MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough slams Dem strategy, says Trump won because voters ‘were looking at their wallets’
MSNBC "Morning Joe" co-host Joe Scarborough on Friday slammed Democrats' White House campaign strategy, arguing President-elect Donald Trump won because voters "were looking at their wallets" and did not care about "frightening" rhetoric.
Earlier in the week, the GOP congressman-turned-cable news anchor was visibly shocked when his wife and co-anchor, Mika Brzezinski, told him on air that the price of butter had risen to $7.
Since Trump's stunning election win — which included a sweep of several key swing states — left-leaning news anchors have tried to figure out what went wrong.
"While we were looking at all of the crazy things Donald Trump was saying on the campaign trail, all of the frightening things Donald Trump was saying on the campaign trail, they [voters] were looking at their wallet," Scarborough said on Friday.
"They were looking at what groceries cost, what gas costs, what rent costs, and none of that [rhetoric] really penetrated their consciousness when they went to vote," Scarborough added.
Scarborough on Thursday had dragged Dems for being too "afraid" to "offend some small subset of their base" by speaking out about illegal immigration and transgender issues — two vital concerns for voters who helped to elect Trump.
On Friday, Scarborough and Brzezinski discussed an opinion piece written by Frank Bruni for the New York Times that argued voters are too busy, distracted and cynical to care about Trump's discussions of Hannibal Lecter and windmills.
"Democrats will see the shocking things that Donald Trump would say on the campaign trail, and they would think that was going to be what made the difference: him rambling about Hannibal Lecter, him rambling about electric boats, him rambling about sharks, him rambling about going after Nancy Pelosi, going after Liz Cheney, all of these other things," Scarborough said.
But Scarborough said that, as Bruni wrote, voters were not paying attention to these rants along the campaign trail. Rather, they were focusing on high prices at the grocery store and skyrocketing rent.
"A lot of people and a lot of Democrats looked at those big media events, those big political events, thinking that that would smudge over the reality of inflation, and how much groceries cost and how much gas costs, and how hard it was to get into a home," Scarborough said. "And like Frank Bruni says, Democrats never got it."
Brzezinski said Democrats spent too much time focusing on Trump's language and not enough time fact-checking false claims.
"They overcommunicated on it, as important as it was, and left other areas for the Trump side to take, and then there was disinformation," she said. "President-elect Trump successfully harnessed the anger and frustration felt by millions."
Brzezinski also said it was too time-consuming for Americans to break down every piece of Trump's rhetoric along the campaign trail.
"It's, I think, hard for a hardworking American who's busy, who's got kids, who's got a lot of things to worry about, to even take a moment to comprehend 'enemy from within' or 'Hitler's generals' or things that really seem very jarring to students of politics who do this for a living," she said.
