The 10 Senate seats most likely to flip in 2024
CNN
The past three weeks have shaken up the race for the White House, further complicating things at the Senate level.
The past three weeks have shaken up the race for the White House, further complicating things at the Senate level. Democrats faced a challenging path to holding their Senate majority even before President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance and the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump – and they still do. But this year’s Democratic candidates, many of them well-known incumbents, have so far been able to create some separation from the top of the ticket. The question going forward, regardless of what Biden does, is whether they can sustain it. Nine of the top 10 seats on CNN’s latest ranking of the Senate seats most likely to flip are held by Democrats (or independents who caucus with them). And assuming Republicans flip West Virginia, where Sen. Joe Manchin is retiring, the GOP just needs to win the White House or pick up one more Senate seat to win the majority. That’s a tough landscape for Democrats – especially when they’re defending seats in states that either twice voted comfortably for Trump (Montana and Ohio) or are presidential battlegrounds, and when Biden is so far defying intraparty warnings that his candidacy could cause a GOP “landslide.” Montana Sen. Jon Tester and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown – the two most vulnerable incumbents running for reelection – said this week that Biden should exit the race. There’s been limited public polling of Senate races since the increasing Democratic consternation in the debate’s aftermath and virtually none since the attack on Trump in Pennsylvania last week. There has, however, been some slippage in Biden’s numbers, and Democrats are bracing for Trump, who officially claimed the GOP nomination in Milwaukee this week, to receive a post-convention polling bump. All of that raises the stakes for Senate Democrats to keep doing what they’re doing: touting their legislative accomplishments without invoking the Biden administration and using their fundraising edge to try to define their GOP challengers – often by mining their business backgrounds and out-of-state ties. Democrats have also been hitting back on attacks over the southern border by highlighting their support of bipartisan immigration legislation that Republicans killed in Congress this year.
FBI says it has disrupted major Chinese hacking operation that threatened US critical infrastructure
The FBI has used a court order to seize control of a network of hundreds of thousands of hacked internet routers and other devices that Chinese government-linked hackers were using to threaten critical infrastructure in the US and overseas, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday.
The Federal Reserve is preparing to cut interest rates for the first time in the Biden era after the White House spent the last three years grappling with Americans’ dissatisfaction with the cost of living, raising new questions about the health of the economy and the impact on voters at the ballot box.
Israeli officials notified the US that the country was going to carry out an operation in Lebanon on Tuesday but did not give any details about what they were planning, according to three sources familiar with the matter, including in a call between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant early Tuesday morning.