Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* As this week began, there were four competitive Democrats vying for the U.S. Senate nomination in Wisconsin. As of this morning, with State Treasurer Sarah Godlewski ending her candidacy, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes is the last candidate standing.
* The latest Fox News poll in Pennsylvania shows Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman with a double-digit advantage over Republican Mehmet Oz in their U.S. Senate race, 47 percent to 36 percent.
* Making matters just a little worse, The Daily Beast reported this week on a previously undisclosed apartment building the celebrity doctor owns in New Jersey, which probably won’t help as the Fetterman campaign slams Oz as a carpetbagger with few ties to the state he’s running in.
* As for the Keystone State’s closely watched gubernatorial race, the same Fox News poll found Pennsylvania’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro leading right-wing state Sen. Doug Mastriano, 50 percent to 40 percent.
* With Republicans struggling in Pennsylvania’s open Senate race, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is starting to look elsewhere for potentially competitive contests. This week, that led the NRSC to invest in airtime in Colorado and the state of Washington, where there are Democratic incumbents favored to win re-election.
* As part of a case brought by watchdog group American Oversight, a Wisconsin judge yesterday found that the Republicans’ “audit” of the 2020 race has found “absolutely no evidence of election fraud.” The judge did, however, find that the GOP officials responsible for the investigation broke the state’s open records law.
* And as Michigan’s GOP gubernatorial primary nears, the Democratic Governors Association is running ads criticizing frontrunner Tudor Dixon — not in some kind of help-elevate-the-unelectable-radical sort of way, but in a more sincere and direct way. For her part, Dixon’s campaign has asked local outlets to take down the spot that accuses her of promoting policies that will “slash” funding for police departments.
