Jessica Taylor

Updated at 9:16 a.m. ET

Republican Dan Bishop eked out a victory in a closely watched North Carolina special congressional election on Tuesday night — a scandal-plagued race that was actually the final uncalled contest of the 2018 midterms.

The Sept. 12 Democratic debate stage is set with just 10 candidates, ensuring there will be a one-night event in which the front-runners will finally come face to face.

The massive Democratic presidential field could begin its inevitable reduction this week with only half of the current candidates set to make the cut for next month's debate.

The controversial decision will please many party stalwarts who worry that the often dizzying number of Democrats seeking the nomination could endanger their chances of defeating President Trump.

Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro is now the 10th Democrat to qualify for next month's Democratic primary debate.

Castro, a former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, who later became a part of President Obama's Cabinet, met the final benchmark on Tuesday after a CNN poll showed him at 2%, giving him the requisite four surveys where he hit that threshold. He had previously already attained the required 130,000 unique donors from 20 states.

At his first campaign rally after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, President Trump appeared to back away from supporting a possible expansion of background checks in favor of a push for more attention to mental illness.

"There is a mental illness problem that has to be dealt with. It's not the gun that pulls the trigger — it's the person holding the gun," Trump said to roars and a standing ovation from the Manchester, N.H., crowd.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate will discuss measures aimed at addressing gun violence in September. He said he expects background checks, assault weapons and "red flag" laws to be part of the debate.

"What we can't do is fail to pass something," McConnell told WHAS radio in Kentucky, adding, "the urgency of this is not lost on any of us."

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang is the ninth Democrat to qualify for September's next presidential primary debates.

Yang crossed the threshold on Thursday after a Monmouth poll in Iowa put him at 2% support. He had previously hit the donor requirements of 130,000 unique donors from 20 different states. His campaign had said he qualified outright based on an earlier poll, but the Democratic National Committee said it wouldn't count that poll.

Updated at 7:15 p.m. ET

President Trump visited survivors of the shooting in Dayton, Ohio, on Wednesday before heading to El Paso, Texas, the site of the weekend's other deadly violence. Trump remained out of public view during the Dayton stop.

On the ground in El Paso, Trump said, "We had an amazing day."

"The love, the respect, for the office of the presidency, it was — I wish you could have been in there to see it," he told reporters.

Updated on Aug. 5 at 3:50 p.m. ET

Eight candidates have now qualified for September's next Democratic primary debate, with Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar announcing Friday she had met the donor threshold to make the stage.

She will join former Vice President Joe Biden, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, California Sen. Kamala Harris, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker.

Texas Rep. Will Hurd, the lone black Republican in the House, announced Thursday evening he won't run for reelection in 2020.

Hurd's surprise decision is not only a setback for a party in need of diversity but also means there will be one less rare member of the GOP caucus who is willing to speak out against President Trump. The 41-year-old's exit makes it tougher for Republicans to hold on to his swing district next year and is also an ominous sign for his party's chances of winning back the House as retirements continue to mount.

Wednesday's Democratic presidential primary debate in Detroit was interrupted twice by protesters in the audience who were trying to draw attention to immigration and policing issues.

The first happened only minutes into the debate, which was broadcast live on CNN. During New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker's opening statement, a few audience members began yelling, "Fire Pantaleo."

Ideological lines were drawn early and often during Tuesday night's presidential primary debate between the progressive and moderate wings of the Democratic Party.

Updated July 30

This week's debate could be the last onstage appearance for more than half of the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls.

With more stringent qualification rules from the Democratic National Committee set to severely limit who will make the debate stage in September, lower-tier candidates are now facing a do-or-die moment this Tuesday and Wednesday in Detroit.

Updated at 8:02 p.m. ET

The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to use military funds to build sections of the president's desired border wall while litigation is ongoing.

A lower court had initially frozen the $2.5 billion in funds, and an appeals court had agreed. But the administration then asked the Supreme Court to review the freeze, and in a 5-4 decision the high court granted the stay late Friday evening.

The lineup is now set for the second series of Democratic presidential primary debates, at the end of the month.

On the first night, progressive favorites Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren will be on stage together for the first time, while upstart South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg will be trying to continue his improbable rise.

Updated at on July 18 at 1:52 p.m. ET

President Trump continued his attacks against four freshman Democratic congresswomen at a campaign rally in Greenville, N.C., on Wednesday, with the crowd breaking into a chant of "send her back" against one, echoing the president's racist message from the weekend.

Trump on Thursday disavowed the chant.

The 20-person lineup for the two-night Democratic presidential debate on July 30 and 31 will look familiar, with just one change from last month's event.

Last week, California Rep. Eric Swalwell became the first major candidate to end his White House bid. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock — after only narrowly missing the mark last time — will take his place.

Updated at 12:21 a.m. ET

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren controlled the debate early with a progressive policy pitch. She and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said they would eliminate private insurance in favor of "Medicare-for-all." Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro was aggressive on immigration, backing decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

Advice columnist E. Jean Carroll alleges in a soon-to-be-published book that President Trump sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in New York in the mid-1990s.

Trump said in a statement Friday evening that her account is false. "I've never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book — that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section."

Carroll is the latest of more than a dozen women to accuse Trump, a former real estate mogul and reality TV star, of sexual misconduct prior to taking office.

To the disdain of national Republicans and against the advice of President Trump, controversial Alabama Judge Roy Moore announced Thursday he will run again for the Senate in 2020, after losing a winnable race for the GOP as allegations of sexual assault and misconduct against teen girls surfaced from decades ago.

Those multiple accusations — which Moore has stridently denied — led to the Christian nationalist candidate losing the December 2017 special election to Democrat Doug Jones by 1.5 percentage points, just over a year after Trump carried Alabama by 28 points.

President Trump officially launched his 2020 reelection bid on Tuesday at a massive rally in Orlando, though much of the event picked up where his 2016 campaign left off.

Trump relished in reliving his unlikely victory 2 1/2 years ago over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. As the crowd broke into chants of "lock her up," he teased about still trying to search for missing emails on her private server and the possibility his Justice Department could look into prosecuting the former secretary of state.

Updated at 8:45 p.m. ET

President Trump says he might accept dirt from another country on his potential Democratic rivals if offered, raising new questions and concerns about foreign influence on American elections.

"It's not an interference, they have information — I think I'd take it," Trump said. "If I thought there was something wrong, I'd go maybe to the FBI — if I thought there was something wrong."

The mayor of America's biggest city, New York's Bill de Blasio, is jumping into a presidential race where an expansive Democratic field includes the man running a city about 99% smaller.

An incumbent president with a middling approval rating and mounting controversies is usually an easy draw for primary challengers.

Look to Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. All three presidents survived intraparty battles, but those primary fights left their reelection campaigns so hobbled — exposing longstanding weaknesses with their bases — that each went on to lose out on four more years in the White House.

Donald Trump Jr. has reached a compromise with the Senate Intelligence Committee to testify before the panel, according to a source familiar with the negotiations. The deal comes less than a week after the committee's initial subpoena inflamed tensions between the GOP-led panel and the White House.

The mid-June interview will be limited in time — no more than four hours — although no topics are off limits, the source said.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blasted "middle of the road" approaches on climate change, an apparent criticism of former Vice President Joe Biden.

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock announced on Tuesday that he's running for president, appealing to primary voters as a Democrat elected twice in a largely Republican state and joining a primary field of nearly two dozen candidates.

Bullock is focusing his campaign message on campaign finance, touting Montana's election laws that he has championed as attorney general and governor, and promising to "take our democracy back."