Three weeks before Election Day, candidates from two major Senate races were on Capitol Hill, making sure voters knew that they were taking action on Ebola.
Rep. Bruce Braley, a Democrat running for Senate in Iowa, and Rep. Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican challenging Sen. Mark Udall, were among the members of Congress who returned for a hearing on Ebola, posing questions to government officials and medical professionals.
It wasn’t just empty face time on C-SPAN. Ebola has quickly and improbably become one of the most potent political issues in the final weeks of this midterm election cycle.
For many Republicans, the issue has lent itself to a laundry list of dangers Democrats and President Obama have failed to prevent, including the growth of the jihadist group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and invoked the larger question of competency the GOP has pushed.
“First @BarackObama said it was unlikely that Ebola would reach the United States. Then it did,” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, tweeted Thursday. “Then @BarackObama said it was unlikely that Ebola would spread. Then it did.”
The political discourse surrounding the issue has intensified with two new confirmed cases of Ebola, contracted by hospital workers who helped care for Thomas Eric Duncan, the Ebola patient who died in Dallas.
Many Republicans, and some Democrats, have called for stricter or total bans on travel to and from affected countries in West Africa.
“If the president’s not willing to put into a place a travel ban, then we should have 100 percent screening of the people who are coming from those affected areas,” Gardner said in a recent debate with Udall.
A few Republican candidates have even taken the issue a step further politically, attempting to tie Ebola to the security problems on the U.S. border with Mexico, which has been a factor in illegal immigration to the U.S.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have an Ebola outbreak,” Republican Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, said in a recent debate with Sen. Kay Hagan. “We have bad actors that can come across the border. We need to seal the border and secure it.”
Some Democratic candidates have pushed back with charges that GOP-favored cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other government health programs might have left the U.S. less equipped to respond.
“I can tell you what I’m not going to do,” Udall said in his debate with Gardner, “and that’s what Congressman Gardner did — which is to vote for close to $300 million in cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s budget that funds emergency response teams.”
A television ad by Sen. Mark Pryor in Arkansas attacked his Republican challenger, Rep. Tom Cotton, for having supported such budget cuts.
“Tom Cotton voted against preparing America for pandemics like Ebola,” the ad said.
But Democratic candidates in states where the president remains unpopular haven’t been jumping to Obama’s defense, either.
“I think the administration should have acted quicker,” Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic incumbent in Virginia, said in a recent debate with Republican Ed Gillespie.
And when asked this month whether he approved of the president’s actions in response to the spread of Ebola, Pryor wavered.
“I would say that it’s hard to know,” he told MSNBC, “because I haven’t heard the latest briefing on that.”
