CNN’s Jim Acosta: Democrats ‘May Need to Do a Little Less Lecturing and More Listening’ to Rural Voters

 

CNN’s Jim Acosta said on Wednesday Democrats may need to do “a little less lecturing” and more listening to rural voters.

Wolf Blitzer asked Acosta about Glenn Youngkin successfully navigating “the Trump factor” in his race and whether other Republicans would follow suit.

Acosta said other Republicans could try it but “won’t be able to get away with it” because of how close they’ve clung to the former president.

“Right now the Republican party is caught in a riptide of disinformation, and it’s carrying the rest of the country out to sea,” he continued, dismissing Youngkin’s distancing as superficial. “Glenn Youngkin, even though he held Donald Trump at arm’s length, fully embraced Trumpism. If you look at what happened in Virginia, he was carpet-bombing the commonwealth with disinformation.”

He brought up Youngkin’s previous comments about auditing the election results and asked, “Is he going to ask for his own election results to be audited? I guess we should be satisfied tthat here’s not going to be an insurrection in Richmond, but that’s the kind of campaign that Glenn Youngkin was running.”

Acosta went on to acknowledge that Democrats “have big issues here,” including the problems with the candidates they’re running.

A Democratic operative apparently told Acosta that McAuliffe’s debate comment “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” was a big mistake.

Acosta added:

I know the terrain [in Virginia] pretty well. If you look what happened in the red counties, those bright red counties from the Shenandoah Valley all the way down to southwestern Virginia… that is Trump country. And Democrats have not been able to make inroads in that part of Virginia and those kinds of rural areas around the United States for a very long time now. I suspect that Democrats may need to do a little less lecturing and more listening when it comes to those rural voters to help them get back into the good graces of those kinds of Americans.

You can watch above, via CNN.

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Josh Feldman is a Senior Editor at Mediaite. Email him here: josh@mediaite.com Follow him on Twitter: @feldmaniac