I want to talk a little bit more about that race in Texas.

But first, Carrie, le let's let's visit revisit Alaska and what's been happening there because really the Democrats at this point had to just lay low until election day.

And yet now you have this controversy swirling around Democratic candidate Mary Poto um her campaign which is accused of ballot stacking which is not illegal but um raises all kinds of ethical questions.

she has completely denied any knowledge of of these alleged actions.

And so, you know, you have two Dan Sullivanss on on the ballot on on Tuesday.

Um, and that is launched already DOJ investigations and is causing all kinds of trouble.

So, how much of that is actually going to impact the turnout and the the results in Alaska?

Right.

Well, I think it's worth remembering that Alaska could have and maybe would have been an electoral nightmare on an Earth two without the two Dan Sullivanss and without this accusation against Mary Poto or at least her campaign.

Um, simply because of the way that Alaska counts its votes because it is such an enormous state.

Um, they allow absentee ballots to be counted until 15 days after they're postmarked on election day.

So if Alaska, which uses rank choice voting, which is also a very confusing process that most Americans are not a lot of journalists are wrapping their heads around it, um combine all of that, then combine it with the presence of the two Dan Sullivan and the in the the allegation that there was some chicainery here.

Um put all that together and I think this this accusation just adds to what was already going to be a very very confusing result.

if control of the Senate comes down to Alaska, there's going to be a vacuum of information.

Uh, and these um the DOJ allegations here and potential, you know, whatever they want to charge, and as you note, it's not a crime.

Um, but I do think that there could be a perfect storm of the allegation or the idea of impropriy, which could bleed into other races that maybe are close uh elsewhere in the United States.

So, it's if this story had broken, let's say, a month ago, I would have thought that maybe it might have more impact on how voters are reacting.

Keep in mind that this is an electorate of about 30,000 voters and more than 60,000 of them have already voted in this race.

So there there may be a lot of the decision-m that's already been hardened among voters.

I don't know if this story itself is going to move things, but it could have implications for the legitimacy or the idea of legitimacy around Alaska and around elections elsewhere in the country.

I think that's the really important point to underscore here, right?

is like Donald Trump already personally ordered the Justice Department uh to file a lawsuit claiming that they had some kind of a right to block certification uh in any result before a before Peter's colleagues at the times did this reporting about how the other Dan Sullivan got on the ballot.

But more importantly, let's be clear that uh you know it's not up to the Justice Department.

How are they going to go and conduct an investigation?

Are they going to go to people's homes and say like, "Well, you you voted for this Dan Sullivan.

Did you mean to do that?"

It's very hard to determine intent uh of a voter.

And again, certification to me, that was the sort of um you know, the whistle that went off when I saw that because Trump and his allies had been preparing for two years to undermine the legitimacy of this election.

Remember that Donald Trump has said this election was going to be rigged since before there were any candidates, before there were any votes.

uh he has mobilized his government to do everything possible to call into question Democratic victors.

He himself has said that he may not accept any outcome other than a Republican victory in both houses of Congress.

And so I think the question is did Democrats through their own, you know, sort of stumbling hand Donald Trump an issue that he will use to more broadly call into question uh the legitimacy of the the vote.

I think that's I think it's the biggest thing.

You're going to hear him talk about this a lot and he's going to say, "See, I was right.

They're trying to rig this election.

They're trying to cheat.

They're trying to steal.

It doesn't matter whether DOJ succeeds or not.

It just simply muddies the water elsewhere.

And it the Democrats have completely played into his hands by doing this.

And they didn't necessarily need to.

I mean, the August open primary, which anybody could vote for any candidate.

Why Democrats would have thought this was a great idea.

That's what I was going to say.

Voters's top concern after affordability is corrupt.

And I'm not saying that you can debate whether or not you think this is corrupt, right?

But it feeds into the idea that this is not above.

everybody and all but in August Mary Pollo beat both Dan Sullivan's combined right she didn't need a second Dan Sullivan on the ballot to win in August and now she might because and there was the problem is now if her mar if she wins if her margin victory is less than the second Dan Sullivan got which probably won't happen because the ballot is actually very clear about which is the real Dan Sullivan I mean the senator says incumbent senator Republican anyway I just think that it adds to to Trump's ammunition um and and you know this is not the only race that's been subject to some mudsling ing Osma.

You have the Ohio race where gubanatorial ad by Trump ally Vivc Ramaswami against his opponent using this stranged mother who he had she hadn't seen.

I mean, you know, this has now been going on for several weeks.

That has been, you know, the focus of a lot of an ad that was even condemned by Republican lawmakers and it's had bipartisan condemnation and Ramaswami has since pulled the ad, but after intense screw uh condemnation, like you say, bipartisan.

You even have in Texas, you know, Susan was just talking about Texas um controversy surrounding um Senate C Republican uh candidate tell um Ken Paxton.

um what are we seeing here in terms of the way that these races are being fought and the intense scrutiny of these candidates and the intense kind of use of some of these um unconventional let's say approaches.

I mean that that's a good way of putting unconventional.

I mean look I I can say for the Ohio one because I think that one really when I when it came out I think a lot of people questioned it just for folks who may not have know that known that story entirely.

You know, my understanding is that yes, the gubernatorial candidate on the Democratic side has been estranged from her mother for years after allegations of a rape committed by her stepfather.

Um, and so I mean, these were really a horrendous allegation, right?

When she was 12 years old, although President Trump seemed okay with it.

You know, he he openly spoke about the fact that, you know, it's just a mother saying that her daughter is a liar.

He brought it up again on Wednesday.

Every other Republican speaking at that rally didn't say a word.

No other Republicans mentioned it except for Trump who doubles down.

And so everything both of them have explicitly endorsed this.

So I, you know, to give the impression that Republican office holders condemned it.

Well, no, the, you know, the most important leaders of the party actually endorsed this Republicans, local Republicans.

I think that speaks more to me of what the Ohio electorate exactly is thinking, right?

because I do think there is this I don't know maybe I feel this way a bit being from the Midwest even though some would debate Ohio is not always Midwest is that there is a sort of like sensibility of what people want from their politics and I think seeing someone like Mike DeWine come out and say that this was not you know accept I mean that he is not on board with this but I get I think this speaks to the fact of I don't understand people's campaign tactics in this moment it just felt like a an extraordinarily bad judgment call that didn't need to be made that wasn't necessarily likely to win you a lot of voters I would hurt the very competitive Senate race.

It could hurt John Houston.

And I would argue there may even be some bleeding over to other GOP candidates.

You saw Ashley Henson, that the Republican candidate in Iowa come out very strongly against this ad and say and and even imply that um JD Vance's embrace of the ad was not what people were looking for from an empathetic leader.

Um, and I that, you know, she's also in a very tough race and I think if you react reacting to that ad was something that maybe she felt like she had to do.

It's so interesting how nationalized these races are, right?

These are all individual states, individual contests and candidates and yet Terico's name is used in a lot of different places, right?

Elsa's name is used in a lot of different places now because of Trump's admiration for his posterior.

John Husta's name is used in a lot of places that wouldn't otherwise know who he was.

And it's fascinating that we're nationalizing these races.

I mean, it's sort sort of the the the superpower behind some of these candidates who become these national figures.

I was at an event in in Providence, Rhode Island.

They were talking about Telerico, you know.

I mean, well, the other factor here is of course the incredible amounts of money.

I mean, if you think about so what is this is 2026?

We don't know the results yet, but we do know certain ways in which it's going to go down in history.

And I think the most important one is it's going already looking to be the most expensive election in American history.

And that includes presidential elections.

A lot of it powered by a single man, the wealthiest man in the world, is spending more than a quarter of a billion dollars from what was just disclosed.

Uh much of it on a single Senate race in the effort to get Ken Paxton elected in Texas.

I mean, do you think that's um that's uh relevant specifically to this election or do you think we're starting a new trend in Well, it's not a new trend.

I you know, it goes back to the Supreme Court's decision predating Donald Trump and Citizens United.

that's really unleashed the floodgates of spending in a way that I mean this doesn't happen in any other country in the world.

I think that's really important for people to understand this vast amounts of money the billionaires themselves in some ways who are spending the money are now becoming campaign issues but at at the same time it means that some of these campaign missteps or whatever can be amplified.

Part of the reason that we're so familiar with these candidates is because of the extraordinary sums that are being spent by interests.

We may not even really have a clear sense of why it is that they are spending so much money to get these folks elected.

Yeah.

Um Carrie, we talked about early voting a little bit, you know, with specific races, but I want you to take us um more nationally, the national picture.

Um how what do we know so far from early vote v voting?

you know, what can you assess based on that where we might be by next week?

And also, how much has President Trump's rhetoric against early voting sort of fed into some of the patterns you're seeing?

Right.

I'm a little bit skeptical of ear taking too much extrapolating too much from early vote because for one, you can maybe say, okay, turnout in a very Republican area is up.

Do we know that there was persuasion?

Do we know who those people voted for?

No.

Do we know um you know, if if the do we know if they voted in every single race?

there are going to be maybe Republicans who skip some of these races in some cases or Democrats.

Um, but I also think that it's important to note that the way that President Trump has talked about particularly mail voting and early voting and cast sort of a doubt about whether people's votes are going to be counted maybe changing voter behavior which makes me a little bit skeptical of comparing early vote now to previous years.

Democrats, I've seen polling where Democrats are as many as 10 points more likely to say, "Oh, I want to vote in person or I want to vote on election day because they're concerned that their mail vote may not be counted."

Republicans are uh less likely to because of the president's rhetoric, I think, want to vote by mail because he has condemned the idea of voting by mail and said it's illegitimate.

Republicans used to love mail-in voting because the people who are who are most likely to mail in their votes are the older people and veterans.

Those are two very Republican groups.

And a lot of Republican operatives that you talk to will roll their eyes saying the president is actually hurting as is shooting us in the foot by condemning the idea of mail and voting because that's the way a lot of our voters vote, including, by the way, the president twice.

That's right.

We must not forget that.

Peter, take us um for about 30 seconds, take us beyond Tuesday.

If Democrats win the House or uh Senate or both, what changes immediately for Trump and also for the way Congress operates in terms of investigations and otherwise?

The the the big question is how big a wave it is.

if there's a wave, right?

It won't change some things because the president hasn't been using Congress to govern.

He's been using executive power or assertions of executive power to govern.

So, it won't change that much in terms of legislation.

And the Democrats aren't going to be able to pass things over his veto.

They will be able to use oversight.

They will be able to use the GAVL to investigate subpoena power.

They will be able to use spending bills to get some changes on policy.

The bigger question to me is what kind of message is this election sent and how is it perceived?

The expectations game is now so important, right?

If Democrats put the expectations really high and they win, but not quite as much as they have said, it may not be seen as the repudiation of Trump that they want.

This is what happened four years ago to Republicans.

They would have a big blue a big red wave.

They didn't get it.

They won the house but not by much and therefore everybody said, "Well, you really lost even though you won."

So the point is expectations, perceptions.

Is it seen as a repudiation of Trump or does he uh have the argument to say we didn't do as bad as everybody thought we could do?

As briefly, um this time next week, do we know who controls Congress?

the next the next Congress.

I mean, I we'll definitely we'll know who controls the House, I think, very quickly.

The Senate feels really uncertain to me because I think as Carrie said, a number of races feel like they are are toss-ups and I think anybody who is providing additional certainty um is just sort of talking off the I mean, look, the thing I think in addition to, you know, one thing to watch real quick will be the version of the Democratic party that comes out of this.

And that to me is something really interesting because we all know presidential primary begins what, November 4th.

Yeah.

Really?

Who ever thought that it would all hinge on maybe Alaska, right?

We're going to have to leave it there.

Thanks to my guests for joining me and thank you at home for watching.

Be sure to tune in to PBS Tuesday night starting at 7 PM Eastern for special coverage election uh for special election night coverage.

I'm Vivian Salama.

Good night from Washington.