Rachel Maddow was nice to Rand before he won his Senate primary too.
Rand announced his Senate exploratory committee on the freaking Rachel Maddow show of all places. Then, immediately after winning his primary, Rand went on Maddow again - presumably for a victory lap - and Maddow did everything she could to try and make Rand look like a racist. That's still all partisan Democrats on the internet can talk about.
Chris Matthews has been saying nice things about Rand for some time. He predicted Rand would be the GOP nominee. I believe they were seated together or met at a dinner event and Matthews said nice things. And Matthews gave Rand a good interview here and let him get out his message without giving him much in the way of push back (even as Rand argued against things like cigarette taxation and blamed big government policy for the death of innocent black people by over-aggressive police officers).
I just don't see how you can trust anyone at MSNBC in any election against a Democrat though.
In the meantime, that interview seemed almost orchestrated entirely to make Rand play well with the MSNBC audience and highlight 'the divide' in the GOP. There were ABSOLUTELY ZERO hardball questions in that interview considering he was speaking to MSNBC's audience. (Irony.) I suspect they're trying to play up the GOP rift and Rand serves that role well as a good spokesman for the non-interventionist movement helping give it credibility. (He also probably draws viewership.) I wonder how much of that interview content (or lack of arguing against anything Rand said) was promised before Rand would agree to go on.
If you're trying to reach Democrats I suppose MSNBC is an avenue Rand can take to talk to left-leaning and younger voters if MSNBC is willing to offer up 'gimme' interviews... but I'm not sure you keep MSNBC's viewership on-board the second the primary is over and MSNBC talks about nothing but abortion, environmentalism and the CRA (assuming Rand wins, of course).
