Murkowski Endorses a Dem, Denounces Trump’s Attack on Alaska’s Election
Like Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the pattern with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), a relatively moderate voice in today’s extreme GOP, is that while she may critique Trump publicly, she often votes to support his policies when it matters.
But in recent days, Murkowski has been offering some substantial, pre-election pushback to the president.
On Tuesday, she endorsed a Democrat for governor over Trump’s chosen candidate.
“I have found fault with the Dunleavy administration,” she told Alaska News Source of the current governor, Republican Mike Dunleavy, who is term-limited. “I think that they have left federal money on the table. I think in certain areas, where we have worked hard to put opportunities from the federal side, here, into the state, the state has failed with it.”
“I think it’s been a hard eight years in many different areas, and Alaskans are looking for something different,” she added, describing Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, the Democrat, as a “young Alaskan with a view and a perspective that I think Alaska needs right now.”
JKT, as he’s often called, is up against three Republicans, one of whom, Bernadette Wilson, was endorsed by Trump. He was already favored to win, in part because of the split Republican field.
Murkowski has supported Democrats before — she endorsed Mary Peltola’s campaigns for House in 2022 and 2024. Her more significant move, I’d argue, was on Friday denouncing the DOJ’s pre-emptive lawsuit seeking to block Alaska from certifying its election if a Democrat wins, a lawsuit Trump said he ordered.
“The State of Alaska has already handled this by clearly distinguishing the candidates on this year’s ballot,” she said, pushing back on the DOJ’s premise that two Dan Sullivans on the ballot had hopelessly tainted the election.
“The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit,” she said.
That clear-eyed assessment from the most prominent Republican voice in the state predictably triggered Trump to lose it. Over multipleTruth Social posts, he called Murkowski “Republicans’ Worst Senator, by far,” “a DISGRACE to Alaska and our Country,” and falsely suggested she fraudulently won a previous race.
“They’ve been trying to get rid of Lisa Murkowski forever in Alaska,” he claimed.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s Big Escape
Flavio Bolsonaro C, the right-wing Liberal Party candidate in Brazil’s presidential runoff, attends a press conference after presidential runoff in Brasilia, Brazil, Oct. 25, 2026. (Photo by Jin Haoyuan/Xinhua via Getty Images)
When Brazilian authorities ordered Flávio Bolsonaro — the recently defeated, Trump-aligned candidate for president — to turn over his passport this week amid a money laundering investigation, he scoffed that he would never think of fleeing the country.
But yesterday morning, news began to emerge in various South American outlets that that may, in fact, have happened.
Its unclear how Bolsonaro ultimately made his escape, with some reports suggesting it was via Argentina, to the south, where President Javier Milei is an ally of the Bolsonaro family and Trump, and others suggesting he left via Venezuela, to the north.
Regardless, it was the Trump administration that offered his family refuge, and by Tuesday evening he was in Florida.
The journey inspired a bit of déjà vu, as his father took a similar trip after a 2022 auto-coup attempt he led, reminiscent of January 6, failed.
Flávio Bolsonaro promised to keep rallying his allies from the U.S.
With the midterm elections a week away, President Donald Trump is pre-emptively casting doubt on the results if they are unfavorable to the Republican Party. On Tuesday, reporters asked the president if he would unconditionally accept the results in November. “I will if they’re honest elections,” Trump responded.
It’s a familiar line for Trump. As the Washington Post summarized, “In 2016, Trump said he would accept the election results ‘if I win.’ In 2020, he repeatedly declined to commit to accept the results, saying ‘We’re going to have to see what happens.’ In 2024, Trump said he would accept the results if the election was ‘fair and legal and good.’”
But some analysts are growing increasingly worried Trump might do more to annul voting results this time around, especially as the Department of Justice is getting increasingly involved in the elections. Earlier this month, the DOJ filed criminal charges against more than two dozen green card holders in California, accusing them of illegally registering to vote or casting fraudulent ballots. Last week, Trump personally requested a DOJ lawsuit against Alaska to block certification of the state’s Senate election if the Republican incumbent loses. The New York Times reported it was “a highly unusual move that signaled an effort to potentially intervene in the outcome.”
On Monday, the Trump administration threatened Washington state with legal action if it did not purge around 400 people from its voter rolls that they claim are not U.S. citizens.
“The timing of this request — one week before the General Election — is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said in a statement on Monday. “We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously and will only respond to requests that follow due process. We saw what happened in California and don’t want Washingtonians to be harassed.”
Even if these attempts don’t work, the overall goal may be to rattle voter confidence in the security of the U.S. elections. “This is part of the election takeover playbook that I’ve seen around the world and unfortunately in some other autocratic environments,” Michael McNulty, a former senior elections adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development, told the New York Times. McNulty has studied elections in countries like El Salvador, Hungary and Venezuela. “Trump has essentially undermined the independence of the DOJ and it’s been weaponized,” he said.
“Time and again, the evidence shows U.S. elections are secure. State and local election officials, in communities across the country, painstakingly implement layered security to protect the integrity of elections,” Ben Hovland and Emma Hulbert write in a recent article for Center for American Progress. “Despite all this evidence, the Trump administration continues to call the security of elections into question. As the Center for American Progress has detailed, alleging voter fraud or invoking national security emergencies provide powerful pretexts for challenging election results, despite the fact that these claims are contrived to justify just such election subversion. Widespread voter fraud is a myth, and presidents have no constitutional or legal authority to take control of elections.”
As David Kurtz has been chronicling for TPM in his daily newsletter, the Trump administration has started to undertake what much of America long expected: it is trying to intervene in the midterms to help Republicans retain control of Congress.
The Department of Justice sued Alaska on Friday, demanding that the state delay certification until an investigation can “determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan” — a Republican on the ballot with the same name as the incumbent GOP senator — “were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan.” Trump said he asked the DOJ to initiate the suit. Experts see the case as weak.
In California, the DOJ demanded that Los Angeles — and then every other county in the state — segregate ballots from a list of names it provided, claiming those people were noncitizens likely to cast ballots.
The lists appear to have considerable problems, as have previous administration effort to identify noncitizen voters. One county’s list had only two alleged noncitizen voters, and the county clerk told the New York Times it appears neither had ever voted. Another county clerk told the Times that she had been sent the wrong list, with names only of people from a different county.
On Sunday, federal appeals court judges appeared skeptical of the Los Angeles effort, suggesting both that it was premature for the court to order the county to do as the DOJ wished, and that, even if the court had jurisdiction, the DOJ did not have a case on the merits.
This campaign has clear echoes of 2020 and early 2021, when the administration and allied lawyers went to court dozens of times seeking to throw out votes from various swing states. They used arguments that ranged from complaints about new, COVID-era election administration procedures to hare-brained conspiracy theories. Over and over, they lost.
But the legal campaign and the headlines it generated — along with a steady flow of ever-more out there conspiracy theories and incendiary rhetoric from the administration — created the appearance that, well, something must be off. Otherwise, how did all of these cases wind up in court? What’s everyone talking about? Regular Americans don’t have time to get to the bottom of it. The hubbub inspires doubt and creates chaos, which, for Trump, opens doors.
As TPM has chronicled through close examination of Trump allies’ texts and legal memos from the period immediately after the 2020 election — many of which we published for the first time — this strategy was part of a carefully calculated campaign.
As January 6 approached, the goal was no longer for victory in lower-level federal courts, but for a kind of deus ex machina — for either Congress to throw out the votes from certain states and seat Trump’s alternate slate of electors, or for the Supreme Court to step in and somehow invalidate the election without getting too deep into the specifics. Trump’s lawyers planned for a congressional stalemate over the results of the election to begin, but not end, on January 6. All of the lawsuits ahead of Jan. 6, regardless of outcome, would “force serious review in Congress of election fraud in various states,” one Trump lawyer wrote in December 2020, imagining an election that was still unresolved by January 20, 2021 — Inauguration Day.
The lawsuits initiated last week lay the groundwork to run this campaign again, this time with the full force of the federal government behind it. Even if the DOJ loses repeatedly in court — as looks likely, at least with these first two efforts — the appearance of still-unresolved questions tees up the argument that its premature to seat any new Democratic majority.
This is not to say this plan is likely to succeed. But its worth being clear-eyed about the road we’re heading down.
A Defeat for the Right in Brazil Inevitably Leads To Election Denial
SAO PAULO, BRAZIL – OCTOBER 25: Supporters of Presidential candidate and incumbent president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil celebrate with a hand gestures of an ‘L’ in honor of him after the results of the general election day on October 25, 2026 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Photo by Alexandre Schneider/Getty Images)
Brazil’s incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won reelection Sunday with 51.76% of the vote. Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president who attempted a Jan. 6-like autocoup, recieved 48.24%.
Immediately, Bolsonaro said he would not accept defeat. A Lula-appointed Supreme Court justice extended voting hours after bad weather and, Lula alleged, meddling by local officials prevented some voters from being able to reach the polls. Both candidates requested the extended hours, but Bolsonaro’s team later described it as a “judicial coup.” “It is impossible to recognize the election results, given the circumstances under which things unfolded,” Bolsonaro told journalists, saying he would seek to get the election annulled.
The fact that Lula won by 4 million votes means Bolsonaro is unlikely to succeed.
The U.S. State Department pushed hard for Bolsonaro to return to power, Reuters reports. In the months before election campaigning began, two top State Department officials “instructed US diplomats in Brazil that it was US policy to restore former President Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil’s leader – even though he had been disqualified from office for plotting a coup in 2022, when he lost the presidential election to Lula,” Reuters reports.
Tabs
The right-wing strongman leader of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic — often compared to Hungary’s now-ousted leader Viktor Orbán — has conceded defeat in a parliamentary election that followed years of student-led protests against his reign.
“Companies with ties to President Donald Trump and his family are staffing up with lawyers and lobbyists, as Democrats threaten sweeping probes if they flip either chamber of Congress in the midterm elections,” Bloomberg Businessweek reports. That includes prediction market companies and crypto firms.
Woman of the Hour
Former U.S. Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem attends a Shield of the Americas meeting in conjunction with the 81st session of the United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly at U.N. Headquarters on September 22, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
It’s Kristi Noem, who, on October 16, put out what appears to be a fake press release, on fake letterhead to make it appear as if she was still involved in the Trump administration. “The Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas role was always a six-month appointment,” it read. “Secretary Noem remains at the State Department as a Senior Advisor.” State Department sources told Politico and CBS the press release was not real, nor was the letterhead it was published on.
Attorney General Todd Blanche lashed out at CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday after she questioned whether President Donald Trump’s intervention in Alaska’s Senate election could lay the groundwork for overturning results he dislikes.
“Oh, stop it!” Blanche exclaimed during a heated appearance on “State of the Union.” “You’ve gotta stop it with that! You are not being a real person! Come on man, that is crazy!”
“It is not crazy!” Bash responded.
The confrontation came as Bash pressed Blanche about the Justice Department’s unprecedented lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska‘s Senate election if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses. Trump acknowledged Friday that he directed the legal action, telling reporters, “I’m the one that said do it.”
The administration argues that another candidate, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., could confuse voters and siphon support from the incumbent, potentially benefiting Democratic challenger Mary Peltola. Alaska courts have rejected efforts to remove the similarly named candidate from the ballot.
Asked what crime justified federal intervention, Blanche struggled to identify one.
“What’s the crime? Well, it depends. There could be a crime,” he said, before arguing that the real concern was voters becoming confused and having their voices ignored.
Bash then raised the possibility of a “doomsday scenario” in which Trump attempts to overturn election results, invoking the aftermath of the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
“That is not a real question!” Blanche protested.
“We’re not laying any groundwork for the president to do that!” he added, insisting the administration was not attempting to take over a state election.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., rejected the Justice Department’s intervention.
“It’s not the federal government’s business to run Alaskan elections,” Schiff said. “It’s Alaska’s business to do that.”
Schiff argued that Alaska’s courts had already addressed the ballot dispute and questioned the Justice Department’s legal standing.
The lawsuit has also drawn criticism from Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, underscoring opposition extending beyond Democrats.
With Election Day quickly approaching, the administration’s willingness to challenge how a state certifies its results has raised concerns about federal interference in elections traditionally administered by state officials.
President Donald Trump is urging Republicans across the country to vote early and by mail, even as his Justice Department escalates legal challenges to election procedures in multiple states less than two weeks before the midterms.
In a series of nearly identical Truth Social posts promoting Republican turnout, Trump encouraged voters to use virtually every available method of casting a ballot.
“Whether you VOTE early, absentee, by mail, or in-person, Republicans must SWAMP the Radical Left Dumocrats with massive turnout!” he wrote.
The enthusiastic endorsement of mail voting comes from a president who has repeatedly attacked the practice as vulnerable to fraud and previously sought sweeping restrictions on mail ballots.
Meanwhile, federal prosecutors sent letters Friday to election officials in at least 18 California counties, demanding that they identify and set aside ballots suspected of belonging to noncitizens within 48 hours.
“Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli warned.
The demands follow a Justice Department lawsuit seeking to prevent California from counting ballots associated with roughly 20,000 people the administration considers likely noncitizens. State officials dispute the reliability of the federal government’s data and warn that eligible voters could be disenfranchised.
Federal prosecutors have charged 28 people in California with illegally registering to vote, some of whom also allegedly cast ballots. Research has consistently found noncitizen voting to be extremely rare.
In Alaska, Trump’s Justice Department filed a separate lawsuit seeking to block certification of the Senate race under certain circumstances if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses to Democrat Mary Peltola. The dispute centers on another candidate named Daniel Sullivan, whom Republicans argue could confuse voters.
“I’m the one that said do it,” Trump told reporters Friday, acknowledging that he directed the lawsuit.
The California and Alaska cases involve different legal questions, but together underscore the administration’s aggressive involvement in state election administration. For Republican voters, however, Trump’s message remains straightforward: Use every available voting method to defeat Democrats.
Login
