As the long, contentious primary season nears its end, Democratic voters elevated another progressive Senate candidate in Florida, while President Donald Trump's chosen candidate in his adopted home state, Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, won the nomination to be the state's first Black governor. It was a mixed bag for incumbents in the state, where Republican-led redistricting efforts scrambled congressional maps. Voters in Alaska, Wyoming and California were also choosing their nominees, sometimes considering multiple people running with matching last names. Plus, fake election polls and the Justice Department's Comey case. |
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Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds points at supporters during at a primary election party Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2026, in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/John Raoux) |
Election takeaways: Donalds joins historic field and progressive scores upset victory in Florida — By Jill Colvin and Mike Catalini
Tuesday's contests will help shape the midterms this fall to determine control of Congress, where Republicans have a narrow edge.
Progressives notched a surprise victory as the battle between outsider and establishment candidates that has roiled the Democratic Party in states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan moved to more conservative territory.
In a major upset, progressive state lawmaker Angie Nixon easily defeated retired Army Lt. Col. Alex Vindman, a former National Security Council official who delivered searing testimony against Trump in his 2019 impeachment trial. Vindman had outraised Nixon by more than 16-to-1, with Nixon bringing in less than $1 million. But in another matchup in South Florida, U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz won the nomination for reelection in a new Republican-friendly district against union organizer and democratic socialist Oliver Larkin.
Donalds, a rising star in the Republican Party, won his party's nomination to succeed the term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis, joining a historic slate of Black gubernatorial nominees across the country as he vies to become the first Black governor of the state.
They include Republicans Rep. John James in Michigan and Lisa Demuth, who defeated pillow-selling conspiracist Mike Lindell in Minnesota. On the Democratic side, David Crowley won a razor-thin primary against a democratic socialist in Wisconsin, joining Attorney General Aaron Ford in Nevada, state Rep. Jermaine Johnson in South Carolina and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia.
Either Bottoms or Demuth could be the country's first Black woman governor.
Read more from Colvin and Catalini on Tuesday's primary results. |
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What to know about Median Strategies' fake election polls |
A close-up view of “I Voted” stickers at Maples Elementary School on primary election day, Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026, in Dearborn, Mich. (AP Photo/Nic Antaya) |
Fake polling from mysterious company highlights danger of unvetted election surveys — By Steve Peoples, Amelia Thomson-Deveaux and Ken Sweet
Locked in a competitive reelection race, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared on social media last week that a new poll was evidence that her campaign was “gaining momentum.”
Just a few days later, the truth emerged: The poll was fabricated.
The California results were among at least three “polls” across three states posted online this month by Median Strategies, a previously unknown organization that admitted to the Los Angeles Times on Monday that the purported results were fake.
The company wrote before shuttering its website this week that it “was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”
The post offered no explanation of who was behind the “experiment” or for what purpose.
The trajectory of the California poll offers a cautionary tale about the perils of trusting unvetted polling. While high-quality independent polls still exist, they appear amid a slew of other surveys produced by outside groups, campaigns or super PACs or using undisclosed or questionable methodologies. It can be a struggle to make sense of the findings — and as the latest episode shows, even campaigns may end up falling for falsified data.
Read more from Peoples, Thomson-Deveaux and Sweet on the polling situation. |
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Justice Department defends James Comey prosecution in Trump threat case |
Former FBI Director James Comey speaks during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 8, 2017. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) |
'No serious dispute' that Comey's seashell post could be read as a Trump threat, prosecutors say — By Eric Tucker
The Justice Department is defending its prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, saying “there is no serious dispute" that a social media post of seashells he made last year could be understood as a threat against Trump.
Prosecutors also called into question Comey's account that he had found the seashells in the numerical arrangement of “86 47” while walking on a beach in North Carolina and suggested that his May 2025 post on Instagram was a thinly veiled attempt to sell copies of a forthcoming novel about a social media personality whose words have inspired his fans to attack his foes.
The arguments in motions late Tuesday represent the government's most detailed explanation of its indictment and were filed in response to wide-ranging defense efforts to dismiss the case on grounds including that it constitutes a vindictive prosecution and that Comey's post did not amount to a true threat. Comey's lawyers contend that investigators in the case misled judges, submitted documents containing false statements, withheld key facts and repeatedly came up empty in their efforts to prove that Comey intended a physical threat or knew that the number 86 could suggest violence. Read more from Tucker about the latest filing in this case. |
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Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, who is seeking a third term, flashes a thumbs up after a passing motorist honked during a sign waving event at an intersection on primary election day in Anchorage, Alaska, Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen) |
Anchorage-based photo journalist Mark Theissen has been on the ground covering the primary elections and the high-stakes Senate race that could determine partisan control of the chamber in November.
Explore more of Theissen's extraordinary work. |
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