If I had a dollar for every time "Morning Joe" Scarborough came all unglued over anything Trump-related, or even Trump-adjacent, I'd be a wealthy man. Joe Scarborough is absolutely unhinged when it comes to Donald Trump, and honestly, it's kind of entertaining, in a "can't tear your eyes away from a five-car-pileup" sort of way. "Morning Joe" fumes, he rants, he fulminates - and in the end, he's probably not changing anyone's mind.
It's not as though Joe Scarborough is an actual reporter. And, to be fair, he makes no bones about it; he's an advocate, with little or no pretense of impartiality. Nothing wrong with that - I'm an advocate myself, after all. But in Scarborough's latest meltdown, he's all spun up about the Trump campaign's advertising on the transgender issue; the problem is, as Joe sees it, that the Harris campaign isn't responding.
Probably because it's a losing issue for them, Joe:
MSNBC's Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough fumed over Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s recent transgender ad airing in battleground states, saying the Harris campaign "is blind to" the ad’s impact in the final days before the election.
"They’ve run that 30,000 times during football games. It’s having an impact," Scarborough said Friday of the ad, which highlights Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s support for taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal immigrants.
"The [Harris] campaign is blind to it, they’re just blind to it. I don't know if they think they're too good to respond to an ad," Scarborough continued.
Evidently, the point here went so far over Joe's head that Israel's Iron Dome system couldn't have shot it down.
Trump's ad shows Kamala Harris advocating for taxpayer-funded transgender treatments - for prison inmates and illegal immigrants. That's not a winning message.
🚨🚨🚨Team Trump is now running this ad during NFL games. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/OIMgf3lOKw
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 22, 2024
But there's so much more to it than this, although soaking the taxpayers for completely elective cosmetic treatments for prisoners is bad enough. There is literally nothing about the whole "transgender" issue that Kamala can win with. They are staying way the heck away from it as we wind this election season up, and it's one of the few smart things the Harris campaign has done.
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Polling on the whole "transgender" issue is favoring Trump's stance, not Kamala Harris', on the issue of allowing dudes to play on women's sports teams - and share their showers and locker rooms:
"I do think it's just emphasizing that sort of cultural divide that we do see in sport," said Jessica Taylor, a nonpartisan election analyst with the Cook Political Report. Taylor said the issue can appeal to men and swing suburban women, and polling backs that up.
Polling from the Marist Center for Sports Communication in 2022 found that 61% of Americans say transgender athletes should only be allowed to "play on teams that match their birth gender."
Sixty-one percent is rather surprising - that it's that low, that is. But it's still a substantial margin.
It's easy enough to see why. The sports issue in particular resonates with large numbers of Americans, especially the large percentage that have daughters in school. While I'm not a sportsball guy, this issue nevertheless hits my family; we have a nine-year-old granddaughter who wants to play basketball, and none of us, especially her parents, want her competing in middle school or high school against a boy - or boys. It's cruelly unfair, it's an unforgivably bad practice, and if Morning Joe doesn't get why the Harris campaign, already slipping in the polls, doesn't want to touch this with an 11-foot bohunk - that being what you use when a 10-foot pole is too short - then Joe is in the wrong line of work.
The Trump campaign is pushing this message hard, including during the World Series. The two teams involved are from huge media markets - the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees. Those aren't areas Trump is going to carry, but we shouldn't have to point out that the broadcast will reach millions of registered voters nationwide. That's got to be an expensive ad buy, but it's going to yield dividends with demographics with which Trump is already making inroads, like younger men, black men, and Hispanic voters. These are the groups that tend to be conservative on social issues, for the most part. It's a smart, savvy move; which is almost certainly why Joe Scarborough is all agitated about it.
This, dear readers, is why you can't spell "Scarborough" without "Ugh."
