WASHINGTON — Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith appeared to downplay a question about rising beef prices last month by saying Americans have “so many proteins to choose from.”

Fellow Republican Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio told a conservative podcaster last week that people living in poverty lack the experience to handle the “real world.”

And Kansas GOP Sen. Roger Marshall said on CNN that Americans have to accept the spiking cost of gas as one of the “sacrifices” of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

In each case, the remarks were embedded within longer interviews that contained nuanced points about complexities of the economy. But when reduced to pithy sound bites, they illustrate the tightrope Senate Republicans walk while discussing affordability, widely seen as the central issue of the midterm elections.

“Senate Republicans are just remarkably out of touch with everyday Americans,’’ said Gus Nathanson, the Senate press assistant for the Democratic super PAC and research firm American Bridge 21st Century.

“We see rising prices across the board, from food to gas to health care. And instead of … addressing these concerns, we see Senate Republicans patronizing Americans with the notion that their struggles are their own fault and that there’s not a thing that elected officials can do about it,’’ Nathanson said.

The issue that helped propel Republicans into the Senate majority and give them a governing trifecta in Washington now threatens to complicate their chances of holding on to both in 2026. Democrats believe Republicans’ response to Americans’ financial struggles and President Donald Trump’s sinking job approval numbers have created a path — albeit a narrow one — to winning the Senate majority. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to flip the chamber.

Still, doing so won’t be easy for Democrats. Republicans continue to hold a decisive edge in a cycle when the Senate map runs through deep-red terrain such as Mississippi, Ohio and Kansas.

Out of touch

Democrats have sought to portray Republicans as out-of-touch with the concerns of cash-strapped Americans.

“Ohioans are in crisis — gas prices are soaring, utility bills are at an all-time high, health care is becoming a luxury, and our grocery bills continue to climb,’’ said Husted’s opponent, Democrat Sherrod Brown, the former Ohio senator seeking a comeback. “But Jon Husted says affordability is a ‘buzzword.’”

Local prosecutor Scott Colom, Hyde-Smith’s Democratic challenger this fall, accused the senator of let-them-eat-cake indifference.

“Cindy Hyde-Smith sits on the Senate Agriculture Committee, and her answer to Mississippians struggling at the grocery store is to just eat something else?” he said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “That’s an insult to the people who sent her to D.C.”

Republicans, meanwhile, point to steps they’ve taken to address the affordability crisis.

The massive tax and spending law crafted by the Trump administration and passed by Congress last year contains a host of policies designed to reduce financial stress and put more money in people’s pockets, said Joanna Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

From no tax on tips and overtime to “Trump accounts” that give money to babies born between 2025 and 2028, Republicans are embracing policies that boost Americans’ bottom line, she said, faulting Senate Democrats for failing to unveil specific policies to rein in rising costs.

“Americans are seeing an average tax refund over 14 percent higher than last year thanks to President Trump and Senate Republicans,’’ Rodriguez said in an email. “Democrats continue to believe that was a mistake and oppose the bill that eliminated taxes on tips and overtime. Working families saw how Democrat policies drove runaway inflation and open borders, and no reasonable voter wants to go back to that.”

In the run-up to the 2024 election, Republicans focused relentlessly on the cost of living, with Trump vowing to bring grocery prices on “Day One.” But most economic measures show that prices have continued to rise on his watch.

“Cost of living is a very real concern for millions of people,” Nathanson said, “and the rhetoric and the messaging that’s coming from the Republicans is ‘You’re just going to have to get used to it.’”

New figures released Wednesday showed wholesale prices spiked sharply in February, with producer prices jumping 3.4 percent, the biggest increase in a year. The conflict in Iran, which has driven up oil prices, is adding to voters’ economic angst.

In an interview Tuesday on CNBC, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett appeared to shrug off the war’s impact driving prices up.

A drawn-out conflict, he said, “would hurt consumers, and we’d have to think about if that continued, what we would have to do about that,” he said. “But that’s … really the last of our concerns right now because we’re very confident that this thing is going ahead of schedule.”

Trump himself has soft-pedaled affordability concerns, calling them a “Democratic hoax,” even as Republicans have highlighted the steps the GOP has taken to address economic anxiety.

“Republicans voted to pass the Working Family Tax Cut plan. Every Democrat voted against it,’’ Husted said Monday on social media.

Growing Democratic optimism

In recent months, Democratic leaders have expressed mounting confidence that the party will retake the Senate — seen as an unlikely scenario just a few months ago.

“The economy is the thing,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer told The Wall Street Journal in January. Democrats believe their path to the majority hinges on flipping four of six GOP-held battleground states — North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa and Texas — while holding on to their own vulnerable seats in Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire and Minnesota.

Democrats have landed high-profile recruits in all six GOP-held states — five of which Trump carried in 2024.

Schumer hasn’t always been the most reliable prognosticator, though: In 2024, he projected a Senate Democratic win bolstered by a strong showing by the party’s presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

His conference ended up losing four seats that year — and with it, the majority.

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