Midterm Elections Daily: Midterm Races Enter the Final Stretch (Published 2022) (2024)

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Here’s the latest from the campaign trail.

It’s Halloween, which is good practice for eight days from now, when candidates and voters alike will be up late stress-eating snacks. With Election Day just over a week away, you’re probably being deluged by political ads and coverage. We’re here to help you make sense of it all.

Here’s what to know:

To get more G.O.P. poll workers installed, Republicans turn to lawsuits.

Before this year’s election, an R.N.C. official working on behalf of the state party engaged with a coalition of activist groups, including some known for pushing outlandish conspiracy theories, to try to recruit thousands of Republican election officials to work in the state. Regarding the Flint lawsuit, party officials are claiming that Republican recruits were rejected and that the process is unfair, according to The Free Press.

Davina Donahue, the interim city clerk in Flint, said before the lawsuit was filed that it was hard to find Republican poll workers in the overwhelmingly Democratic city, The Washington Post reported.

Republicans have filed similar lawsuits in Maricopa County in Arizona, which the Republican county recorder there has called “absurd,” according to The Arizona Mirror, as well as in Nevada. Critics have said that such lawsuits could further efforts to delegitimize election results if they don’t come out as desired.

In Virginia, the state Republican Party recently filed a suit against Eric Olsen, the Prince William County registrar, in an attempt to force the county to put equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats in leadership positions in polling places.

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Olsen disputed their claims. He said that he had made it a point to recruit enough Republicans so that there were equal numbers of Democratic and Republican poll workers in a county that skews Democratic, but that the Republican poll workers did not have the same levels of experience.

Mr. Olsen said he was considering resigning after the election in part because of the stress over the party’s poll worker lawsuit and other matters.

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The Justice Dept. says the First Amendment may not protect self-appointed drop box monitors in Arizona.

“The First Amendment does not protect individuals’ right to assemble to engage in voter intimidation or coercion,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, wrote in a brief filed on Monday in U.S. District Court in Phoenix. “Nor does it transform an unlawful activity for one individual — voter intimidation — into a permissible activity simply because multiple individuals have assembled to engage in it.”

The filing was made in a case that the League of Women Voters of Arizona brought last week against two groups that have been organizing ballot box monitoring, the Lions of Liberty and Clean Elections USA, as well as some of their principals. On Friday, the plaintiff asked the court for an injunction against those groups to stop the activity. That petition is still pending.

The judge overseeing the case, Michael T. Liburdi, on Friday refused to issue an injunction in a parallel lawsuit against Clean Elections USA, claiming that the Constitution protected the activities of citizens who wish to gather near ballot boxes.

The Justice Department’s intervention represents a rebuke to that ruling by Judge Liburdi, a longtime member of the Federalist Society who was appointed in 2019 by President Donald J. Trump.

The Justice Department’s brief addresses numerous points made by the judge, including the idea that taking pictures of voters and their car license plates is equivalent to filming police officers in the line of duty. The brief also draws comparisons to numerous past instances of apparent attempts to intimidate or deter voters. In one example from 2004, involving operatives in South Dakota who followed Native American voters and recorded their license plate numbers, a federal judge issued an injunction.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is weighing an emergency appeal to Judge Liburdi’s ruling filed by the plaintiffs in that case, the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans and Voto Latino, on Saturday; a lawyer for Clean Elections USA said the group was rushing to file a response later on Monday.

And in a hearing on Monday on the League of Women Voters’ case, Judge Liburdi dismissed the Lions of Liberty and its parent organization, the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, from the suit after its leaders pledged in court not to engage in any more election monitoring activities. “We are standing down,” a board member, Jim Arroyo, told the judge. An evidentiary hearing on the injunction petition is scheduled for midday on Tuesday.

The founder of Clean Elections USA, Melody Jennings, has not appeared in court. In a Saturday appearance on “War Room,” a podcast hosted by the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, she said that her group was changing its name to the Drop Box Initiative in Arizona, but would retain the Clean Elections USA moniker in the rest of the country.

“We are going to rebrand a little bit,” Ms. Jennings said, adding that while she was still looking for volunteers in most places, “I don’t need any more people in Arizona, honestly.”

In a second “War Room” interview, on Monday, she asked listeners to consider donating money to True the Vote, a right-wing group focused on voter fraud, to support her legal defense.

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Echoes of unrest in Kenosha in 2020 are affecting a tight governor’s race in Wisconsin.

Only one thing has made her hesitate as she considers casting a ballot for him again: the riots.

In Kenosha, that’s shorthand for the harrowing events of August 2020, when a police officer shot Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old resident, during an arrest. The shooting, during a summer when the United States was being roiled by racial justice demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, prompted protests, looting, fires and destruction in Kenosha that lasted for days.

Two years later, Mr. Evers’s handling of the unrest has Ms. Ermert questioning his leadership. Now, as Mr. Evers enters the final days of a tight re-election contest facing a Republican challenger, Tim Michels, she is still asking: Did Mr. Evers err in releasing a statement hours after the shooting of Mr. Blake that seemed to criticize the police officer and suggest that the episode was motivated by racism? Could the governor and other officials have done more to stop the unrest? Who was responsible for what happened?

The questions come at a time when crime has become one of the top issues for voters nationally and in the midst of an excruciatingly close race in a key swing state. Now, more than a few voters in Kenosha, Wisconsin’s fourth-largest city and a longtime Democratic stronghold, are wondering whether a drop in support for Mr. Evers in Kenosha could play a major role in the outcome of the race. And it’s clear that he is struggling to quiet those concerns.

“I think Evers is going to have a hard time in Kenosha,” Ms. Ermert said. “He’s got to fight for himself here. He needs redemption.”

Kenosha should be a solid hub of Mr. Evers’s support as he crisscrosses Wisconsin in an election that could be decided by only a handful of votes. The lakefront city of 100,000 people has long been a Democratic-leaning place whose identity was shaped by automobile manufacturing and labor organizing.

Mr. Evers has won big in Kenosha before: In 2018, Mr. Evers, then the state schools superintendent, beat Scott Walker, the incumbent Republican governor, by a margin of less than 30,000 votes statewide, winning 49.5 percent of the votes cast. In Kenosha, he won close to 60 percent of the vote. He still has strong support in the city, and is seen by many Democrats as a crucial check on Republicans who have a near-supermajority in the heavily gerrymandered State Legislature. “He’s all we’ve got,” said Nathaniel Wells, 84, a Kenosha resident who had placed signs supporting Mr. Evers and Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes in his front yard.

Yet some Kenosha voters said they had since soured on Mr. Evers — along with Mr. Barnes, who is hoping to unseat Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican. Some said they saw Democratic leaders as unable to keep them safe, noting that shootings and homicides spiked in Kenosha in the year after the civil unrest.

The shooting of Mr. Blake in 2020 unfolded after police officers arrived at an apartment complex in Kenosha in response to a domestic complaint. When they tried to take Mr. Blake into custody, and unsuccessfully used a Taser to subdue him, one officer, Rusten Sheskey, repeatedly fired his gun into Mr. Blake’s back. (The top prosecutor in Kenosha later declined to bring charges against the officer. Mr. Blake, who is partially paralyzed, has since moved to Chicago.)

After a brief cellphone video of the shooting spread widely on social media, demonstrations, looting and fires erupted. On the third night of the unrest, Kyle Rittenhouse, then a 17-year-old living in Illinois, shot and killed two men in an act that a jury last year ruled was self-defense.

During the unrest in the days after Mr. Blake’s shooting, many Kenosha residents feared that their residences would be set aflame, and some left home for days until they felt it was safe to return.

Those anxieties over personal safety are still rippling through Kenosha and beyond. A recent survey by Marquette University Law School revealed that the top five issues that Wisconsin voters said they were “very concerned” about included gun violence and crime. Though homicides increased in 2021 in Kenosha, they have decreased significantly so far this year.

Mr. Michels, the Republican challenger, has made Kenosha and Mr. Evers’s response to it a central theme of his campaign. At a round table event in Kenosha in August, he said that Mr. Evers had failed to deploy enough resources to protect the city.

“Kenosha was ignored, and as a result Kenosha burned,” he said.

David Zoerner, a Republican who is running for Kenosha County sheriff, has joined in the criticism, telling voters that “liberal leadership failed Kenosha” in 2020. His campaign has distributed yard signs that have popped up all over town that read “Make Kenosha County Safe Again.”

At least one prominent Republican in Kenosha defended Mr. Evers: David Beth, the longtime sheriff of Kenosha County, said in an interview this month that attacks on Mr. Evers were nothing but politics. Sheriff Beth, who endorsed Donald J. Trump for president in 2020, said that Mr. Evers sent all the National Guard members that were requested at the time.

“I don’t blame anybody for what happened except for the rioters who came,” Sheriff Beth said. “It’s campaign time right now. They’re looking to discredit someone. And I have no one to discredit.”

Two years later, scars from the rioting still remain in Kenosha. On the main commercial street in the Uptown neighborhood where much of a city block was burned, several charred, crumbling buildings have been torn down, yet to be replaced.

During a visit to Kenosha this summer, Mr. Evers, in a brief interview, said that he had responded with every possible resource to the unrest.

“I did everything that they asked me to do,” he said of local elected officials. “Is the other side going to lie and do whatever they can? Of course they are. They’re politicians.”

As Mr. Evers shook hands and chatted with customers at a coffee shop, Brooke Ohl, 38, walked past him without stopping. His presence was a reminder of the frustration and the fear she felt in August 2020, she said.

“I felt like he did nothing to help us,” said Ms. Ohl, who works as a manager in a dental office. “I’m sure he’s a very nice man. But he should have gotten us some more help.”

Mr. Evers’s supporters have been spending the final days before the election trying to convince voters that in 2020 the governor did everything he had the power to do. On Monday, as Mr. Evers stopped in Kenosha to accept an endorsem*nt from the local firefighters’ union, Joseph Sielski, the vice president of the union, introduced the governor by trying to debunk the widely repeated narrative that Mr. Evers had failed to send in the National Guard.

“I’m going to go over some of the lies that were spoken of the governor’s actions in regards to the civil unrest in my hometown, the town I currently reside in, the city of Kenosha,” Mr. Sielski said. “I recently saw a political ad from the governor’s opponent that stated that it took the governor days to dispatch the National Guard. That is an outright lie.”

Anthony Kennedy, a city alderman whose district includes the block where Mr. Blake was shot, said that criticism of the handling of the civil unrest had been a running line of attack not just in the governor’s race, but in local, county-level races in the past two years.

“I’m calling it the Kenosha big lie,” said Mr. Kennedy, a Democrat who holds a nonpartisan seat as alderman. “The people who are out here using this for their own political gain, shame on them.”

Mr. Kennedy said that Mr. Evers and Mr. Barnes had been instrumental in helping the city recover, asking local elected officials what kind of funding and resources were needed, and visiting frequently to show support. A spokesman for Mr. Evers’s campaign pointed to millions in federal funding that the governor has committed to Kenosha for rebuilding efforts.

Still, the suggestion that Mr. Evers failed Kenosha residents has become so pervasive that it could harm his re-election prospects, Mr. Kennedy said.

“I think it’s going to be very damaging,” he said. “They have an issue, and it’s a potent one. I’m not going to deny the emotional weight that’s behind this.”

Stacy Juga, who works in the area of downtown Kenosha that was heavily damaged after Mr. Blake’s shooting, said last week that the civil unrest had left residents looking for someone to blame, without success.

“I do believe Evers made mistakes,” she said. “Would I vote for him again? Probably.”

Echoing a common sentiment among people in Kenosha, she added: “It makes me not want to vote at all.”

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Republicans in New England are pushing to flip more seats by running as moderates.

“I want to work with Democrats and Republicans,” Mr. Logan, a former state senator, said in an interview between door knocks. “There is no one congressman or woman that I agree with on every topic, 100 percent of the time.”

Farther north in Maine, former Representative Bruce Poliquin says in his ads that he wants to bring “Maine common sense” back to Congress, working to distance himself from the far-right tilt of his party as he campaigns to reclaim the seat he lost to Representative Jared Golden four years ago.

In an aggressive push in the homestretch of the midterm congressional campaign, Republicans have stepped up their efforts to lay claim to seats in New England, a region that once boasted a proud tradition of electing independent-minded Republicans, but that has more recently slid out of reach of a party that has lurched to the right.

They have done so by promoting candidates who are billing themselves as centrists with broad appeal — a far different brand from the hard-right figures and election deniers who make up the critical mass of the party — hoping to bolster their chances of winning a substantial House majority in a cycle that has favored Republicans.

New York Democrats are facing a tough fight to take an open Republican House seat.

Yet every two years, Representative John Katko, a local Republican with moderate views, outperformed his party to defend his seat. This year, Mr. Katko is no longer a factor: He has chosen not to seek re-election.

Mr. Katko’s open seat in the 22nd District represents a rare chance for Democrats — who are all-in on trying to protect their majority in Congress — to win a Republican-held seat.

It is not expected to be easy: With Republicans riding a national wave of anger over inflation and fear of crime, recent polls show a tight race between the Republican candidate, Brandon Williams, and his Democratic opponent, Francis Conole, a Naval intelligence officer with deep ties to the district.

“This is a very volatile year,” said Stephanie Miner, the former Democratic mayor of Syracuse. “And that’s going to be reflected in what happens in this race.”

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California is the unlikely backdrop of some of this year’s most bitter political campaigns.

The vitriol in what would normally be a quiet race for a decidedly safe Democratic seat illustrates how liberal California, of all places, has become home to some of this year’s most vicious political mudslinging — and not across party lines.

Unlike a vast majority of the country, where voters are mulling the yawning ideological gaps between Republicans and Democrats on their midterm ballots, California has a top-two open primary system, which means two Democrats can — and often do — square off against each other in general elections. And in many cases, those candidates prove strikingly similar on policy, forcing them to dig deep to distinguish themselves.

Lately, it’s grown pretty nasty.

Democrats are running against Democrats in six House races, 18 state races, and dozens of municipal and local elections around California in November. In many contests, the candidates have resorted to extreme and divisive language, in a reflection of the growing polarization of American politics.

Control of the Senate control hinges on neck-and-neck races, a new Times/Siena poll finds.

The results indicate a deeply volatile and unpredictable Senate contest: More people across three of the states surveyed said they wanted Republicans to gain control of the Senate, but they preferred the individual Democratic candidates in their states — a sign that Republicans may be hampered by the shortcomings of their nominees.

Midterm elections are typically referendums on the party in power, and Democrats must defy decades of that political history to win control of the Senate, an outcome that has not completely slipped out of the party’s grasp according to the findings of the Times/Siena surveys. Democrats control the 50-50 Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tiebreaking vote. To gain the majority, Republicans need to gain just one seat.

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A top U.S. security official says threats against polling sites are undemocratic.

Ms. Easterly expressed confidence that the midterm elections would be “safe and secure” and said she trusted the resilience of the system. She also said there was no information about credible threats to compromise or disrupt election infrastructure.

Ms. Easterly was asked about Elon Musk’s posting on Twitter of an unfounded conspiracy theory about the attack last week on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Ms. Easterly avoided directly answering the question, saying that the attack was horrific and that she was “laser focused on the election.”

She added that election officials were not “faceless backroom bureaucrats” but dedicated public servants working to secure elections.

“They deserve not just our support, but our admiration and respect and they deserve to be safe and we all need to be responsible about ensuring that’s a safe and secure environment,” Ms. Easterly said.

Disinformation, she said, can be used to “sow discord that can undermine confidence in election integrity. And that can be used to incite violence.”

Russia, Iran and China have all tried to use influence operations to sway the election, Ms. Easterly said. Asking questions about sources of information, and not spreading possible disinformation more broadly, will help prevent foreign adversaries from having “a chance to manipulate Americans and to sow discord and to create lack of confidence in our elections,” she said.

A QAnon Democrat? Fierce warfare erupts in deep-blue California.

But Mr. Kim is not a Republican. He’s a progressive Democrat who supports “Medicare for all” and a Green New Deal. And the attacks come from a fellow progressive Democrat, Representative Jimmy Gomez, who is fighting to keep his seat in Congress.

The vitriol in what is normally a quiet race for a decidedly safe Democratic seat illustrates how liberal California, of all places, has become home to some of this year’s most vicious political mudslinging — and not across party lines.

Unlike a vast majority of the country, where voters are mulling the yawning ideological gaps between Republicans and Democrats on their midterm ballots, California has a top-two open primary system, which means two Democrats can — and often do — square off against each other in general elections. And in many cases, those candidates prove strikingly similar on policy, forcing them to dig deep to distinguish themselves.

Lately, it’s grown pretty nasty.

Democrats are running against Democrats in six House races, 18 state races, and dozens of municipal and local elections around California in November. In many contests, the candidates have resorted to extreme and divisive language, in a reflection of the growing polarization of American politics.

That’s particularly the case in azure-blue Los Angeles, where nearly every elected office is held by a Democrat, only a single Republican has served as mayor in the past half-century, and an explosive racism scandal involving three members of the City Council plunged the city’s political world into chaos just weeks before the election.

Take the race to be the city’s next controller, typically a dull contest with few, if any, pyrotechnics. But this year, Paul Koretz, a progressive city councilman with more than three decades in public office, has taken to calling his opponent, Kenneth Mejia, “dangerous,” saying he is an antisemite and an “anarchist” who is little different from the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“He’s the phoniest Democrat you can find,” Mr. Koretz said in an interview of Mr. Mejia, a relative political newcomer and former Green Party member who has supported a reduction in police funding and backs a national tenants’ bill of rights.

Mr. Mejia’s campaign manager, Jane Nguyen, called Mr. Koretz’s accusations “ridiculous smears” and said he was “out of touch.” Since the leak this month of a recording of City Council members in a discussion that involved offensive comments, she and other allies of Mr. Mejia have sought to portray Mr. Koretz as a racist, accusations he denies.

Some Democrats worry that the poisonous environment is bad for party unity.

“There are wild charges going back and forth about whether one candidate is a closet conservative and one is a closet Marxist,” said Garry South, a longtime Democratic strategist. “I just don’t think these runoffs between Democrats should turn into a derby about who can accuse the other of being the most extreme. That’s not a healthy debate to have.”

Mr. South and other consultants pointed out several other races where the animosity was at full pitch, including a contest for a City Council seat on the wealthy Westside of Los Angeles. One candidate, a centrist Democrat with a background in employment law, has tried to link her progressive opponent, a criminal defense lawyer, to pedophiles and rapists. That lawyer, in turn, has called her a racist.

In a race for a State Senate district encompassing parts of Downtown and South Los Angeles, two Democrats with nearly identical policy positions have accused each other of being pro-business and anti-tenant.

“It’s a race to the bottom,” Mr. South said.

For more established candidates, the negative messaging may come from a place of desperation: Even before the controversy consumed City Hall early in October, an anti-incumbent mood seemed to have settled over Los Angeles.

In the June 7 primary, two sitting City Council members lost decisively to inexperienced challengers, one by a wide enough margin to preclude a runoff.

In their primary, Mr. Mejia walloped Mr. Koretz by nearly 20 percentage points, though he fell short of the 50 percent threshold that would preclude a runoff. Afterward, Mr. Mejia gained several key endorsem*nts, including from The Los Angeles Times and Councilman Mike Bonin, whose son was the subject of some of the racist comments at the heart of the unwinding scandal.

Mr. Koretz, by contrast, had been endorsed by all three City Council members caught on the now-infamous recording. After the scandal broke, his campaign website was scrubbed of mentions of their support, cached versions of the site show.

In their race for Congress, Mr. Gomez and Mr. Kim have a history.

In 2020, Mr. Gomez, who has served in the House since 2017, also faced Mr. Kim, an immigration lawyer. That time, Mr. Gomez won the primary by almost 30 points and went on to the general election without paying much, if any, attention to his rival. “He never even mentioned my name,” Mr. Kim said over a breakfast burrito at a restaurant this month.

But Mr. Gomez ended up winning the 2020 general election by a surprisingly slim margin of six points. In April 2021, he asked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to inject money into the contest for what has traditionally been a safe seat for the party, telling donors he was “in a very tough race,” HuffPost reported.

This past August, Mr. Gomez’s campaign unveiled a website titled “Who Is the Real David Kim?” that accuses him of failing to support democracy and of hiding a “QAnon MAGA endorsem*nt”; a core falsehood of QAnon is that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is trying to control politics and the news media. In October, Mr. Gomez has sent out three mailers juxtaposing photos of Mr. Kim with an image of Jan. 6 rioters climbing up the walls of the Capitol, and has paid for internet ads with side-by-side pictures of his rival and former President Donald J. Trump.

The QAnon reference, explained Steven Barkan, a consultant for Mr. Gomez’s campaign, stems from the fact that, in 2020, Mr. Kim asked for and received endorsem*nts from the losing candidates in the primary. One of them, Joanne Wright, a Republican, turned out to have embraced conspiracy theories, and had a “Q” image on her Twitter page before being kicked off the platform. Mr. Barkan said that Ms. Wright’s views were exposed before the primary, and he argued that Mr. Kim either knew or should have known whom he was dealing with. (Ms. Wright did not respond to requests for comment.)

“It is correct to say we don’t think he’s QAnon,” Mr. Barkan conceded. “But he ran with QAnon support. It is serious when people like Kim give credibility to QAnon.”

Some of the Gomez campaign’s attacks have also centered on the fact that Mr. Kim was once a registered Republican; Mr. Kim says he was raised in a Republican family but long ago changed his registration.

Mr. Kim called the advertising campaign a dirty tactic and said the endorsem*nts, which included one from a Democrat he defeated, showed that he was “a unifying candidate and leader” willing to work with people who hold different viewpoints. He also pointed out that the endorsem*nt occurred in the 2020 race, yet was being misleadingly presented as if it happened in the current campaign.

“People like Jimmy continue to add to the extreme polarization of our country and government,” Mr. Kim said.

Bill Przylucki, the executive director of Ground Game LA, a nonprofit group that promotes progressive politics and candidates, frowns on messaging that associates left-wing candidates with extremists at a time when more than 370 Republican candidates for influential offices nationwide have cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

“Given the national picture, I think that’s a bad strategy overall for the Democrats,” Mr. Przylucki said, comparing the approach to “red-baiting.”

Some political observers note that it has scarcely been a decade since California moved to an open primary system, and say that some adjustment is necessary. But Mr. Przylucki argued that the hostilities emerging in the current system called for a complete rethinking of traditional Democrat-versus-Republican politics.

“Democrats are trying to figure out what it means to be a party in a place like Los Angeles,” he said. “Or whether it even makes sense.”

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In New England, Republicans run as moderates in a push to flip more seats.

In nearby Connecticut, George Logan, a Republican former state senator, switched effortlessly between Spanish and English as he went door to door telling voters in suburban New Britain that he wanted to lower their taxes.

“I want to work with Democrats and Republicans,” Mr. Logan, a former state senator, said in an interview between door knocks. “There is no one congressman or woman that I agree with on every topic, 100 percent of the time.”

Farther north in Maine, former Representative Bruce Poliquin says in his ads that he wants to bring “Maine common sense” back to Congress, working to distance himself from the far-right tilt of his party as he campaigns to reclaim the seat he lost to Representative Jared Golden four years ago.

In an aggressive push in the homestretch of the midterm congressional campaign, Republicans have stepped up their efforts to lay claim to seats in New England, a region that once boasted a proud tradition of electing independent-minded Republicans, but that has more recently slid out of reach of a party that has lurched to the right.

They have done so by promoting candidates who are billing themselves as centrists with broad appeal — a far different brand from the hard-right figures and election deniers who make up the critical mass of the G.O.P. — hoping to bolster their chances of winning a substantial House majority in a cycle that has favored Republicans.

The turf has hardly been friendly to the G.O.P. in recent years. Republican representation in New England was nearly wiped out in 2006, when only one of the region’s 22 House races was won by a Republican. By 2018, the party was shut out entirely after Mr. Poliquin lost his re-election campaign to Mr. Golden. That left Senator Susan Collins of Maine as the sole remaining congressional Republican in New England.

Now, Republican leaders are working to revive the party’s standing with an estranged but critical swath of voters in the region who prefer politicians who do not operate in lock step with the national parties.

And Democrats, who have watched with alarm as the Republicans have gained traction, are scrambling to persuade voters that however mainstream these New Englanders may seem, electing them would empower an extremist G.O.P.

In an interview, Seth Magaziner, a Democrat and former teacher and state treasurer who is running against Mr. Fung for an open seat in southern and central Rhode Island, cited his opponent’s support for former President Donald J. Trump and his opposition to a state marriage equality law as evidence that Mr. Fung is no centrist.

“The Republicans are trying to package someone who is not a moderate as a moderate,” said Mr. Magaziner, who has trailed Mr. Fung in recent polls. “That has never been his record.”

Top Republicans are spending freely to try to strengthen the New England Republicans’ chances.

Last week, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Representative Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican and minority leader, poured an additional $1 million into Mr. Fung’s race, tripling its investment. Calvin Moore, a spokesman for the group, said the PAC had spent $3.5 million for Mr. Logan and $5.5 million for Mr. Poliquin.

Mr. McCarthy visited Rhode Island in August to raise money for Mr. Fung, and Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the minority whip, attended a fund-raiser for Mr. Fung last week.

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the third-ranking Republican who denies that the 2020 election was fair, also appeared with Mr. Logan this month at a fund-raising event.

One reason the region appeals to Republicans as they look to expand their footprint into even the bluest of states is the makeup of the electorate: Between a third and half of registered voters in New England do not have a party affiliation. They have long been known for rewarding politicians who reach across the political aisle, like Ms. Collins and Senator Angus King, a Maine independent, both of whom have been involved in bipartisan negotiations and supported Democratic-led bills.

Republicans are hoping that disaffected Democrats and independent voters will turn to “Republican candidates who are running local races and delivering a more pragmatic message” as a check on Democratic dominance in their states, said Samantha Bullock, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

At a recent debate, Mr. Logan, who is challenging Representative Jahana Hayes, a second-term Democrat, described himself as a “Connecticut Republican”: moderate on social issues, fiscally conservative. He admonished the Biden administration for its economic policies, blaming Democrats’ large spending bills for rising inflation. But he appeared to share Ms. Hayes’s views on some issues, saying he supported infrastructure investments and abortion rights.

Mr. Logan later clarified to reporters that he did not think Congress had the constitutional power to codify Roe v. Wade, as Democrats sought to do after the Supreme Court decision this year overturning it.

In Rhode Island, Mr. Fung, the first Chinese American to be elected mayor of Cranston and a two-time candidate for governor, is campaigning on fighting inflation and increasing public safety. Mr. Fung said in an interview that he would have supported the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law that President Biden signed last year, as well as an industrial policy measure enacted over the summer, and that he would back legislation to protect abortion access.

He denied that he had shifted his positions to appear more moderate, saying that Democrats were “running a lot of this national cookie-cutter playbook, and I just don’t fit their mold.”

Mr. Poliquin may be the least centrist of the three, having aligned himself more closely with Mr. Trump and embraced conservative positions on social issues, such as opposition to gun control measures.

National Democrats have invested huge sums to counter the G.O.P.’s inroads into New England, working to portray Mr. Fung and the other Republican candidates as far outside the mainstream. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and allied political action committees have spent more than $2.3 million in the Rhode Island race, $3.6 million in Ms. Hayes’s district and nearly $10 million in Mr. Golden’s, according to a spokesman for the Democratic committee.

Democratic ads show a smiling Mr. Fung wearing a Trump beanie. Ads against Mr. Poliquin emphasize his support for abortion bans, including his previous backing for legislation that would prohibit abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

And in Waterbury, Conn., the campaign staff for Ms. Hayes held signs at a rally before a televised debate that read “Logan [hearts] Trump.” After the debate, Ms. Hayes told reporters that a moderate would not have invited House leaders to campaign in the district or appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program to share his message, as Mr. Logan did this month.

“He has inextricably connected himself to national Republican leadership,” she said. “They are propping up his campaign with millions of dollars.”

Not all voters are swayed by the connection.

Dr. Earl Bueno, an anesthesiologist and independent voter from Connecticut, said he supported Mr. Logan, likening the Republican candidate to one of the state’s Democratic senators.

“I don’t see him as an extremist that people are painting him as right now,” Dr. Bueno said. “I’m pro-George Logan because, like Senator Chris Murphy, you can actually reach out and have a conversation with him.”

Some Democrats are resorting in the final weeks of the campaign to reminding voters that electing any Republican — even a moderate one — could hand the G.O.P. control of Congress.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, made that point at a recent dinner for Mr. Magaziner at a golf course in Providence.

“Please,” he told a group of voters at the dinner, “don’t make Allan Fung the vote that makes Kevin McCarthy speaker of the House of Representatives.”