Republicans have won the Senate, flipping control of the chamber from Democrats for the first time in three years, following a fierce competition for a Senate majority that came down to a handful of seats in the 2024 election.
Republicans have won the Senate, flipping control of the chamber from Democrats for the first time in three years, following a fierce competition for a Senate majority that came down to a handful of seats in the 2024 election.
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — Alaska voters were deciding Tuesday a hard-fought race for the state’s only U.S. House seat that could help decide control of that chamber. They were also choosing whether to repeal the state’s system of open primaries and ranked choice general elections just four years after opting to give that system a go.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola sought to fend off GOP efforts to wrest back the seat held for 49 years by Republican Rep. Don Young, who died in 2022. Peltola’s main challenger was Republican Nick Begich, who is from a family of prominent Democrats and was among the opponents she defeated in special and regular elections two years ago when Peltola, who is Yup’ik, became the first Alaska Native elected to Congress.
In addition to the repeal initiative, the ballot included a measure that would raise the state’s minimum wage and require paid sick leave for many employees, a measure opposed by groups including several chambers of commerce and a seafood processors association.
Fifty of the Legislature’s 60 seats were up for election, too, with control of the state House and Senate up for grabs. The closely divided House has struggled to organize following the last three election cycles. In Alaska, lawmakers don’t always organize according to party.
In Alaska’s marquee House race, Peltola tried to distance herself from presidential politics, declining to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris and dismissing any weight an endorsement from her might carry anyway in a state that last went for a Democratic presidential nominee in 1964. She cast herself as someone willing to work across party lines and played up her role in getting the Biden administration to approve the massive Willow oil project, which enjoys broad political support in Alaska.
Begich, whose grandfather, the late Democrat Nick Begich, held the seat before Young, was endorsed by former President Donald Trump following his showing in the primary.
Trump’s initial pick, Republican Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, bowed to pressure from Republicans seeking to consolidate behind one candidate following her third-place finish in the primary and dropped out. Alaska’s open primaries allow the top four vote-getters to advance. The initial fourth place finisher, Republican Matthew Salisbury, also quit, leaving Alaskan Independence Party candidate John Wayne Howe and Eric Hafner, a Democrat with no apparent ties to the state who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for threatening authorities and others in New Jersey, on the ballot.
Begich, the founder of a software development company, sought to cast Peltola as ineffective in stopping actions taken by the Biden administration that limited resource development in a state dependent upon it, including the decision to cancel leases issued for oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Alaska is one of just two states that has adopted ranked voting — and would be the first to repeal it if the ballot initiative succeeds. In 2020, Alaskans in a narrow vote opted to scrap party primaries in favor of open primaries and ranked vote general elections. Most registered voters in Alaska aren’t affiliated with a party, and the new system was cast as a way to provide voters with more choice and to bring moderation to the election process. Critics, however, called it confusing.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Republican and Trump critic who has been at odds with party leaders, appeared in an ad in support of keeping open primaries and ranked voting.
Opponents of the system succeeded in getting enough signatures to qualify the repeal measure for the ballot — and withstood a monthslong legal fight to keep it on the ballot. Begich was among those who supported the repeal, and the state Republican Party also has endorsed repeal efforts.
The passing of long-time Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (TX-18) on Friday created a new vacancy in the U.S. House of Representatives. Republicans now hold a 220-212 partisan advantage.
Jackson Lee was renominated for a 16th term in the state’s March primary. Replacing her on the November ballot will fall to the Harris County Democratic Party’s executive committee, who has until August 26 to nominate someone. It is up to Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to decide whether there is a special election to complete the current term.
A brief update on the other two seats that are currently unfilled:
NJ-10: Democratic Rep. Donald Payne Jr. died in April. The seat will be filled in a special election on September 18. Party primaries were held July 16, with businessman Carmen Bucco unopposed for the GOP nomination. For the Democrats, Newark City Council president LaMonica McIver advanced from a large field, and will be heavily favored in this district where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 6 to 1 margin.
At a party convention this past Thursday, McIver was also selected to be the nominee on the November ballot for a full two-year term. She will replace Payne, who had been posthumously nominated in the June primary.
WI-08: Republican Mike Gallagher resigned in April. The seat will be filled concurrently with this year’s regular elections. Special primaries are on August 13; the special election is November 5. This is a safely Republican seat; three are vying to succeed Gallagher.
Nearly two-and-a-half years after its launch, Truth Social is struggling to hang onto its small U.S. user base, according to new data on the microblogging platform launched by former President Donald Trump‘s media company.
So far in May, U.S. daily visits to Truth Social have dropped more than 21% from April, and more than 35% compared to March, according to digital intelligence platform Similarweb.
The site’s average number of monthly visits over the past year — just over 4 million from May 2023 to April 2024 — plummeted more than 39% from the prior 12-month period, from May 2022 to April 2023, Similarweb reported.
The traffic has declined even as Trump — the most prominent Truth Social user and the majority shareholder of its parent company, Trump Media — has saturated the national news with coverage of his criminal trial and White House bid.
And while the app saw a surge in visitors in the lead-up to Trump Media’s public trading debut in March, Similarweb’s most recent data show that those gains have already been erased.
The user and engagement data from Similarweb and two other data firms, collected and analyzed exclusively for CNBC, offers a glimpse into how Trump Media’s flagship product is developing — one that the company itself has yet to provide.
The company claims it does not track key indicators that social media platforms traditionally use to monitor their performance. Those include metrics like a site’s active user accounts and its daily and monthly visitor numbers, as well as its revenue per user and ad impressions.
Trump Media says it believes tracking those stats “might not align with the best interests” of the company or its stockholders, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The company also said it “may never collect, monitor, or report any or certain key operating metrics.”
CNBC reached out to Trump Media for comment on the firms’ findings, and asked if it could provide any data of its own.
“Why would we comment on a fake news network reporting on fake analyses?” the company said through a spokesperson.
But the new analyses could be warning signs for Trump Media, whose business depends in large part on growing its user base.
“If you can’t demonstrate that you have a sizeable, active, engaged, growing audience, I don’t understand how you create a successful ad-supported social media business,” said David Carr, Similarweb’s editor of insights, news and research, in an interview.
Trump Media relies entirely on ad sales for its revenue, and discloses in its SEC filings that a decline in user engagement could hurt its business by making Truth Social less attractive to advertisers.
The data firms’ findings could also harden Wall Street analysts’ view of the company as a “meme stock” whose sky-high market capitalization is untethered to its business fundamentals.
“We basically don’t see anything in these digital indicators that would explain why the valuation is as high as it is,” Carr said.
Trump Media on Tuesday reported a first-quarter net loss of nearly $328 million on revenues of about $771,000, most of which came from advertising.
Nonetheless, as of Friday, the company had a market cap of slightly more than $8 billion.
The stock closed on Friday at $45.81 per share, which is roughly in the middle of the wide range of share prices, from a low of around $22 per share to a high of around $70, that TMTG shares have traded at since the company went public in March.
Truth Social’s monthly active user numbers declined significantly in the U.S. in the final months of 2023, three different data firms told CNBC.
But the platform’s traffic rebounded in the first quarter of this year, as Trump Media closed in on a deal allowing it to start trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker DJT.
Similarweb tallied 781,954 active iOS and Android users on Truth Social in the U.S. that month, a more than 58% surge from February. GWS Magnify offered an even rosier analysis, calculating that Truth Social’s monthly user numbers hit a new peak of 1.4 million in March, which carried over into April.
News of Trump Media & Technology Group public trading is seen on television screens at the Nasdaq Marketplace in New York City on March 26, 2024.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
Data firm Sensor Tower, meanwhile, calculated that the social media platform’s U.S. monthly active user level in the first quarter of 2024 rose 10% year over year.
But all three analysts linked that rise to the heavy press coverage surrounding Trump Media’s public merger and its highly volatile trading kickoff, when the stock rocketed up as much as 50%.
That meme-fueled frenzy seems unlikely to establish a long-term gain in traffic: In the four-week period ending May 19, for instance, daily active U.S. Truth Social users were down 19.7% year over year, according to Similarweb.
Truth Social also faces two major obstacles to building an engaged user base, according to GWS Magnify.
The first is a retention problem. Truth Social users on average check the site fewer than two days a week — falling behind apps like Facebook, X, TikTok, Reddit and Pinterest.
Truth Social users also clock fewer minutes of engagement on the platform that do the users of other social media networks. The vast majority of Truth Social users, 87%, also use Facebook. Another 51% are also on X, GWS Magnify reported.
“Compared to other social media platforms, Truth Social users are accessing the app much less frequently and are spending much less time on it per session,” the firm’s CEO, Dr. Paul Carter, told CNBC in an email.
“That will have a bigger impact on the prospects for Truth than any media limelight,” Carter said.
Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in the South Bronx in New York City on May 23, 2024.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images
He added that a future decline in Truth Social’s numbers “will be because the platform has failed to engage users in the way that the most successful social media companies – TikTok most prominently – have mastered.”
The second problem is that Truth Social doesn’t offer anything to set it apart from bigger microblogging sites, especially X, which it closely resembles.
Trump Media says it is focused on adding new features to Truth Social, including live TV streaming, according to its latest earnings report.
For now, the most unique feature of Truth Social is Trump himself, who uses the app regularly and occasionally makes news in his posts.
Yet Trump’s presence on Truth Social alone has not been enough to draw users away from its competitors, nor has the wall-to-wall national press coverage of Trump’s criminal trial and his campaign to defeat President Joe Biden.
“It just hasn’t happened,” Carr said.
— NBC News’ Rob Wile and CNBC’s Gabriel Cortes contributed to this report.
On the last Sunday before Election Day, Kamala Harris told voters that there is a “divine plan strong enough to heal division” and urged those casting their ballots to reject Donald Trump’s disparagement of an electoral system that he falsely claims is rigged against him.
On the last Sunday before Election Day, Kamala Harris told voters that there is a “divine plan strong enough to heal division” and urged those casting their ballots to reject Donald Trump’s disparagement of an electoral system that he falsely claims is rigged against him.
For the first time in about a century, it is legal for U.S. residents to trade election contracts in a regulated prediction market.
This shift came after a legal battle between Kalshi, a prediction market for event contracts and its regulator, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
On Friday morning, Kalshi launched a market allowing users to predict the winner of next month’s presidential election.
At this early point, market participants are evenly split between Harris and Trump. Click the image for current pricing.
There are also markets for control of each branch of congress, although these are currently only available in multiples of 5,000 contracts.
At publication time, Republicans had a 73% chance of winning the Senate, while Democrats were 63% likely to win the House.
A Kalshi blog post indicated other markets are coming soon.
Other political prediction markets, including the two below, have been active, but with restrictions.
Polymarket has seen over $1 billion worth of volume in its Harris vs. Trump market. However, this exchange is not available to U.S. residents.
PredictIt operates on a 2014 CFTC waiver, but participants are limited to $850 in any contract.