Midterm Elections 2022: More than 40 million ballots cast early ahead of Election Day

President Joe Biden continued his campaign travel Sunday with an appearance at a rally Sunday to support New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who's on Tuesday's midterm election ballot.

Biden has faced messaging challenges as Republicans have hammered Democrats on the economy and crime even as the president's job numbers continued to improve and even as he's been thrifty enough to see the federal deficit cut in half (following record pandemic relief spending).

Crime has proven a thorn for congressional Democrats, who have generally vowed to continue to increase spending on police. At the same time, the bump in homicides, which correlates to a rise in gun sales, was more likely to be found in so-called red states.

The rally threw distractions at him, just as the GOP has.

The president was heckled by supporters who shouted, "Biden, Biden!" and by a detractor, who yelled, "We love Trump!"

"Well, let Joe talk," the president responded.

Then a woman in the audience at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York fell ill, and Biden paused his speech and asked for any medical doctors there to step up.

After helped arrived, within seconds, Biden said, "It'll be OK."

Perhaps that's the message with the most political potential as Republicans have warned of a dark future, including a worsening economy and more crime.

While Biden is on board with those who say Democracy is at stake when Republicans who deny the results of the 2020 election vie for congressional and state offices, he contrasted his outlook against GOP pessimism.

"People ask me why I'm so optimistic," he said, addressing college students in the crowd. "Because of you."

"You’re the best educated," he said. "You’re the least prejudiced. You're the most engaged. You’re the most involved generation in American history."

Biden recalled meeting world leaders at a G7 meeting and telling them, "America is back."

TUCSON, Ariz. — The memory of Donald Trump supporters surrounding her home after President Joe Biden won in 2020 has stuck with Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who's up against Trump-endorsed Kari Lake for governor in the midterm elections.

After the last presidential election, supporters of Trump chanted "we are watching you" outside Hobbs' home, made death threats and even doxxed her private address.

Hobbs said in an interview after a campaign rally in Tucson that she is "absolutely" worried she could become a target again for people who refuse to accept the results of Tuesday's election.

Hobbs also said her office is closely monitoring voting locations across the state to stifle possible intimation tactics.

“My plan is to work with my office, make sure that every eligible voter is able to cast their ballot and that we’re problem-solving any issues that come up,” she said. “We’re continuing to monitor for security issues personally and in our office and in voting locations across the state to make sure that voters can be free of intimidation.”

A federal judge last month declined to bar a group from monitoring outdoor ballot boxes in Maricopa County, where watchers have shown up armed and in ballistic vests. Local and federal law enforcement said they were alarmed by reports of people, including some who were masked, watching 24-hour ballot boxes in Arizona’s most populous county.

"It's critical that we have the time and opportunity to count votes accurately rather than quickly," Hobbs said. "There's not a problem if it takes a while to count votes. We're doing the job that we're supposed to do."

HIRAM, Ga. — Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley leaned into a hard-line immigration message Sunday as she suggested the voters should "deport" Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic opponent of Georgia GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker.

“The only person we need to make sure we deport is Warnock,” Haley, who was the U.N. ambassador in the Trump administration, said to cheers in this small town outside Atlanta.

Warnock, the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, was born in Savannah.

Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, spoke about her family’s legally immigrating to the U.S. in contrast to a recent wave of migrants coming across the U.S. border with Mexico, which Walker also decried.

“Legal immigrants are more patriotic than the leftists these days,” Haley said. “They love America, and they want the laws followed in America.”

Haley’s remarks about deporting Warnock dovetail with Walker’s campaign theme that Warnock should be “evicted” from the Senate — a reference to an apartment complex owned by Warnock’s church, where some low-income tenants reportedly received eviction notices. Warnock's camp has said the suggestions are misleading.

Former President Donald Trump has been teasing a potential 2024 run, but some Republican voters aren’t so quick to hop on the Trump train if he's up against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis, a possible 2024 presidential candidate, was mocked by Trump Saturday night at a rally in Pennsylvania during which the former president also suggested he'll launch a bid for re-election "in the very next very, very, very short period of time."

Speaking to NBC News ahead of Trump's "Get Out the Vote" rally in Miami Sunday, several voters said they'd not want to be in a position to choose between DeSantis and Trump, but if forced to do so, they'd go with DeSantis.

“I would have to say Ron DeSantis would have my vote," said Soslan Temonson, who traveled from Wisconsin to see the former president, "because Ron DeSantis is more in touch with reality, with the people."

WASHINGTON — The run-up to Election Day has long come with a few rites of passage for candidates, but one of them — showing up on the debate stage to take questions and square off against an opponent — seems to be fading from the list of prerequisites.

An analysis of debate schedules by NBC News confirms what many political observers have speculated: The number of debates in competitive 2022 Senate races has hit a new low since 2008.

The decline is a result of changes to the media and political landscape that have tipped the cost-benefit analysis for campaigns away from debates, strategists in both parties say, because the risk of a mistake has never been higher and the reward for participating has never been lower.

But that calculus does not factor in the cost to voters of losing one of the few remaining places where political leaders engage in unscripted political discourse and face challenging questions.

Read the full story here.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia is preparing to file a lawsuit in Cobb County — an increasingly diverse Atlanta suburb of swing voters — after it learned of allegations that 1,000 absentee ballots had not been mailed out.

Andrea Young, the executive director of ACLU Georgia, said the organization was contacted by a college student who requested her ballot but never received it and was unable to travel from Mississippi to vote. The organization then found “many more” people who did not receive ballots, it said.

The lawsuit alleges that the incidents stem from Senate Bill 202, a restrictive voting measure that Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed into law last year. The law curtailed the amount of time the county can mail ballots from 49 days to 29 days before elections, as well as reduced the number of days voters could request ballots from 180 before elections to 78.

Young said the new law bars employees from beginning the mailing process before early voting, which she said led to employees in Cobb County dealing with a backlog and forgetting to mail the absentee ballots. “Because of this law, people are finding barriers [to voting] that shouldn’t have to exist,” she said.

Under Georgia law, ballots must be received when polls close at 7 p.m. on Election Day. In its lawsuit, the group asks that voters who are affected be allowed an extension until the Monday after the midterms to return the ballots. 

NBC News has asked the Cobb County elections director for comment.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Republican J.D. Vance believes “we’re in a very good place.” 

Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan believes “things are moving our way.” 

One of them will be wrong Tuesday, when their hard-fought Ohio Senate race comes to an end. But together, they have found themselves in a contest that grew more competitive than many expected, given former President Donald Trump’s comfortable wins in the state. And in interviews after campaign events here Saturday, Vance and Ryan both spoke as if victory was within reach. 

They also wrestled with questions about how they would fit in a seat that in recent history has been held by pragmatic centrists, including Rob Portman, the retiring Republican they are running to succeed.

“I think that we’re in a very good place,” Vance, a venture capitalist best known for his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” said after a small rally with Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., at a hotel in northern Columbus. “I think that we’re going to win, and I don’t think it will be that close.”

Read the full story here.

The NAACP, the country's oldest civil rights organization, has spent roughly $400,000 to buy out all remaining advertising spots on Black radio stations in Arizona ahead of Tuesday's election, a spokesperson for the group said Sunday.

The nonpartisan organization booked more than 3,100 spots that are focused on get-out-the-vote efforts and call on voters in the key battleground state to defend democracy, the spokesperson said.

The NAACP has spent about $2 million on radio ads during this midterm cycle, the spokesperson said.

Arizona is home to some of the highest-profile races in this midterm election campaign. Democrats are defending the Senate seat held by Mark Kelly against Republican challenger Blake Masters, and the firebrand Republican Kari Lake is running for governor against Democrat Katie Hobbs.

NAACP chief Derrick Johnson made headlines last week after he called on companies to pause all advertising on Twitter after it was acquired by Elon Musk, writing in part that advertisers should not fund "a platform that fuels hate speech, election denialism and conspiracy theories."