Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* In a bit of a surprise, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D) of Nevada withdrew from consideration for her party’s vice presidential nomination. The senator added, however, that she supports Joe Biden’s candidacy “100%” and she’ll “work tirelessly to help get him elected this November.”
* Despite the White House’s campaign against voting by mail, we can add Kellyanne Conway and RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel to the list of Team Trump members who’ve apparently voted by mail.
* On a related note, Donald Trump published an all-caps tweet last night insisting that mail-in voting will “lead to the end of our great Republican Party.” The president apparently forgot that he’s supposed to pretend to have policy concerns, not partisan concerns.
* Business Insider reported this week that Stephanie Alexander, the Trump campaign’s new chief of staff was arrested in Oklahoma in 2016 “and charged with conspiracy to violate state campaign-finance laws.” The report added, “The charges were later dropped, and the case was expunged last month at Alexander’s request.”
* RNC officials are still trying to salvage plans to hold their nominating convention in North Carolina, and yesterday they sent a letter to Gov. Roy Cooper (D) with proposed health and safety guidelines for convention attendees. Convention organizers reportedly want a definitive answer from the governor’s office by June 3.
* The Trump campaign’s latest television ad buys are targeting (in alphabetical order) Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The Republican ticket carried each of those states in 2016, and Ohio isn’t generally seen as one of this year’s most important battleground states. * Republican Voters Against Trump, a newly formed organization, is reportedly prepared to invest $10 million into efforts to persuade GOP voters to vote against the president. The New York Times reported that the group has “created a cache of 100 testimonial videos, most shot on smartphones, with voters explaining why they are making the sometimes painful choice to break with their political party.” * On a related note, Stu Stevens, a Republican strategist who worked with Mitt Romney, has joined the Lincoln Project, made up of anti-Trump Republicans. * And in Nevada, a conservative outfit called True the Vote filed a lawsuit in the hopes of scrapping the state’s plan to have a mostly vote-by-mail primary election. A federal court this week threw out the case.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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