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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFILE – Steaks and other beef products are displayed for sale at a grocery store in McLean, Va., Jan. 18, 2010. (AP Photo\/J. Scott Applewhite, File)<\/p>\n
The video cuts to a man grilling burgers who says, \u201cPick another protein? I\u2019d rather pick another senator instead.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Mississippi race is somewhat unusual because it\u2019s the Democrat hammering the Republican over beef. Elsewhere, Republicans have branded Democrats as vegans or otherwise opposed to meat, trying to show that they\u2019re culturally out of step with voters, hostile to local cattle industries or just not manly enough.<\/p>\n
In Texas, Republicans seized on an old interview in which Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico boasted that his campaign, then for the Texas statehouse, was going vegan. Talarico has since been publicly scarfing down barbecue to rebut allegations that his dietary choices mean he\u2019s not a real Texan.<\/p>\n
In Colorado, Republicans have gone after Democratic congressional candidate Manny Rutinel for his activism against meat production and factory farming. In college, he was photographed shirtless with a banner for the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals around his chest. In 2021, Rutinel founded Climate Refarm, which advocated for cutting down on the use of meat and has signed onto letters advocating for raising taxes on meat and dairy. He also supported a 2024 ballot measure to ban a lamb slaughterhouse in Denver, which failed.<\/p>\n
Rutinel, 31, is now running against Republican Rep. Gabe Evans in Colorado\u2019s 8th district, which includes a vast swath of the northeastern part of the state dotted with ranches, dairy farms and meat processing facilities, including the headquarters of beef production titan JBS Swift. Republicans have hammered Rutinel over advocating veganism, to the point that the conservative media group Daily Wire this week released an undercover video of a campaign official saying Rutinel eats meat \u201cas little as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rutinel, who\u2019s made a point of publicly eating steak tacos on the campaign trail, scoffed at such arguments. \u201cI don\u2019t think Coloradans care about what\u2019s on my plate, I think they care more about what\u2019s on theirs,\u201d Rutinel said in an interview after a recent campaign stop.<\/p>\n
Evans said the issue goes beyond Rutinel\u2019s meal preferences. \u201cI don\u2019t care what he eats personally,\u201d Evans said in an interview. \u201cI care that he wants to use the power of the government to make everyone eat that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Republicans have gone after two other Democratic House candidates on meat \u2014 hammering Lindsay James in Iowa\u2019s 2nd district, an area filled with hog farms, for supporting \u201cmeatless May\u201d in a 2020 Facebook post, and Amish Shah in Arizona\u2019s 1st district for his longstanding vegetarianism and animal rights activism.<\/p>\n
Also in Iowa, Republican Senate candidate and current Rep. Ashley Hinson slammed her opponent, state lawmaker Josh Turek, for opposing a bill banning lab-grown meat from being sold in the state. \u201cHe\u2019d rather have meat that comes from a lab than from our family farms,\u201d she said at a campaign appearance.<\/p>\n
Democrats have hammered on meat as well, but mainly just as one of the staples that cost more under Trump, squeezing voters\u2019 pocketbooks. Trump has tried to lower prices by opening U.S. markets to beef imports, especially from Argentina, which is governed by a close Trump ally.<\/p>\n
\n\t\tWinnipeg Free Press | Newsletter\n\t<\/p>\n
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However, those moves have angered U.S. producers as prices have remained stubbornly high, creating a potential weakness in Republican-leaning states where Democrats hope to gain ground this year. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average pound of ground beef cost $6.79 last month, up from $5.55 in January of 2025, when Trump returned to office.<\/p>\n
That was the dynamic that Hyde-Smith, a cattle rancher and former state agriculture commissioner, was addressing in her interview that was clipped in Colom\u2019s video. The prosecutor \u2014 who also delivers the \u201cpick another senator\u201d line in the spot \u2014 is running a longshot challenge in Mississippi.<\/p>\n
A spokesman for Hyde-Smith\u2019s campaign argued that the Democrats deserve blame for high prices. \u201cIt is Scott Colom who supports Biden-era policies that drove up inflation,\u201d said Nathan Calvert.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
Associated Press writer Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the midterm elections, meat is on the menu. As Democrats and Republicans argue over high prices and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":933583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194296],"tags":[49,48,22073],"class_list":["post-933582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-winnipeg","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-winnipeg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=933582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/933583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=933582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=933582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=933582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}