his allies to engage in the primary race for the first time, but it ultimately did little to alter the trajectory of the campaign.

Mr. Brown’s unique background could draw in voters. In 2008, he was nearly killed while serving in Afghanistan when his vehicle drove over a roadside bomb. He underwent more than 30 surgeries during a three-year recovery, and was left permanently scarred.

In his pitch to voters, Mr. Brown often refers to his near-death experience. In his speech on Tuesday, he said he was speaking to Americans who “are at a point like I was on that day in 2008, where we are this close to allowing hope to be extinguished.”

And what is perhaps the informal slogan for his campaign — which he urged the audience to shout out on Tuesday — is the same phrase an Army comrade told him when he helped to extinguish the flames that were burning Mr. Brown in Afghanistan: “I’ve got you.”

“Sam is an American hero who is once again answering the call to serve our country,” Senator Steve Daines of Montana, who leads efforts to get Republicans elected to the Senate, said in a statement after Mr. Brown’s win.

Mr. Brown’s campaign will emphasize popular Republican talking points — border security and inflation — and lay the blame for the Nevada economy’s sluggish recovery from the pandemic at the feet of President Biden and Ms. Rosen.

Ms. Rosen’s campaign plans to emphasize her bipartisan reputation and highlight times when she has defied Mr. Biden, who is unpopular in the state. She will point to victories on issues like lowering prescription drug prices while attacking Mr. Brown’s record on abortion rights.

In the past, Mr. Brown expressed support for a 20-week ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. After announcing his campaign for Senate, he clarified that he would not support a nationwide ban, and told The New York Times that the issue should be left to the states.

North Dakota voters approve an age limit for members of Congress.

The measure provided a rare glimpse into how one state’s voters think about age at a time when questions over the effectiveness of older political leaders have been part of the national conversation.

The campaign in North Dakota to pass an age limit on the state’s members of Congress began as many Americans have debated whether age ought to be a factor in this year’s presidential contest. President Biden is 81, and his opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, is 77.

As a practical matter, the rule does not pose a threat to the state’s three current federal lawmakers, all Republicans, who range in age from 47 to 67.

Jared Hendrix, 41, a Republican politician from Fargo who led the effort to put the question on the ballot, said he saw it as an opportunity to elevate the debate about whether older politicians can govern effectively.

“I think it’s very possible that if we pull this off here, other states will follow,” he said before the election.

In 2022, Mr. Hendrix led a successful effort to set term limits for governor and state legislators.

North Dakota lawmakers anticipated that the new measure would be challenged in court if approved. A Supreme Court case in 1995 established that states cannot add eligibility restrictions beyond those in the Constitution. The Constitution establishes age minimums to serve in Congress — 25 in the House and 30 in the Senate — but federal lawmakers may serve as long as they continue winning races.

A participant in the Jan. 6 riot loses his bid to unseat a Republican state lawmaker in South Carolina.

Mr. Irizarry graduated last month from the Citadel, the esteemed public military college in Charleston, S.C. He was running in House District 43, a rural area in the northern part of the state. The incumbent, Randy Ligon, will not face a Democratic challenger in the general election, and will serve a fourth term in office.

Mr. Irizarry was sentenced to 14 days in jail after pleading guilty to a trespassing charge related to his participation in the 2021 riot. He was suspended from the Citadel for a semester but was later reinstated after a federal judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, wrote a letter to the school stating that Mr. Irizarry had demonstrated “remorse and a determination to make amends.”

Before his sentencing, Mr. Irizarry told Judge Chutkan that he was ashamed of his participation in the storming of the Capitol. But in the run-up to the election, his campaign website noted his prosecution for engaging in “nonviolent activities” at the Capitol as proof that he had “always stood for the conservative movement.”

That reference to Jan. 6 disappeared from the website last week after The New York Times discussed it with Mr. Irizarry’s federal public defender. In a text message, Mr. Irizarry said he had initially mentioned his involvement in the riot on his website “for the sake of transparency.”

Congressman wins Republican nomination for governor in North Dakota.

On the campaign trail, both candidates emphasized their support for former President Donald J. Trump and, as one debate moderator put it, tried to “out-conservative the other.” Mr. Armstrong and Ms. Miller each called for cracking down on illegal immigration and for pushing back on President Biden’s agenda.

This year’s race for governor did not take shape until relatively late in the cycle, as Republicans waited to see whether Mr. Burgum would seek a third term. Mr. Burgum, a business-oriented Republican, sometimes bucked the right flank of his party on transgender issues. After failing to gain traction in the Republican presidential primary, he announced in January that he would not seek another four years as governor.

Mr. Burgum, whom some have mentioned as a potential running mate for Mr. Trump, has emerged in recent months as a more outspoken supporter of the former president.

In the campaign for governor, Mr. Armstrong made the case that his years in Congress, and the relationships he had built, would help him look out for North Dakota’s interests. Ms. Miller sought to paint herself as a political outsider whose business background would shape her approach to governing.

The Republican nominee will face State Senator Merrill Piepkorn, a Democrat from Fargo who was unopposed in his party’s primary, in November.

Though North Dakota voters have occasionally been open to Democrats in the past — Heidi Heitkamp, a moderate Democrat, won a Senate race in 2012 — Republicans have dominated recent statewide elections. Four years ago, Mr. Trump carried the state by 33 percentage points, and Mr. Burgum won re-election by an even greater margin.

North Dakota is a largely rural state, and one of the country’s least populous, though its energy industry has brought an influx of new residents to western North Dakota over the last 15 years. As of April, the state’s 2-percent unemployment rate was tied for the lowest in the country.