Joy Reid, Colbert Panic: Republicans Will Try to 'Steal' Election That's 'Biden's to Win'

October 20th, 2020 2:46 PM

MSNBC’s ReidOut host Joy Reid brought her loony toons conspiracies to the Late Show audience, Monday night, panicking again about Republicans “stealing” the election through “cheating.” She also defended Joe Biden as having nothing to prove to voters while she unfairly put the blame on President Trump for every bad thing that resulted from coronavirus lockdowns.

After commiserating with Reid about their 2016-induced “PTSD,” Stephen Colbert wondered what to believe with polls showing Biden up ahead. Trying to make himself feel better, he gushed, “Biden’s looking great,” clearly ignoring the Hunter Biden scandal. Both TV hosts would rather live in their alternate reality where Biden is scandal-free and Clinton won the 2016 election. Reid proved that with her delusional answer: “Hillary Clinton actually did win by about what the national polls said she'd win by.”

 

 

Reid added that Biden didn’t have to face the same scrutiny as Clinton did because Trump was the incumbent: 

The things that people couldn't anticipate in 2016--which was a jump ball election...And so you say to yourself, You throw both candidates in the air, do I want this one or do I want that one and measure them by their flaws more or less evenly. And so it's a lot harder to call a jump ball race. This isn't a jump ball race. This is an incumbent running for election. He is the thing at issue, it's not his opponent. It's not a referendum on Joe Biden, it's a referendum on Trump...

How convenient for Biden; it's not as if he was Vice President or anything for 8 years. But Biden’s already been enjoying the media protecting him from any criticism as he put a “lid” on talking to journalists this whole week.

Reid went on to blame Trump, instead of Democrat governors, for the negative effects of shutdowns while she refused to give credit for the economy coming back in the past several months due to opening back up businesses (click "expand"):

[O]n the one job he had, the one job, keep people safe. Let people see their 80-year-old grandmother, allow people to feel comfortable going to a restaurant, living their normal lives, let their kids go to school. He had one job as president, he failed, and that means that this is an election about him. And then you start to look at everything else about him. He's there now. He didn't handle the economy well when it came to the pandemic. One-quarter of businesses failed. We have 25  million people who have now signed on unemployment, 8 million can't pay their rent. It’s a disaster of 1930s proportion. He didn’t do that job well. His foreign policy chops are poor. We are pitied. We have been a lot of things in the world, people have been enraged, angry about the Iraq war, we're now a subject of pity all around the world..

Reid's rants didn't match up to facts. The last jobs report pegged unemployment at the same exact rate it was before the 2012 election when Obama was re-elected and he wasn’t facing a global pandemic. As for foreign policy, Reid must have "forgot" about the historic Middle East peace deal the administration recently made.

She ended her long-winded rant spreading panic in Democrat voters with kooky conspiracies that Republicans were “cheating” to beat Biden (as Colbert encouraged her to keep explaining all the ways Republicans "cheat" like maintaining accurate voter registration rolls): "The X factor here is cheating. It's whether or not Republicans will try to steal an election that looks like it's Joe Biden’s to win. That's what people have to worry about and why people need to vote, vote, vote make it a big margin so it’s harder to cheat." 

Reid then ended her answer touting the Russia collusion hoax as reality happening once again in 2020.

Capital One sponsored this pro-Biden propaganda, you can contact them by following the link listed or at the Conservatives Fight Back page.

Read the relevant transcript below:

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

10/20/20

STEPHEN COLBERT: Okay, so I buy all of that, except that doesn't Donald Trump's success in 2016 kind of throw up in the air our ability to exactly know what the political effect of a person's behavior is? Because Biden's looking great, things are looking -- you know, knock on everything, Biden is looking great, but a lot of people who would like Joe Biden to win are feeling burned by 2016. I don't have to tell you. Can we know what the political reality is right now, given how wrong people were in 2016? 

JOY REID: So I think, you know, one of the things I always tell people, because everyone has PTSD from 2016, I have PTSD from 2016, but the reality is polls are only giving you a snapshot in time, and they're giving you a general sense of where things are going. Hillary Clinton actually did win by about what the national polls said she'd win by. The things that people couldn't anticipate in 2016--which was a jump ball election. A jump ball election is harder to call because you don't have to have the powers of incumbency leaning against it, you don't have the actual fact of a president's performance leaning against it. It's literally a jump ball. And so you say to yourself, You throw both candidates in the air, do I want this one or do I want that one and measure them by their flaws more or less evenly. And so its a lot harder to call a jump ball race. This isn't a jump ball race. This is an incumbent running for election. He is the thing at issue, it's not his opponent. It's not a referendum on Joe Biden, it's a referendum on Trump, and on the one job he had, the one job, keep people safe. Let people see their 80-year-old grandmother, allow people to feel comfortable going to a restaurant, living their normal lives, let their kids go to school. He had one job as president, he failed, and that means that this is an election about him. And then you start to look at everything else about him. He's there now. He didn't handle the economy well when it came to the pandemic. One-quarter of businesses failed. We have 25  million people who have now signed on unemployment, 8 million can't pay their rent. It’s a disaster of 1930s proportion. He didn’t do that job well. His foreign policy chops are poor. We are pitied. We have been a lot of things in the world, people have been enraged, angry about the Iraq war, we're now a subject of pity all around the world. We have few friends and the friends we have are like Kim Jong Un and Putin. Everything about him is magnified by that failure, so, no, I think the data is right, but the X factor here is cheating. It's whether or not Republicans will try to steal an election that looks like it's Joe Biden’s to win. That's what people have to worry about and why people need to vote, vote, vote make it a big margin so it’s harder to cheat. 

COLBERT:: When you say cheat you mean suppress the vote or literally steal ballots, change results? 

REID:  So I don’t think--There's the old, you know, 1960, you know, people think people will go in -- you know, you have a lot of Republicans to this day don't believe John F. Kennedy won that race when they stuffed ballots. That's not the way cheating normally works. One way to cheat is to go after the voter roll. To take people registered to vote, you go in, say, I'm Stephen Colbert and they say sorry, sir you're not on the rolls. And you say, I’ve been voting all my life!

COLBERT: What happened in Georgia. 

REID: Exactly. And you can literally do that. Some people -- stealing ballots is a very small part of it. The second way to do it is to intimidate people into not voting at all, make people think it's futile, turn them away. We know there's an operation that was put in place by Republicans in 2016 designed to deter black people from voting. They threw everything at the black community. Fake information, Russia, Hillary Clinton saying don't vote for her, just stay at home. The third way is the scary way which is to say Biden wins Pennsylvania and then the state legislature in Pennsylvania says you know what? we don't believe Biden won Pennsylvania because there was some absentee balloting. We've looked at this and in our opinion as the state legislature, we're just going to set aside the election and give the electorates to Trump. That's the really scary way. And so that’s the third thing we have to worry about. All three of those things are now happening all at the same time, with Russia help.