Sen. Sherrod Brown, the only Democrat still holding statewide elective office in Ohio, was nominated for his Senate seat on Tuesday as three Republicans fought for the right to challenge the incumbent president in November.

The winner of the Republican slugfest between Bernie Moreno, a wealthy former car dealer with the support of former President Donald J. Trump, Senator Matt Dolan, whose family is the majority owner of the Cleveland Guardians baseball team, and Frank LaRose, the Ohio Secretary of State, will entering the general election penniless and bruised by the negative primary campaign.

But he will also be running in a state that Trump won in successive presidential elections in 2016 and 2020, each time by eight percentage points.

Mr. Brown, who was first elected to the Senate in 2006, showed little concern about his third reelection bid or about which Republicans would prevail in the primaries. The Democrat has built his reputation as a pro-labor politician who has spoken out against free trade deals and championed unions in a state where the working class has drifted toward the Republican Party since Barack Obama won it twice.

“We will spend this campaign contrasting my position on taking over Wall Street, my position on taking over the pharmaceutical companies and my position on trade with theirs,” he told reporters in Dayton, Ohio, on Monday.

With control of the Senate now within Republicans’ reach, Ohio and Montana — the only states where Trump won in 2020 and a Democrat is running for re-election — promise to draw enormous attention. Democrats have 51 seats in the Senate, but one of them, in deep-red West Virginia, has all but disappeared with the retirement of conservative Democrat Joe Manchin III.

The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC affiliated with the Senate Republican leadership, and an allied group, American Crossroads, have earmarked nearly $83 million in ad time in Ohio this fall.

But Mr. Brown, whose fundraising has brought in money not only from unions steadfastly loyal to him but also from companies that do business for the Senate Banking Committee, which he chairs, will have his own firepower. His campaign has raised at least $26.7 million this election cycle and has $13.5 million cash on hand.

By contrast, Mr. Moreno and Mr. Dolan had each spent their war chests down to less than $2.4 million by the end of February. Mr. LaRose had less than $600,000.

On the Republican side, there has rarely been a primary that so clearly separated the old Republican establishment from the new Trump wing of the party. Mr. Dolan had the support of Ohio’s low-key Republican governor, Mike DeWine, and the recently retired moderate senator, Rob Portman. Mr. Moreno had Mr. Trump and was counting on the former president to provide another loyal foot soldier to the Senate.

With just days to go before the election, Ohio’s three-way Republican Senate primary has turned into a food fight, fueling concerns about former President Donald J. Trump’s favored candidate, Bernie Moreno.

Tuesday’s contest to decide who will take on Senator Sherrod Brown has been contentious for months, with Mr. Moreno, a wealthy former car dealer who has never held elected office, struggling to outpace his rivals, State Senator Matt Dolan and Secretary of State Business to avoid Frank. LaRose. But a handful in recent weeks independent studies have indicated that Mr. Dolan, a more traditional conservative with deep pockets of his own, is gaining popularity.

On Monday, Mr. Dolan received the approval from Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio — after receiving support last week from another statewide Republican, former Sen. Rob Portman. That same day, Mr. Trump’s campaign announced that the former president would appear alongside Mr. Moreno in Dayton on Saturday, which was widely interpreted as a sign that Mr. Moreno could benefit from an eleventh-hour boost. (The former president had planned to attend a meeting in Arizona but was diverted over concerns about Mr. Dolan’s surge in internal polling, according to two people familiar with the planning.)

In the home stretch, Mr. Dolan and the groups backing him have outspent both Mr. Moreno and Mr. LaRose, blanketing the airwaves with attacks highlighting inconsistencies in Mr. Moreno’s record that could be important in a Republican primary, like the more liberal views about immigration that he has embraced in the past. At the same time, Mr. Moreno and his backers have portrayed Mr. Dolan as not supportive enough from Mr Trump.

“This is between the steadfast, consistent conservatives of the last 20 years versus the more upstart, populist, Donald Trump-inspired candidates,” said Ryan Stubenrauch, a Republican strategist in Ohio who has not endorsed the policy. one of the candidates.

He called Mr. DeWine and Mr. Portman “conservative, popular politicians who have done a lot of good” in Ohio, adding: “That still counts for something, that’s what we’re seeing, and it’ll be interesting to see how much it counts.”

Republicans have seen this year as their best chance yet to defeat Mr. Brown, the only Democrat to retain a statewide position in Ohio. After Mr. Trump won the former battleground state by overwhelming margins in 2016 and 2020, Ohioans sent J.D. Vance, who won his own nasty primary with Mr. Trump’s support, to the Senate in 2022. challenged by a ticket headlined by President Biden, who remains unpopular in Ohio.

Democrats have made no secret of their desire to compete with Mr. Moreno, who has already been the subject of a barrage of negative ads questioning his conservative bona fides and headlines drawing attention to legal issues involving his companies.

This week, a Democratic group began running an ad highlighting Moreno’s tough stance and close ties to Trump, something Democrats say will be easier to counter in a general election. Mr. DeWine, in a message on XThe interference indicated that Democrats “know he is the weakest candidate to defeat Sherrod Brown this fall.”

Bitterness over the muddled Republican fight has made its way to Washington, where Republican leaders and strategists have privately and preemptively assigned blame. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who disagreed with Mr. Trump over the selection of Republican primary candidates in 2022, casually said that “it would be nice to have a baseball owner here” in the Senate, according to one person with direct knowledge. of the comment. (The Dolan family is a majority owner of the Cleveland Guardians.)

At a meeting of Senate Republicans on Tuesday, Mr. McConnell went further and appeared to question the former president and Mr. Vance’s expressions of support for Mr. Moreno.

“Let’s hope Trump and JD get this right,” Mr. McConnell said, according to two people familiar with the conversation, before adding that “Bernie doesn’t look too attractive.” Mr. McConnell’s comments prompted a swift response from Mr. Vance, who one person said was in the room. A spokesman for Mr. McConnell declined to comment.

Mr. Moreno has attributed the recent attacks and negative reports to his commitment to challenging the status quo, even among Republicans. He posted a message on Friday a video about X from Donald Trump Jr., another prominent financier, who told him during a campaign stop that there were “a lot of people working hard against you.”

“I wear attacks like a badge of honor,” Mr. Moreno wrote. “It means I’m a threat to the establishment.”

Reagan McCarthy, a spokeswoman for Mr. Moreno, said Mr. Dolan was “trying to mislead voters and distract from his anti-Trump, left-wing record.”

“Ohio voters will not be fooled by these desperate and vicious attacks and will nominate the only true conservative in this race on Tuesday: Bernie Moreno,” she said.

In addition to pitting factions of the Republican Party against each other — the old guard versus Trump loyalists — the race has provided a test of Trump’s influence rarely seen in this year’s Republican Party primaries.

In 2022, Mr. Trump endorsed several Senate candidates in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, who won primaries with his support but lost competitive general elections, allowing Democrats to retain control of the Senate. This time, Mr. Trump and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Republican Senate campaign arm, aligned more closely, largely avoiding painful primaries.

But the NRSC declined to grant an approval in Ohio. The three Republicans and groups supporting them have collectively spent more than $30 million since January 2023, according to AdImpact, a media tracking company. In the final weeks of the campaign, Mr. Dolan and the groups backing him spent several million on advertising against his rivals.

Jim Renacci, a former Republican congressman who ran against Mr. Brown in 2018 and remained neutral in the primary, said Mr. Dolan “seemed to be heading in the right direction, and the other two candidates don’t have the resources. in my opinion to slow him down.

But Mr. Dolan’s support may have a ceiling: He declined to endorse Mr. Trump during the Republican Party’s presidential primaries, backing “Trump policies” rather than the former president personally, before saying he Mr. Trump would “support” once it was clear he would be the nominee. His reluctance could prove troublesome among a primary electorate that overwhelmingly supports Mr. Trump.

“What they see in me is someone who actually gets things done, actually executes, has an agenda, knows the issues, and doesn’t just walk on other people’s backs,” Mr. Dolan said in an interview. a shot at Mr. Moreno.

Brown’s campaign — which raised $5.7 million in the first two months of this year, more than his potential opponents combined — is banking on the continued resonance of his working-class message as Democrats eagerly watch the Republican power struggle .

“Republicans in this race are more focused on fighting each other than fighting for the people of Ohio,” said Katie Smith, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Democratic Party. “No matter which untested rich man makes it through this expensive slugfest, he or she will enter the election damaged, with significant baggage and a steep hill to climb.”

Throughout the contest, Mr. Moreno has portrayed himself as the outsiders’ candidate while leaning on high-profile endorsements, appearing out with Mr. Trump’s eldest son and Mr. Vance, as well as Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican presidential candidate.

Mr. LaRose, the least wealthy of the candidates, has used his background in the U.S. military and his years of government service to portray himself as a conservative fighter, especially on issues like abortion. And Mr. Dolan has presented himself as a consensus-oriented Republican with a softer approach to dealing with undocumented immigrants and access to abortion.

Yet all three men — and the super PACs that support them — have become personal, as many of their policy positions are virtually indistinguishable from one another. Mr. LaRose and Mr. Moreno have joined forces to attack Mr. Dolan as disloyal to Mr. Trump, while both Mr. Dolan and Mr. LaRose have accused Mr. Moreno of shifting his views on everything from gun control to Mr. Trump himself. .

In interviews with nearly two dozen voters at events attended by all three candidates just over a week before the election, the majority said they had not yet decided who to vote for on Tuesday.

Mr. LaRose, once seen as a front-runner and the only candidate to win statewide races, has gone after his opponents after backing two failed attempts to restrict abortion access in Ohio and failing to win passage from Mr Trump. But at a Republican pancake breakfast last Saturday in Cincinnati where all three candidates spoke, Mr. LaRose urged attendees to think about who they “trust” the most.

“That word ‘trust’ is something that transcends people’s big ad buys worth millions of dollars, it transcends a group of famous people supporting someone, and it gets to the heart of the question: When you walk into a voting booth, who do you trust to to represent you in Washington, DC?” Mr. LaRose said in an interview after the event.

Ms. Noem, who supported Mr. Moreno, told voters in Columbus on Monday that she had come “on direct orders” from Mr. Trump, before issuing a warning: “You don’t want to elect a candidate who has a primary like Donald Trump. won’t get here at 1000 percent in November.

But for some voters, like Mitzi Baird of Elyria, Trump’s word wasn’t enough. She showed up to a Lincoln Day dinner at Vermilion confident she would support Mr. LaRose, but continued to lean on Mr. Dolan despite being a “strong supporter” of Mr. Trump.

“I had the feeling that Moreno was there campaigning for Trump, and not for himself,” Ms. Baird said. “I know Trump supported him, but he has to say what he’s going to do – we know what Trump is going to do.”

Michael C. Bender reporting contributed.

After a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell the app or face a nationwide ban advanced rapidly through the House of Representatives this week, its progress in the Senate has slowed.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader who determines which legislation comes to a vote, has not yet decided whether he will bring the bill to the floor, his spokesman said. Senators — some of whom have their own versions of bills targeting TikTok — will need convincing. Other runway legislation could be prioritized. And the process of passing the House bill and possibly rewriting it to suit the Senate can be time-consuming.

Many in the Senate are keeping their cards close to their vests about what they would do with the TikTok measure, even as they said they recognized that the House sent a strong message with its vote on the bill, which passed 352-65. was hired. orders TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell its stake in the app within six months or face a ban.

“The lesson of the vote in the House of Representatives is that this issue can arise almost spontaneously because of the support it has,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said in an interview Friday. He said adjustments could be made to the bill, but there was bipartisan support for wresting the app from Chinese ownership.

The Senate delay means TikTok will likely face weeks or even months of uncertainty about its fate in the United States. That could result in continued lobbying, in addition to maneuvering by the White House, the Chinese government and ByteDance. It will also likely spark potential talk of deals — real or imagined — while uncertainty about losing access to the app will continue to hang over the heads of TikTok creators and its 170 million U.S. users.

“Almost everything will slow down in the Senate,” said Nu Wexler, a former Senate aide who worked for Google, Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. “They will need some time to massage egos or reach consensus.”

The House of Representatives passed the legislation just over a week after it was introduced and passed it with bipartisan support amid concerns the app could compromise U.S. users’ data or be used as a Chinese propaganda tool . The bill also received support from the White House. After saying last week that he opposed the legislation, former President Donald J. Trump said he now supported it in an interview with Fox News on Friday.

The bill has angered China, with one official saying the United States had “never found any evidence that TikTok posed a threat to U.S. national security.” Beijing could take action to block a sale if the legislation passes. Some lawmakers are concerned that the bill could overstep Congress’ mandate by specifically mentioning TikTok, which would violate a constitutional ban on targeting individuals. And TikTok has argued that the secret drafting of the bill and the speed with which it passed in the House of Representatives indicated that lawmakers were aiming for a ban rather than a sale.

TikTok, which has repeatedly said it has not shared data with the Chinese government nor will it allow any government to influence its algorithmic recommendations, has scrambled to respond to the bill, which took the company by surprise.

On Wednesday, Shou Chew, TikTok’s Singaporean CEO, posted a video addressing users, saying a ban on the service would hurt small businesses in the United States. He urged them to call their senators and fight back. (The company did the same with representatives of the House of Representatives last week.)

TikTok has spent more than $1 billion on an elaborate scheme known as Project Texas — due to its partnership with Austin-based Oracle — that aims to process sensitive U.S. user data separately from the rest of the company’s operations. The plan also provides for independent and government oversight of the platform to check for manipulation.

On Friday, searching for “KeepTikTok” on the app yielded a banner asking Americans to “Tell your senator how important TikTok is to you.” The message asked users to enter their zip code and then informed them of the correct lawmaker to call.

“We continue to educate members of our community about the rushed ban bill, how it would trample on their constitutional right to free speech, and how they can make their voices heard,” Alex Haurek, a TikTok spokesperson, said in a statement.

Senate offices have received hundreds of calls and voicemail messages about the bill from TikTok users in recent days, said two Senate aides, who were not authorized to discuss the calls publicly. The aides said many of the calls appeared to be from minors.

The White House is also lobbying behind the scenes, surprising some talent agencies representing TikTok creators on Friday by inviting them to a briefing “on the ownership of social media platforms,” according to an email received by two attendees, who spoke on condition of anonymity. because the conversation was off-the-record.

John F. Kirby, a national security communications adviser to the president, emphasized that the White House was seeking a TikTok divestiture to a group of representatives from talent agencies such as CAA and Viral Nation, the attendees said. There were several questions about how the agencies’ clients and their jobs would be affected by the legislation, they said. A White House spokesperson declined to comment on the call.

Congressional experts said the Senate would likely be harder to crack because the smaller number of individual members would be more likely to try to put their own stamp on legislation. A single member who objects to a measure can make it difficult to speed up the legislation. And the country must also consider and pass a major package of spending bills before the deadline for a partial government shutdown.

“I think senators will do their due diligence,” said Lindsay Gorman, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “There will be a rigorous conversation about exactly this question: whether we just need to move or whether there is room to tinker.”

Some senators have expressed support for the bill. Intelligence Committee leaders Senators Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, and Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said in a statement Wednesday that they would support the bill moving forward in the Senate.

Mr. Warner, who also has his own TikTok proposal, said Wednesday that he was still asking questions about several elements of the bill but was welcomed by the momentum it brought out of the House.

“There are a lot of bases that need to be touched,” Mr. Warner said. But, he added, it was “difficult to think of anything else that has received more than 350 votes in a House that is otherwise not fully functioning.”

Others have been more cautious. Mr. Blumenthal said in the interview that the Senate needed to review certain aspects of the bill, adding that a six-month deadline to reach a sales agreement may not be long enough.

He also said he had “heard about some very credible and prominent groups” that were interested in buying TikTok but had not yet appeared in the press.

“There is a clear path to achieving all the interests here – keeping TikTok, but simply transferring it into other hands,” he added.

Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington and chair of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, will likely influence whether the House legislation gets a vote in the Senate. She said last year that she was drafting her own legislation to address TikTok, and was noncommittal about whether she would support a House vote on the legislation. She said in a statement after it passed the House of Representatives that she planned to work with colleagues to “try to find a path forward that is constitutional and protects civil liberties.”

A spokeswoman for the Trade Committee declined to make Ms. Cantwell available for an interview.

A Democratic group is wading into Ohio’s Republican Senate primaries with a new television spot aimed at promoting the conservative credentials of Bernie Moreno, a Cleveland businessman who has won the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump.

The spot criticizes Mr. Moreno as ultra-conservative and too aligned with Mr. Trump. But by placing the ad in the final week of the primaries, these criticisms are likely to be seen as badges of honor by Republican primary voters, a tactic Democrats have used in other races in recent years.

A group called Duty and Country spends about $879,000 on the advertisementwhich will be used across the state, according to AdImpact, an advertising tracking company.

The group is largely funded through the Senate Majority PAC, the main super PAC supporting Democratic efforts to maintain control of the House.

Mr. Moreno is running for the Republican nomination against State Senator Matt Dolan and Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose. The winner will face Senator Sherrod Brown, the Democratic incumbent.

“Democrats continually underestimate the America First movement at their own peril,” said Reagan McCarthy, Moreno’s communications director. “They thought President Trump would be easy to beat in 2016 and then they had their clocks cleaned when he took down Hillary Clinton. The same thing is going to happen to Sherrod Brown this year.”

Mr. Moreno has struggled to pull away from his main challengers despite support from Mr. Trump and others, including Senator J.D. Vance, a Trump-backed Republican who was elected in 2022. Mr. Moreno won their support by embracing the hard conservative line. positions that Democrats believe are potentially easier to challenge in a general election.

“When Ohio voters go to their polls, they deserve to know the truth about Bernie Moreno – and the truth is that Moreno is a MAGA extremist who embraced Donald Trump, just as he embraced his policies to ban abortion nationwide and to repeal” the Affordable Care Act, said Hannah Menchhoff, spokeswoman for the Senate Majority PAC.

Republicans must flip two seats to regain power if President Biden is re-elected, but only one if the White House returns to Republican hands. Republicans are already expected to gain one seat in West Virginia after Sen. Joe Manchin III, a Democrat, announced he would not seek re-election.

In last month’s California Senate primary, Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat, had a spot describing Steve Garvey, a Republican and former Major League Baseball player, as too conservative. Mr. Schiff and Mr. Garvey will face each other in their deep blue state in November.

During the 2022 race for Pennsylvania governor, Democrat Josh Shapiro took out an ad in the Republican primary denouncing the conservative credentials of Doug Mastriano, the Trump-backed candidate in the race. Mr. Mastriano won and Mr. Shapiro easily defeated him to win the governor’s office.

A bipartisan bill to expand the child tax credit and reinstate a raft of tax breaks for businesses has stalled in the Senate after receiving overwhelming approval in the House of Representatives, as Republicans oppose legislation they see as considered too generous for low-income families.

The postponement of the $78 billion tax package has jeopardized the measure’s chances and reflects the challenges of passing any major legislation in an election year. Passing a new tax law would give President Biden and Democrats an achievement they can campaign for, something Republicans may prefer to avoid.

The House of Representatives passed the measure in January on a 357-72 vote — a major bipartisan achievement in a Republican-led body that has toiled to craft legislation — and supporters had hoped to pass it around the start of tax filing to get to the finish line. season at the end of that month. But with just over a month before the filing deadline, there has been no movement in the Senate.

The package, which would be in effect through 2025, would expand the child tax credit and restore a range of tax credits related to business research costs, capital expenditures and interest. It would also include a boost to a tax credit that encourages the development of low-income housing, tax relief for disaster victims And tax breaks for Taiwanese workers and companies active in the United States.

The bill would be funded by curbing the employee tax credit, a pandemic-era program that has become a magnet for fraud. The package was crafted by the top two tax writers in Congress: Representative Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and chairman of the Finance Committee.

“The American people want to see a bipartisan effort that gets to a yes,” Mr. Wyden said. “The clock is ticking and families are waiting for this help. They are telling members of Congress that they would like to see this done.”

Senate Republicans have raised a range of concerns, mostly fixating on a so-called lookback provision that would allow parents to use the previous year’s income to claim a larger child tax credit. Republicans argue the measure would weaken work incentives because parents who had little to no income in the current year would still be able to claim a credit of up to $2,000 per child.

The Republican Party has also portrayed the bill’s financing mechanism as a sham, as the program that would be ended to pay for the tax benefits has cost the government far more than expected.

“The fundamental problem with the bill is that Republicans made a major concession to Democrats — allowing the child tax credit to transition into a de facto welfare program — in exchange for something Democrats already wanted: research and development tax breaks for corporations. ,” wrote Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina and an outspoken opponent of the package an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal.

He added: “How can a fiscal conservative defend himself by using fake savings to pay for more spending? It’s like paying off a credit card balance with another credit card. It is fiscally irresponsible and unsustainable.”

Senate Republicans have also complained that they were left out of the deal because it was reached and presented by Mr. Smith and Mr. Wyden without the approval of Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, who opposes it. It. Negotiators tried to get Mr. Crapo on board months ago, including by limiting the lookback provision in the child tax credit, but ultimately announced the bill without his support.

Now Senate Republicans have said they want the chance to review the bill in the Finance Committee.

“Efforts to pressure Senate Republicans to approve the Wyden-Smith tax deal have been counterproductive,” Crapo said. said in a statement in which he explains some of his objections. “Each week that has passed, members have strongly voiced additional calls for numerous changes, and there have also been increasing concerns about making changes in 2023, this far into the IRS tax filing season. While I remain committed to a bipartisan resolution that a majority of Republicans in the Senate can support, I hope that the bill’s proponents will commit to pursuing a more constructive strategy.”

Any major changes to the bill would likely undermine support among Democrats, who overwhelmingly support the package as it stands. And they would send the bill back to the chaotic House, which has struggled to handle regular legislative business for months.

Mr. Wyden said he was open to Republicans’ concerns but worried they would still have to find a “smorgasbord of ideas” for the changes they were calling for.

“Depending on how you approach this, a tax bill here could become a Christmas tree in 20 minutes, and really we only have a few weeks,” Mr. Wyden said.

Although Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and majority leader, has said he supports the bill, he has yet to commit to a floor vote.

A handful of Republicans have supported the bill and are eager to move it forward. They include Senators Steve Daines of Montana, head of the party’s campaign committee, and Todd Young of Indiana, both of whom serve on the finance panel.

“I want something done,” Mr. Daines said, emphasizing his support for the bill’s business tax provisions. “I think we have a good chance of getting through it.”

Still, the politics of an election year hang over the bill, raising questions about whether Republican leaders really want to push through a measure that would give Mr. Biden and Democrats an achievement to tout during the campaign.

Republicans see an opportunity to win the Senate majority in November, a shift in control that would position Crapo as chairman of the Finance Committee. Some, including Mr. Tillis, have argued that Republicans will have more leverage to negotiate a tax bill next year, when former President Donald J. Trump’s 2017 tax law expires.

“That’s one of the things we’re talking about,” Sen. John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, said Thursday after Republicans discussed the bill during a closed-door meeting.

The bill could bring political benefits to both parties. It would be a political victory for Mr. Biden and vulnerable Democrats whose seats Republicans want to claim, such as Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who has made expanding the child tax credit a signature issue. Republicans, some of whom also support expanding the child tax credit, could trumpet tax breaks for corporations and point to a new tax law as evidence of their ability to govern.

Mr Crapo insisted he had no intention of delaying the bill.

“I’ve always said we have to do this,” he said last week. “I worked on it for three years to make this happen. And I think we should do that as quickly as possible.”

Mr. Young, who has been working behind the scenes to advance the package, said there was broader Republican Party support for the existing bill than had been publicly expressed and that there was “a pretty good chance” it would pass in the Senate could make progress.

Rohit Kumar, a former Republican leadership aide in the Senate who now leads national tax authorities at PWC, said several Republican senators “certainly want to say yes on the bill” but have refrained from approving it out of deference to Mr. Crapo . .

“This thing does have a clock,” Mr. Kumar said. “No one knows how much time is on that clock, but there is a clock. And at some point the political will to do so will disappear.”

Representative Adam B. Schiff, who last week became the Democratic nominee for an open Senate seat in California, on Sunday denied suggestions that his primary had been tampered with.

Mr. Schiff said Democrats had quickly rebuked a claim by one of his leading opponents, Representative Katie Porter, that wealthy donors had spent millions of dollars on Mr. Schiff to “rig” the race, unlike his party and former president Donald J. Trump’s false claims about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

“That term ‘faked’ is a very charged term in the year of Trump,” Mr. Schiff said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It implies fraud, voting fraud and false claims like those made by Donald Trump. I think what’s remarkable is that Democrats rallied very quickly to say, “No, we’re not using that language.”

Ms. Porter, one of Mr. Schiff’s two progressive primary opponents for the seat, thanked her supporters on social media last week and went on to describe “an attack by billionaires spending millions to rig the primaries.”

Her comments immediately drew criticism from Democratic colleagues, including Senator Alex Padilla of California, who dismissed Ms. Porter’s suggestion as “ridiculous.” an interview with Politico.

“That stands in stark contrast to the Republican Party’s handling of allegations of a rigged election,” Mr. Schiff added on Sunday, referring to Republicans who have characterized the prosecutions following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol as political retaliation. “They urge President Trump to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists if he ever gets the chance.”

Ms. Porter failed to make headway in the Senate primaries last week after Mr. Schiff and his allies spent tens of millions of dollars airing television ads that described Steve Garvey, the Republican opponent, as “too conservative for California’.

Mr. Schiff’s ads are widely believed to be part of his campaign strategy to draw more Republican voters to the polls and sideline his Democratic rivals in California’s “jungle” primaries, where the top two winners advance to the general election , regardless of their party. connectedness.

The ads were sharply criticized by Ms Porter, who characterized them as “shamelessly cynical.”

Mr. Schiff defended his campaign strategy during the interview on Sunday, saying he was simply going after his Republican opponent, just like his Democratic colleagues.

The Senate on Friday gave final approval to a $460 billion spending bill to fund about half of the federal government through the fall, sending the legislation to President Biden’s desk with just hours to go. to prevent partial closure.

The lopsided 75-22 vote affirmed a resolution that resolved at least part of a spending stalemate that has consumed Congress for months and repeatedly pushed the government to the brink of shutdown. Biden was expected to sign it before the midnight deadline to keep federal funding flowing.

But key lawmakers during the same period were still negotiating spending bills for the other half of the government, including for the Pentagon, which Congress must approve by March 22 to avoid a shutdown. Several thorny issues, including funding for the Department of Homeland Security, remain to be resolved.

The legislation passed Friday includes six spending bills, extending funding through September 30 for dozens of federal programs in agriculture, energy and environment, transportation, housing, the Justice Department and veterans.

“For people who worry that divided government means nothing ever gets done, this bipartisan package says otherwise,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and majority leader. “It helps parents and veterans and firefighters and farmers and school cafeterias and more.”

The package adheres to funding levels negotiated last year by Mr. Biden and then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, keeping spending on domestic programs essentially stable — even as funding for veterans programs continues to grow — while military spending may increase. slightly.

Democrats rejected the most divisive Republican policy demands, including an effort to gut a new Food and Drug Administration rule that would allow mifepristone — the first pill used in a two-drug abortion regimen — through the mail and in stores can be distributed. and efforts to reduce and limit nutritional benefits for low-income families.

“Today we did the first half of the job: we passed a serious bipartisan package to fund key parts of our government,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and chairman of the Appropriations Committee. “This is not the bill I would have written on my own, but this is a powerful, bipartisan package that supports vital resources that matter in people’s lives.”

House Republicans scored some smaller victories, including modest cuts to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the FBI and environmental programs, although some cuts were much smaller than they appeared. And they won inclusion of a measure that would curtail a policy instituted by the Veterans Affairs Department that aims to prevent suicides among veterans by creating a federal gun background check when veterans are found to lack the mental capacity to manage their own finances.

One Democrat ultimately opposed the spending legislation because of its inclusion.

“I’m voting no because I will not accept a return to a time when the gun lobby could bury gun riders in appropriations bills (which often happened before Sandy Hook),” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said in a speech. rack. “This cannot happen again.”

Fresh off spending more than $10 million to help defeat Rep. Katie Porter, a progressive Democrat, in California’s open Senate race, the crypto industry’s big new super PAC has identified its next political targets for this fall. At the top of the list are two races with the most threatened Democrats up for re-election, in Ohio and Montana.

The crypto industry and its associated super PACs, which entered 2024 with more than $80 million in the bank, aim to use their financial and political power to both elect allies and ultimately shape a favorable set of rules in Congress to give.

“How do people understand that crypto is real – that it is a real problem?” said Kara Calvert, head of US policy at Coinbase, one of the largest crypto trading platforms. “When you have $85 million behind an issue, that’s pretty real.”

Josh Vlasto, a spokesman for Fairshake, the largest of a group of three new crypto super PACs, said the super PAC had made the decision to play in four Senate races this year: the Democratic primaries in Maryland and Michigan, as well as the general elections in Ohio, where Senator Sherrod Brown is up for re-election, and Montana, where Senator Jon Tester faces a serious challenge.

“We will have the tools to influence race and the composition of institutions at every level,” Mr. Vlasto said. “And we will deploy these assets strategically to maximize their impact to build a sustainable, bipartisan crypto and blockchain coalition.”

Mr. Brown and Mr. Tester are the only two incumbent Senate Democrats running nationally in states that former President Donald J. Trump won in 2020, and Democrats must win both for the party to have any hope of maintaining their slim majority.

Mr. Vlasto said the crypto super PAC has not yet decided whether to oppose or support Mr. Brown and Mr. Tester. But the signs of where Fairshake is headed are clear.

Mr. Brown, as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has been a public skeptic of what he has called “crypto abuse.” He said that at one hearing “crypto appeals to crime organizations and scammers.” One of Brown’s possible Republican opponents, Bernie Moreno, was one crypto booster in the Cleveland area. The GOP primaries are later this month.

The announcement that the industry plans to spend big on the Ohio race amounts to a warning shot. Two people familiar with the industry’s plans said all lawmakers running in targeted races, as well as in some other districts and states, would soon receive industry-related questionnaires asking them to document their positions on crypto issues. Such questionnaires are not uncommon for special interest groups, but can be burdensome for the politicians asked to complete them.

“I wouldn’t say there’s a target on their backs,” Ms. Calvert said of Mr. Brown and Mr. Tester. “What I would say is, there is, I think, an opportunity, and there is an important period between now and the election where many policymakers have to make a decision: Do they want clear rules? and consumer protection? Or do they not?”

Coinbase, which has contributed more than $23 million to the new crop of crypto super PACs, is one of the three major players in the sector, along with Ripple Labs and Andreessen Horowitz, which hold the bulk of the super PAC funds for their account. The industry also has a nonprofit, Stand With Crypto, which has highlighted that 52 million Americans own crypto, with almost equal shares of Democrats, Republicans and independents.

The increasing political activity comes as the industry seeks federal regulation in part to give the digital currency greater legitimacy.

Mr Tester, who is a member of the Banking Committee, has also been a crypto skeptic. He continued NBC’s “Meet the Press” in December 2022 that crypto “couldn’t have passed the smell test for me.” “If we regulate it,” Mr. Tester added in the interview, “it could give people the opportunity to think it’s real.”

After Fairshake spent $10 million against her, Ms. Porter, a close ally of Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a Democrat and a crypto industry skeptic, said her California race had been “manipulated by billionaires.”

Mr Vlasto responded by saying: “Thank you, Katie Porter, for giving Fairshake credit for your loss.”

In addition to advertising the super PAC, Stand With Crypto organized an election rally in Los Angeles with rapper Nas and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.

“By 2024, it will become clear that anti-crypto is bad politics,” Mr. Armstrong said there, according to the group. “Go out and vote to make your voice heard.”

The 2024 elections are not the first to see a huge influx of cryptocurrency. In 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, poured tens of millions of dollars into congressional races. FTX failed spectacularly, wiping out billions of dollars, and Mr. Bankman-Fried, who had appeared on Capitol Hill and even attended a House Democratic retreat, was later convicted of fraud and conspiracy.

In addition to these Senate contests, the new crypto super PACs have already entered some recent Democratic House primaries, as well as some Republican races. Fairshake’s two affiliated crypto PACs are called Protect Progress, which focuses on Democratic races, and Defend American Jobs, which plans to be involved in Republican races.

Protect Progress spent $1.7 million boosting Shomari Figures into an open seat in the Alabama House (he promises on its website to “embrace the new landscape around digital assets, such as cryptocurrency”) and nearly $1 million on behalf of Julie Johnson in Texas (who says on its website that “Americans can benefit from crypto innovation”). Ms. Johnson won her primary, and Mr. Figures finished first in his and headed to a runoff.

Mr. Vlasto said that in deciding who to support, Fairshake and its affiliates will “evaluate a candidate’s leadership on issues important to the crypto community, a candidate’s viability, the importance of the election and our ability to influence the race.”

He said the group had also decided to run in two current Democratic Senate primaries but had not yet chosen sides.

In Michigan, Rep. Elissa Slotkin is the leading Democratic candidate, and she sits on the House Agriculture Committee, which has also considered cryptocurrency regulation. Her opponents are Nasser Beydoun, a businessman, and Hill Harper, an actor.

In Maryland, Rep. David Trone, a wealthy former businessman, is running against Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks.