Hillary Clinton says Republicans use crime to ‘scare voters’

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Thursday that the Republicans’ focus on the crime agenda ahead of the 2022 US midterm elections is blatant hypocrisy, telling Don Lemon, gives CNN that the party is not “concerned about the safety of voters, they just want to keep voters scared”.

Clinton, who will headline her first candidate-specific political rally on Thursday night with an event for New York Governor Kathy Hochul, praised President Joe Biden’s efforts to fight inflation as “truly impressive” but said that it is “more challenging to focus that focus on the future” than to feed grievances.

But Clinton’s most scathing attacks on Republicans centered on criminality, telling the CNN that she found it “ironic” and “downright disturbing” that Republicans have not been as fervent in denouncing the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as they have been about making crime a political issue.

Crime has been a dominant issue for Republicans during the 2022 campaign, with the party spending millions to attack its Democratic opponents for being “soft” on the issue or linking them, sometimes dubiously, to efforts to withdraw funding. from the police.

This was most clear in the dispute between Hochul and his Republican opponent, Representative Lee Zeldin, in which the Republican condemned the crime in New York City in his bid to be the state’s first Republican governor since George Pataki, who left office in 2006.

Zeldin, according to ad tracker AdImpact, ran six pieces on television last month — five of which focused on crime. Some of these videos show footage of violent crimes taking place in New York, including shootings and robberies, all of which the Republican attributed to Hochul.

Clinton said the focus on crime is Republicans “just trying to incite all kinds of fear and anxiety in people.”

“They’re not dealing with it. They’re not trying to confront it. So I see it as an effort to scare voters,” said the former Democratic presidential candidate.

Shocked by the GOP’s response to Pelosi’s attack

While Clinton said she agreed that crime was a legitimate concern for voters, she argued that Republicans “don’t want to solve a problem, whether it’s crime or inflation or whatever, they just want a problem.”

The former secretary of state, who said former President Bill Clinton spoke to Nancy Pelosi after the attack, showed particular contempt for Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona who joked about the attack on Paul Pelosi.

The Republican response to the attack, Clinton said, is “unfortunately a real indicator of where we are in our country now that you have people on the Republican ticket, like the woman running in Arizona, laughing at an attack on an 82-year-old man whose wife is second in line to the presidency”.

“I’m rarely shocked, but making fun of this attack, somehow trying to turn it into a joke, the same party that wants us to worry about crime,” Clinton said. “You know, the hypocrisy is incredibly obvious.”

Despite being one of the most well-known Democrats in the country, Clinton has been one of the party’s least visible understudies at campaign rallies in recent years. Her event with Hochul will be the first specific act for candidates she will head this year.

The fact that New York Democrats are asking for his help in increasing turnout in Manhattan underscores the deep anxiety coursing through the party as Election Day approaches, with Hochul locked in a tight race against Zeldin.

Polls show a rush in New York – with a Quinnipiac University poll released in mid-October revealing that 50% of likely voters support Hochul compared to 46% for Zeldin.

Clinton said the tight dispute between Hochul and Zeldin was “more of a participation issue” and that the former presidential candidate expected the Democrat to win on Tuesday.

“But a midterm election is always difficult for the ruling party. […] We’ve seen this over and over in recent history,” Hillary said. “So our job is to convince our voters to come, because if they come, there’s no question that we’re going to win.”

Clinton said the same problem is being faced by Democrats across the country, including the Biden administration, which needs to convince voters that their actions now will make their future better.

“It’s really hard to tell people what’s going to happen in the future when, understandably, they’re focused on the present,” Clinton said. “So, yes, people are worried about the cost of living, they’re worried about the economy, although Republicans have absolutely no plans to do anything about it. It’s more challenging to have that focus on the future.”