Trump delivers law-and-order message in Kenosha, Wis.

In the 8th District, Rep. Stephen F. Lynch beat back a left-wing challenger, the latest and best-organized of his 19-year career in the House.

The 8th District starts in Boston and cuts through traditionally working-class towns down the highway, such as Quincy. Challenger Robbie Goldstein has outspent Lynch on the air and has bet that informing reliable Democratic voters that their congressman opposed the Affordable Care Act and the legalization of marijuana can change the dynamics.

Republicans are not contesting the race in November.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) told voters she was skeptical of the high U.S. death rate from the novel coronavirus, echoing comments espoused online by conspiracy theorists.

After one voter suggested the United States was overcounting deaths from covid-19, the disease the coronavirus causes, Ernst said she was also “so skeptical” of the data , according to the Courier in Waterloo, Iowa.

“These health-care providers and others are reimbursed at a higher rate if covid is tied to it, so what do you think they’re doing?” she said at a campaign event.

After the event, Ernst expanded on the comment, telling a reporter, “They’re thinking there may be 10,000 or less deaths that were actually singularly covid-19. … I’m just really curious. It would be interesting to know that.”

On Sunday, Twitter removed tweet that Trump retweeted making a similar unfounded claim that rather than killing nearly 180,000 Americans, the virus had really killed 9,000 because the rest had underlying conditions.

Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, pushed back hard against this claim that has now found its way into the mainstream.

“That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of covid didn’t die of covid-19. They did,” Fauci said Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “So the numbers you’ve been hearing — there are 180,000-plus deaths — are real deaths from covid-19. Let [there] not be any confusion about that.”

“It’s not 9,000 deaths from covid-19, it’s 180-plus-thousand deaths,” he said.

Ernst’s other accusation that doctors are over-recording coronavirus deaths because it has a higher reimbursement rate has no basis in fact. There has been no evidence that medical professionals are trying to profit off the pandemic.

Ernst is in a difficult reelection battle in one of a handful of states Democrats believe they can wrest away from Republicans to take control of the Senate.

Rep. Richard E. Neal fended off a primary challenge from Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse in Massachusetts’s 1st District, according to the Associated Press.

Neal had touted the endorsement of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), while Morse had the backing of liberal Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

The Neal-Morse race was rocked last month by a scandal that fell apart, as members of the state’s College Democrats made vague accusations of misbehavior by Morse that were later retracted. (The 31-year-old mayor has taught some classes in the district’s branch of the state university system.) Although some of Morse’s endorsers initially recoiled at the accusation, they returned to help him, his fundraising surged and he brought the campaign’s focus back to his original message: Replace a Washington insider with a liberal mayor who supported Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal.

Neal, 71, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was long considered the favorite to win.

Biden accused Trump of inflaming the volatile situation in Kenosha, Wis., and said if he were dealing with local leaders in places where there was civil unrest, he’d be focused on bringing the factions together.

“Well, look, I in the past have gotten overwhelming support from both the communities as well as the police ... And so I’d be sitting down with law enforcement and the community at the same time, bringing them together,” Biden said in an interview with ABC 11 in Raleigh, N.C. “The fact is that there are bad cops, but the vast majority are good, decent honorable people.”

Biden said he’would be working with leaders on what structural changes needed to be made in policing, including on issues such as use of excessive force. Earlier Tuesday in a visit to Kenosha, Trump denied there was need for structural changes in law enforcement or within society when it came to issues of race.

“Trump sees this as an opportunity, an opportunity to focus on both law and order while he’s throwing gasoline on the fire so you don’t focus on the incredible failures,” Biden continued.

Biden condemned protests that have turned violent, pushing back at the image Trump has painted of a country overrun by crime if Biden was president.

“Everyone talks about this as if I’m already president,” Biden said. “The fact is this is Donald Trump’s America. ... I have condemned the violence from the very beginning. Protesting does not include burning. Protesting does not include toppling statues. Anyone who engages in that activity, whether they are in a protest and they engage in that, or they’re out-of-town folks who are part of a made-up militia, they should be condemned. If they’re arrested, they should be tried.”

Biden, who is beginning to campaign in person after months of mostly doing virtual events, said he would soon be traveling to North Carolina, a key swing state, but that unlike Trump he was going to “model responsible behavior.” Trump is visiting the state on Wednesday.

“The American people are looking for responsible leadership on covid,” Biden said. “They shared sacrifice, missing weddings, funerals, family events. They should expect the same responsibility from a presidential candidate or a president. I’ll be there. I promise you, I’m coming.”

While trying to define Democratic rival Joe Biden as an avatar of lawless anarchists, President Trump has warned about rioters in the streets of liberal American cities. He has fanned fears of low-income minorities invading the suburbs.

And this week, he offered a new alert: “Thugs wearing dark uniforms,” he told Fox News host Laura Ingraham, had crowded en masse on a plane to fly to Washington and wreak havoc at the Republican National Convention last week.

Lacking details, Trump’s fantastical tale took on the wild, conspiratorial tone of a subversive Reddit forum or a foreign government disinformation campaign. That it was coming from Trump on a popular cable news show highlighted how his long-standing willingness to promote and disseminate conspiracy theories has become, in his view, central to a reelection effort that has foundered during the coronavirus pandemic.

Vice President Pence, when asked about reporting in a new book that he was told to be on standby when President Trump made an unannounced trip to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in November, said he didn’t “recall” it.

“President Donald Trump is in excellent health,” Pence said when asked about the report in an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier. “Nothing out of the ordinary about that moment or that day.”

Pressed on the question of whether he was told to be ready to take over, Pence said, “I don’t recall being told to be on standby. I was informed the president had a doctor’s appointment. I gotta tell you, part of this job is that you’re always on standby.”

The new book, by New York Times political reporter Michael Schmidt, says Pence was told to be on “standby” in case Trump needed surgery and he would have to temporarily assume the presidency.

Schmidt wrote that the reason for Trump’s visit remains a mystery, and the White House says it was part of a routine physical exam. On Tuesday, Trump tweeted multiple times to deny an unsubstantiated claim that he had been taken to Walter Reed after suffering mini-strokes.

Virginia Republican Bob Good dropped his first congressional campaign ad Monday, showing his Democrat opponent, Cameron Webb, against images of rioting in an unidentified location and trying to paint Webb as a “radical” who supports forced government health care and defunding the police.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee condemned the ad as a “racist dog whistle.” Webb, who if elected would be the first Black doctor ever to serve in Congress, called it a “gross distortion” of his positions.

“The imagery certainly was meant to be provocative,” Webb said, adding that he would hope people will see the ad does not match his platform. "Even though [Good] attempted in this ad to avoid talking about himself at all, I think he’s just told everybody a lot about himself. … He’s telling us about his approach to politics.”

Karlie Kloss, a fashion model and co-host of the reality show “Project Runway,” is headlining a Biden campaign event Thursday focused on STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics) education for girls.

It is a subject that Kloss is passionate about, so it is little surprise that she would use her celebrity to advance it politically.

But what sets her apart from the dozens of Biden-supporting celebs is her unique family ties to the Trumps.

Kloss is married to Josh Kushner, the younger brother of Jared Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump and works as a senior adviser in the White House.

Kloss and her husband are Democrats who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. While Jared Kushner was celebrating his father-in-law’s inauguration in January 2017, Josh Kushner attended the Women’s March the next day. The next year, Kloss and her husband attended the March for Our Lives rally in D.C. to support greater gun safety laws.

In the past month, Kloss has tweeted about expanding Medicaid, appeared with Stacey Abrams for a virtual campaign event for a Democrat running for governor in Missouri and advocated for justice for Breonna Taylor and Jacob Blake.