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Donald Trump’s Republican party has “nothing to run on” for the congressional midterm elections after the president broke promises to lower costs and avoid starting war overseas, Hakeem Jeffries has said.
The House minority leader, a New York congressman, made those comments on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, exactly 100 days from the 3 November midterms, when Jeffries and his fellow Democrats are aiming to take control of the US House and Senate from their Republican opponents.
Asked to discuss the elections, Jeffries alluded to how Trump and other Republicans quickly seized on a 21 July announcement from Mike Sherrill, the Democratic New Jersey governor, that 6,600 noncitizens in the state had registered to vote because of a software error.
Fewer than 400 of them voted before the identification and correction of the error. But the president and his allies nonetheless used the disclosure to boost false claims that there are scores of noncitizens on voter rolls who could compromise the integrity of the midterms, during which Republicans are predicted to lose seats.
Jeffries on Sunday argued that was because it is a more comfortable strategy to adopt rather than confront how the US and Israeli militaries began warring with Iran in February after Trump won a second presidency in 2024 having promised “not to start … endless wars in the Middle East”.
The costs of the war have included the deaths of 18 US troop members as of Sunday, along with injuries to hundreds more. Gas and grocery prices have also soared amid the conflict, leaving 95% of Americans believing that the US is suffering an affordability crisis, according to exclusive polling conducted for the Guardian.
“Republicans … have failed to actually deliver on making life more affordable for the American people,” Jeffries said to Dana Bash, the State of the Union host. “It was Donald Trump who promised to lower costs on day one. But we know that costs haven’t gone down in this country. Costs have gone up.
“It was Donald Trump … who said that he was elected not to start wars, endless wars in the Middle East, but to stop them – and then turned around and has gotten us involved in this reckless war of choice in Iran that has skyrocketed gas prices on the American people.”
Jeffries then referred to how Republicans a year earlier cut more than $1tn from Medicaid, the public health insurance program for people in the US who are low-income and disabled, adding: “They have nothing to run on. We’re going to run on fighting for an affordable America.”
“Too many people are working hard – they’re playing by the rules, but they can’t thrive,” Jeffries also said. “And they can barely survive, not enough food on the table, not enough gas in the tank, unable to actually regularly and consistently afford to pay the rent or pay the mortgage.”
A recent analysis from Decision Desk HQ forecasts that Democrats are likely to win a majority in the House – and that Republicans are narrowly favored to retain control of the US Senate.
