Politics

Early voting begins in California, Texas, 5 other states

Published

1 year ago

October 7, 2024

Early voting begins in California, Texas, 5 other states

The country’s two most populous states, California and Texas, begin early voting on Monday along with Montana, Georgia, Nebraska, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Here is everything you need to know about the voter registration and early voting plans for each state.

Georgia is one of the most competitive states this cycle, and Montana offers a hotly contested Senate race

Georgia has voted Republican in all but two elections in the last four decades. The first was former President Clinton’s landslide win in 1992, and the second was 2020, when President Biden brought the state back to the Democrats by 11,779 votes.

A win for either candidate here would make their path to victory easier. The Peach State has 16 electoral votes on offer, and with recent polls showing a tight race, it’s ranked Toss Up on the Fox News Power Rankings.

Democrats do well in metro Atlanta, home to more than half the state’s population, and particularly its densest counties, Fulton and DeKalb. There is a higher concentration of Black and college voters there. The surrounding suburban areas also help Democrats run up the vote.

Republicans win big with rural voters, who can be found just about everywhere else. The GOP won all but 30 counties in the last election, with many of the largest victories in the sparse northwest and southeast regions.

Over in the northwest of the country, Montana is a Republican stronghold at the presidential level, but it also hosts one of the most competitive Senate races in the country this cycle. Incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester faces Republican Tim Sheehy in a race where Trump’s popularity and Sheehy’s discipline gives the GOP an edge. It’s Lean R on the rankings.

Finally, absentee in-person voting begins today in Nebraska, where absentee voting is already underway. The state is home to three competitive races.

Key downballot races in today’s early voting states

Voting also begins today in nine House districts ranked Lean or Toss Up on the Fox News Power Rankings. For a full list of competitive races, see the latest Senate and House rankings.

California’s 13th district: Incumbent GOP Rep. John Duarte is a freshman in this San Joaquin Valley district. He won the race by 564 votes in the midterms. Biden won the same area by more than 25,000 votes two years prior; a 10.9 point victory (Dave’s Redistricting). That’s what makes this such a competitive race this year. Duarte faces Democratic state assemblyman Adam Gray in this Lean D race.
California’s 22nd district: It’s the same story in the 22nd district, home to east Bakersfield. Rep. David Valadao, one of two Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021, kept this district on a three-point margin in the midterms, but Biden won it by 13 points in the last presidential election. Valadao’s strong centrist brand keeps this race, against former assemblyman Rudy Salas, at Toss Up this cycle.
California’s 27th district: The 27th is another GOP-held, Biden-won district. Incumbent GOP Rep. Mike Garcia won here by more than six points in the midterms; Biden won the same area by more than 12 points two years prior. The 27th is north of Los Angeles and includes some parts of that county, including Santa Clarita. Garcia faces Democrat George Whitesides, the former CEO of Virgin Galactic, in this Lean D race.

Early voting begins in a smattering of states across the country. (REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz)

California’s 41st district: The Golden State’s 41st district is represented by Republican Ken Calvert, who has served in the House since 1993. He won his most recent race by under five points, and this year, he’ll face the same competitor: former federal prosecutor and Democrat Will Rollins. This race is a Toss Up.
California’s 45th district: President Biden won this southern California district by six points last cycle; its heavy and right-leaning Asian American population makes it highly competitive. Incumbent Rep. Michelle Steel faces Democratic lawyer Derek Tran in this district, which includes parts of Los Angeles. It moved to Toss Up last month.
California’s 47th district: Democratic Rep. Katie Porter ran unsuccessfully for the Democrats’ Senate nomination this cycle, leaving the 47th district wide open. This race will now feature Democratic state senator Dave Min and Republican former state assemblyman Scott Baugh. The district includes Orange County, which has leaned towards the Democrats in the Trump era. It’s a Power Rankings Toss Up.
Montana’s 1st district: Montana’s 1st district is the less Republican of the two; incumbent GOP Rep. Ryan Zinke took it by a slim three-point margin in the midterms. He has an edge in this western district established just two years ago following redistricting, and will compete against the same Democrat he faced two years prior: Olympic rower Monica Tranel. It’s a Lean R race.
Texas’ 28th district: Longtime 28th district Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar is seeking his tenth term this year. He won his last race by 13 points in the midterms; Biden won the area by seven in the last presidential election. In May, the Department of Justice indicted him on money laundering, conspiracy, and bribery charges. The embattled incumbent goes up against Republican former Navy commander Jay Furman. This race is Lean D.
Texas’ 34th district: Down to southeast Texas, where incumbent Democrat Vicente Gonzalez is seeking a fifth term in congress. He won by eight and a half points in the midterms. He is facing Republican former congresswoman Mayra Flores, who briefly represented the district in 2022. This Gulf Coast district is ranked Lean D.

How to vote in California

This is a guide to registration and early voting. For comprehensive and up-to-date information on voter eligibility, processes and deadlines, please go to Vote.gov and the election website for California.

Voting by mail

California began absentee voting on Monday, and the state will proactively send absentee ballots to actively registered voters. That ballot must be delivered to state officials by Nov. 5.

Early in-person voting

California offers early in-person voting, but the dates vary by location. Check the state’s website for more information.

Voter registration

California residents can register to vote online or by mail through Oct. 21. They can register in-person during early voting from Oct. 7 through election day.

CHECK OUT THE LATEST FOX NEWS POWER RANKINGS IN THE 2024 ELECTION

How to vote in Montana

Voting by mail

Montana began absentee voting on Monday. Residents do not need to provide an excuse in order to receive a ballot. State officials must receive a ballot request by Nov. 4, and that ballot must be delivered to state officials by Nov. 5.

Early in-person voting

Montana offers early in-person voting beginning Oct. 7 and running through Nov. 4.

Voter registration

Montana residents can register to vote by mail through Oct. 7. They can register in-person during early voting from Oct. 7 through election day.

CLICK HERE FOR THE LATEST FOX NEWS POLLING IN THE HARRIS-TRUMP PRESIDENTIAL RACE

Former President Trump and Vice President Harris remain in a neck and neck race. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

How to vote in Georgia

Voting by mail

Georgia began absentee voting on Monday. Residents do not need to provide an excuse in order to receive a ballot. State officials must receive a ballot request by Oct. 25, and that ballot must be delivered to state officials by Nov. 5.

Early in-person voting

Georgia offers early in-person voting beginning Oct. 15 and running through Nov. 1.

Voter registration

Georgia residents must have registered to vote by Oct. 7.

IN BID FOR DISGRUNTLED REPUBLICANS, HARRIS TEAMS UP WITH CHENEY IN GOP BIRTHPLACE

How to vote in Nebraska

Voting by mail

Nebraska began absentee voting last month. Applicants do not need to provide an excuse to receive a ballot. The state must receive a ballot application by Oct. 25, and that ballot must be delivered to state officials by Nov. 5.

Early in-person voting

Nebraska began early in-person voting on Oct. 7, and it will run through Nov. 4.

Voter registration

Nebraska residents can register to vote online or by mail through Oct. 18. They can register in-person through Oct. 25.

Early voting has begun in most states across the country. (Christopher Mark Juhn/Anadolu via Getty Images)

How to vote in New Hampshire

Voting by mail

New Hampshire began absentee voting on Monday. Applicants will need to provide an excuse to receive a ballot. The state must receive a ballot application by Nov. 4, and that ballot must be delivered to state officials by Nov. 5.

Early in-person voting

New Hampshire does not offer early in-person voting.

Voter registration

New Hampshire does not offer voter registration by mail or online. Residents can register to vote in-person on election day. Check the state’s website for more information.

How to vote in South Carolina

Voting by mail

South Carolina began absentee voting on Monday. Applicants will need to provide an excuse to receive a ballot. The state must receive a ballot application by Oct. 25, and that ballot must be delivered to state officials by Nov. 5.

Early in-person voting

South Carolina will begin early in-person voting on Oct. 21, and it will run through Nov. 2.

Voter registration

South Carolina residents can register to vote online, in-person and by mail by Oct. 14.

Trump and Harris continue to battle over a handful of swing states. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

How to vote in Texas

Voting by mail

Texas began absentee voting on Monday. Applicants will need to provide an excuse to receive a ballot. The state must receive a ballot application by Oct. 25, and that ballot must be delivered to state officials by Nov. 5.

Early in-person voting

Texas will begin early in-person voting on Oct. 21, and it will run through Nov. 1.

Voter registration

Texas residents must have registered to vote by mail or in-person prior to Oct. 7. By-mail requests must be postmarked by Oct. 7.

Anders Hagstrom is a reporter with Fox News Digital covering national politics and major breaking news events. Send tips to Anders.Hagstrom@Fox.com, or on Twitter: @Hagstrom_Anders.

Politics

AOC accuses Vance of believing ‘American people should be assassinated in the street’

Published

1 hour ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

AOC accuses Vance of believing ‘American people should be assassinated in the street’

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Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leveling a stunning accusation at Vice President JD Vance amid the national furor over this week’s fatal shooting in Minnesota involving an ICE agent.

“I understand that Vice President Vance believes that shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not,” the four-term federal lawmaker from New York and progressive champion argued as she answered questions on Friday on Capitol Hill from Fox News and other news organizations.

Ocasio-Cortez spoke in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting death of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good after she confronted ICE agents from inside her car in Minneapolis.

RENEE NICOLE GOOD PART OF ‘ICE WATCH’ GROUP, DHS SOURCES SAY

Members of law enforcement work the scene following a suspected shooting by an ICE agent during federal operations on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Video of the incident instantly went viral, and while Democrats have heavily criticized the shooting, the Trump administration is vocally defending the actions of the ICE agent.

HEAD HERE FOR LIVE FOX NEWS UPDATES ON THE ICE SHOOTING IN MINNESOTA

Vance, at a White House briefing on Thursday, charged that “this was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order.”

“That woman was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation,” the vice president added. “The president stands with ICE, I stand with ICE, we stand with all of our law enforcement officers.”

And Vance claimed Good was “brainwashed” and suggested she was connected to a “broader, left-wing network.”

Federal sources told Fox News on Friday that Good, who was a mother of three, worked as a Minneapolis-based immigration activist serving as a member of “ICE Watch.”

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

Ocasio-Cortez, in responding to Vance’s comments, said, “That is a fundamental difference between Vice President Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.”

But a spokesperson for the vice president, responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s accusation, told Fox News Digital, “On National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, AOC made it clear she thinks that radical leftists should be able to mow down ICE officials in broad daylight. She should be ashamed of herself. The Vice President stands with ICE and the brave men and women of law enforcement, and so do the American people.”

Paul Steinhauser is a politics reporter based in the swing state of New Hampshire. He covers the campaign trail from coast to coast.”

Politics

Contributor: Don’t let the mobs rule

Published

2 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

In Springfield, Ill., in 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln delivered a powerful speech decrying the “ravages of mob law” throughout the land. Lincoln warned, in eerily prescient fashion, that the spread of a then-ascendant “mobocratic spirit” threatened to sever the “attachment of the People” to their fellow countrymen and their nation. Lincoln’s opposition to anarchy of any kind was absolute and clarion: “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”

Unfortunately, it seems that every few years, Americans must be reminded anew of Lincoln’s wisdom. This week’s lethal Immigration and Customs Enforcement standoff in the Twin Cities is but the latest instance of a years-long baleful trend.

On Wednesday, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom, Renee Nicole Good, was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Her ex-husband said she and her partner encountered ICE agents after dropping off Good’s 6-year-old at school. The federal government has called Good’s encounter “an act of domestic terrorism” and said the agent shot in self-defense.

Suffice it to say Minnesota’s Democratic establishment does not see it this way.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey responded to the deployment of 2,000 immigration agents in the area and the deadly encounter by telling ICE to “get the f— out” of Minnesota, while Gov. Tim Walz called the shooting “totally predictable” and “totally avoidable.” Frey, who was also mayor during the mayhem after George Floyd’s murder by city police in 2020, has lent succor to the anti-ICE provocateurs, seemingly encouraging them to make Good a Floyd-like martyr. As for Walz, he’s right that this tragedy was eminently “avoidable” — but not only for the reasons he thinks. If the Biden-Harris administration hadn’t allowed unvetted immigrants to remain in the country without legal status and if Walz’s administration hadn’t moved too slowly in its investigations of hundreds of Minnesotans — of mixed immigration status — defrauding taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars, ICE never would have embarked on this particular operation.

National Democrats took the rage even further. Following the fateful shooting, the Democratic Party’s official X feed promptly tweeted, without any morsel of nuance, that “ICE shot and killed a woman on camera.” This sort of irresponsible fear-mongering already may have prompted a crazed activist to shoot three detainees at an ICE facility in Dallas last September while targeting officers; similar dehumanizing rhetoric about the National Guard perhaps also played a role in November’s lethal shooting of a soldier in Washington, D.C.

Liberals and open-border activists play with fire when they so casually compare ICE, as Walz previously has, to a “modern-day Gestapo.” The fact is, ICE is not the Gestapo, Donald Trump is not Hitler, and Charlie Kirk was not a goose-stepping brownshirt. To pretend otherwise is to deprive words of meaning and to live in the theater of the absurd.

But as dangerous as this rhetoric is for officers and agents, it is the moral blackmail and “mobocratic spirit” of it all that is even more harmful to the rule of law.

The implicit threat of all “sanctuary” jurisdictions, whose resistance to aiding federal law enforcement smacks of John C. Calhoun-style antebellum “nullification,” is to tell the feds not to operate and enforce federal law in a certain area — or else. The result is crass lawlessness, Mafia-esque shakedown artistry and a fetid neo-confederate stench combined in one dystopian package.

The truth is that swaths of the activist left now engage in these sorts of threats as a matter of course. In 2020, the left’s months-long rioting following the death of Floyd led to upward of $2 billion in insurance claims. In 2021, they threatened the same rioting unless Derek Chauvin, the officer who infamously kneeled on Floyd’s neck, was found guilty of murder (which he was, twice). In 2022, following the unprecedented (and still unsolved) leak of the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case, abortion-rights activists protested outside many of the right-leaning justices’ homes, perhaps hoping to induce them to change their minds and flip their votes. And now, ICE agents throughout the country face threats of violence — egged on by local Democratic leaders — simply for enforcing federal law.

In “The Godfather,” Luca Brasi referred to this sort of thuggery as making someone an offer that he can’t refuse. We might also think of it as Lincoln’s dreaded “ravages of mob law.”

Regardless, a free republic cannot long endure like this. The rule of law cannot be held hostage to the histrionic temper tantrums of a radical ideological flank. The law must be enforced solemnly, without fear or favor. There can be no overarching blackmail lurking in the background — no Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of a free people, ready to crash down on us all if a certain select few do not get their way.

The proper recourse for changing immigration law — or any federal law — is to lobby Congress to do so, or to make a case in federal court. The ginned-up martyrdom complex that leads some to take matters into their own hands is a recipe for personal and national ruination. There is nothing good down that road — only death, despair and mobocracy.

Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. X: @josh_hammer

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Ideas expressed in the piece

Democrats and activist left are perpetuating a dangerous “mobocratic spirit” similar to the mob law that Lincoln warned against in 1838, which threatens the rule of law and national unity^[1]
The federal government’s characterization of the incident as self-defense by an ICE agent is appropriate, while local Democratic leaders are irresponsibly encouraging anti-ICE protesters to view Good as a martyr figure like George Floyd^[1]
Dehumanizing rhetoric comparing ICE to the Gestapo is reckless fear-mongering that has inspired actual violence, including a shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas and the fatal shooting of a National Guard soldier^[1]
The shooting was “avoidable” not because of ICE’s presence, but because the Biden-Harris administration allowed undocumented immigrants to remain in the country without legal status and state authorities moved too slowly investigating immigrant fraud^[1]
Sanctuary jurisdictions that resist federal law enforcement represent neo-confederate “nullification” and constitute crass lawlessness and Mafia-style extortion, effectively telling federal agents they cannot enforce the law or face consequences^[1]
The activist left employs threats of violence as systematic blackmail, evidenced by 2020 riots following Floyd’s death, threats surrounding the Chauvin trial, protests at justices’ homes during the abortion debate, and now threats against ICE agents^[1]
Changing immigration policy must occur through Congress or federal courts, not through mob rule and “ginned-up martyrdom complexes” that lead to personal and national ruination^[1]

Different views on the topic

Community members who knew Good rejected characterizations of her as a domestic terrorist, with her mother describing her as “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” “extremely compassionate,” and someone “who has taken care of people all her life”^[1]
Vigil speakers and attendees portrayed Good as peacefully present to watch the situation and protect her neighbors, with an organizer stating “She was peaceful; she did the right thing” and “She died because she loved her neighbors”^[1]
A speaker identified only as Noah explicitly rejected the federal government’s domestic terrorism characterization, saying Good was present “to watch the terrorists,” not participate in terrorism^[1]
Neighbors described Good as a loving mother and warm family member who was an award-winning poet and positive community presence, suggesting her presence during the incident reflected civic concern rather than radicalism^[1]

Politics

Trump plans to meet with Venezuela opposition leader Maria Corina Machado next week

Published

13 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

Trump plans to meet with Venezuela opposition leader Maria Corina Machado next week

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he plans to meet with Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado in Washington next week.

During an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity,” Trump was asked if he intends to meet with Machado after the U.S. struck Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro.

“Well, I understand she’s coming in next week sometime, and I look forward to saying hello to her,” Trump said.

Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado waves a national flag during a protest called by the opposition on the eve of the presidential inauguration, in Caracas on January 9, 2025. (JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images)

This will be Trump’s first meeting with Machado, who the U.S. president stated “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country” to lead.

According to reports, Trump’s refusal to support Machado was linked to her accepting the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump believed he deserved.

But Trump later told NBC News that while he believed Machado should not have won the award, her acceptance of the prize had “nothing to do with my decision” about the prospect of her leading Venezuela.