MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt Identifies Segregationist Senators from Biden’s Civility Boast as Republicans — They Were Actually Democrats

When 2020 front-runner and former Vice President Joe Biden told a tale of civility and comity to wealthy Democrat donors in New York on Tuesday night, he invited a world of Wednesday trouble, mainly because the men he chose as his example were segregationists.

Biden has been dealing with that fallout all day, both from commentators and fellow candidates. But when MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt covered the news, she got a pretty major part of the story wrong: the party.

Hunt identified the two segregationist Senators, James Eastland and Herman Talmadge, as Republicans. “Still to come, Joe Biden references his relationships with two former Republican colleagues at an event in New York City. The only problem? They were both segregationists.”

That was not the only problem, however. They were both Democrats, too. Not Republicans.

The clip above shows the segment teaser, where Hunt actually misidentifies. In the full segment, Hunt did not correct herself, but instead referred to the two men as Biden’s “colleagues” and “lawmakers”. Biden surrogate Anita Dunn likewise had multiple opportunities to make the correction, or to even identify the two segregationist Senators as Democrats without correcting Hunt, but did not.

In fact, the two repeatedly related the positions held by the two Democrats, as well as the necessity of working with them, to Republicans in Congress today and Democrats having to work with them. It only reinforced the earlier identification. Just like those Republicans then, Biden is talking about working with Republicans today, was the essential argument.

Neither in the remainder of the show, nor since on Twitter, has Hunt corrected that mis-identification. Ironically, the topic of party ID, or the whitewashing of it with regard to segregation, was a topic of some controversy at the House hearing on reparations just a bit earlier in the day.

UPDATE –– 6:27 pm ET: Hunt has since posted a correction on Twitter and said they’ll correct the error on the show tomorrow:

Earlier today, I inaccurately said Sens. James Eastland & Herman Talmadge were Republicans. They were, of course, both Democrats. We regret the error. We’ll make sure to correct it on the show tomorrow, but wanted to correct the record here in the meantime.

— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) June 19, 2019

Watch the clip above, courtesy of MSNBC.