On Thursday's Morning Joe, former senior campaign strategist of the unsuccessful 2008 Presidential campaign of John McCain and current MSNBC Political Analyst Steve Schmidt decided to tap deep into his political bloodlust.

Although the general tenor of the discussion involved Joe Scarborough repeatedly invoking a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll as evidence that roughly 90% of American voters want some form of amnesty for the DACA “dreamers,” Schmidt decided to take it one step further. He labeled those who support deporting “dreamers” as “extreme,” purveyors of “cruelty,” and “loons screaming out there on the fringes” who are “gonna have no impact.” Schmidt also trotted out the old trope of describing “a faction of the Republican party [that] has had a gun to the head of the country on defaulting on the country's credit.”

However, far more sinister than comparing Republicans who advocate for fiscal responsibility to terrorists, Schmidt couldn’t help himself but continue off into wilder territory. Talking about the Politico/Morning Consult poll’s 12% of American voters who support deporting “dreamers” and the “right-wing media-entertainment-wing” of the Republican Party, Schmidt ranted:

"And what we're going to find is if these guys don't bend is that this group of people who have so dominated our politics, injected this anger, this vitriol, they're powerless. Put them out of business. That's what the opportunity right now for this country is."

Co-host Willie Geist promptly asked for clarification: "What does that mean Steve? How do you put them out of business?" Schmidt replied:

You put them out of business by [not] pretending they have actual influence. That there is a majority of people in this country who subscribe to these absurd positions that are propagated on Breitbart, on the talk radio wing of the Republican party. [...] They're not looking to strike deals with him. They're looking to dominate him. They’re looking to dominate, to dictate, to mandate that the Republicans embrace positions that the overwhelming majority of these people up there endowed with any level of common sense know are absurd, know are bad for the country. [...] This is the moment to break their backs.

Considering that Schmidt believed back in mid-late October of 2016 that Hillary Clinton would win over 400 electoral votes against Donald Trump come November 8th, it’s difficult to take his prognostications with respect to polling too seriously.

Instead of rallying the troops to curb stomp conservative media into a bloody pulp, perhaps Schmidt and other analysts at MSNBC should take a look at a broader array of polls. For example, as Nate Silver’s outfit FiveThirtyEight has recently pointed out, it was likely Trump’s hardline campaign stance on immigration that propelled him to victory in the primaries last year. Across the country, Trump voters who rated immigration as their top issue consistently voted for him in huge numbers. Considering that Trump explicitly promised to end DACA, reversing course on that could well be seen as a betrayal. Additionally, a YouGov poll from earlier this September clearly shows that, contrary to what Scarborough repeatedly suggested during the segment, 57% of Trump voters and 49% (a plurality) of Republicans reported wanting Trump to end the DACA program. It seems unlikely that these numbers have changed so dramatically in just a couple of weeks.

Regardless, one poll from Politico is certainly not conclusive evidence of a clear-cut nationwide call to save DACA. Thus, it would behoove the MSNBC panel to consider a slightly broader number of polls than just one in the future when considering how many Americans support or oppose something.

The following is an extended transcipt of the segment: