Midterm elections live updates: Judge orders DOJ to halt threats to election workers

As President Donald Trump prepares to have his last in-person midterm rally in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis said on X on Friday that Republicans are “underperforming” in the early vote in a key GOP county between Orlando and Tampa.

"Republicans are underperforming in Polk County," DeSantis said. "We have a voter registration advantage of 60,000 in the county and it went R+30 four years ago."

After Friday’s rally in Daytona Beach, the president will have made 35 stops since Labor Day, including 27 campaign events in total -- 26 in-person rallies and the two-day RNC Midterm Convention.

-ABC News' Ben Siegel

According to a new report from Wesleyan Media Project, a project run by academic professionals that monitors political advertising, political ad spending has exceeded $7.1 billion across House, Senate, and gubernatorial races in the 2026 midterm election cycle.

Spending on ads made with the help of artificial intelligence accounts for over $187 million this cycle with over 90% of AI ad spending coming from Republican candidates or organizations, according to Wesleyan Media Project.

Roughly $1.4 billion of the $7.1 billion in ad spending -- approximately 20% -- has been spent in the past two weeks, from Oct. 12 to 25, the report said.

The spending is driven in part by outside groups, which have spent around $3 billion on ads for House and Senate races. Outside spending groups have spent three times as much on ads as Senate candidates, according to the report.

-ABC News' Will Lennon

With his Kansas and Iowa rallies canceled, President Donald Trump's last in-person midterm rally before Election Day on Tuesday will take place Friday in Daytona, Florida, his home state, which he won comfortably by about 13 percentage points.

The Republican National Committee confirmed on Thursday night that planned midterm election rallies in Kansas, set for Saturday, and Iowa, set for Sunday, with Trump will no longer be happening, with the president instead "expected to participate" in a large number of tele-rallies by phone.

Eight years ago, during his first presidential term, Trump held his final midterm rally in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the day before Election Day 2018.

-ABC News' Hannah Demissie

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul EL Sayed and his onetime primary rival Rep. Haley Stevens will make a joint campaign appearance alongside Rep. Jim Clyburn at a church in Detroit on Sunday, according to his campaign.

The two have not appeared together since the initial days after the primary.

This comes as Stevens' fiancé announced earlier this week that he would be voting for Republican Mike Rogers based on what he saw as EL-Sayed's antisemitism.

Stevens has criticized EL-Sayed as doing an insufficient job of winning over Black and Jewish members of her coalition but has maintained that she supports him.

-ABC News' Diana Paulsen