On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Hardball” just moments before Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s rally at Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile, AL, MSNBC contributor Joy Reid weighed in on what she thought was the make up of Trump supporters.
According to Reid, there was likely a lot of “overlap” of Trump supporters, Tea Partiers and supporters of former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) and she declared them to be “white Americans” felt “left out” in Obama’s America.
Partial transcript as follows:
CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST OF “HARDBALL”: Joy Reid, I want to go over these because I read your pre-interview, and I know where your thinking is, your analysis. What`s interesting in these polling we`re coming up with here now, the CNN/ORC poll, the national Opinion and Research Corporation, is basically that he isn`t going to left or the center-left, but his appeal seems to pick up on independents who lean Republican.
Then you get moderate Republicans and further right and you get conservative Republicans, then you get Tea Partiers. So he has a big grab of the electorate starting somewhere in the middle. So he`s middle to right.
He`s not — you think, though, based upon your sampling, that he`s all Tea Party. I wonder if you think that still.
JOY REID, MSNBC CORRESPONDENT: Well, no, I mean, I`d like to see a Venn diagram between the Tea Party, the Palinites and the Trump supporters. I`ll bet there`d be a lot of overlap there. And Remember, Tea Partyers claim they weren`t far right, they weren`t really Republicans, they were just, you know, average Americans who wanted the truth.
And so I think what you have with Trump and what I see as his base is not just the far right, but the right, and it`s a lot of Republicans who are disgruntled with the Republican Party. It`s white Republicans.
MATTHEWS: Yes, that`s true.
REID: It`s mostly white male Republicans, and it`s basically white Americans who feel left out of Obama`s America, who are peeved with the fact that their preferred party can`t seem to beat Obama, and who want to hear a guy be able to stand up and be as politically incorrect as they can`t be. They`d get fired from their jobs if they put on Facebook some of the things Trump said.
But here`s a guy who can say what he wants to them, be a man`s man, and get out there and be the kind of Ronald Reaganesque kind of America where we did what we want, said what we want, pushed the world around, and told them to go to hell if we wanted to!
(LAUGHTER)
REID: I think that`s what they like.
MATTHEWS: Well, you`re capturing his idiom now, that`s for sure.
(h/t Mediaite)
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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