Kamala Harris is widely expected to win traditionally blue Maryland, but its a tougher race for the state's open U.S. Senate seat. The Democratic candidate, Angela Alsobrooks, is a longtime protege of the vice president, and is largely running her campaign on the same issues.

"A lot of her values align, I think, with Maryland's values," Alsobrooks told Scripps News Thursday in Baltimore.

Like Harris, protecting abortion rights has been a key part of her campaign, and Alsobrooks has indicated her support to eliminate the filibuster to codify Roe V. Wade. But, in a state most analysts believe will go for Harris by a wide margin, Alsobrooks is significantly underperforming compared to the Vice President in the latest statewide polling.

According to a late September poll from the University of Maryland Baltimore County's Insitute of Politics, Harris appears to be winning Maryland over former President Donald Trump by over 20 points.

Alsobrooks is leading former Republican Governor Larry Hogan, but only by single digits.

Alsobrooks attributes this to her challenger's high name ID, after he served as one of the nations most popular governors for eight years.

"What we consistently see is that as people hear more about my own record and about my message, they are supporting me," Alsobrooks told Scripps News.

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In the closing days of the 2024 campaign, polls show a growing chance that Republicans will retake control of the Senate, and Democrats are in an all-out sprint to shore up support.

Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, is the third Democratic senator to stump with Alsobrooks this week.

There are a number of different pathways with which Democrats can hold, and potentially expand, their majority," Murphy told Scripps News. "Listen, people counted us out, as Democrats in the Senate, in 2020 [and] 2022."

"We've won a majority, we expanded our majority, and I think we'll do the same thing again in this election day," Murphy said.

He was one of the nations most popular governors, a Republican who oversaw a blue state for eight years. Now, Larry Hogan, whose term expired last year, is a candidate for U.S. Senate and struggling to win back the moderate Democratic voters who supported him in the past in a hotly contested presidential election year.

"Obviously it's a different turnout, Hogan told Scripps News aboard his campaigns bus after a Veterans for Hogan event in southern Maryland. It's a different motivation, and I have to convince a lot of ticket splitters.

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Recent polls show Hogan trailing the Democratic candidate, County Executive Angela Alsobrooks by double digits. Though Hogan is running as a Republican, the focus of his campaign has been a promise to be an independent voice in the Senate.

Hogan says he would model his time in Washington after outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin, the longtime Democrat turned Independent.

Hogan, though, has not indicated he would leave the Republican party.

[Manchin] just recently, on his way out the door, switched to become an independent, Hogan told Scripps News. There's just not as much of a path to victory to make a difference, he added.

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The R next to Hogans name has been a major focus of Alsobrookss attacks against him, especially when it comes to the issue of abortion.

"My position has never changed, Hogan insisted. I ran for governor promising to protect access to abortion, and I delivered on that promise.

Hogan remains a registered Republican, in a state even he predicted will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris by probably 30 [percentage] points.

Meanwhile, for Hogan, promoting bipartisanship might not be enough to succeed in a year when Maryland appears to be a safe bet for Democrats at the top of the ticket.

House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Wednesday that he was delaying a vote on a funding bill that would avert a government shutdown before the annual funding deadline of Sept. 30.

The temporary spending bill would keep federal agencies and programs funded for the next six months. However, Speaker Johnson also tied to it a bill that would have required people to show proof of citizenship in order to vote in federal elections something critics say is unnecessary since it's already illegal for noncitizens to vote.

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Johnson said conversations on the spending bill will continue into the weekend. Democrats, meanwhile, say they want a short-term extension of the current spending bill, pushing a 2025 funding fight until after the November presidential election.

House Republicans' current plans to avert a shutdown have them on a collision course with Democrats, as any plan to keep the government open past the end of September will need to be bipartisan in order to pass the Republican-majority House, Democratic-majority Senate, and get a signature from President Joe Biden.

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If the government shuts down, hundreds of thousands of federal workers could be furloughed, and more could be required to indefinitely work without pay though they would receive back-pay once the shutdown ends.

In the nation's capital, Congress is back in session and House Republicans are blaming the Biden-Harris administration for the chaotic and deadly 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee released a report Monday over its investigation into the withdrawal, accusing the White House of ignoring security warnings that might have prevented the suicide attack at the Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. servicemembers.

In the report titled "Willful Blindness" Chairman Michael McCaul asserts that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris "picked optics over security."

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As a result of the Biden-Harris administrations failure to plan for all contingencies, the U.S. government conducted an emergency evacuation without the necessary personnel, supplies, and equipment," McCaul said in a statement. "The administrations dereliction of duty placed U.S. servicemembers and U.S. State Department personnel in mortal danger, where the Taliban our sworn enemy became the first line of defense.

"As a direct result of the failure to plan for all contingencies, 13 U.S. servicemembers and 170 Afghans were murdered in a terrorist attack at Abbey Gate on August 26, 2021, and 45 U.S. servicemembers and countless Afghans were injured," McCaul added."This was preventable."

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House Democrats released a -report, placing the blame on former President Trump for negotiating the withdrawal and accusing Republicans of playing politics by releasing their report several years after the fact.

"Republicans partisan attempts to garner headlines rather than acknowledge the full facts and substance of their investigation have only increased with the heat of an election season, and after recent public criticisms about the investigation from former majority staff," wrote House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Gregory Meeks. "With the ascendance of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, the GOP performance has reached a crescendoRepublicans now claim she was the architect of the U.S. withdrawal though she is referenced only three times in 3,288 pages of the Committees interview transcripts."

As Congress returns to Washington, a high-stakes showdown is brewing on Capitol Hill to avert a government shutdown before the annual funding deadline of Sept. 30.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is hoping to pass a six-month-long continuing resolution to fund the government at current spending levels well into next year.

The move sets up an early funding fight for a potential Kamala Harris or Donald Trump administration.

But Johnson has told House Republicans he wants to attach the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, to the funding package.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal, and multiple independent studies have found it is extremely rare.

The inclusion of the bill is expected to generate rampant opposition by most Democrats.

Critics argue it is unnecessary and could inject last-minute confusion among voters and state officials into the 2024 election.

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Meanwhile, Democrats say they want a short-term extension of the current spending bill, pushing a 2025 funding fight till after the election, with no SAVE Act attached.

"[My] view is that [the short-term spending bill] should go into December," Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told Scripps News on the sidelines of the DNC in Chicago last month.

"Let's get rid of what we did the last time," DeLauro continued, referencing the protracted government funding battle earlier this year. "We got rid of all of the policy riders that [Republicans] put in, 99% of them," she continued. "Those should go by the wayside."

If the government shuts down, hundreds of thousands of federal workers could be furloughed, and more could be required to indefinitely work without pay, though they would receive back pay once the shutdown ends.

A shutdown could also affect the 2024 election. In early 2019, at the end of the longest government shutdown in American history, the chair of the Federal Election Commission wrote a letter to Senate Democrats, saying the agency was "not exercising its core functions," adding, "campaign finance enforcement has ground to a halt."

House Republicans' current plans to avert a shutdown have them on a collision course with Democrats.

Any plan to keep the government open past the end of September will need to be bipartisan in order to pass the Republican-majority House, Democratic-majority senate, and get a signature from President Joe Biden.

A source in House Republican leadership told Scripps News on Wednesday that the vast majority of House Republicans don't have the appetite for a government shutdown ahead of the November election.

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Before becoming a player in national politics, Tim Walz was a centrist-Democratic member of the House of Representatives. First elected in 2006, Walz beat a six-term Republican incumbent for the seat, and held the seat for over a decade until 2019.

During the 114th Congress, Walz was ranked by Georgetown University's Lugar Center as the seventh-most bipartisan member of the House.

A member of the Congressional Rural Caucus, Walz was also endorsed by the National Rifle Association in 2013, and received $14,000 from the gun rights group from 2008 to 2016, according to FEC records. After the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, he announced he would donate the money to charity.

Walz declined to run for reelection in 2018, instead running for governor of Minnesota, a race he won in 2019.

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When Democrats took full control of the Minnesota Capitol in 2023, Walz signed into law several progressive priorities, including free school meals for children, paid family and medical leave, health insurance regardless of immigration status, protections for abortion access, and voting rights expansions.

Moments after he was named, Republicans Tuesday quickly sought to brand Walz as "far left."

"Tim Walz's record is a joke," Sen. JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, told a crowd in Philadelphia at a campaign event. "He's been one of the most far-left radicals in the entire United States government at any level," Vance continued.

Democrats, however, have labeled Walz as a pragmatic moderate. Independent Sen. Joe Manchin, who left the Democratic Party in May, praised Walz as "the real deal," and Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington state touted his "proven ability to repeatedly and consistently win in rural and swing districts."

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"To characterize him as left is so unreal," former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat, told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Tuesday. "He's right down the middle, he's a heartland-of-America Democrat," she added.

With recent polls showing the overwhelming majority of voters don't know Walz, Democrats and Republicans are rushing to define Harris' pick, with less than 100 days to go in the campaign.