White House brushes off another potential Iran war rebuke from Congress

🔮 North of $405 million will be spent on advertising in the final week of the midterm elections for the top 15 races in the House and Senate, an eye-popping figure that will only continue to climb ahead of Election Day on Tuesday.

🔮 Trump will rally voters Monday in the Magnolia State to reelect Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) just as Democrats and election watchers are paying closer attention to what was once an unthinkable seat to flip for Democrat Scott Colom.

🔮 Lucky for Talarico and Paxton, their actions may wind up canceling each other out.

🔮 Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV) is considering a return to the governor’s mansion in a political gamble that could oust a fellow Republican, open his Senate seat, and set off a domino effect across West Virginia politics.

🔮 The exchanges occurred during the second debate of the Maine Senate race, a battleground contest that could determine control of the Senate.

🔮 Whether Moore can again eclipse Cox by as wide a margin as before, as well as convince voters to green-light a high-profile redistricting ballot measure, could affect his role in the approaching 2028 presidential election as a candidate or a bystander.

🔮 ICE Deputy Director Charles Wall said it was “unbelievable” that Igbojekwe would have been employed by a congressional campaign.

🔮 “They won’t,” el Sayed said on Fox News, responding to host Martha MacCallum that the special interests and corporations who fund such political action committees could seek to collect on their investment once he’s elected.

🔮 He’s also picked up endorsements from party holdouts and maintained a nominal lead in the polls over Republican rival Mike Rogers, even after months of negative headlines from his association with controversial streamer Hasan Piker. El Sayed’s current election prospects are undoubtedly up from where they were just a month ago, when he couldn’t shake his ties with Piker, a far-left Twitch streamer, and was lobbying skeptical Senate Democrats in Washington to get behind him. “When you’re in a circumstance where there’s a large constituency of people who feel very uncomfortable with your ascension into higher office where they don’t feel safe, you’ve got to put those concerns at the core of your campaign,” Mike Nellis, an ex-senior adviser to former Vice President Kamala Harris, said of Jewish Democrats’ unease with el Sayed.

🔮 Washington has left itself no shortage of work for when it returns after the Nov. 3 midterm elections with a lengthy to-do list that includes averting a government shutdown, which could be exponentially complicated by the election results.

🔮 Vance, meanwhile, is developing a style built around economic populism, cultural conservatism, and his working-class roots, offering an early glimpse of how he might seek to carry Trump’s political movement into the 2028 presidential election.

🔮 Control of the U.S. Senate may be decided in 2026 by a handful of candidates who genuinely have no hope of winning their own races.

🔮 President Donald Trump said Monday that the administration will pay out $1 million to tipsters who report cases of voter fraud that result in convictions, just one week before the polls close in the 2026 midterm elections.

🔮 The limited break in fighting will begin Thursday, according to the White House, and will be limited to the region of Olenshky in southern Ukraine.

🔮 President Donald Trump would not say if he will endorse Vice President JD Vance for the presidency in 2028, telling reporters Tuesday that the two men have never discussed the topic.

🔮 Trump specifically noted that Sullivan has been working with the White House to drive foreign investments into the Alaska liquified natural gas pipeline “and all the other projects that will come with it.”

🔮 President Donald Trump held a rally for Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and other down-ballot Republicans in Wasilla, Alaska, Tuesday night, the first stop on a three-leg western campaign tour that will also take the president to Arizona and Montana.

🔮 Last week, Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin announced an agreement that would see Russia export nearly 5 million tons of diesel to the United States, including 300,000 tons in the immediate future.

🔮 Heading into the weekend, polls showed Democrats holding an advantage of more than 8 points over Republicans on generic House ballots, leading most analysts to believe that the chamber will flip majorities in November.

🔮 The White House routinely discounts those critiques, but recent reporting on deals linked to Kushner has some GOP figures questioning whether MAGA’s typical hand-waving regarding the Trump family’s business empire will work this cycle.