Joe Scarborough seems baffled and caught off-guard by the simple economics that ultimately fueled Trump’s victory in 2024. His exchange with a Kamala Harris voter, who nervously confessed that “Trump’s gonna win” due to something as basic as the high cost of groceries, exposes a crazy disconnect between liberal media elites and everyday Americans.
“I wanna talk about the economy for a second,” he said. “A few weeks ago, three weeks ago, somebody who was gonna be voting for Kamala Harris came up to me and said, 'Oh my god. Trump's gonna win.' I go, 'Why is that?' He goes, 'I just — I went to the grocery store, butter's over $3.'“
Scarborough, who evidently hadn’t noticed how inflation has been affecting the costs of basic goods, brushed off the voter’s comment.
“I kinda laughed, and I said, 'Well, that's kind of reductive, isn't it?' I said it to myself. To him, I smiled, and I said, ‘Good point.’”
This dismissive reaction reveals his inability to see the writing on the wall, which has been obvious to everyone but the liberal media elites. But then his wife Mika Brzezinski chimed in, pointing out that butter costs seven dollars in some places. “Butter is $7?!” Scarborough responds as if it’s some absurd, isolated case. “What? Is it framed in gold?” he asks, trying to laugh it off.
The irony here is hard to miss. The voter’s “reductive” reasoning about grocery prices isn’t just a trivial complaint; it’s a telling snapshot of the very economic struggles driving millions of Americans to the polls. Scarborough admits he eventually connected the dots on Election Night
“Anyway, my point is this,” he said. “The rent is too damn high, and this guy was saying the cost of butter is way damn too high. And so I thought it was a bit reductive. It ended up being just the point. That if you look at the cost of groceries, if you look at the cost of gas... if you look at the cost of things compared to four years ago, it was a very simple, answer for working-class Americans.”
It may be a good thing that Scarborough finally realized that the American people are struggling in the Biden-Harris economy, but this was something he was only able to see or admit after the election was over and Trump had clinched a victory.
It seems baffling that someone like Scarborough could be so out of touch with real-world economic burdens that have dominated daily life for the past three and a half years. It’s not like it’s been some big secret. Certainly, conservative media has been pointing out that the cost of essentials like groceries, gasoline, utilities and such are impacting working families across the country. Even Harris had to admit that prices are still too high.
On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough is still trying to square how Kamala Harris lost so bad and was SHOCKED to learn about the high price of groceries.
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) November 7, 2024
Scarborough was floored when a friend told him butter was $3 and he almost fell out of his chair when Mika Brzezinski told him… pic.twitter.com/6MelvWoput
By laughing off what he calls “reductive” concerns, Scarborough unwittingly highlights his own failure to understand why Trump resonated with voters. Or it could be that the liberal media deliberately turned a blind eye to these concerns before the election, thinking that the key to helping Kamala win was to tell people that the economy was great and everything is fine.
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