On Friday morning, MSNBC viewers had a rare moment of clarity: The American people voted against Democratic candidates in 2020 because the party has embraced its radical “progressive” base and moved too far Left to be electable. After having that revelation, “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough and his guest went on to blame the extremism in “both parties” on … Russia.
“As you know, the American people had a choice last November,” Scarborough told guest Kasie Hunt, who hosts the network’s early morning show that precedes his own. “They thought the Democrats were way out of the mainstream. That’s why a party led by Kevin McCarthy in the House outperformed anybody’s wildest expectations. He picked up 10 seats. That’s why they have a chance to take over the majority in the House of Representatives next year.”
“I know a lot of progressives, a lot of my friends don’t like to hear this,” continued Scarborough, whose wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski was on vacation. “But they had a choice, and there are a lot of Americans who would rather elect somebody who would say no to what they consider to be a radical agenda.”
“Hey, yeah, we progressives went too far Left, even for a lot of Hispanics” last year, he said. “That’s why we were -9 with Hispanics against a guy who said racist things against Hispanics.” While it’s true that Donald Trump gained modestly among the Latino vote in 2020, Biden won a lopsided majority of that demographic. A post-election report by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative of 13 key states found that Biden won the Hispanic vote three to one in nine states. “Only in Florida was Biden’s margin among Latino voters less than 2 to 1,” it said.
Still, the Democrats underperformed expectations among Hispanics in 2020 — a fact former President Barack Obama blamed on Hispanics’ Christian worldview. “There are a lot of evangelical Hispanics who, the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts undocumented workers in cages, they think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion,” Obama said.
But it’s not merely Hispanics who find Obama’s party out-of-touch, and not just on those two social issues.
For instance, 62% of Americans believe transgender athletes should only compete on teams that match their biological sex, according to a Gallup poll. Hardly one-third of U.S. voters believe biological males should compete against biological females, which would be ushered in by the Equality Act, legislation officially supported by the Democratic Party platform.
The Biden administration has similarly staked out an adversarial position on Second Amendment rights, even as the number of gun sales surged at a record-setting pace in 2020 and continued into 2021.
And the Democratic Party’s official platform position of taxpayer-funded abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy puts it far outside the mainstream of even most voters who support abortion. Two-thirds of self-described “pro-choice” voters oppose abortions in the third trimester, according to a 2019 poll. A 2021 poll found that 58% of Americans think it’s wrong to force taxpayers to fund abortions at home, and a whopping 77% oppose taxpayer-funded abortions overseas.
“Yes, Mitch McConnell is the majority leader in a 50-50 Senate,” Scarborough concluded, “but it’s not as if Democrats can’t figure out a way to start winning more elections in middle America. They may just choose not to elect the kind of candidate that could challenge the Republican Party, that could challenge Mitch McConnell.”
Hunt agreed that Biden’s attempts to sell himself as a moderate, at least until he got into office, paid off.
“Joe Biden was very careful about making sure to include those middle of the road … at least when he was a candidate,” she said, “telling the rest of his party to say, ‘Hey you know, yeah, I am progressive, but I’m not going to go where these other folks are going, and I’m confident that that’s going to lead me to victory.’ And it did.”
She then somehow connected the two parties’ polarization with perfidious Russian meddling.
“The extremes in both parties are now dictating what everyone else is doing,” she said. “You pull in what’s going on overseas — I mean, the Russians are actively encouraging this by using social media to try and divide us even further. And the goal, of course, is to separate us from our European allies, weaken democracy around the world. And you can really argue that they’ve been incredibly successful.”
“Yeah, you sure can,” Scarborough replied. “And unfortunately, too many people have played right into Vladimir Putin’s hands by spreading a lot of lies that come straight out of Russia’s firehose of falsehood.”
It is true, according to Reuters, that Russian cyberwarfare attempted “to divide Americans by race and extreme ideology, said reports by private experts released [in 2018] by U.S. senators from both parties.” It’s unclear what role Moscow played in the writing of the Democratic Party’s 2020 platform — or the extremism regularly broadcast on outlets like MSNBC.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.