Pelosi and Sanders Press Democrats’ Case, and More News From the Sunday Talk Shows

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/23/us/politics/democrats-midterms-sanders-pelosi.html

Version 0 of 1.

With less than three weeks to go before Election Day and polls showing Republicans gaining ground, Democrats dispatched surrogates to the Sunday morning talk shows to make their case for control of Congress. They focused on inflation and wages, a notable shift after months in which they leaned on abortion rights.

Widespread anger at the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade fueled Democrats through the summer, lifting them in special House races and raising their hopes of defying the historical pattern of midterm elections, in which the party in power usually loses seats. But polls suggest voters are prioritizing other issues.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont emphasized Social Security and Medicare on Sunday, pointing to Republicans’ calls for spending cuts, while adding that they still considered abortion an important issue that would motivate many voters.

“The Republicans have said that if they win, they want to subject Medicare, Social Security — health blackmail — to lifting the debt ceiling,” Ms. Pelosi said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “They have said they would like to review Medicare and Social Security every five years. They have said that they would like to make it a discretionary spending that Congress could decide to do it or not, rather than mandatory. So Social Security and Medicare are on the line.”

Mr. Sanders, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” rejected the argument that Democrats were to blame for inflation, noting that the inflation rate was also very high in Britain and the European Union. He argued that Republicans had put forward no workable plans to combat it.

“They want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid at a time when millions of seniors are struggling to pay their bills,” he said. “Do you think that’s what we should be doing? Democrats should take that to them.”

On ABC’s “This Week,” Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, also accused Republicans of having no policy prescriptions and listed several measures that Democrats had passed under President Biden, including ones to strengthen veterans’ health care and to cap out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for seniors.

The Republican side was less represented across the five major Sunday talk shows. Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina was the only Republican interviewed broadly about the party’s agenda, as opposed to narrowly about a specific campaign. (Margaret Brennan, the host of “Face the Nation,” said the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, had declined CBS’s invitation.)

Ms. Mace, appearing on CNN, endorsed Mr. McCarthy’s suggestion last week that a Republican majority would demand spending cuts before agreeing to raise the debt ceiling — a strategy that could lead the United States to default on its debt, causing economic chaos.

“I support that strategy because, look, at the end of the day, when Covid-19 happened, you had the federal government — and state governments, too — literally shut companies down,” Ms. Mace said. (The federal government did not shut companies down; lockdowns were imposed at the state and local levels.) “Businesses had to make tough decisions about how they were going to keep their doors open, and the federal government just kept getting record revenue year over year and hasn’t had to make those tough decisions.”

Here’s what else happened on the Sunday shows.

Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican facing an unexpectedly competitive race for re-election, defended text messages from 2020 in which he discussed the possibility of Republican state legislatures’ appointing “alternative” slates of presidential electors. The messages were revealed publicly earlier this year and have been criticized by Mr. Lee’s independent opponent, Evan McMullin.

In the messages, quoted during an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Lee wrote to the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, “If a very small handful of states were to have their legislatures appoint alternative slates of delegates, there could be a path.” He also said he had been “calling state legislators for hours.”

“There were rumors circulating in the days and weeks leading up to Jan. 6, rumors suggesting that some states would be shifting out their slates of electors,” he said on Sunday, noting that he had ultimately voted to certify Mr. Biden’s victory. “We were trying to narrow down what was truth and what was fiction. I made phone calls to investigate the truthfulness of those rumors, that’s all. Not advocating, just investigating the truthfulness of them.”

The host, Shannon Bream, also played a clip from the 2016 Republican National Convention in which Mr. Lee screamed his opposition to Mr. Trump. Ms. Bream noted that Mr. Lee voted for Mr. McMullin’s independent presidential campaign in 2016.

“I didn’t believe that President Trump would do the things he promised to do, and I was still sore over the way some of my colleagues had been treated during the 2016 election cycle,” Mr. Lee said. “But that vote I cast in 2016 was a huge mistake, just as it would be a huge mistake for my fellow Utahns to vote for Evan McMullin today.”

Another guest on “Fox News Sunday” was Representative Henry Cuellar, one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress, who faces a competitive race in South Texas.

“No, the border is not secure,” Mr. Cuellar said, rejecting a characterization from Vice President Kamala Harris and noting that he had urged the incoming Biden administration to take a harder line on immigration after the 2020 election. He similarly bucked the party line on energy policy, saying he wanted to combat inflation by supporting oil and gas drilling.

Mr. Cuellar, who narrowly defeated a progressive challenger in the Democratic primary, scoffed at a suggestion from his Republican challenger, Cassy Garcia, that he could not point to anything he had done to improve border security.

“She’s not from the district, so she probably doesn’t know what I’ve been doing,” he said, adding that he had secured money for Border Patrol agents in appropriations bills and that he planned to announce a $165 million checkpoint in Laredo on Monday.

Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, repeated debunked claims of election fraud in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” and, when asked if she would seek to limit early voting, suggested falsely that it is inherently less secure than limiting voting to Election Day.

“When I first started voting back in the ’80s, we had Election Day,” Ms. Lake said. “Our Constitution says Election Day. It doesn’t say election season, election month. And the longer you drag that out, the more fraught with problems there are.”

The host, Jonathan Karl, asked why she didn’t believe the Republican officials, including former Attorney General Bill Barr, who have affirmed that the 2020 election was not stolen. “I’m just wondering why they would all lie,” he said. In response, Ms. Lake accused him and other reporters of being “obsessed” with her views of the 2020 election.

Ms. Lake’s Democratic opponent in the Arizona governor’s race, Katie Hobbs, is also the sitting secretary of state, putting her in a position to oversee inquiries or disputes related to an election she is running in.

It is a potential conflict of interest that Democrats criticized in 2018, when Brian Kemp, then the Georgia secretary of state, was running for governor against Stacey Abrams. But in an interview on ABC, Ms. Hobbs did not commit to recusing herself.

“We’re having these discussions right now,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about a hypothetical. We don’t know what the outcome of the election is going to be yet.”

Republican lawmakers who objected to the 2020 election results have attacked opponents with incendiary language far more than other politicians have, a New York Times analysis found.

More than 5.5 million people have already cast ballots in person or by mail. Experts predict high turnout in the midterm elections.

As democracy frays around them, Republicans and Democrats see different culprits and different risks.