Pollster Sarah Longwell said Monday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) must be having a “nervous breakdown” over her Medicaid comments, saying death is inevitable.
Longwell said, “That video of her, it looks like she must be having a nervous breakdown. She is in a cemetery while she is making that joke. And one of the first things, one of the first rules about making a joke like that is it should be funny. And there was nothing funny about that. It was — I think what the kids call ‘cringe’ is how it felt. I mean, this is a thing they’ve learned from Donald Trump, right? It’s like, you say something stupid, you don’t apologize, you double down. And, so, that was her doubling down.”
She continued. “But this is the kind of thing that Democrats should be all over, because what she did was highlight the thing that is the most pernicious about the bill, which is that people are going to lose Medicaid. And Republicans right now are out there desperately trying to convince people that that’s not true. They are lying to people about what this bill does, because they know that that is going to be deeply unpopular and not just unpopular with Democrats.”
Longwell added, “Her sort of, doubling down on this and drawing more attention to the fact that it will do real harm, is one of those big PR disasters that, I think, they think they’re being clever on. But is absolutely going to backfire.”
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