Midterm campaign updates: GOP's Cheney endorses Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan for Senate

Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is expected to campaign on Oct. 26 for Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and state Attorney General Josh Kaul in what is the latest appearance by a prominent Democrat to rally voters weeks before the high-stakes midterms.

The events with Warren, first reported by ABC News, will also feature Wisconsin's Democratic senator, Tammy Baldwin.

Baldwin, Evers, Kaul and Warren will host an early voting event focused on young people near the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, according to the Wisconsin Democratic Party.

Baldwin and Kaul are expected to walk with a group of students to an early voting location to cast their ballots.

Polling shows that Evers is in a toss-up race against Republican challenger Tim Michels, with the latest FiveThirtyEight average showing Evers with less than 1% lead.

In a statement to ABC News, the Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler said: "This election is deadlocked, and no one can sit this out. If Wisconsin students turn out to show the GOP they won’t let them trample on their rights, Democrats will win up and down the ballot. Senator Warren is an electrifying voice who will bring her incomparable energy and vision to mobilize Wisconsin students at exactly the moment it’s needed most."

In her own statement, Warren said, "Voters in Wisconsin know what is at stake in this election. Wisconsinites have the opportunity to vote for [Senate nominee] Mandela Barnes, Tony Evers, and Democrats all the way down the ballot who will fight to restore a woman’s right to choose, to bring down costs, to build an economy that works for all of us, and to attack the climate crisis head on. I’m proud to join them in this critical fight."

Barnes, too, is in a tight race to defeat incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican.

Warren joins a growing list of big-name Democrats -- including former President Barack Obama -- to hit the trail in various battleground states before Election Day.

They hope to counter the history of rough midterm elections for the party in power, plus major headwinds like high inflation, in part by focusing on Republican-backed restrictions on abortion and the extremism of some of the GOP nominees.

When asked by reporters after a gubernatorial debate on Friday whether former President Donald Trump planned to stump for the Republican ticket in Wisconsin, Brian Fraley, a communications specialist for the Michels campaign, said they would notify the press if such an event was scheduled.

Fraley said then that Obama coming to Milwaukee was a "sign" that the Evers campaign was "in trouble" because "they're calling in all the big dogs."

-- ABC News' Cheyenne Haslett and Paulina Tam

Fourteen members of Nevada GOP Senate nominee Adam Laxalt's family said in a letter Wednesday that they were endorsing his opponent, Democratic incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.

"Catherine has consistently demonstrated a fierce loyalty to her home state of Nevada," the three-page letter states. "She has always put Nevada first – even when it meant working against her own party's policies."

The letter, obtained by The Nevada Independent, does not mention Laxalt by name or his Senate campaign. Some of his family members previously opposed him in a 2018 column during his gubernatorial campaign

The new endorsement for Cortez Masto comes just days after Laxalt attended an event with former President Donald Trump in Minden, Nevada, where both Laxalt and Trump jabbed at the senator.

"Between surging inflation, rising violent crime, the effects of an open border and record-high gas prices, Nevadans are fed up with Cortez Masto being a 95% rubber-stamp vote for Joe Biden," Laxalt said then.

However, some of his relatives seem to have a different opinion, writing in the letter: "We staunchly believe that Catherine is well equipped with her own 'Nevada grit' – a quality that she will take forward in representation of our home state for six more years across the halls of Congress."

In a statement, Cortez Masto campaign spokesperson Sigalle Reshef said: "The Laxalt family joins a growing list of Cortez Masto endorsers that includes Democrats, Republican leaders from across the state, and Nevada law enforcement, and she appreciates their support in this race."

Laxalt fired back on Twitter, saying most of the relatives "are Democrats ... They think that Nevada & our country are heading in the right direction. I believe Nevadans don't agree."

-- ABC News' Abby Cruz

It's an obvious enough point that former President Donald Trump broke and then rewrote the traditional rules of politics in ways that are still being felt inside of both major parties.

What's becoming more apparent is the extent to which different Republican candidates are taking different lessons of the Trump era and applying them to their unique circumstances. They're testing intraparty loyalties and assumptions along the way, much like Trump himself.

Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker is in defiance-and-denial mode as he digs in on a scandal that puts him at odds with the mother of one of his children as well as one of his sons.

"Yes, she's lying. Yeah, she's lying. Yes, she's lying," Walker told ABC News' Linsey Davis on Tuesday, referring to the woman who claims he paid for her to get an abortion in 2009 and whom, he now acknowledges, is the mother of one of his children.

Trump's approach toward the news is a lesson internalized by a range of GOP campaigns -- manifesting itself in part with candidates like Pennsylvania's Doug Mastriano who echo his periodic media hostility by largely, if not entirely, avoiding interviews with mainstream outlets.

Read more https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/gop-candidates-read-pages-trumps-playbook-note/story?id=91347486here.

-- ABC News’ Rick Klein

Former Vice President Mike Pence joined Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey in Phoenix on Tuesday to formally endorse Donald Trump-backed GOP Senate nominee Blake Masters.

At a school choice forum with conservative political action committee Club for Growth, with less than a month until the midterm elections, Pence offered Masters his total endorsement, calling Masters a "proven conservative" and "one of the brightest stars in the Republican Party."

Masters’ contest against incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat, is one of the razor-thin races that may determine which party controls the upper chamber next session.

"It is a special privilege to me to come here to the Grand Canyon to tell the people of this state that Arizona and America need Blake Masters and a Republican majority in the United States Senate," Pence said.

“Blake Masters may be the difference between a Democrat majority in the Senate and a Republican majority," he continued. "Blake Masters could well be the deciding vote of whether or not Republicans will have a majority to stop the runaway spending agenda, open borders, inflation-driving policies that are beset this country and are hurting families here in Arizona."

Masters originally launched his candidacy with the support of Trump-aligned billionaire Peter Thiel but has since received funding from groups like the Senate Leadership Fund, a Mitch McConnell-adjacent PAC. Trump endorsed Masters on June 22 and has not shied away from inflammatory remarks pointed at McConnell.

(Masters, for his part, has alternately distanced himself from and embraced Trump's false claim of 2020 election fraud.)

Pence’s support for Trump-backed Masters comes after he’d deviated from his former boss during the Republican primaries by endorsing a number of candidates who were competing with the former president’s selections. In Arizona, Pence supported, and even traveled to campaign ahead of the race, for Republican Karrin Taylor Robson in the Arizona governor’s race. He pitted himself against Trump, whose choice was the current GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake.

-- ABC News' Libby Cathey