WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she doesn’t regret pandemic aid passed by Democrats to boost the U.S. economy and advised her party’s midterm candidates to focus on the Biden administration’s efforts to curb inflation.
Pelosi’s messaging before control of both houses of Congress is up for grabs on Nov. 8 amounted to a rejection of Republican arguments that the American Rescue Plan has fueled the fastest U.S. inflation in 40 years. She was asked on Sunday whether she regretted measures under the plan, such as stimulus checks mailed to qualifying Americans in 2021.
“No, absolutely not, because that was necessary for people to survive,” Pelosi said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “The point is that when you reduce unemployment, it’s inflationary. That is a fact.”
In a letter to fellow Democratic lawmakers on Saturday, she urged her party to focus campaigning on “kitchen table” issues and steps to reduce inflation, which is cutting into Americans’ purchasing power ahead of the midterm elections.
Pelosi said House Democrats should tell voters what they have already done to ease the burden of inflation and what they’ll do if they return to power in the next Congress.
“The fight is not about inflation, it’s about the cost of living,” she said on Sunday.
Pelosi denied that Democrats counted too much on tapping into voter outrage about the Supreme Court decision striking down the national right to abortion.
“Nobody said we’re doing abortion rather than the economy, but it’s about both,” she said.
Polls have consistently suggested that a plurality of Americans trust Republicans more than Democrats on the economy.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll published Sunday showed respondents favoring the GOP over Democrats on the economy by a margin of 38% to 24%, while Democrats increased their edge on abortion by 8 percentage points from the previous poll in August to 46%, versus 25% for the GOP.
Pelosi, who is serving her second term as speaker, said in her letter that Republicans “mismanaged” the response to COVID-19, “stealing jobs, shuttering small businesses, strangling supply chains” and that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated a “global scourge of inflation.”
“Greedy corporations and special interests have sought to take advantage of the crisis: stealing from families by raising prices to obscene levels,” she said.
In contrast, Pelosi said her party has passed legislation that would reduce the cost of living for Americans, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan, an infrastructure law and the CHIPS and Science Act.
U.S. inflation gauges have been running at four-decade highs this year, affecting everything from gasoline prices to restaurant sales and prompting the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to the highest level since 2007.
Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican running for re-election next month, said “the issues really are inflation,” gasoline prices that reached a record in June and crime.
“A dollar you held at the start the Biden administration is now worth only 88.3 cents,” he said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”
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(With assistance from Daniel Flatley and Erik Wasson.)
