Reporting a new poll out on the Iowa Senate race on this evening's program, Hardball host Chris Matthews seemed a bit befuddled that a Tea Party conservative who grew up on a farm, Joni Ernst, is actually leading a Democratic lawyer Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) who waded into a muck a few months ago with an elitist-sounding crack about Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) being a "farmer from Iowa who never went to law school."
Twice Matthews mentioned Ernst's memorable ads in which she mentioned how she castrated pigs when she was growing up on a farm and tied that in to her pledge to cut pork in Washington, D.C. Of course, Matthews failed to make that connection for his viewers and twice mentioned the hog castration as though it were some odd disqualifier in a state the chief industres of which are agriculture and food processing (particularly pork). [Watch the video and read the transcript below the page break]
MSNBC
Hardball
June 9, 2014
7:13 p.m. Eastern; 33 seconds
CHRIS MATTHEWS, host: Well, Republicans need to pick up six seats to take control of the United States Senate. Democrats need to hold the line, lose no more than five.
But new polling suggests the Democrats may have a hard time in a state they expected to win, Iowa. Let's check the Hardball scoreboard.
According to a new poll from Loras College, Republican Joni Ernst, the one who talks about castrating hogs in her campaign ads, now leads Democratic U.S. Congressman Bruce Braley by six [percentage points]. It's Ernst, the hog castrator, 48, and the Democrat Braley at 42.
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