A lookback at Mitch McConnell's Senate run **NOTE - do not use TBD

Maine U.S. Senate Democratic nominee Graham Platner said Monday he is "taking the time to reflect on the best path forward" for his candidacy minutes after POLITICO reported that a woman who dated him said he forced her to have sex with him.

Platner denied the allegation, but he said in a roughly two-minute video posted to social media on Monday that he is "mindful of the political reality" the reporting "will inflict."

"Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward," Platner said.

It's the first time that Platner — despite a series of scandals ranging from controversial online posts to earlier accusations about his behavior with women to a tattoo with Nazi ties — has indicated he was considering exiting the race.

His comments come after 41-year-old Maine resident Jenny Racicot told POLITICO that Platner entered her home uninvited five years ago and forced himself on her despite her repeatedly telling him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him that his actions that night were not consensual.

"I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me," Racicot said. "I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, 'This is no longer my choice.'"

In his video, Platner called the allegation "troubling" and "serious" while denying it. He said his ultimate goal is defeating GOP Sen. Susan Collins in November.

"Every one of you deserves to see that vision come to fruition and see Susan Collins defeated," Platner said, vowing to "use every tool at our disposal to do so."

Democrats can still replace Platner on the ballot, but only if he chooses to drop out before the July 13 deadline outlined in Maine state law. If he were to drop out, the state Democratic Party would have to choose his replacement by July 27.

Many progressives, both elected officials and commentators, have stood behind Platner's past scandals. But some said they found POLITICO's report incredibly troubling for Platner in the immediate aftermath on Monday.

"That is curtains," progressive commentator Hasan Piker said of Platner's candidacy while reading the article to his Twitch audience. "I believe this allegation."

Fellow progressive commentator Emma Vigeland called the allegation "immensely damaging" while arguing that Platner had not been fully truthful during past scandals.

"The Platner campaign insisted that nothing new was coming, and that was obviously not the truth. Just devastating," she said on X.

"They're animals," President Trump said about the success of leftists in this year's Democratic primaries.  "We have to stop this…horrible threat of cancer that's permeating our country called communism," he told right-wing evangelicals in a desperate effort to stir fear about Democrats.

The Washington Post described his words as "dehumanizing," and similar to 1950s "redbaiting," attacks on Democrats that led the U.S. Senate to censure the infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.). 

Trump is pushing every button with the November midterms getting closer.

As his poll numbers sink to 61 percent disapproval in a Fox survey, Trump is frantic for any tactic to stop Democrats from taking control of the House and possibly winning a Senate majority.

He is even planning a national Republican convention before the midterms.

He wants to distract from RealClearPolitics polls that show Democrats with the advantage in generic congressional voting, holding about a 5-point edge on Republicans.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) warned last month that Trump is willing to "deny the results of midterms if they do not go his way…do not let this scare you: show up, vote, and fight like this country depends on you — because it does."

Slotkin's words presaged Trump's refusal last week to sign a bipartisan bill to create more affordable housing.

That potential win for the Republican majority went to waste because Trump's focus is on having Congress pass the SAVE Act, to require more identification from voters in an effort to depress turnout among Democrats.

Congressional Republicans don't have the votes but Trump delights in the deadlock and talk about election fraud.

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As a result, the Republican majority in the House left town for an early July 4 break without passing a defense policy bill. 

Trump's fixation with stopping a blue wave in the midterms now defines all politics.

Around the country, the president has already succeeded in pressing Republican state legislators to draw new congressional districts to increase the number of seats likely to be won by Republicans.

The Supreme Court made history by weakening the Voting Rights Act to allow some of that mid-decade redistricting. That ruling ignited racial tensions nationally by allowing white Republican state legislators to dismantle majority Black districts that vote for Democrats.

Trump has also pushed the Justice Department to force states to give him access to voter registration rolls so that he can look for voters he thinks should not be allowed to vote.

He still refuses to admit he lost the 2020 presidential election. To this day, most Republican voters do not even support that fraudulent claim. And he has pardoned supporters who led a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop certification of the 2020 election.

It is hard to believe but earlier this year, when confronted with the historical pattern of midterm losses for the party in power, Trump told Reuters: "When you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election."

Now doomsday speculation about the fall election is taking hold in conversations among insiders on Capitol Hill. Political players on both sides of the aisle casually speculate that Trump will press Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to refuse to seat Democrats who would form a new House majority.

That fear grows because the scenario has precedent. 

Last year, Johnson delayed the swearing-in of Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) for nearly two months after she won a special election, in order to shield the president from the release of embarrassing files about his decades-long friendship with notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. 

Johnson already did this to delay release of files on Epstein and child sexual abuse. Election rigging is small ball by comparison.

More recently, Johnson amplified Trump's unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in California without any evidence of any irregularity.

Most telling in listening to the current rush of scary political fantasy is that it takes the lid off a pot of boiling anxiety with four months to go before the midterms.

The basics of the script is consistent: Democrats win enough competitive House races to claim a majority, but the Speaker delays or refuses to seat members from closely contested districts — citing bogus allegations of voter fraud or unresolved close election disputes.

The fight inevitably lands before the conservative Republican majority on the Supreme Court who has already shown itself to be corrupt and serving partisan interests that protect Trump from accountability.

With potential legal and personal accountability awaiting Trump and his aides if Democrats take control of House subpoena powers, the president prefers having Republicans now in Congress and, ultimately, the Supreme Court decide the election.

Add to that a nation that has grown accustomed to the threatening presence of Trump-controlled military and law enforcement agents in Washington, where Congress ultimately decides the disputed House elections.

It is a constitutional crisis waiting to happen — the "sum of all fears" that could bring the American experiment, now celebrating its 250th anniversary, to its greatest test. 

This would all be a bad political satire if it was not so scary. Comedian Bill Maher summed up Trump's approach to elections during a recent interview with Vice President JD Vance: "Under Trump, you guys have two outcomes an election can be: Either we win, or they cheated. That s— has to stop."

Maher is right. It has to stop.

Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book "New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America's Second Civil Rights Movement."

Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Speaker Mike Johnson had just delivered President Donald Trump his biggest legislative win of the year, but as he sat in his office in mid-June surrounded by a group of furious senior Republicans, the mood was sour.

To secure that win, Johnson had been forced to make a deal with a gang of hardliners, led by firebrand Rep. Chip Roy, to help bring a bill cracking down on border security to the floor. Roy and others said he'd vowed to do so before the July 4 recess.

But now, just ahead of that deadline, Johnson was receiving a stark warning from his powerful center-right faction, including several high-ranking Republicans, three people familiar with meeting told CNN. If Johnson brought the bill to the floor, these members threatened to raise their own demands — namely, a list of long-awaited bills to overhaul the US immigration system, making it easier for certain groups to gain lawful entry into the country.

That previously unreported sit-down helps explain the House GOP's descent into chaos in recent weeks as the fractious GOP conference repeatedly derails the speaker's agenda. Johnson and his team lost an ugly floor fight last week, in part, because the speaker chose not to put that border security bill on the floor — sparking a revolt by Roy and other hardliners that paralyzed the chamber and forced leadership to scrap their agenda and send members home early instead.

In a narrow House majority where just two or three members can effectively seize control of the floor, Johnson is facing a governing crisis unlike what any speaker has seen in modern history. And some of his members fear those floor blockades will only get worse as his party approaches a critical midterm election, with Trump fiercely leaning on his members to enact his agenda before a possible change in control of Congress in November — at the same time that dozens of Republicans' fear their political future is at stake.

The border crackdown bill is not the only thing thwarting Johnson's agenda. Another group of hardliners, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, is still refusing to unjam the floor until GOP leaders can find a way to pass Trump's elections overhaul bill. (The passage of that election bill, under current rules, is essentially impossible with the tight GOP margins in Congress and many Republicans quietly grumble that Luna continues to misinterpret Hill procedure in her quest.) Then there's a pair of Ohioans demanding a vote on a major pension shortfall issue back home.

"It'll be on everything we do from now until the end of this Congress," fumed House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers, whose massive defense policy bill was stymied by the hardliners' floor antics.

"Leadership needs to give those attention divas a little attention. That's all they're asking for. That's what they do repeatedly," Rogers said. Asked whether party leaders can fix the situation, Rogers replied: "I don't have an answer for you."

Johnson said Sunday that he plans to move quickly to advance the elections overhaul bill through a complex process known as reconciliation that wouldn't require Democratic votes in the Senate. That plan would likely face a number of hurdles, however, and it's unclear whether GOP leaders would be able to pull it off.

Even as frustrations spike, multiple Republicans told CNN there's no appetite to replace their party leaders in this moment — or even to punish the leadership-bucking GOP defectors. They simply can't afford to alienate any GOP votes and still have any hope of passing spending bills and other must-pass legislation this year.

Johnson allies point to the fact that the House was recently still able to pass a bipartisan housing bill and a bipartisan kids' Internet safety bill – but major agenda items like that Pentagon policy bill and appropriations bills remain in limbo.

Many Republicans, like Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, have made clear that they are putting the blame squarely on Johnson's far-right agitators for freezing the floor.

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"We got a handful of people who are, I'll call them double digit IQ strategists," Bacon said, taking a swipe at the hardliners who have jammed up the House floor. "We're shooting ourselves in the foot, it's not helpful. You would think that the Democrats are telling them what to do, that's how dumb it is."

And while immigration is one of the GOP's strongest domestic policy issues, some Republicans believe that Johnson's problems with the border bill may end up being the most intractable. In a call on Wednesday, Johnson assembled a group of Republicans — members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus as well as key center-right Republicans — to try to come up with a compromise.

That conversation, however, did little to quell tensions, according to one person on the call. Center-right Republicans argue that it makes no sense to use precious floor time on a messaging bill that would go nowhere in the Senate. But conservatives, including House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, demanded to see the bill come to the floor, the person said. (The border bill, known as HR 2, has not yet passed out of the Judiciary Committee.)

But the hardliners also firmly oppose the push made by the party's center-right, pro-immigration Republicans. Many of those more moderate Republicans hail from agriculture states or heavily Latino districts whose constituents have been dealing with a broken system for decades.

Among their own policy demands: Creating a pathway to legal residency for undocumented immigrants already living here, improving the visa program for farmworkers and safeguarding the program for migrants who cannot safely return home to their countries, known as Temporary Protected Status, that Trump has sought to dismantle. Some also want to shore up the popular Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which has also been under threat.

Conservatives, meanwhile, are clear about what they want.

"I want to see [Johnson] execute the promise to put HR 2 on the floor. It was supposed to be on this week," Rep. Keith Self of Texas told CNN after helping to tank Johnson's attempt to bring the sprawling defense policy bill to the floor last week.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com

By Nolan D. McCaskill

WASHINGTON, July 6 (Reuters) - U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia is a fundraising juggernaut, raising more than $81 million so far this cycle and holding nearly $33 million in campaign cash, or $30 million more than his opponent in the November election, Republican Representative Mike Collins.

It might not matter anymore.

Ossoff's financial edge in a state that ‌President Donald Trump won in the 2024 election may have effectively been erased by the U.S. Supreme Court, which last week struck down limits on how much individual candidates ‌could coordinate their spending with national political parties.

The Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee, among others, will now be able to spend unlimited funds from their big donors in coordination with political campaigns.

That could well tilt the playing field ​in favor of Republicans, who tend to raise more money from big, corporate donors through national committees, over Democrats, whose candidates tend to raise more money from small individual donors.

While the national committees could previously spend on behalf of their candidates, party officials say the restrictions on coordinating their messaging and strategy with individual campaigns made that spending far less targeted and effective.

Democratic candidates currently have a staggering cash advantage over Republican rivals in competitive Senate races: $16 million in North Carolina, $9 million in Ohio and $8 million in Texas.

Unlimited funds from the Republican Party's national apparatus, however, can now shore up lagging fundraisers such as Collins in Georgia ‌and Texas' Republican Senate nominee, Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Under existing laws, ⁠donors are permitted to give national political committees tens of thousands of dollars, but their contributions to individual campaigns are capped at $7,000 per election cycle. And until Tuesday's ruling, coordinated expenditures for Senate races were limited to between $130,000 and $4 million, depending on each state's voting-age population.

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Now that those caps no longer exist, Republican ⁠committees instantly stand to benefit. Each entered June with more cash than their Democratic counterparts, including a $110 million gulf between the RNC and the DNC, which has $18 million in debt.

POLLS SHOW TIGHT RACES ACROSS THE COUNTRY

Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, where Democrats would need to net four seats in the November election to win control. Despite a favorable political environment for Democrats as high living costs and the U.S.-Israeli war with ​Iran ​erode President Donald Trump's popularity, winning the Senate will be an uphill battle.

Democrats are defending seats in Trump-won Georgia ​and Michigan, while targeting Republican-held seats in North Carolina, Maine, Ohio and Alaska. ‌They have also set their sights on more Republican-leaning seats in Iowa and Texas.

A series of New York Times/Siena polls released on Wednesday found Democrats leading in North Carolina and within the margin of error in Maine, Texas, Alaska, Iowa and Ohio. The Democratic candidates are out-raising Republicans in every state but Alaska and Iowa.

A pair of Fox News polls showed Ossoff leading by 13 percentage points in Georgia while Iowa's Senate race was within the margin of error.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority opinion on Tuesday that the Supreme Court decision levels the playing field for all political parties. But Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent, said the majority bypassed Congress, rewriting its rules to circumvent contribution limits.

The ruling enables "a party to serve as an alternative checking account for a campaign," Kagan wrote.

REPUBLICANS ‌WANT DISCOUNTS ON ADVERTISING

But a key element of that coordination remains murky: whether the committees can purchase TV ads ​at the low rates afforded to candidates.

The Federal Communications Commission sets campaign advertising rules to ensure candidates are not disadvantaged ​with "unfairly high advertising rates during the ends of a campaign or rates that differ from ​their opponents."

In a memo, the Senate Republicans' campaign arm said it was no longer required to produce and distribute advertisements independently, without consulting campaigns on messaging, ‌targeting or timing. And it touted better advertising rates as one benefit of ​the ruling, saying broadcast and cable buys would be ​three to 13 times cheaper than the rates outside groups pay.

Democrats have disputed that, highlighting past comments by Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the Trump administration's lawyer, who in an October Supreme Court filing said "rules require broadcasters to charge low rates for candidate spending, but not for party spending — whether coordinated or independent."

The FCC did not respond to a request for ​comment.

Jacquelyn Lopez and Rachel Jacobs, partners at Elias Law Group, which represented ‌Democratic groups in the Supreme Court case, disagreed with the ruling but said Democratic campaigns would benefit in the long run.

"For years, Republicans have pushed the boundaries of ​coordination limits to make up for the weak campaigns and lackluster fundraising of their House and Senate candidates," they said in a statement. "Now, both parties are free to ​offer unlimited support to their candidates."

(Reporting by Nolan D. McCaskill; Editing by Michael Learmonth and Edmund Klamann)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Staff for Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell said last week that the senator is "continuing his recovery" in a hospital while the Senate is out of session. But his office has released no details about the former Republican leader's condition during his weekslong hospitalization or whether he will be at the Capitol when the Senate returns next week.

McConnell was admitted to the hospital on June 14, according to a statement from his office that only said he was "receiving excellent care." A statement a week later said that he would not be voting that week. And on Thursday, a new statement said that he "continues to improve" and "appreciates the outpouring of support he's receiving while he continues his recovery in the hospital."

His office has not released any updates since then, and a spokeswoman did not return a request for comment on Monday.

The senator's unspecified health issues come after several hospitalizations in recent years, and as Senate Republicans are already navigating a narrow majority in the final months before the midterm elections. McConnell, 84, was the longest serving Senate leader in history before stepping aside from that role. He is serving out his final term, which ends in January.

While he was still Republican leader, McConnell was hospitalized with a concussion in March 2023 and missed several weeks of work after falling in a Washington hotel. After he returned, he twice froze up during news conferences that summer, staring vacantly ahead before colleagues and staff came to his assistance. A year later, he fell and sprained his wrist while walking out of a GOP luncheon.

McConnell had polio in his early childhood and he has long acknowledged some difficulty as an adult in walking and climbing stairs. He also tripped and fell in 2019 at his home in Kentucky and underwent surgery for a fractured shoulder.

McConnell was first elected to the Senate in 1984 and was the Republican leader from 2007 until last year, serving as both majority and minority leader during that period. He has remained active as a rank-and-file senator, showing up for work when the chamber is in session, often using a wheelchair to get around.