Mary Ellen McIntire, CQ-Roll Call (TNS)

Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin feels confident about Tuesday’s gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, arguing Democrats have the momentum coming off of a series of overperformances in special elections this year.

“If we win these elections on Tuesday, which I think we will, that will be a huge wakeup call to Republicans that a wave election is coming,” he said Sunday in an interview with CQ Roll Call at the DNC headquarters in Washington.

But Martin, a former chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party who took over as national party chair in February, acknowledged that a 2026 wave election may not include winning the Senate majority.

“The hill is pretty steep for us to win the Senate back,” he said, before suggesting Democrats could “chip away at the margin enough” to be primed to flip the chamber in 2028.

“There could be enough of a wave election next year that brings us back into both, both chambers. I won’t bet against it. I won’t bet on it. It’s still unlikely,” he said. “The likeliest chamber to flip will be the House.”

Democrats face a daunting Senate map next year, needing to flip a net of four seats to win control. Martin said he felt good about picking up North Carolina’s open seat, where Democrats are excited about former Gov. Roy Cooper’s candidacy.

He also said Maine, where GOP Sen. Susan Collins is up for a sixth term, “certainly could be a real promise for us if we don’t blow it.”

But for further gains, Democrats will need to expand the map into red territory. Martin pointed to Iowa, Alaska, Ohio and Texas as potential pickup opportunities, adding that he thought Rep. Jasmine Crockett would join the field of Senate hopefuls in the Lone Star State.

The interview with Martin came shortly before a planned afternoon door-knocking excursion in Virginia, where Democrats are looking to win back the governor’s mansion. He spent the previous day in New Jersey, where Democrats are hoping to win a third straight gubernatorial election for the first time since the 1960s.

The Democratic nominees in both races —New Jersey Rep. Mikie Sherrill and former Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger — were both first elected to the House in 2018, when Democrats won control of the chamber two years into Donald Trump’s first term. Martin said both candidates, as well as New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, have emphasized their own messages around an economic agenda while not “taking the bait that the Republican candidates are trying to set for them on some of these other issues that they want to debate.”

“Even though they’re all sort of uniquely different and represent uniquely different spaces, their through line is affordability and the through line is an economic agenda that they’re offering up,” he said. “And they’re using, of course, local issues to illustrate that.”

Martin was skeptical that Republican efforts to link Democratic House candidates to Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, as the National Republican Congressional Committee has signaled it plans to do, would be effective next year.

“They’ll certainly try, don’t get me wrong,” Martin said. “I haven’t seen that work a lot in the past, to be honest with you.”

Trump’s push for Republican-led states to redraw their congressional maps to help the party defend its House majority and Democratic attempts to counter those moves have reshaped next year’s fight for the chamber.

Martin said he thinks the GOP would have a net gain of seven seats when both parties are eventually done with their redistricting efforts. But, he said, that was still less than the 26 seats the party out of power has won, on average, in midterm elections.

So far, GOP-led redraws in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina could help the party net as many as seven seats. California Democrats responded to Texas’ move by passing their own map, which state voters will decide on through a ballot measure Tuesday. Martin said he felt confident that Californians would approve Proposition 50, which could help the party pick up as many as five seats.

“My hope is that it actually sends a chilling effect to Republicans, and they stop with this nonsense around the country. But if they don’t and they continue moving down this road, we’re going to respond in kind,” he said.

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Democrats, though, have fewer opportunities to redraw congressional lines in states they control, as several give redistricting power to independent commissions. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been pushing Illinois Democrats to redraw their map in an effort to squeeze out an extra seat, but state legislators took no action during a recent veto session. Martin said that although Illinois’ candidate filing deadline for congressional races is on Monday, he didn’t think that would completely close the door on redistricting efforts in the state.

Martin also said he’s expecting the Supreme Court to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a civil rights-era law that has been used to ensure majority-minority congressional districts. Such a move would significantly affect Democrats’ hold on several Southern House seats, though it’s unclear if such a decision would come down early enough to affect the 2026 elections.

And with red states such as Florida and Texas likely to gain House seats after the next census in 2030, Democrats need to have a long-term strategy to become competitive in more parts of the country, Martin said.

“We cannot keep just investing in one election cycle,” he said. “Of course, we’ve got to win in ’26, but we’ve got to do this in a way that helps us also prepare for the future.”

©2025 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By MARYCLAIRE DALE, Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Two separate courts have ordered immigration officials not to deport a Pennsylvania man who spent four decades in prison before his murder conviction was overturned.

Subramanyam Vedam, 64, is currently detained at a short-term holding center in Alexandria, Louisiana, that’s equipped with an airstrip for deportations. Vedam, known as “Subu,” was transferred there from central Pennsylvania last week, relatives said.

An immigration judge stayed his deportation on Thursday until the Bureau of Immigration Appeals decides whether to review his case. That could take several months. Vedam’s lawyers also got a stay the same day in U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania, but said that case may be on hold given the immigration court ruling.

Vedam came to the U.S. legally from India as an infant and grew up in State College, where his father taught at Penn State. He was serving a life sentence in a friend’s 1980 death before his conviction was overturned this year.

He was released from state prison on Oct. 3, only to be taken straight into immigration custody.

The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeking to deport Vedam over his no contest plea to charges of LSD delivery, filed when he was about 20. His lawyers argue that the four decades he wrongly spent in prison, where he earned degrees and tutored fellow inmates, should outweigh the drug case.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Monday that the reversal in the murder case does not negate the drug conviction.

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“Having a single conviction vacated will not stop ICE’s enforcement of the federal immigration law,” Tricia McLaughlin,” Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, said in an email.

Vedam’s sister said Monday that the family is relieved “that two different judges have agreed that Subu’s deportation is unwarranted while his effort to re-open his immigration case is still pending.”

“We’re also hopeful that Board of Immigration Appeals will ultimately agree that Subu’s deportation would represent another untenable injustice,” Saraswathi Vedam said, “inflicted on a man who not only endured 43 years in a maximum-security prison for a crime he didn’t commit, but has also lived in the U.S. since he was 9-months-old.”

By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The first clinical trial is getting underway to see if transplanting pig kidneys into people might really save lives.

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United Therapeutics, a producer of gene-edited pig kidneys, announced Monday that the study’s initial transplant was performed successfully at NYU Langone Health.

It’s the latest step in the quest for animal-to-human transplants. A second U.S. company, eGenesis, is preparing to begin its own pig kidney clinical trial in the coming months. These are the first known clinical trials of what is called xenotransplantation in the world.

To protect the study participant’s identity, researchers aren’t releasing information about when the NYU surgery was performed or further patient information.

NYU’s Dr. Robert Montgomery, who led the transplant team, told The Associated Press his hospital has a list of other patients interested in joining the small trial, which will initially include six people. If all goes well, it could be expanded to up to 50 as additional transplant centers join.

The Food and Drug Administration is allowing the rigorous studies after a series of so-called “compassionate use” experiments, with mixed results. The first two gene-edited pig kidney transplants were short-lived.

Then doctors began working with patients who badly needed a kidney but weren’t as sick as prior recipients. At NYU, an Alabama woman’s pig kidney lasted 130 days before she had to return to dialysis. The latest record, 271 days, was set by a New Hampshire man transplanted at Massachusetts General Hospital; he also is back on dialysis after the pig organ began declining and was removed last month. Others known to be living with a pig kidney are another Mass General patient and a woman in China.

“This thing is moving in the right direction” as doctors learn from each patient’s experience, NYU’s Montgomery said. He noted the ability to resume dialysis also gives a safety net.

More than 100,000 people, most needing kidneys, are on the U.S. transplant list, and thousands die waiting. As a potential alternative, scientists are genetically altering pigs so their organs are more humanlike, less likely to be immediately attacked and destroyed by people’s immune system.

United Therapeutics’ trial is testing pig kidneys with 10 gene edits, “knocking out” pig genes that trigger early rejection and excessive organ grown and adding some human genes to improve compatibility.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

OJAI, Calif. (AP) — Diane Ladd, the three-time Academy Award nominee whose roles ranged from the brash waitress in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” to the protective mother in “Wild at Heart,” has died at 89.

Ladd’s death was announced Monday by daughter Laura Dern, who issued a statement saying her mother and occasional co-star had died at her home in Ojai, California, with Dern at her side. Dern, who called Ladd her “amazing hero” and “profound gift of a mother,′ did not immediately cite a cause of death.

“She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and empathetic spirit that only dreams could have seemingly created,” Dern wrote. “We were blessed to have her. She is flying with her angels now.”

A gifted comic and dramatic performer, Ladd had a long career in television and on stage before breaking through as a film performer in Martin Scorsese’s 1974 release “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” She earned an Oscar nomination for supporting actor for her turn as the acerbic, straight-talking Flo, and went on to appears in dozens of movies over the following decades. Her many credits included “Chinatown,” “Primary Colors” and two other movies for which she received best supporting nods, “Wild at Heart” and “Rambling Rose,” both of which co-starred her daughter. She also continued to work in television, with appearances in “ER,” “Touched by Angel” and “Alice,” the spinoff from “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” among others.

Through marriage and blood relations, Ladd was tied to the arts. Tennessee Williams was a second cousin and first husband Bruce Dern, Laura’s father, was himself an Academy Award nominee. Ladd and Laura Dern achieved the rare feat of mother-and-daughter nominees for their work in “Rambling Rose.”

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A native of Laurel, Mississippi, Ladd was apparently destined to stand out. In her 2006 memoir, “Spiraling Through the School of Life,” she remembered being told by her great-grandmother that she would one day in “front of a screen” and would “command” her own audiences.

By the mid-1970s, she had lived out her fate well enough to tell The New York Times that no longer denied herself the right to call herself great.

“Now I don’t say that,” she said. “I can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, English accents, Irish accents, no accent, stand on my head, tap dance, sing, look 17 or look 70.”