The Democrats have made affordability their newest campaign theme. Liz Peek told FOX Business’ Varney & Co. that the party’s own record makes the pitch impossible to take seriously.
The evidence, Peek said, is hiding in plain sight. “Ten most expensive states in the nation, all but one, are run by Democrats,” she told Stuart Varney — and not by a thin margin, either. “They’re not just run by a Democrat governor. Typically, the legislatures are solid Democrat and maybe a Democrat supermajority in most of those states. Also, they’ve been in charge of these states forever.”
The ten most expensive cities are Democrat-run as well, Peek noted. And when Zohran Mamdani campaigns on making New York affordable, the obvious problem with the promise is the record behind it. “New York’s been run by Democrats for years,” she said. “Why is it that these places are so expensive?”
Her answer was a list of the party’s own policies: pro-union labor costs “which drive up the cost of everything”; high taxes that businesses “funnel back into consumer prices to get their money back”; and energy rules that put “electricity and gasoline through the roof.”
“It’s not accident, Stuart. It is not geography. It’s not climate,” Peek said. “It’s because their policies enact those crises.” The campaign, she argued, tries to sell the cure for a disease the party spread: “They campaign on affordability, their policies created unaffordability.” Her verdict was blunt: “It’s a complete lie and a hoax.”
Earlier in the segment, Peek picked up Varney’s argument that moderate Democrats have left the party’s socialist wing unchallenged. “I think you’re totally right,” she said. “The Democrats are just scared to death of their shadow at this point. They are scared of being primaried.”
The exception she named was Rahm Emanuel — a longtime party stalwart, former aide to President Obama and former mayor of Chicago — who is “sort of coming from outside the party” and is “actually positioning himself to be the moderate Democrat candidate.” Peek credited him for taking on the teachers unions: “Good for him. Someone should be doing that.”
She expects the fight to break open in 2028. “You’re going to have a tremendously vicious primary, I think, on the Democrat side,” Peek said, as Democrats are finally forced to confront “these Democratic socialists like AOC and others who want to be president.”
And she pointed to the trap waiting for the party in the House: without a big majority, Democrats will need the far-left bloc’s cooperation to pass anything. “They’re going to have to have their acquiescence. So they are going to go further left,” Peek said — which is precisely why “the generic ballot is now shifting back a little bit away from Democrats towards the Republicans.”
