Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on Thursday suggested Republicans are “not concerned about voter safety, they just want to keep voters scared.”
The former Democratic presidential candidate told CNN This Morning that the GOP’s focus on crime as a major midterm issue is just an effort “to gin up all kinds of fear and anxiety in people.”
“They are not dealing with it. They are not trying to tackle it. So I view it as an effort to scare voters,” she said.
Clinton said crime is a legitimate concern for voters but claimed Republicans “don’t want to solve a problem, whether it is crime, inflation or anything else, they just want an issue.”
She went on to criticize Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake for her comments about the violent attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Clinton called the response to the attack “sadly a real indicator of where we are in our country right now that you would have people on the Republican ticket, like the woman running in Arizona, laughing about an attack on anyone, let alone an 82-year-old man whose wife happens to be second in line to the presidency.”
“I am rarely shocked any more but … making fun of that attack, somehow trying to turn it into a joke, the same party that wants us to be worried about crime,” Clinton said. “You know, the hypocrisy is incredibly obvious.”
Clinton is set to stump for New York gubernatorial candidate Kathy Hochul on Thursday. Crime has become a major issue in Hochul’s race against Representative Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, while stumping for Zeldin last week on Long Island, called the state’s crime problem “totally self-inflicted.”
“You cut police budgets, you do things like eliminate cash bail, and you have rogue prosecutors who won’t even enforce laws that they disagree with,” he said. “Of course you’re going to have streets that are less safe.”
Every voter National Review spoke with at the rally cited crime as a top concern.
Hochul drew criticism over comments on crime that she made during a debate with Zeldin days before the rally. “Anyone who commits a crime under our laws, especially with the change we made to bail, has consequences. I don’t know why that’s so important to you. All I know is that we could do more. We could do more,” Hochul said when Zeldin pointed out that she had not talked about “locking up anyone committing any crimes” during the debate.
Zeldin said during the rally on Saturday that Republicans want a government that isn’t passing pro-criminal laws, district attorneys that enforce the law and to back law enforcement unapologetically.
Earlier this month, two people were shot outside Zeldin’s Long Island home while his 16-year-old daughters were in the house alone.
Zeldin said Saturday: “You want to know why this is so important to me, to fight crime? These two girls were at home doing homework at their kitchen table when my house just three weekends ago became the site of a drive-by gang shooting.”