Nancy Pelosi says ‘disgusting’ Republican reaction to attack on her husband may have influenced midterm voters

Americans may have voted for Democrats to hold on to at least one chamber of Congress simply because of the growing ugliness of the conservative politcial movement, Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested on Sunday.

Reacting to a historic performance by her party in Tuesday’s elections, which saw Democrats hold the Senate and position themselves for an expanded majority, Ms Pelosi noted that the Republican Party’s reaction to the attack on her husband had been met with a muted response from GOP leaders while their own members and supporters, like Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin and Donald Trump Jr., engaged in outright mockery.

Mr Pelosi was attacked by an intruder in his home just days before the 2022 midterm elections took place; he was hospitalised for a skull fracture after the suspect allegedly grabbed a hammer from Mr Pelosi’s hands and struck him with it.

Instead of responding with grace or any semblance of concern for another person’s wellbeing, figures on the right took to spreading conspiracy theories and crass jokes about the attack. To this day, social media remains riddled with conspiratorial far-right nonsense seeking to explain away responsibility for the attack despite the espoused right-wing beliefs of the suspect, and Twitter CEO Elon Musk has even engaged in spreading the baseless lies.

According to the House speaker, that inability to show human emotion contributed to the GOP’s downfall this week.

“It wasn’t just the attack,” said the Speaker. “It was the Republican reaction to it that was disgusting.”

“There’s nobody disassociating themselves from the horrible response that they gave to it,” she said on CNN’s State of the Union.

More follows...