MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough blamed “radical” Iowa Republicans for setting themselves up to lose again in November’s general election.
Donald Trump won over 50 percent of the vote in the state’s first-in-the-nation caucus, and the “Morning Joe” host said Republicans should consider dropping Iowa as the bellwether of its primary contests as Democrats have done.
“I think there was a big winner, and I think there was a big loser,” Scarborough said. “The big winner, of course, Donald Trump. He got over 50 percent of the vote. The big loser, of course, the Republican Party, who is strapped with a Republican loser, a seven-time loser. The problem for Republicans is they started in Iowa. This is just a perennial problem for the GOP, it really is, a problem that the Democrats fixed.”
Iowa GOP voters have consistently backed candidates with little chance of winning a general election, Scarborough said, and he placed Trump in that same column.
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“You go back and look, who won in 2008? Mike Huckabee, was it?” Scarborough said. “Huckabee won in 2008. [Rick] Santorum won in 2012. Ted Cruz won in 2016. You go back to 1988, you have televangelist Pat Robertson beating the sitting vice president of the united states, George H.W. Bush. I went back last night and looked at the news coverage. The [Los Angeles] Times quoted young George W. Bush saying, ‘We got whipped.’ They did, but we’re going to be reading a lot of exit polls. People will be saying, ‘Oh, my God.'”
“No doubt, the Republican Party nationwide is not the party of [Ronald] Reagan anymore – not even close,” Scarborough added. “Not even the party of George W. Bush, but this is a radical, in many ways, a radical electorate if you look at what they say. Again, they have set up, once again, Donald Trump, their weakest candidate, to go to the general election. A great night for Donald Trump given the fact that [Ron] DeSantis wasn’t pushed out of the race and [Nikki] Haley wasn’t pushed out of the race, so these two continue splitting the anti-Trump vote in half, and Donald Trump loves that.”
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