Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.

* Elon Musk has already earned a reputation as the pre-eminent Republican megadonor, having spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help put Donald Trump in the White House again. Two years later, he’s taking similarly ambitious steps to buy the midterm elections for the GOP.

The New York Times reported that Musk, the world’s wealthiest billionaire, “has quietly funneled more than $276 million into Republican groups and his super PAC since the start of July, building a huge turnout operation to help the party battle headwinds in the midterm elections.”

The same report added that with three weeks remaining in the election cycle, Musk “has already given far more money, about $366 million, to federal committees during the 2025-26 election cycle than he did during the 2024 election, when he laid out roughly $290 million.”

* House Speaker Mike Johnson held some campaign events in Iowa on Friday, where he tried to define the stakes in the midterms in rather stark terms: The Louisiana Republican said there were 22 key U.S. House races that, in his estimation, will “determine the fate of the republic.”

* In Texas’ closely watched U.S. Senate race, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico had to leave the campaign trail for nearly 10 days recently after being sick with the flu, but he returned to his public schedule on Friday, appearing at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. In the meantime, the candidate’s far-right critics have been pushing a series of bizarre conspiracy theories related to his absence.

* Though Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race isn’t generally thought of as a key Democratic pickup opportunity, Barack Obama has recorded a campaign ad in support of Senate hopeful Scott Colom, the latest in a series of indicators that Democrats see the race as worthy of attention.

* Speaking of Democratic pickup opportunities in red states, late last week, the Senate Majority PAC, the super PAC affiliated with the Senate Democratic leadership, made a $5 million investment in Kansas’ Senate race, fueling the party’s hopes that the Rev. Adam Hamilton has a real chance of success against the Republican incumbent, Sen. Roger Marshall.

* On a related note, Bloomberg reported that the Senate Majority PAC also is shifting millions of dollars that had been set aside for North Carolina’s race, with the resources being moved into the contests in Ohio and Iowa.

* And in a competitive U.S. House race in Arizona, the Never Going Back PAC, a group tied to Trump’s political operation, launched an attack ad last week targeting Jonathan Nez, the former president of the Navajo Nation and the Democratic nominee running against Republican Rep. Eli Crane. The ad stood out as notable because it twice used a photo of Myron Lizer, Nez’s vice president of the Navajo Nation and a prominent Republican surrogate, confusing the two different people.

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