Trump fights for votes in Texas and deadlock in Israeli election: Morning Rundown

Texas’ Senate candidates rally at dueling events just a few miles apart. No clear winner in Israeli election but Netanyahu looks far from defeated. And a new CDC report warns of rising threat of drug-resistant germs.

Here’s what to know today.

James Talarico faces off against Trump in dueling Texas rallies

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In reliably red Lubbock, Texas, people waited for hours in lines that stretched for blocks to see Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. Less than three miles away, a similar scene unfolded for President Donald Trump, as he sought to boost the Republican Senate candidate, state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

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Yesterday’s dueling rallies in the city, which has a population of less than 300,000, underscored the high stakes in a Senate race that could see the Republican Party lose its grip on Texas.

At Talarico’s rally, Democrats panned the economy, high gas prices and closures of rural hospitals. The Senate candidate called Paxton corrupt and sought to tie him to Elon Musk, who has significant business interests in the state.

For Trump and Paxton, the stop in Lubbock was their second of the day, having held an earlier rally in Corpus Christi. At the evening event, Trump cast Talarico as a Second Amendment-hating, meat-loathing extremist out of touch with everyday Texans. Paxton leaned on Trump’s support, calling him “the greatest president of my lifetime.”

And in a potential sign that Republicans were looking to attract more voters, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has generally held higher approval ratings than others in the administration, was given a speaking part.

Here’s what else happened at the rallies.

Dive deeper into the 2026 election:

• See the latest polling and the battleground states in play.

• What are the other big races in Texas? See who’s running and how Republicans and Democrats fared in past elections. Scroll to the end of the page to explore data in other states.

• Senate What If: Explore different paths to a Republican or Democratic Senate majority, mapped out by NBC News chief data analyst Steve Kornacki and “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker. Then, create your own scenarios.

More politics news:

• For subscribers: Electronic election equipment isn’t deliberately changing votes, even if people have trouble with machines at the polls, experts and officials say.

• For subscribers: The days leading to Election Day are typically a quiet period for the Justice Department. Not this year.

• Trump announced plans to undo Biden-era regulations on methane, the second-biggest contributor to climate change after carbon dioxide.

• A federal grand jury declined to indict Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump White House aide turned star Jan. 6 witness.

Israel’s election has no clear winner — but Netanyahu looks far from defeated again

When Israelis awoke on Wednesday, it seemed that their future had taken another twist overnight: Results that had looked like a narrow loss for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when they went to bed now pointed to a narrow lead by dawn.

There is still no obvious winner, with uncertainty set to follow the country’s first election since the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023.

The votes are still being counted, and Israel’s Central Elections Commission said final results likely won’t be known until tomorrow. But the preliminary tallies from this pivotal contest still point to one clear outcome: Netanyahu suffered significant losses but he didn’t really lose.

Still, the Israeli public dealt Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister for nearly 20 of the past 30 years, a notable electoral setback.

With more than 84% of the votes counted, Netanyahu’s coalition, the most right-wing in Israeli history, would be diminished from 64 members to only 54, short of the 61-seat threshold needed to form a government.

He appears to have eked out a slight advantage over the bloc led by his main rival, former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, in contrast to the initial projection from exit polls on Tuesday night.

Each leader claimed to have received a mandate from voters but stopped short of claiming victory.

Read more about what could happen next.

Interest rates expected to hold steady ahead of midterms

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Warsh declines to give hint about Fed's next rate hike

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The Federal Reserve is expected to keep interest rates unchanged today despite climbing inflation. With less than a week to go until Election Day, economic experts expect the Fed to keep its tradition of staying far away from politics, especially as rising prices are set to play a key role in the polls.

The Fed last month raised rates by a quarter of a percentage point. Inflation figures for September, released this month, show the annual rate rose to 3.7% from 3.4% the previous month, which some experts feel is reason enough to hike rates. But there’s also a sense among top officials that the central bank shouldn’t rush into interest rate decisions.

Why some economists think the Fed should act anyway.

CDC warns of rising threat of drug-resistant germs

A new CDC report sheds light on what the agency calls one of the nation’s most urgent public health threats: infections resistant to existing treatments, which kill more than 50,000 people in the U.S. each year.

The new report — the first comprehensive assessment of these pathogens in seven years — estimated that 19 drug-resistant germs cause 9.7 million infections annually in the U.S. Of them, four were ranked as the most worrisome, including the bacteria that causes gonorrhea, which has become resistant to all but one class of antibiotics used to treat it.

More on the evolving threat.

More CDC news:

• Dr. Jennifer Shuford, the agency’s deputy director and chief medical officer, has resigned less than five months into her tenure.

Staff Pick: Detainees at California ICE facility say they’re losing hope

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The Adelanto ICE Processing Facility sits in a remote stretch of the Mojave Desert, and just getting there from any direction can take hours. Its remoteness is a reason why some of the 1,800 detainees say they feel isolated and forgotten.

I recently made the four-hour round trip drive from Los Angeles with a social media influencer who visits regularly to highlight detainees’ stories.

During visiting hours, we met with a man who offered a first-hand account of what life was like inside. He spoke about some physical hardships but mostly about his mental-health struggles. Being held in a facility so far away from legal representation and his loved ones, he said, made him feel alone and forgotten.

As we spoke, I looked around the large room holding a dozen or so other visitors and couldn’t help but wonder how far each of them traveled — and the cumulative time, energy and money it took for them to be there. — Aarne Heikkila, senior investigative producer

Read All About It 

• At least 30 people were killed when two high-speed trains crashed in central Spain, officials said.

• Two luxury real estate brokers, Oren and Alon Alexander, and their brother, Tal, were each sentenced to 30 years in prison for drugging and raping women in a sex trafficking ring.

• Brazilian Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro fled to the U.S. after losing in the country’s presidential election and refusing to hand over his passports.

• The 16-year old Oregon school shooter was assaulted twice at his home and bullied in recent years, with police records also noting that he “likely had a cognitive disability.”

• A luxury residential cruise ship forced its passengers to disembark in Cambodia amid financial struggles attributed to soaring fuel costs.

• Los Angeles Rams offensive coordinator Nate Scheelhaase describes how his time as a youth pastor helped him rise to one of the NFL’s most auspicious jobs.

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