Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed Sunday that her party will keep control of the Senate in next month's elections, an opinion her Republican counterpart, Reince Priebus, strongly denied.
The competing chairpeople appeared together on
"Fox News Sunday," during which Wasserman Schultz claimed that Republicans' efforts to couch the Nov. 4 midterm election as a referendum on President Barack Obama is a flawed plan and won't work.
"We are going to hold the Senate," the Florida lawmaker told show host Chris Wallace. "The
president is not on the ballot."
Story continues below video.
Instead, she maintained that Republicans want to put Obama and his actions, including Obamacare and the Internal Revenue Services' targeting scandal on the ballot to "turn away from their own terrible record."
Current polls give Republicans at least a 60 percent chance of winning the Senate, reports Fox News. The GOP needs to win at least six seats to take control.
But Wasserman Schultz maintained Republicans have taken away Americans' healthcare and opposed minimum-wage hikes, and said that "one question voters will ask is: Who has your back?"
Priebus countered that Obama is "taking the country in the wrong direction and (Democratic) candidates are following him off the plank."
“I don’t know whose back he has, but it’s not the American people’s,” Priebus told her.
The two chairpersons also debated the role of the growing Ebola crisis when it comes to politics.
Both agreed that it should not be made a political issue, "but I think the problem you have is that Americans, like so many other issues that the president is touching right now, have lost confidence in this president's ability to lead," said Priebus.
However, Wasserman Schultz complained that arguments about travel bans and more when it comes to Ebola are politicizing an issue that should not be politicized.
"We should not be rattling our sabres," she said. "We are making sure that people understand that this is something we have to take seriously."
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