Sister Stephanie Schmidt had a hunch about what her fellow nuns would discuss over dinner at their Erie, Pennsylvania, monastery on Wednesday night.

The day before, a Republican operative in the battleground state falsely suggested to his nearly 58,000 followers on X that no one lived at the monastery and that mail ballots cast from there would be “illegal votes.” Cliff Maloney, who hired 120 people to go door-to-door across Pennsylvania urging Republican voters to return their mail ballots, wrote on X that one of those workers had “discovered” an Erie address where 53 people were registered to vote but “NO ONE lives there.”

DULUTH, Ga. — Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson warmed up the crowd at Donald Trump’s rally here Wednesday night with a dark metaphor, bashing Vice President Kamala Harris and declaring that “dad” was coming home to mete out discipline.

“He’s pissed!” Carlson said to extended cheers. “Dad is pissed. … And when dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’”

“And there’s very few states that benefit like you do from fracking. I mean, you have 500,000 jobs.”

— Former president Donald Trump, remarks at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Sept. 29

“Kamala has said repeatedly, she wants to ban fracking, which would kill over 500,000 jobs in Pennsylvania alone.”

CONCORD, N.H. — President Joe Biden sparked controversy Tuesday with a new attack line against former president Donald Trump, telling Democrats, “We’ve got to lock him up,” before moderating to suggest he meant figurative rather than literal incarceration.

After listing several dangers posed by a potential second Trump presidency at a Democratic Party campaign office here, Biden said: “I know this sounds bizarre. It sounds like, if I said this five years ago, you’d lock me up. We’ve got to lock him up.”

Yelp disabled comments for a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania where former president Donald Trump manned the fry station during a weekend campaign stop, after the restaurant’s Yelp page was hit by a flurry of politicized reviews.

“Went to this McDonalds to try the new chicken big Mac and was stunned to see a convicted felon operating the drive through,” a reviewer wrote.

CLACKAMAS COUNTY, Ore. — In a close contest that could determine control of the House of Representatives, a Republican incumbent and her Democratic challenger appear to be competing for an unlikely title: most centrist.

In Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, Republican Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer and state Rep. Janelle Bynum, her Democratic opponent, are both running as moderates, touting their bipartisan records and policymaking chops, while trying to cast each other as ineffective and extreme.

Several people who once occupied the White House are now energetically crisscrossing the country on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris: Bill Clinton was recently in North Carolina, Barack Obama will head to Georgia on Thursday and his wife, Michelle, will be in Michigan on Saturday for the start of early voting.

One of Donald Trump’s most effective and most useful tactics in rebuffing criticism has been to insist that any critic is operating in bad faith. There are no valid complaints about Trump, he insists, and there are no reliable complainers. Saying something critical of the former president means that you are not loyal to the former president and therefore that your criticism is tainted by your anti-Trump bias. Question-begging as political defense.

Letters that threatened Florida TV stations with criminal penalties if they aired a political ad backing a referendum that would repeal the state’s six-week abortion ban came directly from Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office, according to the attorney who signed and sent them.

Attorney John Wilson said that he resigned as general counsel for the Florida Department of Health rather than “complying with the directives” of DeSantis’s executive staff to send more cease-and-desist letters to TV stations running the ad.

“Kamala Harris supports EV mandates, killing Michigan jobs. She wants to end all gas-powered cars. Crazy but true. Harris’s push requiring electric only is failing big, and Michigan autoworkers are paying the price. Massive layoffs already started. She could tank Michigan’s whole economy.”

— Donald Trump campaign ad, released Oct. 17