Category: Politics

DETROIT — As a professional driver navigated a gleaming new Ford Bronco Sport up a steep ridge, Mallory McMorrow found herself pinned in the back seat clinging to the overhead roll bar.

The Detroit Auto Show course is designed to show off the Bronco’s capabilities — while putting an escapist scare into its thrill-seeking passengers. But it just reminded McMorrow of her day-to-day reality running for Michigan’s open Senate seat.

“It’s a teeter-totter, man,” McMorrow told POLITICO about her race, after having navigated a very literal giant teeter-totter in the Bronco. “It could go any direction.”

McMorrow is locked in a tight three-way primary with Rep. Haley Stevens and physician Abdul El-Sayed that has emerged as a test for what the next generation of Democrats will look like — and whether they can win a key swing-state election that will help determine Senate control.

In recent days, the trio of candidates’ squabbles careened hour to hour from whether they should embrace Medicare for All, to how far Democrats should go in fighting ICE. In fact, the contest has emerged as a catch-all for every question and problem plaguing Democrats politically and tactically: Where should they stand on Israel and Gaza? Should they send their aging congressional leaders packing? What does electability look like in this political environment? Should Democrats tap into the attention economy or focus on traditional campaigning?

El-Sayed, on the left, has taken consistently maximalist positions fitting for a man who wrote a book titled “Medicare For All: A Citizen’s Guide” and has vocal support from Sen. Bernie Sanders. Stevens, a classic swing-state centrist favored by many establishment Democrats, has taken smaller-bore stances. Between them sits McMorrow, who’s aiming to appeal to voters in both of their lanes.

But this three-way battle to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) isn’t just about what direction the Democratic Party takes in Washington — it’s whether they can get there in the first place.

Democrats think they see a route back to the Senate majority. But if they don’t hold on to their seat in Michigan, that faint path won’t materialize.

“It’s already a long shot, but it’s a doable thing — but not without Michigan,” said David Axelrod, the longtime senior adviser to former President Barack Obama.

Axelrod called it the “most fascinating and consequential primary” in the country.

Democratic leaders both in Michigan and D.C. are growing more worried by the day that the hard-fought contest, which won’t be decided until the August primary, will exacerbate ideological tensions and leave the nominee in a weakened position heading into a contest against former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.).

“We’re used to having long primaries,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) told POLITICO. “No one loves them, but we’re used to having them. And I don’t think it’s insurmountable.”

For now, the race is wide open.

Most public polls have found a tight three-way race in the primary, with Stevens or McMorrow holding a slight lead depending on the survey; in those same polls, Stevens runs slightly ahead of Rogers in the general election, with McMorrow just a bit behind her and El-Sayed a bit further back.

Stevens has a fundraising edge. According to the latest Federal Election Commission reports, which posted on Saturday, she brought in $2.1 million in the past quarter and has $3 million cash on hand; McMorrow and El-Sayed both raised around $1.75 million and each has just under $2 million in the bank. Rogers raised just under $2 million and has just under $3.5 million cash on hand.

Part of the lack of separation in the polls is that voters haven’t engaged yet. The campaigns don’t expect cleavage until paid media starts happening in full (El-Sayed is the only candidate so far to roll out a statewide ad.)

“Only the most political have started to click in,” Slotkin said.

Michigan Democrats also worried about the impact the primary could have on the rest of the party as they fight to hold on to term-limited Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s office and win back control of the Legislature.

Whitmer, with her 60 percent approval rating, is facing a pressure campaign from some in the party to endorse either Stevens or McMorrow early in the race to narrow the field, according to two senior Michigan Democratic officials granted anonymity to speak about private discussions. Otherwise, one of them worried, “we could see real losses.”

Whitmer and El-Sayed duked it out in a 2018 gubernatorial primary, and the officials say bad blood remains between them.

A Whitmer spokesperson declined to comment.

A clash of ideologies

The candidates have sharp ideological divides on major issues including health care, Israel and Gaza and accepting corporate PAC money.

After a second person was killed by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis, the three candidates’ diverging approach to ICE and its funding supercharged the primary.

While McMorrow and Stevens glad-handed at the Detroit Auto Show and union halls around the MLK holiday, after immigration agents killed Renee Good and before they killed Alex Pretti, El-Sayed, who has championed the Abolish ICE movement since 2018, went to Minneapolis and filmed man-on-the-street interviews for social media that were reminiscent of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s successful viral campaign videos.

He told POLITICO he was there to “understand what it looks like when an arm of the government lays siege to a city in America.” (El-Sayed also jetted to California for a fundraiser earlier that week).

McMorrow has expressed supportfor reforms to ICE, such as requiring agents to be unmasked, and argues Republicans and Democrats should “deny DHS one penny more until complete overhaul and accountability of this agency” happens.

Stevens, meanwhile, is co-sponsoring a bill that would divert what she called ICE’s $75 billion “slush fund” to state and local law enforcement agencies; she has also called for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s impeachment.

The candidates are also at odds over health care, an issue over which they’ve sparred in recent days.

In an interview with Democratic influencer Brian Tyler Cohen last week, El-Sayed reignited the health care debate. He said, “if you like your insurance from your employer or from your union, that can still be there for you,” apparently flipping on his stance on Medicare for All. McMorrow and her allies seized on his remarks as El-Sayed seemingly embracing a position he had repeatedly attacked her on. El-Sayed hosted a December health care town hall with Sanders where he contrasted his Medicare for All support with McMorrow’s and Steven’s backing of a public option.

“It’s wild to call yourself the ‘next generation’ of Democratic leadership and be running AGAINST Medicare for All in 2026,” he posted on X a month ago, quote-tweeting McMorrow.

In an interview with POLITICO after the dustup, El-Sayed declined to discuss specifics of his position on the record. In a statement, a spokesperson said that he supports Medicare for All as a baseline option for everyone, “and if folks want additional private coverage through a union or an employer then that can be there for them too.”

The conflict in Gaza has also led to sharp divisions in the race.

El-Sayed, who is the son of Egyptian immigrants, has been an outspoken critic of Israel, which he has long said was committing genocide in Gaza. That’s a major issue in a state with the highest percent of Arab-Americans in the country; more than 100,000 people voted “uncommitted” instead of backing then-President Joe Biden in the 2024 primary over his administration’s support of Israel — an effort El-Sayed helped lead.

He told POLITICO that when he talks about U.S. tax dollars “being misappropriated to weaponize food against children and to subsidize a genocide, rather than to invest in real people in their communities and their kids and their schools and their health care, it is the single biggest applause line in every speech.”

McMorrow took a bit more time to come to that view. In October, when asked whether she thought the conflict was a genocide, she paused for several seconds, exhaled, and responded, “Based on the definition, yes.” Her campaign said her view was informed by a September United Nations Commission of Inquiry report.

Stevens has been more supportive of Israel, and has the support of AIPAC, the politically influential pro-Israel lobby. Some senior Michigan Democrats have expressed concern that an AIPAC independent expenditure campaign backing Haley could make the primary even more toxic ahead of the general election. Asked about their plans, an AIPAC spokesperson told POLITICO they had no updates.

Asked by POLITICO in November whether she was comfortable with AIPAC support, Stevens dodged, saying she’s delighted to “see the hostages get home,” and added she “wanted to see an enduring ceasefire where Hamas surrenders and so that we can get the people of Palestine and Israel in long standing peace, living peacefully, side by side with one another.”

Stevens’ campaign also attacked both El-Sayed and McMorrow’s record on manufacturing, a sector that employs some 600,000 in Michigan. She told POLITICO that McMorrow “has a history of criticizing Michigan’s key industries” and that El-Sayed “supports policies that would decimate Michigan’s manufacturing economy,” citing his support for the Green New Deal.

“I’m going to call out what isn’t working for Michigan’s manufacturing economy, whether it is Mike Rogers or members of my own party,” Stevens said in an interview in the conference room of the Teamsters Local 234 union hall in Plymouth.

Old school vs. new school

The race is also shaping up as a test of offline coalitional politics at a moment increasingly defined more by viral videos than baby-kissing and union hall campaign stops.

Stevens has leaned hardest into traditional brick-and-mortar campaigning, while El-Sayed has been much more focused online, with McMorrow’s approach once again falling between them.

McMorrow’s biggest splash of the campaign so far came with a viral video that attacked NFL RedZone for adding ads as “the latest example of corporate greed,” and tied it to spiking grocery costs. It earned nearly 2 million views.

El-Sayed has built a national profile and fundraising network in part with a health care-focused podcast on Crooked Media, the network run by the Pod Save America team made up largely of former Obama senior advisers. At least three members, Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Ben Rhodes, appeared as hosts on an invite to El-Sayed’s fundraiser earlier this month in California.

Stevens has taken a different tack, putting more focus on campaign stops and meat-and-potatoes fights for local industry, especially auto and other factory jobs.

In a year-out-from-election day memo, Stevens’ campaign argued that her “strength with Black Michiganders and union workers, her relentless focus on lowering costs and protecting Michigan manufacturing, and her record fighting for Michiganders — which has led to her winning tough primaries and general elections — will propel her to victory.”

Campaigning at a Teamsters Local 234 union hall in Plymouth, she spent a lot more time talking about a local labor contract dispute than national concerns.

“Look, manufacturing might not light up the internet, but it fuels a lot of jobs here,” she told POLITICO afterward.

That dogged approach helped her flip and hold a swing seat, then win a tough incumbent-on-incumbent primary in 2022, and is one she thinks will pay dividends now.

“I’ve had a couple of tough primaries before, and I’m just out here trying to win it for Michiganders,” she said.

But it remains unclear how well it will translate in a statewide campaign.

“Haley seems to have more institutional support — whether or not it’s admitted as such — and that is a strength, but it also could be a weakness,” said a longtime Michigan Democratic operative who remains neutral in the race and was granted anonymity to assess the primary. “Her presence on the campaign trail I’m not sure is one that’s really like, Man, I got to be with her.”

Stevens has earned criticism over whether she can galvanize the online, grassroots activists, or electrify crowds on the trail. “She’s [an] uneven campaigner when it comes to the retail stuff,” said Adam Jentleson, a longtime Democratic campaign strategist whois pushing for the party to break more with left-wing interest groups and focus more on expanding the party’s coalition to win (he also voiced concern about El-Sayed as a general-election candidate).

Right now, both El-Sayed and Stevens have been training most of their fire on McMorrow rather than each other, seeing her as the bigger threat to their potential voting coalitions.

Insiders and outsiders

Stevens’ electoral track record is part of why many establishment-leaning Democrats in D.C. prefer her in the race.

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) invited her to attend a fundraising retreat in Napa Valley that featured a crypto roundtable, but Stevens told POLITICO she did not attend due to the government shutdown.

In an interview with POLITICO, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was bullish on defending Michigan but declined to appraise any individual candidacies; a DSCC spokesperson declined to comment on whether the committee would officially endorse in the race.

McMorrow has taken a very different approach to D.C.’s Democratic leadership.

Shetold POLITICO last March, before she was even officially a candidate, that she wouldn’t vote for Schumer as party leader should she win her Senate seat. She also previously penned a scathing letter to Biden following his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, urging him to drop out.

“We’re drawing a contrast that is really about defining my lane,” McMorrow said in an interview at a campaign stop at a park in Grand Rapids late last year, suggesting Stevens, without naming her, was running “an uninspiring campaign that’s right out of the D.C. playbook” and that El-Sayed, also without naming him, was campaigning on the idea “that there’s just one weird trick to fix democracy.”

Stevens has said it’s too early to determine whether to would back Schumer; she has called him “a great leader.”

El-Sayed also hasn’t said whether he’d back Schumer for leader. But he’s made it clear he is running headlong against the Democratic establishment.

“The movement we’re building is about taking a bet on the divide in our politics not really being about left versus right, but being about the folks who are locked out and the folks who are locking them out,” El-Sayed told POLITICO.

About the only thing the candidates can all agree on is the stakes of the contest.

“The future of this party is going to be based on what happens in this race,” McMorrow said.

Elena Schneider contributed to this report.

​Politics

Donald Trump’s political war chest grew dramatically in the second half of 2025, according to new campaign finance disclosures submitted late Saturday, giving him an unprecedented amount of money for a term-limited president to influence the midterms and beyond.

Trump raised $26 million through his joint fundraising committee in the back half of last year, and another $8 million directly into his leadership PAC. And a super PAC linked to him has more than $300 million in the bank.

All together, a web of campaign accounts, some of which he controls directly and others under the care of close allies, within the president’s orbit have $375 million in their coffers.

The funds far outstrip those of any other political figure — Republican or Democrat — entering 2026, and have no real historical precedent. And Trump could put them to use this year for the midterms, or to shape future elections, even as he cannot run for president again.

Trump continues to outpace any other Republican in raising money, both from large and small-dollar donors. His joint fundraising committee — Trump National Committee, which pools fundraising for a variety of Trump-aligned groups — accounted for 1 in 8 dollars raised on WinRed, the primary Republican online fundraising platform, during the second half of 2025, according to a POLITICO analysis.

And no super PAC raised even half as much in 2025 as the $289 million from MAGA Inc., the Trump-aligned super PAC that both the president and Vice President J.D. Vance appeared at fundraisers for last year.

Trump has given few clues as to how he might put the funds to use. Trump National Committee primarily sends funds to the president’s leadership PAC, Never Surrender, with a bit of money also going to the Republican National Committee and Vance’s leadership PAC, Working For Ohio.

Candidates cannot use leadership PAC money for their own election efforts. But the accounts — which are common across Washington and have long been derided by anti-money in politics groups as “slush funds” — allow politicians to dole out money to allies or fund political travel.

Never Surrender spent $6.7 million from July through December, with more than half of that total going toward advertising, digital consulting and direct mail — expenses typically linked to fundraising.

So far, Trump’s groups have held their powder in Republican primaries. While Trump has endorsed against a handful of Republican incumbents now locked in competitive primaries — including Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky — and threatened others, he hasn’t used money. A super PAC targeting Massie, MAGA KY, is run by Trump allies but has largely been funded by GOP megadonor Paul Singer.

MAGA Inc.’s only election-related spending last year was to boost now-Rep. Matt Van Epps in the special election in Tennessee’s 7th District.

Trump’s massive war chest makes him a political force, independent of the traditional party infrastructure. The RNC — which derives a significant portion of its fundraising from Trump — had $95 million in the bank at the end of the year, roughly a quarter of what the Trump-linked groups have.

And their rivals at the Democratic National Committee are far worse off — at just over $14 million, while owing more than $17 million in debt.

​Politics

Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee, a Democrat, won a special runoff election on Saturday to serve the remainder of former Texas Rep. Sylvester’s term, who died last year.

The Associated Press projected that Menefee beat Amanda Edwards, an attorney and former member of the Houston City council, after a protracted process to fill the central Houston seat after Turner’s death in March 2025. The process was drawn out by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott’s refusal to quickly schedule a special election following Turner’s death and a crowded field that triggered a runoff following the first round of voting in November.

But the contest between the pair will continue: Both Menefee, 37, and Edwards, 44, are participating in the March primary for a newly refashioned 18th Congressional District, going up against Rep. Al Green, 78. That winner will be heavily favored to win a full two-year term in November.

The March primary is the latest example of the generational change debate animating the Democratic Party, as the two young Democrats take on progressive icon Green, who has been in Congress for more than two decades. It’s a fight that’s taking place nationwide, pitting young and old factions of the party against each other as they both argue they’re better fighters against Republicans.

Residents in this district have been without consistent representation since former Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee died in 2024. Lee held the seat for three decades.

Green’s current district was scrambled by the Texas GOP’s redistricting, prompting him to jump into the race to represent a new district that contains many of his constituents.

Menefee’s victory is a huge boost to his public profile ahead of the primary. Early voting begins in two weeks.

​Politics

Democratic state election officials say the Justice Department’s letter to Minnesota over its voter rolls represents a significant escalation, with several warning that the Trump administration could use immigration enforcement to exert influence over November’s midterm elections.

The officials are baffled by the Trump administration’s continued demand for access to state voter information and refuse to comply, telling POLITICO they view the requests as part of a broader effort by the administration to insert itself into state election proceedings.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, has been at the center of the push after Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a letter to Gov. Tim Walz that one condition of restoring “law and order” in the state amid the administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown would be for Minnesota to turn over its voter rolls to the federal government.

Minnesota — one of two dozen states, along with the District of Columbia, sued by the administration — has rejected the request, prompting an unprecedented legal clash between the Justice Department and state election officials.

“To me, [it] seems to be a project in service of the president’s longstanding but false view that election systems around the country are rigging elections,” Simon told POLITICO. “And this project seems to be in service of that, and that’s the best I can tell.”

Simon said he has not heard back from the Trump administration since responding to the Bondi letter. “This was already a dispute, but it was a dispute being fought where it belongs, which is in a court of law,” he said.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat running for reelection this year, called the letter to officials in Minnesota “extortion” and echoed the suggestion that the effort was aimed at something beyond voter rolls.

“The voter roll stuff is not about voter rolls. There’s something bigger going on,” Fontes said in an interview this week, as dozens of secretaries of state gathered in Washington for a meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State. “They’re bits and pieces, interchangeable in this jigsaw puzzle, and we’re being told something that’s not true,” he added.

The highly unusual push for access to states’ voter rolls is part of a yearlong campaign by the Trump administration, which says it is seeking to ensure that states’ voter registration practices comply with federal law and safeguard election integrity. The White House has requested voter records from nearly every state and Washington, D.C. The move comes as Trump frequently repeats his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.”

The White House said it was authorized to make the requests under longstanding laws such as the Civil Rights Act.

“The Civil Rights Act, National Voting Rights Act, and Help America Vote Act all give the Department of Justice full authority to ensure states comply with federal election laws, which mandate accurate state voter rolls. President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.

At least 11 states have complied with the administration’s request, according to the Brennan Center.

Wyoming is one of the states that complied, and its secretary of state, Chuck Gray, a Republican, told reporters on Friday that it has been “very disturbing” to watch Democrats rebuff the administration’s request to engage in what he described as regular upkeep of voter rolls.

“We’ve been engaging in routine voter list maintenance that people support in making sure the voter lists are clean,” he said.

The Justice Department has sued the 24 states — most, but not all, of which are helmed by Democrats — that have refused to comply, with most citing concerns over exposing sensitive voter information.

“I’m certainly concerned that people may fear that the Department of Justice having access to the voting rolls might make them a target in some way,” said Maine Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.

“This Justice Department has weaponized its office to target people based on identity and based on political affiliation,” she said.

Uzoma Nkwonta, a partner at Elias Law Group, which is representing voters and civic organizations in several states who are also trying to prevent the release of voter rolls, called the effort “another example of overreach by the Department of Justice and the federal government.” “The fact that DOJ officials have stated publicly that they expect to see hundreds of thousands individuals removed from the rolls once they have this data … should set off a red flag,” Nkwonta said, noting that maintaining voter registration lists is a responsibility for the states, not the federal government.

​Politics

BANGOR, Maine — The federal immigration crackdown in Maine may have ended, but the political fallout could continue to reverberate through the 2026 election.

Democratic Gov. Janet Mills launched her first Senate campaign ad on Friday — and it’s focused on attacking Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Political newcomer Graham Platner, competing with Mills for the Democratic nomination, held an anti-ICE protest at Sen. Susan Collins’ offices in Maine on Thursday, calling for her to block funds for the agency.

The message from both Democrats was clear: Immigration enforcement politics is not going away, and they think it could be a winning issue as they look to unseat the only Republican senator up for reelection this year in a state former Vice President Kamala Harris won in 2024.

But Collins’ Thursday announcement that ICE was ending its immigration enforcement campaign in Maine — dubbed Operation Catch of the Day by the Department of Homeland Security — released some of the pressure that had been building in the state for more than a week, with local leaders expressing an initial sense of relief.

That campaign had left the state’s immigrant communities hiding in fear and Democrats and activists raging at their treatment. The surge disrupted life for many in southern Maine, with decreased attendance in schools, legal immigrants afraid to go to work and observers trailing ICE agents in the state.

Now, in the aftermath of an operation that led to more than 200 arrests and prompted widespread protests, lawmakers and community leaders are navigating the upheaval left behind. The political impact continues to ripple.

Collins’ announcement Thursday morning, which implied her conversations with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had helped sway the decision, is emblematic of how she wants voters to think of her: a powerful pragmatist who can get results, including by standing up to her own party. And it was a high-profile reminder of her longstanding case that her senior role in Washington helps her deliver for the Pine Street State.

Still, Democrats and activists, buoyed by rapidly shifting public opinion around immigration enforcement after videos of violent arrests and two fatal shootings in Minneapolis, are redoubling efforts for broader restrictions on ICE and its funding — along with a reckoning on what happened in Maine. Reports of the end of the operation in Maine, they said, are not enough.

“Senator Collins is going to try to use this moment to trick us. To say that she, somehow, used her power to impose upon ICE,” Platner said in protests at the senator’s Portland and Bangor offices on Thursday, held hours after the end of the surge was announced.

He mocked what he called a “pinky promise” she received from Noem to cheers from dozens of supporters who had gathered in Bangor in single-digit temperatures. “We all know it’s nonsense. What she is actually doing is trying to justify to us why she is about to try to give them 9 billion more dollars in funding.”

Platner demanded that Collins, the Senate’s top appropriator, cut off funding for ICE entirely, saying the Trump administration could not be trusted to follow the law.

Collins advocated for passing a DHS funding bill that Democrats blocked this week, citing its funding for body cameras for federal officers as well as de-escalation training. Negotiations are likely to continue in Washington after lawmakers agreed to pass just a two-week stopgap. Failure to pass DHS funding would not stop ICE, as the agency is well-funded from Trump’s major budget bill last summer, but Democrats are hoping to leverage anger at the agency to pressure the GOP for reforms. A Collins spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

The Maine senator’s positioning still held her somewhat as an outlier. Maine Republicans largely expressed support for federal immigration operations in the state while accusing Mills and Democrats of ginning up conflict with law enforcement. Local Republicans were largely quiet about Collins’ news of the drawdown.

Mills, in an interview earlier in the week, derided Collins’ calls for retraining ICE officers, telling POLITICO that the “horse was out of the barn already.” On Thursday, she characterized the drawdown of ICE operations as insufficient, calling for Noem’s removal at DHS as well as congressional action to halt ICE funding until measures are in place at the agency to prevent what she characterized as “abuses of power.”

“Until there are substantive measures and changes in place, no state — including Maine — is protected from the weaponization of Federal law enforcement agencies against its own citizens by the Trump Administration,” she said in a statement on Thursday.

Mills and Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey, a Democrat, sent a letter to Noem and Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons on Friday demanding information about the immigrants arrested in the state and where they are now.

Community leaders and lawmakers are also working to understand what the drawdown means in practice, what happened to those detained by ICE and how to begin restoring trust among immigrants who have barely left their homes in weeks.

“It is welcome news. ICE operations in Maine have failed to improve public safety and have caused lasting damage to our communities,” said Carl Sheline, the mayor of Lewiston, which is home to a large Somali American population and was one of the Maine cities to see significant ICE activity. “We will continue working to ensure that those who were wrongfully detained by ICE are returned to us.”

Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, a Democrat from Biddeford, said among those detained by ICE was a man named Marcos, whom Fecteau had previously employed as a contractor working on his home. Fecteau said he talked on Thursday to the man’s wife, who said he was at an ICE facility in Arizona two days earlier, but the ICE database was no longer showing his whereabouts.

“Over the last week and a half there have been people in Maine who have been arrested and detained unlawfully. We want answers for those people. Who they are, where they are, what was the reason for their detention. Those things need to be answered,” Fecteau said. “I hope that Senator Collins, who clearly has some influence here — she spoke with Kristi Noem yesterday — I hope that was part of the conversation as well.”

In Augusta on Thursday, Maine lawmakers heard testimony over a bill that would require ICE to obtain judicial warrants to search private spaces of schools and health care facilities, among other locations.

Mills on Thursday threw her weight behind the new bill, citing in part the destabilizing effects of the recent surge. It was a notable move for the former prosecutor, who faced heat from progressives and Platner for not taking a stronger stance last year when she allowed a bill limiting law enforcement cooperation with ICE to go into effect without her signature, rather than signing it outright.

Activists and observers who had been trailing ICE in Maine noted some agents appeared to be off duty on Thursday, reflecting the drawdown.

“It’s good news. I hope it’s true. I hope that we can all find peace and rest in the next coming days,” Eric Nathanson, an activist with Jewish Action Maine who was arrested alongside other faith leaders earlier in the week while protesting at Collins’ Portland office. “If the surge is on pause, we reiterate the goal of no additional funding even more strongly.”

But the images and experiences from the past week were not easily forgotten.

“Three people in the past week were abducted in front of my workplace. My coworkers had to watch an ICE agent beat and drag people out of cars,” Nathanson said. “We will stay strong and stay vigilant.”

​Politics

HOUSTON — House Republicans’ slim majority will be even leaner after Saturday, when Democrats vote to fill the Texas seat left open when Rep. Sylvester Turner unexpectedly died last year.

But the vote will just be the next step in choosing who ultimately represents Texas’ 18th Congressional District for a full two-year term — and sets up the next generational change debate that has roiled the party nationwide.

Just five weeks after Saturday’s special election runoff, voters in this Democratic hub of Black political power will return to the polls for a March primary to pick someone to represent the district after the seat was redrawn as part of Texas’ redistricting.

On Saturday, voters are choosing between Harris County attorney Christian Menefee, 37, or former Houston City Councilmember Amanda Edwards, 44, to fill the current seat. The pair emerged as the top two vote-getters in a crowded 16-person primary in November, with Menefee finishing ahead of Edwards by 3 percentage points.

The winner will then hold the incumbency for just a few weeks before challenging activist icon Rep. Al Green, 78. That March election, all three candidates argue, is about choosing the best fighter to stand up to House Republicans, the Trump administration and the Texas GOP, which has been encroaching on Houston’s autonomy in recent years as Republicans try to weaken Democrats’ influence in the one of the nation’s largest cities.

“It’s going to be a fight between generations,” said Marc Campos, a longtime Democratic consultant in Houston, who is unaffiliated with any campaign.

Saturday’s oddly timed runoff is occurring after months of delays by Gov. Greg Abbott, who didn’t call for the special election to fill the seat until eight months after Turner’s death. Turner, in 2022, revealed he had been recovering from bone cancer and his family said he died from “enduring health complications.” He had been elected to replace former Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who died in office in 2024 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She served the district for nearly three decades.

Abbott justified the special election hold up by saying he didn’t trust Harris County to conduct a swift and valid election. The governor, who has set his sights on flipping the county in November, has claimed for years that there are widespread problems with electoral administration in Houston.

Texas Democrats said Abbott’s foot-dragging to fill the seat — which has advantaged House Republicans’ paper-thin majority in Washington — is another example of GOP meddling with Democratic power in major cities. Republicans’ off-cycle redistricting last year scrambled Democratic seats in Houston, Dallas and Austin. Green, a towering figure in Houston political circles, jumped into the race for the newly gerrymandered 18th seat after the neighboring district he held for more than 20 years was carved up by the GOP.

In another sign of how redistricting has muddled campaigns, Menefee and Edwards are running in Saturday’s runoff under different lines from the upcoming March primary — forcing the pair to run simultaneous campaigns with two overlapping but not identical sets of voters. Early voting in the March primary begins in two weeks.

“This is a microcosm of forced redistricting,” said Odus Evbagharu, a Menefee aide. “It’s something that got forced down our throats, and now we just have to live with that.”

During the final stretch of the runoff, candidates crisscrossed both the old and new 18th districts, an area of central Houston with a large Black population. About a quarter of the district’s current constituents live within its new iteration.

At a candidate forum held in a Catholic church on Thursday evening, Green, Menefee, Edwards and a fourth candidate running in the primary with little name recognition, newcomer Gretchen Brown, quickly rattled off their biographies and what they would bring to Washington.

For Green, it wasn’t an introduction as much as a reminder to the audience that he has represented many of them for two decades. A significant share of Green’s constituents in the new 18th district were shuffled over from Green’s old district.

“It is important for people to understand that I’m not moving into a new congressional district,” Green said while taking the microphone and brandishing his signature gold-capped cane. “I am not. The congressional district moved to me.”

In this era when Democrats are eager to forcefully counter Republicans, voters here have a choice: Support a trusted figure who can navigate Washington or take a chance on a younger representative seen as the future of the party. It’s an urgent debate within the party as Democrats plot their strategy for regaining power, and is playing out in primaries across the country. Some other top Democrats facing generational primaries, including Reps. Nancy Pelosi of California and Steny Hoyer of Maryland, opted not to run again.

“Al Green has a great name,” said Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who endorsed Menefee in the runoff but has not weighed in on the primary. “But then, on the other hand, whoever wins [the runoff] will get a bump of celebrity status.”

Menefee made local history as the youngest elected Harris County attorney — the first Black person in the job — and has built his reputation on going head-to-head with Abbott, suing the governor’s ban on mask mandates and challenging his demands to audit local elections. It’s his first stint in public office after he ran a surprise campaign ousting the three-term incumbent in 2020.

Menefee — who is running ads playing on 90’s millennial nostalgia — has racked up endorsements from organizations like Leaders We Deserve and Houston Black American Democrats, more than a dozen labor groups, and prominent figures like Rep. Jasmine Crockett and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke.

Edwards draws on broad support from women and from her years as an attorney and at-large member of the city council. She won the endorsement of past opponent Jolanda Jones, a state representative who has served as a main Menefee antagonist, criticizing him for continuing to collect his government salary while campaigning.

Edwards is also a familiar face on campaign mailers: She ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 2020, Houston mayor in 2023 and U.S. House in 2024. Her career in politics began when she was a congressional aide for Lee as a recent college graduate.

Menefee and Edwards dismiss the idea that the primary will be a referendum on age, seeing it instead as an expression of voters’ desire to see broad change in Congress.

“What I think people want is something new,” Menefee said in an interview. “They want new strategic thinkers who are going to come in and have a plan for opposition against the president.”

Edwards argues it’s also an issue of continuity. A Green victory would mean that some constituents living in the district will have been represented by four lawmakers in three years. “They want to pass that torch forward and this is an opportunity to do that,” she said. “It’s not a question of age. It’s a question of succession.”

Green, in an interview, said he expects people will vote for him if they primarily value experience and accomplishments, ticking off his leadership on the Homeland Security and Oversight committees, along with the billions he has steered toward his district and recommendation of three judges confirmed during the Obama administration.

“I bring to the table traditionally what people have looked for when they were trying to make a decision,” he said. “So we’ll find out whether tradition continues or whether we’ll have a different circumstance.”

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Immigration enforcement is sowing chaos in Minneapolis and across the country. Democrats, elections officials and civil rights groups fear it could interfere with this November’s elections — and are scrambling for a response.

They’re warning that the White House’s deployments of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents could act as a voter suppression tool should armed officers conduct raids at or near polling locations, scaring citizens into staying home.

“You have to see what’s happening: Trump is trying to create a pretext to rig the election,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “It stands to reason that this private police [force] that he’s building is, in part, to be used to try to suppress turnout in the election.”

Senate Democrats considered a requirement banning ICE agents from polling sites as part of their demands in negotiating the Homeland Security funding bill, according to Murphy and Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.). But that policy was not included in Senate Democratic appropriators’ final list of demands to avoid a partial government shutdown, leaving voting rights advocates and Democratic state election officials on edge about what’s to come.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson called fears of voter suppression “Democrat conspiracies” with “no basis in reality.”

“President Trump cares deeply about the integrity of our elections — and so do the millions of Americans who sent him back to office based on his pledge to secure our elections,” Jackson said in a statement. “These Democrat conspiracies have no basis in reality and their claims shouldn’t be amplified uncritically by the mainstream media. ICE is focused on removing criminal illegal aliens from [the] country, who should be nowhere near any polling places because it would be a crime for them to vote.”

ICE’s aggressive crackdowns have already led to citizens hiding at home, and election officials worry that fears of harassment and arrest could keep them from exercising their right to vote.

“In Maine, we saw people were afraid to leave their homes for groceries, to go to work or to go to school, because of fear of wrongful arrest and imprisonment,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who’s running for governor, told POLITICO on Thursday. “If people are too afraid to go to the grocery store because armed ICE agents are patrolling the streets, that may increase fears about going to vote.”

Bellows said her office is preparing for next month’s special legislative election by ensuring voters are comfortable with absentee voting procedures, especially those in areas with large immigrant populations that have been impacted by ICE’s recent crackdown in the state.

Immigration enforcement activity near polling locations could dissuade those with noncitizen family members or voters of color, who fear being racially profiled, from turning out. And widespread deployments of immigration officers to battleground districts could cause chaos in key races and swing close elections.

The Trump administration dispatched about 3,000 federal agents to Minneapolis to apprehend non-citizens in an operation that many in the state and elsewhere consider heavy-handed and excessive. The president and senior officials have indicated that the operation is about more than just law enforcement.

President Donald Trump called the Minnesota operation a “day of reckoning and retribution” and has tied the operation to welfare fraud in the state. On Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz demanding he turn over the state’s voter rolls, an action lawyers for the state of Minnesota described as a “shakedown” and a “ransom note.”

“The demand for the voter rolls tells you what this is really about,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who oversaw California’s elections for six years as secretary of state, told reporters Wednesday. “It’s about trying to rig the next election, and a desperate attempt to hold onto power.”

Federal law is explicit in banning “any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held,” unless to “repel armed enemies of the United States[.]” Many local election officials also take great care to avoid spooking voters by placing law enforcement at polling places, and some states even have laws regulating this. Voter intimidation is illegal across the entire country.

But Trump has falsely and repeatedly claimed for more than a decade that millions of illegal immigrants vote in the U.S., arguing that was one factor in his 2020 loss. He also pledged before the 2020 election to send “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” to polling places.

Some Trump allies have openly described the possibility of deploying immigration enforcement officers to polling sites to ensure non-citizens do not vote.

“They’re petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there’s going to be ICE officers near polling places,” former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said during his show last August. “You’re damn right. … We’re not going to allow any illegal aliens to vote.”

Civil rights groups are preparing for the possibility that Trump exercises emergency powers to allow such a move.

Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the States United Democracy Center, told reporters this week that the Trump administration is “using these violent ICE operations as a weapon” for political ends.

“[Trump] might try to use an executive order or his emergency powers in the 11th hour to interfere with the upcoming election, which is, of course, something that no president in American history has ever done, but something that we need to be prepared for,” Lydgate said Monday during a press briefing.

The Trump administration has continued its focus on election administration. On Wednesday, the FBI executed a search warrant at the Fulton County elections office outside Atlanta. Last week, the Justice Department revealed that DOGE employees were secretly communicating with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states” and may have used Social Security data to match voter rolls. Last week in Davos, Trump suggested prosecutions are forthcoming related to the 2020 election.

State election officials in both parties are anxious to see why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi will address the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State on Friday. A DHS spokesperson didn’t respond to request for comment for this story.

Nonprofit legal groups are already gearing up to challenge any efforts to intimidate voters around the November midterms, said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward.

“Litigation is going to remain an incredibly important guardrail,” said Perryman, whose nonprofit led one of the lawsuits against DOGE’s access to voter information. “And there are many cases that can be swiftly filed on an emergency basis, or even potentially proactively, in order to try to keep the communities as safe as possible.”

David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, warned that election officials across the country — from secretaries of state to local officers — are seeing “a level of federal interference in their work which is unconstitutional and unprecedented.”

“I want to stress how unusual this is,” Becker, a former DOJ civil rights attorney, told POLITICO. “County election officials shouldn’t have to be thinking about what the president of the United States might say about elections.”

Those elections officials are working to instill trust in the electoral process, Becker said, and will encourage voters to utilize a variety of alternative ways to cast a ballot, such as early voting or voting by mail, depending on the state.

An attempt to heighten immigration enforcement before the election could just as easily backfire for Republicans. Trump is now under water on the immigration issue, with polls showing a majority of voters believe his deportation push went too far and want to see it reined in. Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked in the Biden White House as an adviser on democracy and voting rights, pointed to high turnout in this week’s special elections for Minnesota legislature seats in Democratic-heavy districts, where Democrats romped.

“In places where there might be disruption, Minnesota is proving that you might well earn yourself a real significant backlash,” Levitt said.

But even talking about election suppression has a risk of discouraging voters, convincing them there is risk involved or that the elections might be rigged anyway. Conversely, talk of vote-rigging can do the same thing.

“Our fight right now is both to protect the security of our elections and people’s faith in them, because they’re deeply intertwined and they’re both under attack,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

Andrew Howard contributed to this report.

​Politics

Gov. Janet Mills’ first ad buy as she seeks to unseat Sen. Susan Collins features a repudiation of ICE as Democrats nationwide seize on backlash over the agency’s aggressive tactics.

The new TV spot, shared first with POLITICO, pairs news clippings and videos of ICE agents aggressively detaining people with footage of Mills criticizing the deportation campaign during her State of the State address on Tuesday.

“Our federal government has deployed masked law enforcement onto the streets, including here in Maine, stoking fear in our communities and killing American citizens in Minnesota,” Mills says in the ad. “It’s ridiculous, outrageous and unconstitutional.”

The six-figure buy goes up statewide on Friday and is running across broadcast and digital for the next two weeks.

It comes as immigration enforcement has become a national political issue, with voter backlash against ICE raids leading Democrats to talk more about an issue that had once been favorable for Republicans.

An ICE surge in Maine, dubbed Operation Catch of the Day by Homeland Security officials, received widespread backlash from Democrats and local leaders, who highlighted cases of Maine residents being detained by the agency despite having legal work permits and no criminal histories. The fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last weekend further inflamed anger in Maine, too.

Collins announced Thursday that ICE would be halting its surge in the Pine Tree State, but the fallout of the heightened enforcement continues to roil the state. Mills’ decision to seize on ICE for her first ad is a sign she believes the issue will have staying power.

Mills’ main primary opponent, oysterman and political newcomer Graham Platner, has also gone after Collins on ICE this week, holding protests outside her offices in Portland and Bangor on Thursday.

Platner ran TV ads skeptical of Mills when the governor first jumped into the Senate race last fall. His campaign recently went up with more biographical spots and has pledged to stay on air through the June primary.

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