'Ever done a focus group with Black people?’ Morning Joe sparks fury with segment on Trump voters and George Floyd
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" hosted pollster Frank Luntz and New York Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy to discuss their widely criticized focus group with Donald Trump voters to discuss the murder of George Floyd.
The Minneapolis police killing set off a summer of protests that conservatives, in general, and Fox News viewers, in particular, believe were orgies of violence in the nation's cities, and Healy lamented that so many of the opinions he and Luntz heard were based on false information.
The reality is that so many people live in a state of misinformation, including some of the people in this focus group, that I felt the need to say in the introduction that many of the people were trading in false claims about the election being stolen or Black Lives Matter being a Marxist hate group, you know, neither of which is true," Healy said. "So we had to ask ourselves, did we want to do a focus group with folks who maybe, you know, making these false claims?"
"Certainly some of them were defending [Donald] Trump to the max, but I think for me," Healy added, "what I was most interested in was that there was a moment a year ago this week when Republican support for Black Lives Matter spiked. It spiked notably, it spiked briefly, and a lot of us spent part of last summer asking were our attitudes about race and racism in this country changing? Are Republicans talking about the reality of racism in this country differently than usual? Is this a lasting change? And that's part of what, you know, the piece was trying to explore."
The segment prompted a wave of criticism online.
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