Category: Politics

WISCASSET, Maine — As Maine Democrats began the rushed and convoluted process to name a successor to scandal-plagued former nominee Graham Platner, it became quickly clear that progressive Troy Jackson was in control.

From meetings in rural Calais near the Canadian border to urban, progressive Portland, in high school gyms and over Zoom calls across eight counties, the blue-collar logger former state Senate president ran up the score on Saturday.

His campaign dominated the first of two days of the delegate-selection process, with his longtime union allies flexing their organizing muscles to out-maneuver his rivals en route to capturing a strong majority of delegates.

“I’m asking for your vote, but I’m also asking for more than that,” Jackson told over 100 supporters at a Friday evening rally under a gazebo at a park overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Portland, Maine.

“I’m asking you to organize,” he continued. “I’m asking you to talk to your neighbors. I’m asking you to show up at your county meetings, make the calls, send the texts and bring even more people into this movement.”

Organize they did.

On Saturday, Maine Democrats in eight counties chose 319 of the 500 open delegate slots. Jackson-aligned candidates carried an overwhelming majority of the spots selected, while supporters of former state Center for Disease Control director Nirav Shah and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ backers made up just a handful apiece, according to a POLITICO analysis of the campaigns’ released slates and the lists of elected delegates.

Jackson’s performance was so dominant on Saturday — capped off by a clean-sweep of the state’s largest county — that he announced he would host a celebratory tailgate during Sunday’s delegate selection caucus in York County.

The victor of Democrats’ flash pseudo-primary will be thrust immediately into the national spotlight in arguably the most important offensive opportunity for Senate Democrats this fall. Collins is the only Republican running for reelection in a state that President Donald Trump lost in 2024.

Speaking to a small group of reporters in Augusta on Saturday afternoon, Jackson acknowledged the stakes and the challenge.

“It’s probably the biggest race in the whole country,” Jackson said. “And Senator Collins is a whole different type of person to run against.”

Jackson’s campaign showed up to the county conventions with organized groups of volunteers, many of them sporting “Jackson for Maine” t-shirts from his recent unsuccessful run for governor. They also carried flyers with clear delegate slates after making a deluge of calls across the state to recruit supporters and make sure their backers were in place to push him at next week’s convention.

A logger from far-northern Allagash, Jackson made his rise in Maine politics through organized labor and has long been an ally of progressives, receiving Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) backing in the gubernatorial race. He campaigned arm-in-arm with Platner during the original primary. But Jackson swiftly called for him to exit the race after POLITICO reported that a person who dated Platner said he sexually assaulted her. Platner denied the accusation, but dropped out four days later.

Jackson has been able to quickly establish himself as the candidate most in the mold of the oysterman, who dominated the Senate primary, given his longtime track record of backing similar policies.

Saturday’s strong organizational effort by Jackson and his allies — which came just eight days after Platner dropped his campaign, augmented by volunteers from more than a dozen unions that are endorsing Jackson — represents an impressive accomplishment under a tight timeline.

And it has set him up as the clear favorite over a crowded field of more than 10 candidates heading into the second day of county conventions. His nearest rivals, fellow former gubernatorial nominees Shah and Bellows, came out of Saturday’s slate of conventions with hardly any path to victory. Eight more counties will select 181 more combined delegates on Sunday, with another 101 Democratic state committee members already chosen and whose votes are less clear since they are not being elected as part of any slate. Together they will all make up the 601 delegates who will pick their party’s nominee next weekend in the crucial Senate race.

Some of Jackson’s supporters didn’t come in committed to a candidate, but had been swayed by his team’s hyper-local level of retail politics, which will be crucial in the battle with Collins, one of the strongest retail politicians in Congress.

Liam Kent, a Jackson supporter who was elected as delegate on Jackson’s slate in Lincoln County, said he had been undecided when he applied to run as a delegate. But he threw his support behind Jackson.

“I was in the middle of making a sandwich for lunch, and I was shocked to have him call me,” Kent said. “It was really nice because he’s as real on the phone as he is in person.” 

The makeshift slate of county caucuses had its challenges. Voters, delegate nominees and campaigns encountered some minor hiccups while participating in the process, which was created by state and local Democrats in the two weeks after Platner’s exit from the race.

In-person and virtual county meetings provided staff to help voters resolve issues with the state’s online ballots, while campaigns scrambled to adapt to the quirks of the process.

Some delegate nominees were listed on the slates for multiple campaigns, although Jackson’s campaign featured less overlap than others. Bellows’ delegate slate included enough nominees in each county to account for the alternates that voters are allowed to select in each state. Shah’s and Jackson’s campaigns did not, causing confusion among Shah and Jackson supporters in Hancock County over where to assign their additional votes.

Nina Milliken, a state representative who coordinated Jackson’s delegate slate in Hancock County, was listed as a Shah delegate when his campaign initially released their slate. Shah’s campaign later removed her.

“It is nonsensical to me, frankly, that I’m on Shah’s list,” Milliken said. “This has been a profoundly messy process.”

The big delegate prize on Saturday was in Cumberland County, which includes the state’s largest and most Democrat-dense city of Portland. Jackson-aligned candidates claimed a clean sweep of the nominating spots in an online process that saw such high interest the party needed to extend the voting times. The final alternate delegate was a tied vote, so the county chair drew names out of a baseball cap to decide the winner.

While Jackson has a clear lead heading into Sunday, the delegates who are chosen — even if they are aligned with a particular candidate — are not formally pledged and can still change their votes at next week’s convention.

Even as he was able to rally his supporters, there were some voters who were dissatisfied with the process the Maine Democratic Party set up during the extremely narrow window they had to work with, with some who had hoped to serve as delegates feeling they were cut out of the process by campaigns that had coordinated delegate slates in advance. Other voters said the party did the best under the timeline that is outlined in state law.

Richard Zandler, a 75-year-old Democrat from Southwest Harbor, Maine, ran as an uncommitted delegate on Saturday but lost. He expressed dismay that his independence weakened his chances of being elected.

“I think a lot of the slates were established by looking at donors and people who had worked on the campaigns, because all of these candidates have just freshly come off a primary campaign,” he said.

Zandler is at least somewhat correct. A person running for delegate to back Shah said the campaign had contacted him to participate because he had previously donated to Shah’s gubernatorial race.

Other delegate-hopefuls bemoaned the sheer number of phone calls they had gotten from the want-to-be senators. Roughly 3,700 Mainers signed up to try to be delegates, and a number said they’d received 20 or 30 calls and texts from the various campaigns. Shah told POLITICO he’d personally made about 500 calls to delegate nominees ahead of the weekend meetings.

Jackon’s closest rivals were not deterred by early results on Saturday. Shah told POLITICO during a brief interview at Wiscasset Middle High School, before the scope of Jackson’s dominance had become clear, that his campaign would “keep their feet on the gas.”

“No one here is committed, and so there’s going to be a lot of persuasion that happens, without a doubt,” Shah said. “We’re going to continue.”

As the day wrapped up, Jackson posted a video to social media thanking his supporters.“All of you just smoked it,” he said. “Thank you so much. We’re well on our way to get the government we fucking deserve.”

​Politics

From the moment the United States launched its bid to co-host the 2026 World Cup, the games were pitched as a way to elevate and promote North America’s most distinctive and glamorous cities.

There was Miami, with its fabulous beachfront hotels, described in the so-called bid book as the United States’ “gateway to the world.” San Francisco put forth a vision of fans flooding Mission Dolores Park, reveling in the city’s “iconic skyline” and its mythical bridge on the edge of the continent. Boston, one of America’s “most historic” cities, would greet the World Cup with an “elegant simplicity with distinctive New England flair.”

The members of soccer governing body FIFA bought it, and in 2018 chose the United States, Mexico and Canada. But the tournament itself was never intended to be played in many of the cities lovingly described by the bid book. Instead, in a quirk of political geography distinctive to the United States, matches would often land instead in much smaller, less wealthy outlying municipalities known to sports fans and illegible to everyone else.

“When I tell people I’m the mayor of East Rutherford, they’re like, where’s that?” said Jeffrey Lahullier, the elected leader of a New Jersey town of 10,000 hosting this weekend’s final match. “I say, do you know where the World Cup’s being played?”

It’s an inversion of American political power laid bare by the World Cup, where global events are often staged in municipalities with sometimes only a few thousand residents, forcing local officials to negotiate with billion-dollar franchises, international governing bodies and visiting heads of state.

For decades, such suburban stadium cities — often considered little more than a landing pad for enormous, polygonal sports spaceships — have existed in a strange political limbo. They find themselves alternatingly privileged and bullied from the athletic behemoths in their backyards, which come with promising financial impact but deliver it only inconsistently. With the World Cup, what was often a source of local friction between local politicians and their most famous corporate citizens moved onto the global stage.

Santa Clara, California, Mayor Lisa Gillmor welcomed Jordan’s King Abdullah II upon his arrival at the nearby airport, and Arlington, Texas, Mayor Jim Ross greeted Japan’s Princess Takamado. In Foxborough, Massachusetts, the five part-time members of a town’s select board found themselves in a staredown with what might be the world’s most famous nonprofit. In Inglewood, abutting Los Angeles, Mayor James Butts saw a labor fight with a stadium-workers union become intertwined with federal immigration debates after workers said they were fearful of being “kidnapped by ICE” agents assigned to games.

As presidents, prime ministers and kings from across at least three continents meet in East Rutherford, Lahullier’s mind will be focused less on the World Cup final taking place than on how to find room in a $34 million municipal budget to cover a $100,000-plus police overtime bill.

“It was described to me like I’m hosting eight Super Bowls,” Lahullier said of the challenges posed by the World Cup. “But it’s not a money-maker — you’re laying out money you hope you’re going to recoup.”

Long before they were massive monuments to American sports culture, the sites of suburban stadiums were racetracks, swamps, low-income neighborhoods and sandy expanses of land where locals took weekend dirtbike joyrides and came to dump their trash.

Through much of the 20th century, sports were synonymous with the hub and thrum of the city itself. Fans would walk from workplaces and homes to arenas that were centers of civic pride, their cheers and roars knit into the urban soundscape, players and coaches an extension of a city’s character.

That started to change in the 1960s, and teams began to move away from the places and names they bore on the front of their jerseys. Although the rise of the automobile and a population shift into the suburbs guided their destinations, departure was usually precipitated by conflict with local political leadership. In 1971, the Boston Patriots left their hometown after struggling to find space for a permanent stadium that could house the National Football League franchise. They found the land about an hour’s drive away along Route 1, in a small town that would not fund the stadium, but welcomed the project. In recognition of their new Foxborough home — much closer to Rhode Island than Boston’s city hall — the team renamed itself the New England Patriots.

Wellington Mara, the owner of the New York Giants, announced that same year that he would move his team from Yankee Stadium to a swampy New Jersey tideland after growing discontented with the city’s unwillingness to build them their own stadium. (“Every family dreams of moving into its own house and to get away from its in‐laws,” Mara said at the time.) After the announcement, then-New York Mayor John Lindsay called Mara “selfish, callous and ungrateful,” threatening to sue in an effort to force the team to drop New York from its name.

The Miami Dolphins decided to leave the Orange Bowl, in the city’s Little Havana neighborhood, in 1984 after Miami demanded a rent increase. Team owner Joe Robbie signed a 99-year lease with Dade County for a site in a low-income, rural, and then-unincorporated patch of land about 15 miles northwest of downtown Miami.

At the time, the populace of what was then called Lake Lucerne was little enthused about making room for a $100 million professional sports stadium. Local homeowners, many of them Black, mounted lawsuits on both land-use and civil-rights grounds to block development, but found themselves thwarted by maneuvering from the county and state agencies. Even the discovery of a Native American burial ground on the site was not enough to stop Joe Robbie Stadium from opening to the public in 1987.

Similar scenes played out across the country in the decades that followed. The Dallas Cowboys left downtown Dallas for Irving in 1971, then moved deeper into the suburbs to Arlington in 2009, having failed to convince either of its previous two homes to build a taxpayer-funded stadium. The 49ers left San Francisco’s Candlestick Point in 2013 for the warmer, less windy and more financially welcoming city of Santa Clara 40 miles down the San Francisco Bay Peninsula. In Southern California, Inglewood won out over competing sites as the home for the Rams when the football team returned to the city in 2020.

Each transformed a small municipality into a development and entertainment destination whose population could balloon by more than 800 percent on game days or concert nights. That offered an appealing new tax base along with vexing new public-safety and transportation challenges, and tricky politics surrounding it all.

As Foxborough transformed from isolated farm town into a regional destination surrounded by malls, the city wrangled with the Patriots over fan behavior, traffic concerns and their understaffed local police. In Inglewood, the arrival of a stadium led to luxury mixed-use housing developments and new hotels with yoga decks, but also significant displacement of an overwhelmingly non-white community.

Rutherford, New Jersey, is a charming borough whose compact, “20th century quaint” walkable center Forbes once described as fit for a Norman Rockwell painting. The town to its east, however, is little more than a farrago of parking lots surrounding MetLife Stadium (home to football’s Jets and Giants), Meadowlands Racetrack (thoroughbreds, harness horses) and the American Dream mega-mall (Abercrombie & Fitch, Cinnabon). It has since become the smallest city ever to host a Super Bowl.

Leaving San Francisco, the 49ers in 2010 asked voters in Santa Clara — a quiet Silicon valley suburb then best known as the home of Intel and Nvidia — to contribute to $937 million in total spending on a new stadium. Under the terms of the arrangement, a public authority would own the building and the 49ers would act as the manager of day-to-day operations, sharing revenue from non-NFL events with the city.

“The economy wasn’t great, the team was losing, there was a lot of distrust in politics at the time,” said Lisa Gillmor, a former city council member who helped run the pro-stadium ballot campaign. “We worked really hard and convinced our community that it wasn’t going to cost the city any money to build the stadium.”

By the time Gillmor returned to city government in 2016, she said Santa Clara’s relationship with the team had begun to deteriorate. A nearby youth soccer park became a flashpoint as the 49ers considered turning into parking lots, and a popular multi-use trail was diverted on game days. (A 49ers spokesperson said that the field was untouched and that the franchise now provides funding for youth teams that use it.) Most significantly, Gillmor said that money that the city was expected to receive from stadium concert revenues soon fell to near-zero, as the team claimed its security costs had increased, although the team maintains that total revenue from the general fund has outpaced initial projects.

Things turned adversarial enough that Gillmor and the city voted to remove the 49ers as managers of the stadium in 2019, prompting a lawsuit from the team. The 49ers later launched a campaign to unseat her, and in 2022, a team-backed challenger came just 700 votes short of doing so. (The city and the team later settled their lawsuit, leaving the 49ers with management of the stadium.)

Ellie Caple, the 49ers vice president of corporate communications and public affairs, said that the World Cup has been a “tremendous success with no financial risk to the city” and that the 49ers remain committed to investing in the community. Gillmor, for her part, has gone from ally of a San Francisco-based team to a leading antagonist of Santa Clara’s most famous resident.

“They were very hospitable during the election,” said Gillmor. “Then after the votes, things changed, they rolled back up the red carpet.”

A global mega-event like the World Cup is always framed in the bright terms of shared humanity and common purpose, a chance to “embrace the concept of global unity” and “the power of football to meaningfully impact the world,” as the United States’ pitch deck once put it. Still, the relationship between a host city and FIFA is also decidedly transactional in nature.

FIFA, soccer’s governing body, requires locales to sign a hosting agreement requiring cities to cover significant operational costs of matches like security and expanded transportation services, which can run to up to$150 million per city. In return, the host city is promised publicity and an economic infusion from the games, plus reimbursements from state host committees. In the United States, many cities recoiled at those terms, including Chicago, Minneapolis and Detroit, which removed themselves from host consideration in the run-up to the World Cup, citing FIFA’s demands and financial expectations.

“The big problem I had was, they wanted to treat taxpayers as dumb money at the table, and I was not gonna let that happen,” former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in an interview with POLITICO in June, looking back on Chicago’s decision not to host World Cup matches. “I know a bad deal when I see one.”

For the cities that did end up with the games, the welcome wasn’t particularly warm. New York and New Jersey politicians have engaged in a bruising, very public argument with FIFA over its unwillingness to help pay for fan transportation, which World Cup host countries have been on the hook for in the past. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, meanwhile, successfully negotiated with FIFA for $50 tickets and free transportation for 1,000 New Yorkers, and pushed the soccer giant to retreat from a ban on spectators bringing water bottles into stadiums. (FIFA President Gianni Infantino also arranged a call between Mamdani and Arsène Wenger, the legendary manager of Mamdani’s beloved club Arsenal, in an effort to build goodwill.)

Outrage from New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill over FIFA’s plans to sell stadium grass as a collectible drove the organization to reverse itself and agree to return some proceeds to local organizers. (FIFA did not respond to a request for comment.)

But small-town mayors were not always able to capture the same public attention when pushing back against the Zurich-based nonprofit, and were forced to seek leverage elsewhere. The select board of 19,000-person Foxborough withheld a basic event permit for the seven World Cup matches scheduled for Gillette Stadium to extract reimbursement for an estimated $7.8 million in security costs. Less than three months before the World Cup was scheduled to begin, Patriots owner Robert Kraft delivered the money.

“The concessions are small and meaningless, they can say they’ve extracted this, but it doesn’t really matter,” said J.C. Bradbury, a sports business professor at Kennesaw State University and the author of a forthcoming book about how stadiums transformed into “billion-dollar play-palaces for the rich-built increasingly on the backs of taxpayers.”

The settlement between Foxborough and Kraft’s companies allowed the World Cup to proceed in Massachusetts even as the two entities moved their battle to court. In mid-June, Kraft Sports & Entertainment sued the town for “repeatedly misusing its state-granted licensing authority unlawfully to extract funds.” In early July, even before the final match was played there, Foxborough filed a counterclaim that asked a judge to dismiss Kraft’s suit.

“While the plaintiffs, a collection of multibillion-dollar corporations, would prefer to have Foxborough taxpayers bear these expenses, they are contractually bound to pay for the public safety services that are necessary to ensure safe and efficient events at their private venue,” the town wrote in a brief.

Kraft’s New England Revolution professional soccer franchise plays its next match in Foxborough on Thursday.

When the summer Olympics concluded in August 2024, it was Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass who inherited the games’ flame, which she passed to a motorcycling Tom Cruise for an action hero’s escape to California. But the bulk of the ceremony that opens the Olympics in July 2028 will not take place within the city that Bass governs.

Instead it will occur at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium, which had not been built when the World Cup and Olympic bids were formulated but is now regarded as one of the world’s preeminent sporting arenas and will be converted into a swimming venue in 2028.

Mayor James Butts credits his city’s dramatic change in financial fortunes over the last few decades to the arrival of sports teams and stadiums, along with related businesses like the National Football League, which set its West Coast headquarters and media center there. Once the home of the Los Angeles Lakers, the city’s team bucked the suburban trend by leaving Inglewood’s Great Western Forum for a stadium in downtown Los Angeles in 1999. In the decade that followed, the city struggled with crime, high unemployment rates and a $17 million budget deficit. But its fortunes began to change when the Forum reopened and sports investor Stan Kroenke bought the city’s old racetrack, which later became the site of SoFi stadium and the home of the Rams.

Butts estimates that his city now hosts 400 events a year and welcomes a half-million people, requiring “very robust” traffic management and safety resources, insisting that the city-stadium dynamic is “very healthy.”

But that relationship has also been tested by numerous disputes, including a long running legal dispute between the city and Kroenke, who owns both SoFi and the Rams. Inglewood receives millions each year from an admission tax on ticket events, amounting to nearly 10 percent of the city’s general fund revenues.

“We went from BBB- bond ratings to AA+. Median value for a home was $225,000 when I took office, it’s $850,000 now,” said Butts. “Right now we have more in reserves than any city in the county.”

Butts is not alone among local politicians to believe that having one’s city defined by a stadium is worth the hassle and financial burden, and that being too easily confused with its much bigger neighbor can bring its own benefits. In a promotional video for the World Cup, Mayor Rodney Harris of Miami Gardens — where today’s third-place match between France and England will be played — said that the tournament gives “an opportunity to sell our story” in a way that could help lure future businesses.

Ultimately, for these mayors, the moments of pageantry are few and far between. Lahullier attended the tournament’s first match at MetLife, between Morocco and Brazil, in a luxury-box row of government officials. “I wish I could tell you that I follow soccer, but I do not,” he said.

But when broadcasters grabbed shots of local politicians, it was always Mamdani — the camera cutting out the actual mayor sitting to his right. Even when the world is looking on, a small-city mayor can recede into the backdrop.

“I’ve been mayor now for seven years,” Lahullier said. “If I twisted arms I could probably get a signed football or a signed jersey.”

​Politics

Abdul El-Sayed on AIPAC spending, ‘Defund the Police’ and why he’s not a socialist

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​Politics

A self-funding businessman is seizing on messy scandals to try and topple President Donald Trump’s endorsed candidate for a deep-red House seat.

Republican Daniel Keenan is making a hard run at former Sheriff Mark Lamb in Arizona’s 5th District, pouring over $1.6 million of his own cash into the effort and raising questions about Lamb’s fitness for office following a string of sex scandals. The race will test whether GOP voters care more about the allegations — or whether Trump’s support is enough to get him across the finish line.

A multi-part Arizona Republic investigation found that Lamb allegedly engaged in a yearslong pattern of sending sexual images and instigating intimate encounters between him, his wife and others. One woman involved, Jillian Stannard, alleged Lamb encouraged her husband to have sex with other women, including Lamb’s wife. She also alleged that Lamb threatened her, saying there would be consequences, when Stannard raised concerns to leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which both Lamb and Stannard were members. Screenshots the Republic obtained of messages with another woman, Tammy Peacock, suggest Lamb — then a sitting county sheriff — threatened to leverage Arizona’s revenge porn law against her. In a statement, Lamb spokesperson Ed Morabito said “these allegations are false and come from long-discredited political opponents.”

Reached for comment on Wednesday, Stannard said her allegations reported by the Republic are “accurate and true.” Peacock passed away in 2021.

“A guy that goes around and says, ‘God, family freedom,’ is sending pictures of himself and nude pictures of his wife, encouraging his friends and his employees to have sexual relations with his wife,’” Keenan said in an interview this week of the allegations, repeating similar attacks he’s made in campaign advertising. “That’s not ‘God, family freedom.’ That shows you’re morally broke.”

Morabito, the Lamb spokesperson, noted the candidate has Trump’s endorsement and is “confident Republican voters will stand with him.”

“[Keenan] is spending millions attacking a Republican and not a dime attacking Democrats. His name ID is less than 30 percent and he is not a serious factor in this race,” Morabito said in a statement.

Janel Lamb, Mark Lamb’s wife, said in a May Facebook post that “a massive smear campaign is certainly not going to stop us from doing what we know is right.”

The race’s outcome will reveal the power of Trump’s endorsement in a deep-red Phoenix-area district. Already this year, GOP primary voters have been willing to accept scandal-ridden candidates favored by Trump. In Texas, Republican primary voters nominated scandal-plagued Attorney General Ken Paxton over incumbent GOP Sen. John Cornyn.

“I’ve never seen in Republican politics in my life a stronger endorsement than Trump’s,” said former Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.), who represented the 5th District. “And I think that the rank-and-file within the Republican party would rather do anything than cross Trump.”

Keenan has put more than $1.6 million of his own money into his campaign and is using that to make sure voters know all about the reporting. His campaign has spent more than $1.8 million on TV advertising listing the allegations in the Republic, is also hosting numerous town halls a week and has put significant cash into mail advertising as well. Meanwhile, Lamb’s campaign hasn’t put a penny onto the airwaves, according to the tracking service AdImpact.

Lamb has also faced scrutiny for spending much of his time on a ranch in Tennessee and not in the district he is seeking to represent. And Keenan is hitting him over another top issue for Arizona Republicans: Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

“[Lamb] betrayed our president after the 2020 election,” Keenan told POLITICO. “However he feels about election fraud,
he testified for Democrats saying there was no fraud and that President Trump lost the election. I think all of that is disqualifying to represent this district.”

There is some evidence that the pitch to voters is landing. An internal poll from Keenan’s campaign obtained by POLITICO shows Keenan leading Lamb 42 percent to 40 percent, narrowly within the poll’s margin of error. The campaign’s earlier polling from late June had shown Lamb leading 43 percent to 35 percent.

Keenan said he has been in touch with the White House about his bid and made the case that he has always been a steadfast supporter of Trump. He also said Georgia businessman Rick Jackson’s recent gubernatorial primary win without Trump’s endorsement shows he can win without the president’s nod — even if it’s hard.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Still, Lamb’s allies are taking notice of Keenan’s rise. The Washington-based Club For Growth poured $250,000 into pro-Lamb advertising in recent weeks, which Keenan says is a sign of Lamb’s vulnerability: “There’d be no reason for them to do that if he wasn’t in trouble,” Keenan said. Asked about the spending, a spokesperson for the Club pointed to their own internal poll from a few weeks ago showing Lamb up by a 34-point margin.

Lamb was never charged with a crime for his alleged actions. An investigation by the Pinal County attorney found no criminal wrongdoing, though it also concluded a previous county attorney failed to adequately investigate the accusations.

“I know him. I’ve seen him. I’ve seen him time and time again stand for the right things,” said Tyler Farnsworth, a Republican candidate for the Arizona House in Gilbert. “My belief is that the voters here in CD5 have seen who Mark Lamb is.”

“I tend to believe what I see out of the legal system, the justice system, much more than some reporting that may have some very intentional bias toward it,” he added.

The women in the Republic investigation said they also repeatedly raised concerns to Latter-day Saint church leaders. It is unclear what disciplinary action, if any, the church took: The church does not publicly disclose membership status or disciplinary proceedings. The church did not respond to a request for comment.

The stories sent waves through the district’s large Latter-day Saint community. Arizona’s 5th District — sometimes colloquially called the “Mormon district” — includes Gilbert, Queen Creek and parts of Mesa, all areas with significant Latter-day Saint populations.

“When you see the picture of him in a baptismal outfit, with the brother he baptized, and he’s having an open marriage with his wife and this man, it doesn’t seem to uphold our gospel standards,” Suzanne Lunt, an independent voter in Gilbert, said of the allegations. Lunt helped organize Latter-day Saints against Trump in 2024.

In late May, as the Republic’s reporting rocked the valley, a group of prominent Latter-day Saint politicians and strategists coalesced to try and force Lamb out of the race, noting Lamb could make the seat a vulnerability for Republicans in November, or drag down statewide Republicans in the crucial race for governor. But that push tapered off after it became clear Lamb — or his supporters — wouldn’t budge.

“More of an effort hasn’t been made because he doesn’t have a serious opponent well-funded enough to make the numbers close enough,” said Tyler Montague, a Mesa-based political operative who is a Latter-day Saint. “That’s why there isn’t any real movement elsewhere.”

Keenan begs to differ, arguing that Lamb’s scandals could put the district that went for Trump by 20 points “at risk.”

“I don’t actually like [Keenan],” said Amy Wudel, a Republican in Gilbert. “He’s sort of on the extreme side, from typically what I would vote for.” But Wudel, who worked for an independent challenger to Rep. Andy Biggs in the 5th District last cycle, will vote for Keenan because “I do not vote for candidates who do not display the character worthy of office.”

Keenan still faces an uphill battle. His own poll shows the huge name ID deficit he faces — when voters were asked their opinion of Keenan and Lamb, one-third said they were not sure about Keenan, while only 11 percent said the same of Lamb.

It’s unclear how much the mudslinging will land with voters. The Arizona legislature moved the primary date up from early August to late July, meaning thousands of voters already cast a ballot through mail-in balloting or early voting. And the timing of the primary could make it a low-turnout affair: Because many Phoenix-area public schools return in late July or early August, many families are trying to beat the heat by getting in late-summer travel.

“This time of year, any given week, the pews are empty on Sunday and everyone is in Show Low, Flagstaff or San Diego,” said Chad Heywood, a Republican strategist who is neutral in the race.

Meanwhile, Lamb’s supporters are bullish, especially after Trump reinforced his endorsement of Lamb in a social media post Sunday without addressing the scandals. To show his dominance in the 5th District, supporters point to the 2024 election. Lamb ran for Senate, and even as he was being trounced in the primary by Kari Lake, he still managed to win his home of Pinal County by 25 points. One ally also pointed out that Lamb received a standing ovation during a June gathering of Republican women, long after the allegations became public. And his allies in Congress are sticking by his side: Lamb’s campaign sent out fundraising solicitations from House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in recent weeks.

Even Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz), who previously said Lamb’s activity “borders on immoral” and that Lamb should drop out of the race if he isn’t willing to address the accusations, is now keeping the race at arms length.

“I stay out of [District] 5, because it’s not my district,” Schweikert said in an interview at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday. “If that’s good enough for his voters, I mean, they’re the ones in the district.”

​Politics

Democrats continue to rake in cash across some of the nation’s most pivotal Senate races, outpacing their Republican counterparts several times over.

In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff has 20 times as much cash on hand as his Republican challenger, Rep. Mike Collins. In North Carolina, perhaps Democrats’ best pickup opportunity, former Gov. Roy Cooper outraised former RNC Chair Michael Whatley $8.2 million to $2.9 million. And in Texas, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico ended June with $21.5 million in the bank compared to $1.8 million for his GOP opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

But Republicans have a leg up in a handful of states that have gotten messy for Democrats, including Michigan and Maine, where the GOP has built up a cash advantage while primaries have prevented Democrats from sending their resources to a single candidate. That could challenge Democrats’ narrow path back to Senate control heading into the fall.

The Senate battle map is nearly solidified with a handful of critical states left on the primary calendar. Democrats face a steep climb against Republicans, who benefit from a more favorable map and campaign-arm cash advantage. But Democrats’ pipe dream to seize the upper chamber has become more realistic as the party fields a slate of star recruits with proven fundraising prowess — and as Republicans continue to grapple with high costs and an ongoing war in Iran.

Democrats’ hopes were further buoyed Wednesday by their candidates’ second-quarter campaign finance reports, filed with the Federal Election Commission. 

“In key battleground races, Democrats are out-raising and out-polling many of their Republican counterparts,” said Adrienne Elrod, a national Democratic strategist who has advised numerous Senate and presidential campaigns. “All of this bodes well for a strong midterm for Democrats.”

Republicans shrugged off the disparities, pointing to the recent Supreme Court decision relaxing rules around coordination between candidates and party campaign arms that will allow the GOP to flex its committee-level cash advantage. The National Republican Senatorial Committee had just shy of $49 million in the bank at the end of May compared to just under $39 million for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

“Republicans have a massive advantage on the party committee level and were ready to hit the ground running following the Supreme Court decision on Super PACs,” said GOP strategist Doug Heye. “As the fundraising ground has shifted over the past several years, all of this gives reason for Republicans to be hopeful about holding the Senate.”

Republicans are also building sizable cash advantages in some critical swing states where Democrats are slogging through contentious primaries. In Maine, Graham Platner’s exit — after POLITICO reported a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her years ago — has set off a scramble to succeed him on the ballot. Platner denied the allegations, but ended his bid after he hemorrhaged support.

Democrats now stand at a massive financial disadvantage against GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who ended the second quarter with $11 million in the bank.

Platner had raised a whopping $9 million in the second quarter, though his high burn rate meant he ended up with only $1.7 million cash on hand at the end of June.

Democrats are racing to bankroll their next standard-bearer. The DSCC launched a fund for the eventual new nominee as soon as Platner dropped out. Another Democratic group, the grassroots organization Swing Left, said it plans to raise roughly $500,000 for the eventual nominee.

Candidates running against Collins have generally been able to raise a lot of money in the past, but it’s not clear yet whether Platner’s successor will be able to recapture the small-dollar donor base that was electrified by his populist candidacy, especially with just a few months until Election Day.

And in Michigan, Democrats Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens are burning through cash ahead of their Aug. 4 face-off — allowing the presumptive GOP nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers, to build a sizable cash advantage heading into the general election.

Rogers had stockpiled nearly $5.7 million heading into July, compared to Stevens’ $3.4 million and El-Sayed’s $2.7 million.

​Politics

LOS ANGELES — Some of the most powerful Latino politicians in the United States were invited to wear their favorite soccer jerseys. But few chose Argentina’s Abiceleste. 

Mayor Frank Figueroa of Coachella, California said his feelings toward Argentina as a “Latin American country” (in finger quotes) were so strong, he was willing to back England, the team that knocked out Mexico — where Figueroa traces his heritage — in a contentious quarterfinal match.

“Just by looking at their soccer team. For me, it’s like who’s playing on the soccer team compared to all the other Latin American countries who had the people playing on their team,” said Figueroa. “That is a big thing for me. They all look European.”

With the World Cup semi-finals coinciding with one of the country’s largest gatherings for Latino policymakers, organizers of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials annual conference embraced the timing. They have scheduled Telemundo World Cup watch parties in a hotel ballroom and are selling NALEO soccer jerseys to celebrate the organization’s 50th anniversary. Multicolored soccer jerseys — most commonly the green of Mexico’s El Tri — were scattered among the polished suits and business-casual attire in the conference venue.

But the absence of support for the tournament’s only remaining Latin American team was notable. In fact, it was easier today to spot England’s colors than Argentina’s hours before the two countries faced off in Atlanta.

Argentina’s history of blanqueamiento policies encouraging mass European migration, sanctuary for Nazis after World War II and its “genocide” against Afro-Argentines contributes to the “systemic problems and challenges” in Argentina’s history, said Karina Moreno, a councilmember representing Palm Desert, California. It’s a history that Moreno said continues the “fallacy” of superiority from Argentina to other Latin American countries.

Animosity towards Argentina was compounded after Argentine media personality Eduardo Feinmann said he “detested Mexicans” in on-air comments after Mexico’s tournament exit last week. Feinmann went on to describe “the envy the Mexicans feel for us Argentines, not just in football, but in everything.” The ensuing controversy escalated with a public rebuke from Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum.

“It’s not the first time, and it validates what we’re talking about,” Moreno said, referring to the incident.

The behavior of Argentina fans has also come under scrutiny, with FIFA opening an investigation into a supporter’s alleged racist abuse of American streamer IShowSpeed during the team’s victory against Cape Verde earlier this month. Egyptian coach Hossam Hassan’s made FIFA’s designated gesture to report racist abuse — a crossed-arm “X” gesture — against Argentina..

Salta Lake City councilmember Alejandro Puy, a Salt Lake City councilmember sported one of the rare Argentina jerseys. Raised in Buenos Aires, he says “rivalries are expected” between countries in soccer.

“Ultimately we are all brothers and sisters of this continent and we stand by it,” Puy said, though he still says there’s “no doubt” Argentina has the best team in Latin America.

Though he said he appreciated the Latino camaraderie in the conference, Puy was headed to Argentina’s Consulate in Los Angeles to watch the game and not feel “a little alone.”

​Politics