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Today's installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* Election Day in Virginia is six weeks from tomorrow and anyone certain about the outcome of the gubernatorial race is kidding themselves. A new Washington Post/Schar School poll found Democrat Terry McAuliffe with a very modest lead over Republican Glenn Youngkin, 50 percent to 47 percent, among likely voters.
* On a related note, early voting is now underway in Virginia's gubernatorial race. Early voting began this past Friday, Sept. 17.
* In New York's gubernatorial race, Rep. Lee Zeldin, a leading Republican contender, acknowledged over the weekend that he's been receiving treatment for leukemia since last fall. The conservative congressman added that the treatments have been effective and he doesn't expect this to interfere with his statewide campaign.
* Kristina Karamo, a Trump-backed candidate in Michigan's race for secretary of state, told voters she "serves as a professor" at a community college. Evidently, that's not quite true.
* In Pennsylvania's U.S. Senate race, a super PAC backing Jeff Bartos in a Republican primary is now going after his top rival: Politico reports that the "Jobs for Our Future" super PAC is launching an ad campaign "highlighting two instances when Pennsylvania Senate candidate Sean Parnell's wife sought protective orders against him."
* Speaking of the Keystone State, a group of Democratic state senators filed suit on Friday night, asking a state court to block Republican subpoenas as part of the GOP's pointless "investigation" into the 2020 presidential election.
* A group of 14 Republican members of Pennsylvania's state House, meanwhile, have filed their own lawsuit, asking a court to strike down the state's mail-in voting system. Of the 14 legislators, 11 of them voted to create the state's mail-in voting system.
* In Hillsborough County, Florida, local Republican Party officials were forced to tell the FEC last week that they'll be late in filing their monthly campaign finance reports for an unfortunate reason: The person who maintained the local GOP's financial program died from Covid-19, and no one else knows how to operate the guy's software.
* And Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, would like his party to stop referring to the $3.5 trillion price tag on the Build Back Better bill. "I think it would be wonderful, if instead of talking about whether it's 2.5 or 3.5 or 2.7 or 3.1, we actually talk about what's in it," the New York congressman said on Friday. "We actually talked about the substance."