Election Updates: Trump, in two battleground states, again invokes a ‘blood bath,’ this time on the border.

Mr. Trump also used his speech, which lasted roughly 45 minutes, to defend his use of dehumanizing language to refer to immigrants accused of crimes. After referring to the man who the authorities say killed a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia in February, Mr. Trump said: “Democrats said please don’t call them ‘animals.’ I said, no, they’re not humans, they’re animals.”

Mr. Trump drew attention last month when, while discussing the U.S. auto industry, he predicted a “blood bath for the country” should he lose in November. After critics accused him of stoking violence, Mr. Trump and his allies pointed back to Mr. Biden, insisting he was responsible for a “blood bath” because of his immigration policies.

The former president has repeatedly criticized Mr. Biden, accusing him of maintaining lax border security that he blames for violent crime, though available data does not support the idea that migrants are contributing to increases in crime.

Mr. Trump’s campaign appears to be trying to turn “blood bath” into a catchphrase, essentially trolling his critics and shifting the focus to Mr. Biden. On Tuesday, the Republican National Committee, which the Trump campaign now effectively controls, introduced a website, BidenBloodbath.com, that mirrors Mr. Trump’s argument that Mr. Biden is responsible for an “invasion” at the United States’ border with Mexico. The site highlights a number of violent crimes in which undocumented immigrants have been accused.

But his remarks in Michigan and at a rally later in Green Bay, Wis., also demonstrated how the former president has tried to stoke fears around immigration and border security in the 2024 election, a tactic he used effectively in 2016. Republicans have been eager to keep the issue at the top of voters’ minds in a bid to chip away at Mr. Biden’s support.

“This is country-changing, it’s country-threatening, and it’s country-wrecking,” Mr. Trump said in Michigan of migrants crossing the southern border. “They have wrecked our country.”

Democrats have pushed back against that framing. Ahead of Mr. Trump’s visit, the Democratic National Committee put up billboards near Grand Rapids referring to a bipartisan border bill that fell apart in the Senate after Mr. Trump pressed Republicans to block it. The billboards claimed that “Donald Trump broke the border” and that the former president wanted only “chaos, not solutions.”

Mr. Trump’s speeches in both states were his first campaign events after a weekslong break from the trail, during which he raised money, contended with legal issues and blasted his political and legal opponents on social media.

Mr. Trump has seized on high-profile crimes involving immigrants to try to make inroads in key battleground states, including Michigan and Wisconsin, connecting the influx of migrants at the southern border to states hundreds of miles away.

On Tuesday, he said that “once peaceful suburban Michigan” was coming “under an invasion” and spoke of the recent killing of Ruby Garcia, who was found dead on the side of a highway in Grand Rapids last month. The authorities have said that Ms. Garcia was dating the man accused of killing her, who entered the country illegally as a child and was deported to Mexico in 2020.

Michigan Democrats blasted Mr. Trump’s references to Ms. Garcia in remarks before his appearance. Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, said Mr. Trump was “exploiting” Ms. Garcia’s death and called his response “shameful.” And while Mr. Trump said in Michigan that he had spoken with some of Ms. Garcia’s family, her sister told a local television station that Mr. Trump “did not speak with us.”

Ahead of Mr. Trump’s speech in Michigan, his campaign handed out packets to reporters that highlighted other people who the campaign said had been affected by crimes involving undocumented immigrants. They included Laken Riley, the Georgia nursing student whose death has become a flashpoint among Republicans. The authorities say Ms. Riley was killed by a Venezuelan migrant who had entered the country illegally.

Pete Hoekstra, the chair of the Michigan Republican Party, said that “it’s clear immigration and the economy are going to dominate the debate here in Michigan.” He added that he believed voters in the state “look at what’s happening on the border, and it’s hard for them to believe exactly what they’re seeing, that there’s no rule of law.”

Both Michigan and Wisconsin were part of the so-called blue wall that Democrats had counted on for two decades before the 2016 race, when Mr. Trump won over working-class white voters who are key parts of the electorate in both states.

Mr. Biden won both states in 2020, although Mr. Trump falsely claimed during his rally in Wisconsin, which held its presidential primaries on Tuesday, that he had won there “by a lot” and insisted that the election had been stolen from him.

Democrats also won governors’ races in both states in 2018 and defended their seats in 2022, in part by making protecting abortion access central to their races.

The party continued its efforts on Tuesday to make abortion rights a key campaign issue. Though Mr. Biden did not hold public campaign events, his campaign seized on a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court on Monday that allowed the state’s six-week abortion ban but also put abortion access on the ballot there this fall.

There is little indication that Mr. Biden will devote significant time and resources to competing in Florida. But his campaign released a television ad that it plans to run in battleground states — including Michigan and Wisconsin — that attacked Mr. Trump for statements claiming credit for the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.

A senior adviser to the Trump campaign, Brian Hughes, addressed the ruling in Florida, saying in a statement that Mr. Trump supports states’ rights and thinks “voters should have the last word.”

Mr. Trump did not mention abortion, or his role in appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe, at either event. But after his remarks in Michigan, he responded to a reporter’s question about the Florida ruling by saying that his campaign would “be making a statement next week” on abortion.

A spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, Aida Ross, said in a statement: “We don’t need to wait until next week to know where Donald Trump stands on abortion — he has been peddling the same anti-choice extremism for years.”

Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting from Washington.

While Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump scored yawning leads in New York — as well as in primaries in Wisconsin, Rhode Island and Connecticut — small but significant protest votes in both parties have persisted.

New York does not have an “uncommitted” option, so organizers of an anti-Biden protest vote in the state instead urged voters in the Democratic primary to leave their ballots blank.

Blank ballots have not been reported in the initial, unofficial results of the primary, which showed Mr. Biden with more than 90 percent of tallied votes. A spokeswoman for New York’s Board of Elections said the tally of blank ballots would be public within two weeks.

In the Republican primary, Mr. Trump had above 80 percent of the vote, while Ms. Haley had 13 percent and Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey, scored 4 percent of the vote. He dropped out of the race in January.

Mr. Trump took at least 75 percent of the vote in every state as of 8 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday. But Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the race early last month, still took at least 10 percent of the vote in all four states, a sign of lingering discontent in the Republican Party with Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Connecticut was Mr. Trump’s weakest performance, taking under 78 percent of the vote, while Ms. Haley took about 14 percent.

Mr. Biden also won at least 80 percent of the vote in every primary as of 8 a.m. The “uncommitted” option took between 8 and 15 percent of the vote in the states where that was an option. In Rhode Island, 14.9 percent of voters chose the “uncommitted” ballot option, or about 3,750 votes, with turnout on the Democratic side roughly a quarter of that in 2020.

Here’s what else to know:

Voters in Wisconsin approved two constitutional amendments that will forbid officials from accepting donations of money or staffing to help run elections. The questions were placed on the state’s primary ballot by the Republican-controlled Legislature.

A new Wall Street Journal poll released on Tuesday finds that Mr. Trump leads Mr. Biden in six battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden leads in Wisconsin, according to the poll, but only when the test ballot includes third-party and independent candidates. In a head-to-head matchup, they are tied in Wisconsin. Several of the leads are within the margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.

Gov. Jim Pillen, Republican of Nebraska, and Mr. Trump threw their support behind a measure to change the district-based system for presidential elections in the state to a “winner takes all” system that would award all electoral votes to the statewide winner. Mr. Biden was able to win one electoral vote in Nebraska in 2020 under the current rules, the first time a Democrat had done so since 2008.

The rulings present a potential new vulnerability for Mr. Trump in the presidential race. Florida has become steadily more conservative in recent years, placing most statewide elections well out of reach for the Democratic Party. But the two decisions will elevate abortion — an issue that has carried many races for Democrats in recent years — to a position of prominence both on the campaign trail and on the ballot.

The former president indicated last month that he was likely to back a 15-week federal ban on abortion, while adding that he thought abortion should be a state issue — and that anti-abortion activists who wanted a ban earlier in pregnancy should understand that “you have to win elections.”

Mr. Trump did not otherwise address abortion in his campaign appearances on Tuesday in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Green Bay, Wis. Mr. Trump said that “we’ll make a statement next week on abortion” after being asked by a reporter in Grand Rapids if he supported the six-week ban in Florida. The pro-Trump crowd tried to drown out the question with boos and began chanting “four more years” and “U.S.A.” as Mr. Trump walked away.

Representatives of the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions about the abortion announcement and where that would fit into Mr. Trump’s campaign schedule. The former president has often promised policy plans — for example on infrastructure or health care — that are either delayed or never delivered.

President Biden and his campaign pounced on Mr. Trump’s promise of a coming abortion announcement. “You already made your statement, Donald,” Mr. Biden wrote on social media, along with a statement from Mr. Trump last year bragging that he “was able to kill Roe v. Wade” and that “without me there would be no six weeks, 10 weeks, 15 weeks, or whatever is finally agreed to.”

Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for the Biden campaign, said in a statement that “Trump is ‘proud’ he overturned Roe v. Wade, and he is responsible for every extreme abortion ban, every attack on contraception and every cruel, dangerous restriction placed on women because of it.”

Mr. Trump has spoken often of the electoral advantage for Democrats on the issue. He has repeatedly complained that Republicans don’t know how to talk about abortion and has said that if conservative politicians “don’t speak about it correctly, they’re not going to win.” He has also previously singled out the six-week ban in Florida, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, his former rival for the nomination, as “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”

Mr. Trump’s campaign had put out a statement addressing the court decisions in Florida before Mr. Trump took the stage on Tuesday. Brian Hughes, a senior adviser for the campaign, said Mr. Trump “supports preserving life but has also made clear that he supports states’ rights because he supports the voters’ right to make decisions for themselves.”

Michael Gold contributed reporting from Green Bay, Wis., and Anjali Huynh from Grand Rapids, Mich.

Mr. Zuckerberg has said he no longer planned to award grants to election offices.

President Biden narrowly won Wisconsin in 2020, a result that some Republicans tried and failed to overturn afterward. Voters in the state, which Donald J. Trump carried in 2016, tend to split about evenly between the two major parties, and the state could be decisive in this year’s presidential race. Republicans have argued that funding for running elections should be provided solely by the government and should be allocated equitably to all jurisdictions.

Opponents of the ballot question concerning outside staffing for election offices said Wisconsin law already made clear who could or could not work as an election official, and that passing the amendment could have unintended consequences.

By opting for a statewide vote on the proposed election limits, Wisconsin Republicans were able to maneuver around Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat who vetoed a bill in 2021 that would have banned private grants for elections.

“Regardless of the source of additional funding for election administration, election administrators must always run elections according to state and federal law,” Mr. Evers said in his veto message.

Wisconsin is far from alone in seeking to limit private financial support for election administration, which historically has been paid for by governments. The issue grew in prominence after the 2020 campaign, when election offices struggled to cope with the added costs of conducting elections during the Covid-19 pandemic and outside donors stepped in to help.

Twenty-seven states, all with governments under full or partial Republican control, have passed restrictions on the donations since 2020, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many of the new measures were passed through legislatures, but Louisiana residents approved limits last year in a statewide vote.

In Wisconsin, supporters of a ban on donated support have raised concerns about local election offices in left-leaning parts of the state receiving more aid than those in right-leaning areas, possibly affecting election results. Though both liberal- and conservative-leaning Wisconsin jurisdictions received private election grants in 2020, Republicans believe the funding disproportionately helped Democrats.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit group that Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Chan supported, gave more than $1 million each to election offices in Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay in 2020. Green Bay’s county is politically mixed, but Milwaukee and Madison are overwhelmingly Democratic. Smaller cities and towns received smaller grants.

“Our citizens firmly believe that outside money, particularly from liberal states, should not hold the power to determine the fate of elections here in Wisconsin,” State Representative Ty Bodden, a Republican, said last year when lawmakers were debating the issue.

Prominent conservative groups in the state, including the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, urged voters to approve both changes to the Constitution. “Private funding creates an unfair situation when some municipalities realize the benefits of additional election administration funding while others do not,” the institute said.

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin, other left-leaning groups and civil rights groups opposed the ballot measures, arguing that elections were underfunded by the state and that the amendments were vaguely written.

“Grants banned by this proposal have provided a lifeline to help clerks pay for equipment, polling place rental, poll workers and supplies to protect your right to vote and make elections run smoothly and securely,” said the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, which encouraged voters to reject the measures.

Wisconsin has long been one of the country’s most bitterly divided states, with each party routinely accusing the other of undermining democracy and the rule of law. It has also been slow to move on from the last presidential campaign, even as a November rematch between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden looms.

When Mr. Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, three conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justices dissented when four of their colleagues rejected his claims. Since then, Republican lawmakers have tried to remove the head of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. All the while, a fresh set of district maps, recently ordered by the State Supreme Court’s new liberal majority, threatens Republicans’ longtime gerrymandered hold on the legislative branch.

They have put particular emphasis on New York, a large Democratic state that has been a center for demonstrations against the war, including one during a star-studded Biden campaign fund-raiser last week.

Unlike other states, New York does not allow participants in its primary to vote “uncommitted” or write in other options. So organizers have urged voters to register their disapproval of Mr. Biden by leaving their ballots blank instead.

The “Leave It Blank” campaign has the support of the local Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party, New York’s influential left-leaning party. But two of the president’s most trenchant Democratic critics around the war, Representatives Jamaal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, have not promoted it.

Antiwar activists argue that the “uncommitted” protests, which began in Michigan in February, have had an effect. After offering Israel unflinching support in the aftermath of Hamas’s deadly attack on Oct. 7, Mr. Biden has grown more openly critical of the American ally’s war strategy in recent weeks. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza has also accelerated after months of Israeli bombardment.

Groups are organizing similar votes in three other states holding primaries on Tuesday. In two of them, Connecticut and Rhode Island, primary participants will have the option of voting “uncommitted” if they want to register a protest against the president. In Wisconsin, a crucial swing state, they can choose a similar label, “uninstructed,” to show concern.

In another twist, neither Mr. Biden nor his critics are likely to know the size of the protest vote in New York on election night.

A spokeswoman for New York’s Board of Elections said the body did not typically report the number of blank ballots cast in presidential primaries in initial, unofficial results because they have no effect on the allocation of party delegates.

Organizers of the “Leave It Blank” campaign have threatened to sue the board to pressure it to share the result more quickly. But on Monday, the spokeswoman, Kathleen McGrath, said the board had no reason to change its practice. She said the tally of blank ballots would be public within two weeks.

Mr. Biden’s statement on the decision, which clears the way for a six-week abortion ban, came as his campaign and a host of Democratic officials began an all-out effort to pin responsibility for dwindling access to abortion care squarely on former President Donald J. Trump.

“Donald Trump is directly to blame for the fact that abortion has now been effectively banned across the entire Southeastern United States,” Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, told reporters on Tuesday. “Make no mistake, Donald Trump will do everything in his power to try and enact a national abortion ban if he’s re-elected.”

Mr. Trump has indicated support for an abortion ban of around 15 weeks, with exceptions for rape or incest, or to save the mother’s life. A representative for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Florida decision.

Democrats believe the Florida decisions will turn out voters and perhaps even flip the state — a long shot in a state where Mr. Biden’s opponent is a registered voter.

“We’re cleareyed about how hard it will be to win Florida,” Ms. Chávez Rodríguez said, “but we also know that Trump does not have it in the bag.”

As evidence, she and other officials pointed to ballot initiatives in states where voters have chosen to protect abortion rights since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The court’s decision, which ended the constitutional right to an abortion, followed Mr. Trump’s appointment of three conservative justices.

The decision in Florida puts intense scrutiny on a state that has historically been a haven for people from states with more restrictive measures who are seeking abortions. The state’s conservative-leaning Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a 15-week abortion ban enacted in 2022 was constitutional. That ruling will allow a six-week ban championed by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, to take effect by May 1. Mr. Trump previously called the six-week ban a “terrible mistake.”

At the same time, the court also ruled that a proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights until fetal viability, usually around 24 weeks, could go on the November ballot.

Democrats say curtailing abortion access is a losing issue for Republicans. In Congress, some Republicans, particularly those in swing districts, have quietly stepped away from restrictive abortion legislation, instead trying to attack Democrats on issues like immigration, crime and the economy.

Indeed, on Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s campaign shared the names and photos of people officials said had been victims of crimes by undocumented immigrants as the former president prepared to visit Michigan and Wisconsin.

Democrats stayed focused on abortion.

“The more Republicans do here, the worse it’s going to get for them at the ballot box, as it should, because this is an issue people care about all across the country,” said Gov. Roy Cooper, Democrat of North Carolina.

The Biden campaign also released an ad in battleground states on Tuesday in which the president accused his competitor of supporting a national abortion ban. It opens with Mr. Trump saying he was “proud” to have helped overturn Roe.

“Donald Trump doesn’t trust women,” Mr. Biden says in the ad. “I do.”

The spot is part of a $30 million expenditure on advertising in competitive states. Viewers will see it during Major League Baseball games, “Saturday Night Live” and prime-time programming including the Country Music Television awards, the campaign said. The campaign is also targeting social media platforms, including Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, so Florida-based users will see it.

People familiar with the Biden campaign’s strategy said it was unclear whether the campaign would put significant resources toward flipping Florida, but several said the court’s decision allowing a referendum on protecting abortion rights would draw voters to the polls. Recent polling shows that there is enough support for the measure to pass, a sign that activists say is encouraging months before the election.

“I think in this election cycle, with these contrasts, everything is possible, and we have to run everywhere like it’s possible,” Mini Timmaraju, the president of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in an interview.

Mr. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has been a reluctant supporter of abortion access, framing the issue around personal privacy and civil rights rather than access to a medical procedure. On Tuesday, he did not use the word “abortion” in his statement.

“Vice President Harris and I stand with the vast majority of Americans who support a woman’s right to choose, including in Florida,” he said.

Such a perspective is possible because Mr. Kennedy, who has founded his political career on promoting vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories about the government, sees the Biden administration’s efforts to curtail the spread of misinformation as a seminal issue of our time. Censorship, as he calls it, overpowers all other concerns about the political system.

Mr. Kennedy’s stance drew fresh scrutiny this week after he said in an interview on CNN, “Listen, I can make the argument that President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, to censor his opponent.” He repeated himself on Fox News on Tuesday, saying that a president like Mr. Biden was “a genuine threat to our democracy.”

The remarks by Mr. Kennedy, who carries the name but not the support of a storied Democratic family, were an escalation of his attacks on Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party — and he quickly backtracked, saying in an interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation on Tuesday night that he had been misunderstood. “What I said was that I could make this argument. I didn’t say definitively whether I believed one or the other was more dangerous to democracy. I did say that I don’t believe either of them are going to destroy democracy.”

Mr. Kennedy has long said that the government’s engagement with media companies and tech platforms — to prevent the spread of disinformation or illegal materials or, in Mr. Kennedy’s case, the arguments he and his allies made against vaccines — amounts to illegal censorship, an argument that was met with skepticism at the Supreme Court last month.

In the CNN and Fox News interviews, Mr. Kennedy — an environmental lawyer who until last fall was himself a Democrat — trained his outrage directly on the Democratic Party’s leader, whose allies worry that Mr. Kennedy could tip a close election in November to Mr. Trump.

Democratic officials have devoted increasing resources to a multipronged effort to undermine Mr. Kennedy’s campaign, fearing that his presence on swing-state ballots could siphon votes from Mr. Biden.

At the same time, it remains unclear whether Mr. Kennedy — whose anti-establishment message has also made him popular with some disaffected Republicans, independents and Libertarians — would draw more votes from Mr. Biden than from Mr. Trump. A recent Fox News poll showed him drawing about equally from both candidates, and Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Kennedy last week as a “radical Left” candidate, in a potential sign of nervousness about his candidacy.

In campaign appearances, Mr. Kennedy has often drawn comparisons between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump. Last week, when he announced his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley lawyer, Mr. Kennedy said that to young Americans, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump “look like two sides of the same coin.”

But several scholars who have studied democratic governments and the ways they can backslide told The New York Times that it was nonsensical to suggest that social media moderation — which the Supreme Court seemed inclined to uphold as a legitimate goal of government — posed a greater threat than what Mr. Trump has done.

They pointed to his refusal to accept an election loss, his stoking of political violence, and his efforts to consolidate executive power and undermine public confidence in independent sources of information.

The two most fundamental tenets of democracy are that politicians “must always unambiguously accept the results of elections and must always unambiguously reject political violence,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard who co-wrote the book “How Democracies Die.” “I don’t think you’ll find a democracy expert in the world who will claim that the mild efforts to regulate social media in the United States are somehow equivalent or worse than an effort to overturn an election or the encouragement of political violence.”

Sheri Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard College, said Mr. Kennedy had not only downplayed Mr. Trump’s election denial — a threat that is “fundamental” and “has to be recognized as such if democracy is going to work,” she said — but also inflated Mr. Biden’s actions.

“If we had a president who was using federal agencies to chase down his opponents, to disadvantage them politically, to stop them from being able to speak to citizens and voters, that would be a major infringement of democratic norms,” Dr. Berman said. “That’s not what Biden was doing.”

In the CNN interview, Mr. Kennedy said Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election “clearly” was a threat, but added: “The greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns, but a president of the United States who uses the power of his office to force a social media company — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — to open a portal and give access to that portal to the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the I.R.S., the CISA, the N.I.H., to censor his political critics.”

He then said he was not making the argument he had just made, but was simply saying it was an argument he could make.

He also did not provide evidence of any “portal” through which federal agencies can remove posts. Rather, he referred to a lawsuit he filed last year alleging that, by threatening regulatory action, the Biden administration had “induced” social media companies to restrict speech — including anti-vaccine misinformation — in ways the First Amendment would prohibit the government from doing directly.

A federal judge in February granted a preliminary injunction but stayed it until the Supreme Court rules in a related case, Murthy v. Missouri, with which Mr. Kennedy’s case was consolidated. In the meantime, the Supreme Court allowed the government, including the F.B.I., to continue contact with major social media companies — and in hearing the case last month, the justices appeared skeptical of the arguments against the government.

A lawyer for the government, Brian H. Fletcher, told the court that banning the regulation in question would itself prohibit speech, including public comments from a press secretary or other officials seeking to discourage posts that are harmful to children, antisemitic or Islamophobic. He added that the social media companies had acted independently of the government and often rejected requests to take down postings.

A senior adviser for the Democratic National Committee called Mr. Kennedy’s comments “MAGA talking points” that put to rest “any doubts that he’s a spoiler candidate.”

“With a straight face, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that Joe Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump because he was barred from pushing conspiracy theories online,” the adviser, Mary Beth Cahill, said. “There is no comparison to summoning a mob to the Capitol and promising to be a dictator on Day 1.”

In the CNN interview, Mr. Kennedy also said falsely that Mr. Biden was “the first president in history to use his power over the Secret Service to deny Secret Service protection to one of his political opponents for political reasons,” referring to the government’s refusal so far to extend protection to Mr. Kennedy.

“Major” presidential candidates are eligible for Secret Service protection but are not guaranteed it. Whether to grant protection is up to the secretary of homeland security, in consultation with congressional leaders from both major parties, and independent and third-party candidates are less likely than Democrats and Republicans to receive it.

In a fund-raising email on Tuesday morning, Mr. Kennedy’s campaign reiterated its complaints about the Biden administration and the Democratic Party, describing the party as corrupt and attacking its escalating legal efforts to challenge his ballot access and its refusal to allow a debate between Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Biden.

“The Democrat political machine is pulling out every trick in the book to stop our huge momentum,” the email said. “With endless resources, establishment Democrats want to stop a debate between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Biden. They are using a vast network of shadowy dark money groups and vicious attorneys to keep Kennedy-Shanahan ticket off state ballots and spread malicious smears.”

Dr. Levitsky and Dr. Berman both noted that it was rare, in a democratic country, for a politician to explicitly reject democratic norms. It is more common for them to try to create a cloud of doubt so voters struggle to know what is true.

“Those who engage in misinformation about democracy, those who muddy the waters about what is and isn’t democratic, are complicit in the assault on our democracy,” Dr. Levitsky said. “The kind of behavior that sustains a democracy hasn’t changed over time.”

That official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, sent Mr. David a tongue-in-cheek letter last month, gently chiding him over a story line on the final season of “Curb” that is critical of the major voting law Georgia passed in 2021. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first reported on the letter on Tuesday.

In the show, Mr. David faces criminal charges for trying to offer water to a friend’s aunt who is waiting in line to vote — breaking a provision in the real-life voting law that effectively bars third-party groups or anyone else who is not an election worker from providing food and water to voters waiting in line within a 150-foot radius of a polling place.

After multiple episodes’ worth of attention on Mr. David’s trial for breaking the law, Mr. Raffensperger, who has been a vocal proponent of the new law, responded with the type of sarcasm Mr. David often employs.

“We apologize if you didn’t receive celebrity treatment at the local jail,” Mr. Raffensperger wrote, before offering a wry allusion to former President Donald J. Trump’s legal quagmire in the state. “I’m afraid they’ve gotten used to bigger stars.”

Violating the food and water ban in Georgia is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 12 months in jail and a maximum fine of $1,000, though it is unlikely that someone who ran afoul of that provision would be taken away in a police car, as Mr. David was in the show.

Mr. Raffensperger also says in the letter that Mr. David’s fictional arrest is the first of its kind in the state.

“We’d like to congratulate you on becoming the first, and to our knowledge, only person arrested for distributing water bottles to voters within 150 feet of a polling station,” he wrote.

Republicans in Georgia have significantly expanded the authority of law enforcement over elections in recent years, passing a law in 2022 that would give the Georgia Bureau of Investigations broad power to launch investigations into fraud.

During the course of the season, Mr. David gains wide renown back home in liberal Los Angeles for flouting the new voting restrictions — even if he did not know about the law at first — earning a date with Sienna Miller and a lunch with Bruce Springsteen.

Though he calls the law “barbaric” in the show, Mr. David’s character has not singled out any particular Georgia election official.

But in a recent interview with CNN, Mr. David was clear about his feelings for the former president.

“He’s such a little baby that he’s thrown 250 years of democracy out the window by not accepting the results” of the election, he said. “He just couldn’t admit to losing, and we know he lost, and he knows he’s lost, and look how he’s fooled everybody, he’s convinced all these people that he didn’t lose.”

He continued: “Anyway, no, it hasn’t impacted me at all.”

In November, Mr. Gallego, who has no major primary challengers, is likely to face Kari Lake, a former television anchor and close ally of former President Donald J. Trump. That contest will determine who will succeed Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who is not seeking re-election. Ms. Lake faces a primary challenger, Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, but leads him by a wide margin in polls.

So far, Mr. Gallego has raised more money than Ms. Lake, who has not yet released her most recent quarterly fund-raising numbers. Ms. Lake is a more recent entrant to the race than Mr. Gallego, who announced his run in January 2023. In the last quarter of 2023, his campaign raised $3.3 million, while hers netted $2.1 million.

Mr. Gallego’s most recent tally compares favorably with sums raised by Democratic incumbents such as Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio ($6.6 million in the last three months of 2023) and Senator Jon Tester of Montana ($5.5 million in the same period), though it is difficult to compare fund-raising numbers across states.

His funding edge, if it continues, could allow him to flood the airwaves with advertising in a state that has a relatively expensive television market. Mr. Gallego’s campaign spent about $1 million on his first advertisement of the cycle, which began running in March. Ms. Lake, who also ran for governor in 2022, beat him to the airwaves, broadcasting her first ad in January.

The Gallego campaign — announcing its rosy fund-raising numbers two weeks before the required April 15 deadline — said that it had more than $9.6 million cash on hand, and that more than 100,000 people donated in the last quarter, more than half of whom were first-time donors.

“Thanks to the support of hundreds of thousands of small-dollar donors who have chipped in what they could to help elect Ruben Gallego, we are building the infrastructure to win this November,” Nichole Johnson, Mr. Gallego’s campaign manager, said in a statement.

Outside groups could help make up any deficit Ms. Lake faces in fund-raising. She has the backing of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, a group dedicated to electing Republicans to the Senate, and has raised money with top Senate Republicans like John Barrasso of Wyoming. She took in $330,000 at a fund-raiser in Washington alongside nearly 20 Senate Republicans last month, and will raise more money at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida this week.

Mr. Gallego, too, will be buoyed by outside groups. The Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic group, announced a $239 million television reservation last month across seven states, including $23 million in Arizona.