Midterm campaigns are asking, where’s the beef? And how much does it cost?

In the midterm elections, meat is on the menu.

As Democrats and Republicans argue over high prices and the Iran war, they also are having a food fight over who is the most red-blooded carnivore.

The latest example came this week in Mississippi, where Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom released a video with a snippet of Cindy Hyde-Smith, the Republican incumbent, saying that if consumers are upset over high beef prices, “you know you have so many proteins to choose from.”

The video cuts to a man grilling burgers who says, “Pick another protein? I’d rather pick another senator instead.”

The Mississippi race is somewhat unusual because it is the Democrat hammering the Republican over beef. Elsewhere, Republicans have branded Democrats as vegans or otherwise opposed to meat, trying to show that they are culturally out of step with voters, hostile to local cattle industries or just not manly enough.

In Texas, Republicans seized on an old interview in which Democrat James Talarico, the current U.S. Senate nominee, boasted that his campaign at the time for the Texas Statehouse was going vegan. Talarico has since been publicly scarfing down barbecue to rebut allegations that his dietary choices mean he is not a real Texan.

Chowing down on barbecue and tacos

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.

Rutinel, 31, is now running against Gabe Evans, the Republican who represents Colorado’s 8th Congressional District. The vast swath in the northeastern part of the state is 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 “as little as possible.”

Rutinel has made a point of publicly eating steak tacos during the campaign and is backed by the meatpackers’ union. “I don’t think Coloradans care about what’s on my plate,” he said in an interview after a recent campaign stop. “I think they care more about being able to afford what’s on theirs.”

Evans said the issue goes beyond Rutinel’s meal preferences. “I don’t care what he eats personally,” Evans said in an interview. “I care that he wants to use the power of the government to make everyone eat that way.”

High-stakes role for meat in the debate over rising consumer prices

Republicans, in the same way, have gone after two other Democrats running for the U.S. House. They are hammering Lindsay James in Iowa’s 2nd District, an area filled with hog farms, over a 2020 Facebook post supporting “meatless May,” and Amish Shah in Arizona’s 1st District for his long-standing vegetarianism and animal rights activism.

Also in Iowa, Republican U.S. Senate nominee Rep. Ashley Hinson slammed her opponent, state lawmaker Josh Turek, for opposing a bill banning lab-grown meat from being sold in the state. “He’d rather have meat that comes from a lab than from our family farms,” the congresswoman said at a campaign appearance.

Democrats have spotlighted meat as well, but mainly as one of the staples that cost more under Trump, squeezing voters’ 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.

Those moves, however, 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.

That was the dynamic that Hyde-Smith, a cattle rancher and former Mississippi agriculture commissioner, was addressing in her interview that was clipped in Colom’s video. The prosecutor — who also delivers the “pick another senator” line in the spot — is running a long-shot challenge in Mississippi.

A spokesman for Hyde-Smith’s campaign argued that the Democrats deserve blame for high prices. “It is Scott Colom who supports Biden-era policies that drove up inflation,” said Nathan Calvert.

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Associated Press writer Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.

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This story has been corrected to reflect that Manny Rutinel, a congressional candidate in Colorado, said in an interview, “I think they care more about being able to afford what’s on theirs,” rather than, ”I think they care more about what’s on theirs.”