Donald Trump, for all his bluster and controversy, could actually win over the suburban vote in blue Northeastern states, Hardball host Chris Matthews argued on tonight's program. It's just too bad for him, he added, that throwing his arms around the Sarah Palin endorsement could kill those chances since "thoughtful" "pro-choice" women in those New England suburbs would see Palin's embrace as a deal killer.
Here are the relevant transcript and video:
MSNBC
Hardball
January 19, 2016; 7:48 p.m. Eastern
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about this, how it changes things. The one danger I see here is, I think Trump has emerged as a credible candidate in the suburbs of the Northeast. I looked at the numbers in Connecticut tonight he was reporting.
I can see Trump, for example, smashing Bernie Sanders in the suburbs of the Northeast and the Midwest. I think he comes across sometimes, as, despite all the outrageous things that he says, as people say, you know what, I think he's a smart guy and knows how to make money. He's more of a suburbanite than this other guy.
Now, bringing Palin in is dangerous, because Palin turns off suburban woman, suburban pro-choice women who are thoughtful, read the newspaper. They go, wait a minute, this is too much of a cowgirl. All that said, he ain't running in the suburbs of Connecticut right now. He's not running in the suburbs of Philly or Chicago. He's running in the outskirts, Kasie, of Iowa, where people are very conservative.
KASIE HUNT, NBC News: He's absolutely running in Iowa. And you can start to see it in the conservative media, this shift where some people were suggesting, oh, there are people in the in the establishment who could work with Donald Trump. And Donald Trump might be the one, if we have to pick, between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, we're better off with Donald Trump. That was starting to bubble up. And this is going to help tamp that down and give him the kind of conservative credibility in Iowa.
MATTHEWS: So you saw that thing I was just saying is bad for him. Because it was appealing to the Republican Party I grew up around, reasonable people from the 'burbs.
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