Rural voters, Republicans have long history of being mocked by liberal media

Left-leaning media pundits have repeatedly attacked Republican voters and ridiculed the GOP base over their beliefs, as two prominent MSNBC hosts mocked Virginia voters on Tuesday who are concerned about immigration.

MSNBC's Jen Psaki and Rachel Maddow laughed at Virginia voters on Super Tuesday for caring about immigration and the border. Far-left host Joy Reid attacked White working-class Republican voters as only making their decisions based on race and not thanking President Biden, a "White working-class guy himself," for the "benefits they're getting economically" from him.

"They're voting on race," she said. "They're voting on this idea of an invasion of Brown people over the border."

Psaki referenced Virginia exit polling and said their top issue was immigration, adding, "I live in Virginia, Immigration was the number one issue." 

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"Well, Virginia does have a border with West Virginia," Maddow said, as the panelists laughed. 

"You're thinking like, what?" Psaki said. "Trump has indoctrinated people with this fear of people who do not look like them being a threat to them."

Other prominent liberal voices have admonished and attacked GOP voters for voting Republican in recent years. 

In January 2020, then-CNN host Don Lemon hysterically laughed in response to Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson's mocking of Trump supporters as "credulous boomer rubes," during special coverage of the former president's first impeachment trial. 

Wilson took aim at Trump and his supporters and claimed the former president couldn't find Ukraine on a map. "He knows that this is, you know, an administration defined by ignorance of the world. And so that's partly him playing to the base and playing to their audience. You know, the credulous boomer rube demo that backs Donald Trump," he said. 

"'Donald Trump's the smart one — and y'all elitists are dumb!'" Wilson said with a heavy southern accent, imitating what he thought a Trump supporter might sound like. "'You elitists with your geography and your maps- and your spelling!'" Wajahat Ali, now a columnist at the Daily Beast, chimed in during the mockery.

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"The View" co-hosts have bashed the GOP base multiple times, including co-host Sunny Hostin, who compared White suburban women supporting Republicans to "roaches voting for Raid."

"What’s also surprising to me is the abortion issue. I read a poll just yesterday that White Republican suburban women are now going to vote Republican," Hostin said, appearing to refer to surveys showing White women backing Republicans ahead of the 2022 midterms. "It’s almost like roaches voting for Raid [roach spray], right?" Hostin said on Thursday. 

Hostin defended her comments in another episode and said she was just using a metaphor. She also previously claimed White women voters "fall in line" with how their "husbands are voting." 

Co-host Joy Behar lashed out at residents of East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023, following the train derailment, which she blamed on Trump. "I don’t know why they would ever vote for him, somebody who, by the way, he placed someone with deep ties to the chemical industry in charge of the EPA's chemical safety office. That's who you voted for in that district — Donald Trump, who reduces all safety," Behar said while pointing at the camera. 

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During an appearance on MSNBC in February, Politico reporter Heidi Przybyla took aim at "Christian Nationalists," who she argued believe rights "come from God."

"The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists – not Christians, by the way, because Christian nationalist is very different – is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don't come from any earthly authority. They don't come from Congress, they don't come from the Supreme Court. They come from God. The problem with that is that they are determining – man, men, it is men are determining what God is telling them," Przybyla said. 

"And in the past, that so-called natural law is, you know, it's a pillar of Catholicism, for instance. It has been used for good in social justice campaigns, Martin Luther King evoked it in talking about civil rights, but now you have an extremist element of conservative Christians who say that this applies specifically to issues including abortion, gay marriage, and it's going much further than that," she continued, before citing the Alabama Supreme Court ruling on IVF.

Przybyla later apologized for her "clumsy words" in a Politico article, saying, "Reporters have a responsibility to use words and convey meaning with precision, and I am sorry I fell short of this in my appearance." 

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After Gov. Glen Youngkin, R-Va., won the gubernatorial race in Virginia, MSNBC host Nicole Wallace, while covering the election results, claimed critical race theory wasn't "real." CRT was a defining issue in the race. 

"He worshipped at the altar of Donald Trump… he did not really put much distance between himself and Donald Trump on the big lie or the deadly insurrection," Wallace said of Youngkin. "So, I think that the real ominous thing, is that critical race theory, which isn’t real, turned the suburbs 15 points to the Trump-insurrection-endorsed Republican.

Comedian Bill Maher joined MSNBC host Ari Melber's show in September 2023 and argued, in response to Melber taking a shot at Trump's base, that a large portion of people planned to support the former president and said, "some of them are not crazy."

Melber commented on the differences in reactions between Trump's base and "normal, reality-adjusted" people, in reference to the Georgia election interference hearings against Trump.

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Maher pushed back against Melber's dig at the former president's supporters. "I got to stop you and say, I don’t think this helps, the media world that we live in, where we sit here and everybody else is just a deplorable who's reality challenged," he responded. Melber pushed back and defended himself, saying he didn't call anyone "deplorable," but argued there was a difference between those "against sedition" and those who weren't.

"I think it would be helpful if the people who watch this would see that. Just crack a window a little bit, and you maybe understand why people would — you have to try to understand why half the country is looking to Donald Trump as some sort of savior. Yes, it’s not what we think, but, you know, people are not self-deporting in this country. Half the country isn’t going away. Even if the Democrat wins the next time, they’ll still be here, and they'll still have these views. And some of them are not crazy," Maher argued.

Fox News' Kristine Parks, Joseph Wulfsohn, David Rutz, and Jeffrey Clark contributed to this report.

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