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Former Rep. Mary Peltola is postponing campaign stops in her bid for Alaska’s Senate seat after she and her family sustained minor injuries in a car crash Saturday night.
Peltola and her family were traveling to the Alaska Federation of Natives’ annual banquet when another driver struck their vehicle, her campaign announced Sunday on social media.
“Mary and her family sustained minor injuries but are in good spirits,” campaign manager Cheryl Bruce said in the statement. “Unfortunately, per the advice of medical professionals, Mary’s upcoming events in Fairbanks and Bethel will be rescheduled for later in the week as she takes time to recover.”
The crash disrupts the start of Peltola’s eight-community “Alaska Always Tour,” a seven-day campaign swing ahead of the midterms. Events in Fairbanks and Bethel originally scheduled for Sunday and Monday will be rescheduled, while stops in Homer, Kenai, Seward, Juneau, Anchorage and Palmer will continue as planned, the campaign said.
The midterm elections are just over a week away.
Peltola, a Democrat, is challenging Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan in a closely watched race that could help determine control of the Senate.
Alaska’s political history has been marked by fatal transportation disasters. Peltola’s husband, Eugene “Buzzy” Peltola Jr., died in September 2023 when the small plane he was piloting crashed after takeoff in southwestern Alaska. Former Republican Sen. Ted Stevens died in a plane crash in 2010 near Dillingham, and Democratic Rep. Nick Begich disappeared in 1972 after disembarking from Anchorage on a small plane traveling to Juneau.
Prospective presidential candidates are known to chew over pork chops on a stick at Iowa’s iconic State Fair. They gather in South Carolina at Rep. Jim Clyburn’s “World Famous Fish Fry.” And they’re all over New Hampshire … well, any chance they get.
New Mexico today is entering the convening conversation with chicharrón at the “Matanza.”
In the long tradition of major state gatherings that have become dead giveaways of politicians’ presidential ambitions, New Mexico is formally stepping into the political fray, with an inaugural “Fourth in the Nation Matanza Rally” hosted by Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján designed to introduce the 2028 crop to the state.
What exactly is a Matanza? It’s a “New Mexico election season staple,” Deb Haaland, who was Interior secretary in the Biden administration and is running for New Mexico governor, told Blue Light News.
“You dig a big hole in the ground, you build a fire, you put a pig in the coals, and it cooks overnight, and then you share this grand feast along with tortillas and chicharrón,” Haaland said.
Over 1,500 people, local and state leaders and New Mexico’s congressional delegation are gathering to eat and listen to mariachi and local bands at Albuquerque’s International Balloon Museum this afternoon, in part to rally voters to turn out on Nov. 3. Yet the presidential undertones are quite intentional in the new Democratic early nominating state.
“Matanzas typically in New Mexico have centered around family gatherings, weddings, big celebrations, community celebrations, bringing people together,” Luján told Blue Light News. It’ll be a “first taste of New Mexico” for 2028ers to introduce themselves to the state.
New Mexico’s entry into the early nominating lineup has set a course for a primary season where some of the Democratic Party’s most elusive voters will be front and center. Some 2028ers will be hearing from voters directly today — among them Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). Van Hollen has admitted he’s testing the waters for a presidential bid and told Blue Light News “this is going to be part of that process.”
Also in the mix is Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) — who wanted to be “neighborly” and show up for Luján — and said he’s “considering” a run but won’t make a decision until after the midterms.
“New Mexico is a lot like Arizona. We’ve got some shared issues and priorities,” Kelly told Blue Light News. “And I think, you know, the Southwest is growing in importance, more people are moving here.”
But Luján is offering free advice for visiting Democrats: “Understand that you need to get out and earn the trust back from so many families where we lost support: labor families, union families, Hispanic families.”
Latino voters make up the majority of voters statewide, and together with Nevada they’re poised to dominate the early primary calendar.
“I think that both the fact that Trump betrayed voters when it came to the economy, plus the fact that they did a bait and switch when it came to their immigration policies, has turned off a lot of Hispanic voters,” Van Hollen told Blue Light News. “But where Trump was right was recognizing people’s economic pain.”
Blue collar work and agriculture run deep in the fabric of the state. “The [border] lines moved on a lot of families,” as Lujan put it — making the “New Mexican” identity particularly potent.
“We’re the fifth-largest state in the country,” Haaland told Blue Light News. “We have three national labs. We’ve got veteran services here. … We’re also a border state, and so much commerce here in New Mexico happens on our border.”
And Haaland is also adamant about keeping Native Americans at the forefront of the 2028 conversation. “I want any presidential candidates to really know and understand why they need to think about tribes. Why they need to have a plan for Indian tribes when they’re working on their platforms,” she said.
If Haaland wins the governorship, she and Luján will be critical touchpoints for 2028ers. Luján, a former DCCC chair, said he’s already started reaching out to potential candidates. And Haaland, through her gubernatorial campaign, has shared the stage with several of them already.
Pete Buttigieg hit the Land of Enchantment last month, campaigning for Haaland and Vasquez in the heavily Latino town of Las Cruces. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) held a fundraiser in the state in August. Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and Illinois’ JB Pritzker have both swung through the state. And Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has been fielding calls from prospectives, including Rahm Emanuel and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who’s supporting Haaland as chair of the Democratic Governors Association.
But today marks the first official 2028 cattle call for the state. Complete with tribal leaders, local business owners and VIP donors, the first Matanza event will test the appetite for a more Latino-specific cultural touchstone that could round out the obligatory presidential candidate event rotation.
“What I hope that being fourth in the nation can create in New Mexico is a better understanding of what’s needed across the West, across the Rocky Mountains, the high desert,” Luján told Blue Light News.
As for the 2028ers? They “better learn how to eat chile,” Luján added. “Our red and our green, because it’s on everything — breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sometimes even dessert.”
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President Donald Trump is escalating his crusade to exert control of America’s elections as his party barrels towards a potentially bruising midterm.
The Justice Department has already filed lawsuits in nearly every state to try and gain access to voter files. Trump revisited his longstanding bid to restrict mail voting, sparking a legal battle that reached the Supreme Court. He sought to make anti-terrorism funds for state and local governments contingent on how they administer elections. He has threatened to withhold federal election funding from states that refuse to change voter registration forms and sparred with Republican lawmakers over a bill to overhaul elections.
But with most of those efforts stalling, on Thursday, just 12 days before Election Day, the DOJ took things even further: In an extraordinary move, it asked a court to preemptively block Alaska’s Senate results if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, stunning current and former election officials in both parties.
“Boy, they are scraping the bottom of the barrel. It feels like a real desperation play to me, because it has got zero basis in the law,” said Ben Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election law expert who was counsel to George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns.
At virtually every corner, courts have rebuffed Trump’s efforts, and legal experts expect the latest DOJ maneuver to have the same outcome. The requests for voter rolls were blocked repeatedly by members of Trump’s own party and struck down in court. The attempt to restrict mail voting was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court. Federal judges blocked both the anti-terrorism and election funding efforts. The SAVE Act, which would require voters to provide proof of citizenship at the polls, has stalled in the Senate.
But Trump keeps pushing, telling reporters Friday that he had personally green-lit the Alaska lawsuit: “I’m the one that said ‘Do it.’”
The gambit is another sign that Trump is once again ramping up his efforts to exert greater control over how elections are administered — with officials bracing for what may come next.
“I think there is an attempt to lay a foundation to say, ‘If we had won these lawsuits, we would have won the election,’” Gabriel Sterling, a Republican and former senior Georgia elections official who sparred with Trump over his false claims of fraud in the state in 2020, said of the Alaska lawsuit. “So, for them, filing and losing for them is the same difference, tactically speaking, potentially.”
Trump has been claiming elections were being stolen from him since the 2016 primaries, and his wide-ranging legal and political attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss sparked a riot at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, even as some in his party want him to move on.
“The federal government is his company, and he gets to call all the shots of his company, and that’s just never how it’s been done before,” said Stephen Richer, Maricopa County, Arizona’s former GOP chief election official.
Blue Light News reached out to the offices of every Republican statewide election official in America for a response to the DOJ’s action in Alaska. Four declined to comment, and the rest did not respond. Their silence shows just how powerful Trump remains in the party, and how few are willing to cross him just days before November’s midterms.
“The survival rate politically of people who oppose Donald Trump on this issue is not great if you’re Republican,” said Richer, who was ousted by a more conservative Republican in a 2024 primary after defending the county’s 2020 election results against a yearslong campaign from Trump and his allies to try to prove they were rigged.
Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes railed against the DOJ’s lawsuit, accusing the department of “working as the president’s lawyers.”
“The Department of Justice is acting in a monstrously political way, and it’s purely inappropriate, and they lose a lot of credibility by putting their thumb on the scales,” Fontes said in an interview Friday afternoon. “This attempt in Alaska, if it comes to Arizona, will also fail.”
The Justice Department, in a statement posted on social media, said “claims that DOJ is trying to stop Alaska’s election are FALSE.” Instead, the DOJ argued it was “seeking to protect election integrity, consistent with the National Voter Registration Act (enacted by Congress) and ensure the will of Alaska voters is respected.”
Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown, a Democrat, described the legal filing in Alaska as “part of a concerted effort to control the election and to try to dictate the outcome in Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s favor.”
Brown said he worried the administration would contest the results of the midterms.
“That is not hypothetical,” Brown said. “This is what the president has done for years now, and he has the entire power of government, and most importantly, the Department of Justice around elections, acting at his request.”
Sterling predicted the effort would backfire on the GOP.
“By talking about stolen elections, by talking about cheating, they’re suppressing their own vote and they’re encouraging the votes of their opponents,” he said. “So tactically, I think it’s politically moronic.”
The DOJ lawsuit in Alaska comes less than two weeks before a midterm election cycle in which Republicans are bracing for losses across the map. And the Trump administration’s increasing interventions are raising questions about how far his administration intends to go in trying to assert federal authority over elections that by law are run by state and local officials.
A current Georgia Republican election official, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations around the Alaska lawsuit, said they are prepared to forcefully push back on any action from the federal government.
“Bring it on,” the official said. “I think there’s zero credible way for any entity, much less the DOJ, to say that the election results in Georgia are suspect.”
The lawsuit is the culmination of years of escalating tensions between the federal government and state election officials over election proceedings.
In February, a typically staid gathering of the nation’s top election officials turned fiery when Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican and her state’s chief election official, confronted a senior White House aide over the DOJ’s voter roll push.
The DOJ “pretty much slandered all of us to publicly claim that secretaries of state are not doing our jobs and that the federal government has to do it for us. Not OK,” Henderson said to White House Deputy Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Jared Borg, as her colleagues and reporters looked on.
On Wednesday, Henderson’s office received a letter from the Justice Department informing her that election monitors will be sent to her state. Her office responded the next day by distributing instructions to poll workers noting that the DOJ observers “must not interfere with voting” and giving guidance in case “a situation arises involving law enforcement or legal demands.”
Henderson was unsparing in a recent interview with CBS News.
“In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor the threats were all external,” she said. “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government.”
Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.
- Peltola postpones campaign stops after Saturday car crash
- The Trump administration moves to treat millions of mentally ill veterans with psychedelics
- The 2028 crop hits New Mexico for inaugural ‘Matanza’ rally
- Trump makes Alaska the latest frontier in his election power grab
- Spiking ambulance response times spur calls for real-time tracking
- Democrats are warning their party not to get too bullish on House gains
- Exit of RFK Jr. ally widens rift in GOP tent
- Meet Trump’s favorite House Republican candidate
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