Obama stumps for Fetterman in Pennsylvania, takes aim at election deniers

LAS VEGAS — Finishing up a week-long bus tour, Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt starts his stump speeches by telling the audience he has some “breaking news” — President Biden is coming to Nevada on Monday to rally with Laxalt’s opponent, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D).

The audience boos and bursts into laughter. They seem to believe him. Then Laxalt reveals he’s joking.

“Of course he’s not coming,” Laxalt told a crowd gathered in a parking lot in Las Vegas on Saturday to hear from Laxalt and a slew of GOP surrogates, including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark).

If any Democrat could fend off accusations of being anti-police, it should be Val Demings.

Before seeking office in 2012, the Florida congresswoman spent 27 years as an officer with the Orlando Police Department, including four as the city’s first female police chief. In addition to her own nearly three decades of service, she is married to a longtime cop: Her husband, Jerry Demings, has served as chief of the Orlando Police Department as well as sheriff of Orange County, Fla.

Yet her opponent, incumbent Republican Sen. Mario Rubio, has repeatedly attacked her record. His first TV ad in July, featured uniformed law enforcement officials saying Demings may have once been a cop but had turned “her back on law enforcement” and had “called abolishing the police ‘thoughtful’.” (PolitiFact found that the ad took Demings “out of context — undermining her background in law enforcement.”)

RACINE, Wis. — Democratic hand-wringing about the 2022 midterms has already begun, with some party strategists saying that candidates have focused too much on issues like the Jan. 6 hearings and abortion rather than pocketbook concerns and the economy.

But Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers is having none of it.

After telling his audience in Racine on Saturday that he’s read that he shouldn’t be talking so much about “democracy” he launched into an extended riff about the importance of voting rights.

“I think Wisconsinites get it,” Evers told a crowd gathered to see him. “The bottom line is we have to protect our voting rights.”

LAS VEGAS — Campaigning Saturday with Nevada Republican nominee for Senate Adam Laxalt — whose toss-up race could determine control of the chamber — Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) seized on President Biden’s recent comments about the use of coal.

Biden, at a rally on Friday in San Diego, said “no one is building new coal plants” and that “we’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America.”

Republican candidates including Laxalt have hammered Democrats over fuel prices and “energy independence,” saying the United States is overly reliant on other countries.

ATHENS, Ga. — Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker on Saturday leaned into his football celebrity status, making his political pitch to University of Georgia fans amped up ahead of a major Georgia vs. Tennessee college football game.

Walker, who won the Heisman Trophy while playing for the University of Georgia, gave his standard stump speech hours before kickoff to a crowd of a few hundred supporters dressed in red and white.

But much of the attention in Athens on Saturday morning was squarely on ESPN’s presence at “College GameDay” about a mile away. Both teams are undefeated this season.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) has not campaigned with President Biden, whose job approval rating in the battleground state of Arizona isn’t so hot. But on Saturday, the former astronaut welcomed first lady Jill Biden, who sang the praises of both men at an event in Phoenix.

“You know, over the last two years, you’ve served as an Arizona senator with kindness and courage and common sense,” Biden said to Kelly. “And you, like my husband, Joe, you have represented it, represented all of Arizona, not just those who supported you.”

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Tim Ryan and J.D. Vance are both in the Ohio capital today as they travel across the state this weekend from Dayton to Cleveland with their rallying cries for workers’ votes.

At lunchtime on Saturday, Ryan addressed some 300 people at Mount Hermon Missionary Baptist Church in a 25-minute speech that called on Ohioans to bring the country back to the center.

“We’ve got an extremist on one side, and we’ve got an Ohioan on the other side,” said Ryan to a wave of applause. “We’re ready for normal people to come back together and start to heal this country.”

After the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars in political ads and armies of people knocking on voters’ doors, the outlook for the 2022 midterm elections is about the same as it was at the beginning of the year: Republicans are on track to win the House and the Senate is up for grabs.

Elections are about fundamentals, and the fundamentals this year — inflation and the economy, fear of crime and disorder and President Biden’s weak approval ratings — have thrown up obstacles that the Democrats have struggled to overcome. After a midsummer shift toward the Democrats due to the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, the election has swung back to bread-and-butter issues. Republicans are feeling bullish.