Campaign for Control of Congress Enters Final Weekend: Early Votes Near 50 Million as DOJ Steps Into Alaska Race

The campaign for control of Congress has reached its final weekend with the early vote already past every midterm mark. More than 49 million Americans have cast ballots in person or by mail, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab figures in Reuters' Saturday file, read in full this cycle — up from nearly 46 million who voted before Election Day in the 2022 midterms. All 435 House seats and 35 of the Senate's 100 seats are on Tuesday's ballot, and the outcome will set the tone for the final two years of President Donald Trump's presidency; a Democratic win in either chamber could bring congressional investigations of an administration that has had largely compliant Republican majorities for two years, Reuters reported.

The administration stepped up its legal intervention in Alaska on Friday. The Justice Department accelerated its criminal investigation after reports that aides to Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola recruited a retired schoolteacher, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., to run because he shares the Republican incumbent's name, Dan S. Sullivan; U.S. Attorney Michael Heyman, the department's top prosecutor in Alaska, said a New York Times article drove a surge of FBI resources and that he had assigned several prosecutors, while declining to say what crime may have been committed. Peltola has denied knowing about any recruitment effort, and the retired teacher has denied coordinating with her campaign, Reuters reported. The department, acting on a civil suit the president said he instigated, also moved to block Alaska from certifying the result if the incumbent loses narrowly.

The Alaska move sits inside a wider pattern Reuters catalogued: suits against California over more than 20,000 ballots the administration alleges could be noncitizens', suits against roughly 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking unredacted voter rolls, and a federal judge's Friday order — covered by this station as SQ-20261031-012 — directing the department to stop threatening California election officials. Sean Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center told Reuters the efforts are unlikely to win in court but could sow uncertainty; the same file carried the counterweight — 76 percent of voters in a September 30–October 5 Reuters/Ipsos poll said they are confident their ballots will be counted accurately, about equally among Republicans and Democrats. Trump himself is not scheduled to travel Saturday — a mash-up of politics, Halloween and college football, Reuters noted — and returns to the trail Sunday in Kansas and Iowa.