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Democrats to Do Soul Searching after Harris Loss; Trump Lawyers Moving to Have NY Sentencing 'Canceled'; Democrats Seek a Refresh: Howard Dean Weighs In. Aired 6-6:30a ET
Aired November 07, 2024 - 06:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: It's Thursday, November 7. Right now on CNN THIS MORNING.
[05:58:58]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: We're going to make it the best it's ever been. We can do that.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: Swept into power. Donald Trump vowing to move quickly as he sets up his return to Washington.
Plus --
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KAMALA HARRIS, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 2024 PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: Kamala Harris concedes the race but says she's not giving up hope as her party faces a reckoning.
And --
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You can see a new, big-tent Republican Party.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: Republicans crashing a red wave into Washington on the verge of unified Republican government.
And playing the blame game. The Democratic Party now searching for answers as President Biden prepares to address the nation.
All right. Just a few moments before 6 a.m. here on the East Coast, a live look at the White House, where the lights are still off. You may remember, when we were here on Tuesday, the dawn of election day, or pre-dawn election day, they lit it up.
Now, that's going to be Donald Trump's new home. We're two and a half months from inauguration day.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Kasie Hunt. It's wonderful to have you with us.
Donald Trump is returning to Washington, nearly a decade after he rose to political dominance, for four more years at the pinnacle of American power.
A stunning comeback after he left the White House four years ago, impeached for January 6 and isolated after losing to Joe Biden. No longer.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. J.D. VANCE (R-OH), VICE-PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: I think that we just witnessed the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America.
TRUMP: America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: Democrats now reeling. President Biden has already invited Trump back to the White House, and Vice President Harris addressed a tearful crowd yesterday.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HARRIS: While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign. To the young people who are watching, it is OK to feel sad and disappointed. But please know it's going to be OK.
On the campaign, I would often say when we fight, we win. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn't mean we won't win. That doesn't mean we won't win.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: "I do not concede the fight," she says.
But others in her party are acknowledging there's something that Democrats are getting wrong about what the country needs and wants from its leaders.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. DEBBIE DINGELL (D-MI): I mean, your point (ph). As Democrats, we've got to do some soul searching. We're getting a message from a lot of people that we're not hearing them. And I hope we take the time to do the soul searching we have to do.
SEN. JOE MANCHIN (I-WV): Donald Trump didn't win just with MAGA. He won with the centrists and the common sense, the independents in the middle. He was able to have a program that basically more people bought in than what Kamala did. That's the middle. The power of the middle is unbelievable. I just hope when they get to Washington, they remember how they got there.
REP. BRENDAN BOYLE (D-PA): We have to be honest as Democrats. We do have a problem connecting with working-class voters. This started to emerge about a decade ago, and it was focused on white working-class areas. That has now spread. It's not just white working-class voters. It's black working-class voters, and it's Latino working-class voters.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: All right. Joining us now to discuss: Elliot Williams, CNN legal analyst; Isaac Dovere, CNN senior reporter; Meghan Hays, former director of message planning at the Biden White House; and Brad Todd, Republican strategist. Welcome to all of you.
This morning, we finally -- we got all the newspaper headlines: "Trump Storms Back," "Trump Triumphs Again," "Dawn of a New Trump Era." They -- they didn't quite make their deadlines yesterday, because the call didn't come until 5:30 in the morning.
But Isaac, you were at Kamala Harris's event yesterday, so I'll start with you. You also covered Democrats extraordinarily closely.
The recriminations are already coming in over what happened here. What is the lesson, do you think, at this point the Democrats are going to take away from this? Because there is, you know, this argument -- I mean, Joe Manchin is going to say you've got to stick with the middle of the country.
There are going to be people who are going to argue that she didn't do enough to turn out her progressive base, that they weren't excited, all of these things.
Which lesson are they going to learn, and what's the right lesson?
ISAAC DOVERE, CNN SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: I don't know that anybody knows what the right lesson is and what lesson they'll take from it. This is a situation where this is a big loss, but it's -- it was big -- bigger than they expected it to be in so many different ways, that it has just pulled the guts out of Democrats across leadership and across the country, it seems.
When you look at the size of this loss, though, you can make the argument it was about the working class, black working class, white working class, Latinos. You can make the argument it was about losing faith among suburban voters or Jewish voters or Arab voters.
The truth is, Kamala Harris won New Jersey by 5 points. That is a tiny margin. She was 30 points behind Hillary Clinton in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which is a heavily Latino area of Massachusetts.
The -- the scale of this loss is something that the party is going to have to really grapple with in a way that doesn't get solved, I wouldn't think, by saying, OK, we need to tack more to the center. We need to tack more to progressives.
They really need to try to figure out how to make more of this, going forward. And they don't have a clear leader right now. They don't have, really, any clear leaders of who the national person would be.
And it also may be that we are seeing Donald Trump ride, in addition to his own strength, what has been going on all over the world, of people who have been kicking out the parties that were in power in the post-COVID age. I'm not sure that Donald Trump has a huge amount in common with Keir Starmer.
But what happened to the -- the way that the Labour Party triumphed a couple months ago in the U.K. is similar to what happened on Tuesday for the Republicans. So, it's all of that going on at once.
HUNT: Yes.
ELLIOT WILLIAMS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Well, you hear -- ever hear the expression Occam's Razor? That sometimes the most obvious explanation is the one that wins out over all of the different things that people can think about.
HUNT: I'm actually a big fan of Occam's Razor.
WILLIAMS: It's a great expression --
HUNT: It's usually correct.
WILLIAMS: -- and a great concept, right? And we can talk about, should it have been Josh Shapiro? Or was it Latino men? Or was it black men? When in reality, the facts on the ground were you had an unpopular president; in effect, a vice president running for the second term of an unpopular president, at a time when the economy wasn't doing well, people were feeling it. And that was it.
BRAD TODD, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: But she wouldn't say she would do anything differently. But she had a window to break from Joe Biden, and the mistakes. She just had to say, we messed up. We messed up. We messed up the border. We -- instead of inflation reduction, we gave you a green new deal. We said inflation was transitory. We lied to you.
Like, she just needed to say we messed up, and we'll start over. She was not running against Jesus. She was running against Donald Trump.
WILLIAMS: The most important word in there is the "we." And by merely saying, "We messed up," she was the face of the last -- or the current administration. And I just think that headwind would have been incredibly hard, no matter what circumstances.
HUNT: So, Meghan, you were part of this administration. What do you think?
MEGHAN HAYS, FORMER DIRECTOR OF MESSAGE PLANNING FOR BIDEN WHITE HOUSE: I think that we have been not in line with where the electorate is. The party is not in line with where the electorate is. I think we're moving too far to the left, as a party.
And I think the electorate was telling us, no, you are not listening to us. We can't pay for gas. We can't pay for groceries. We don't care that we're sending money to Ukraine for all the right reasons that -- for democracy and all the right reasons. We're sending money to Israel. We can't afford eggs, and we can't afford gas. Why are you sending money to fight foreign wars?
We were -- like, that's one example of the many that we can go through. But I just don't think they're listening to people on the ground. And I think it came down to the economy and Donald Trump saying, were you better off four years ago?
Clearly, the answer was yes for all of these people.
HUNT: What's the answer for Democrats going forward?
HAYS: I think that we need to take a good look at who we are and who we represent and where we want to move forward. And I think that we, a lot of times, cater, just like people do in the primaries. You get the most extreme of candidates when you don't have a primary. And I don't necessarily think that's where the electorate is.
And think that that's the trouble.
HUNT: How much of this, do you think, is cultural? Like, one of the things that especially stood out to me, and Brad, I know, obviously, you were doing all this work in Pennsylvania. But when we started to see the margins for Trump in kind of the rural areas in Pennsylvania, kind of the red middle of the state, that were better for him in 2024 than they were in '20, I was looking at Montgomery, Chester, Delaware County.
Suburban women, right, often relatively well off, compared to other areas. Often moderate, perhaps used to vote Republican; don't tolerate Trump. Her margins in those areas were not coming in ahead of where Joe Biden was. They weren't giving her enough.
And I think the question I had about that was how much of it, of that -- because, again, a lot of those people are not feeling the effects of inflation and the economy the same way working-class people are. But they still weren't coming out for her enough.
How much of that is about some of the cultural divides in -- that the Democratic Party has played into, in the cultural ways they have moved to the left?
HAYS: I think it's massive. I think that Joe Biden had a unique -- it was a different time with COVID. It was a very different time. But I think that Joe Biden had a unique way of connecting with people, because he came across more as a working-class person.
He was from -- people thought he was from Pennsylvania. He just connected differently. But also, it was a different time, so I don't want to, like, go too much into he was the, you know, Uncle Joe stereotype there. But I do think we -- the Democratic Party needs to really evaluate,
like, how far left are we going to go? Are we going to stay in the center? Because the country is telling us they are in the center.
TODD: I think -- I think you're really onto something. And I think -- I think it would be a mistake for Democrats to have this decide. Is this Kamala's fault or Joe Biden's fault?
Now, it's the faculty at universities' fault. It is the education curriculum's fault.
You had moms voting for a guy they did not like in Donald Trump, because they don't like what's in the schoolbooks that come home. They don't like the fact that this -- there's an entire left-wing world view that has invaded so much of the language coming from the left. There -- it's not -- it doesn't square with them.
And they want to be able to educate their kids the way they were educated.
And I think the cultural revolution that Democrats have just allowed to happen in their institutions that you finally just saw middle-class people, even who weren't thrilled with Republicans. I mean, Republicans can over read this, too. But they just rebelled. That's what it was.
That's why you saw Donald Trump win with moms. You saw him win with married women. That's why you saw him increase his margins with suburban women. It was just across the board, and it's deeper than Kamala or Joe.
[06:10:09]
HAYS: I just think when you -- when you are doing well, and your paycheck is -- and you can afford groceries, and you can afford all these things, those things become second nature to you.
But then, when you can't afford those things, everything becomes much more extreme and much more magnified. So that's --
DOVERE: Among undecided voters, one of the things that was coming up in focus groups is that they were hearing from people to say, what do you think Republicans or Donald Trump? What do you think of Democrats, Kamala Harris?
And it was basically coming down to, again, undecided voters. People who had voted for Trump or Biden, both, saying they thought Donald Trump was a little crazy. Republicans were a little crazy.
But they thought Democrats and Harris were preachy. And they felt better about going with the crazy that they knew in their construction of it, than with going with Democrats who made them feel bad about how they are.
TODD: Kamala also sounds like she's running for the faculty Senate. She didn't -- she doesn't sound like she's running for working-class America. And I don't think she had much experience sort of pursuing that voter.
Joe Biden did, for instance. In Pennsylvania, I can tell you, during the Senate race, we were relieved when Biden left the ticket, because Biden did know how to speak to those voters. He was unpopular. The administration was unpopular, but he could connect with them. She couldn't.
HUNT: Brad, you said that Republicans shouldn't make the mistake of over reading?
TODD: For sure.
HUNT: Expand.
TODD: Well, this was a huge victory for Republicans, and it's a huge opportunity for us to build out this coalition of what I call the party of work. Right?
It's -- we have new people who haven't voted for Republicans before who have -- but that shouldn't. We shouldn't intake that they agree with us on everything. Right? We're going to have to pay very close attention to this. It's going to require a lot of discipline from us in Congress, which discipline is not our forte in Congress.
HUNT: You don't say.
TODD: So, we're going to have to, like, really look and try to pass some meaningful things and actually function.
You know, we succeed a lot of times about stopping things. We're going to have to do a couple of things here. I don't think we need to look -- think like Democrats do and say we'll use the government to solve everyone's problem.
But we do need to prove we can run the railroad a little bit. And I think we'll have to, you know, try to find a way to reach out to people who didn't do this enthusiastically.
HUNT: Yes.
TODD: Right? There are people who voted for Republicans because they felt like they had to. That's going to be a pretty key audience for us.
HUNT: Really fascinating point. Governing is hard is going to become the mantra of things we're covering here, day in and day out.
All right. Straight ahead here on CNN THIS MORNING, Trump's legal battles, or lack thereof? The president-elect facing sentencing in New York in less than three weeks.
Plus, the GOP trifecta. Why Republicans are growing more confident by the hour that they will win control of the House, too.
And Howard Dean is here. The former DNC chairman and presidential candidate will tell us why he thinks election night went so terribly wrong for Democrats.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HOWARD DEAN, FORMER DNC CHAIRMAN, FORMER DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We're going to South Dakota, and Oregon, and Washington, and Michigan. And then we're going to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House! Yeah!
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[06:16:49]
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TRUMP: The real verdict is going to be November 5 by the people.
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HUNT: "November 5th by the people." The president-elect of the United States, who you saw there, does have a sentencing hearing scheduled for later this month in New York, because he was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up the hush-money payment during the 2016 campaign to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Trump's legal team already moving to have the sentencing canceled. New York Attorney General Letitia James says she's ready to fight back.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LETITIA JAMES, NEW YORK ATTORNEY GENERAL: If possible, we will work with his administration, but we will not compromise our values, or our integrity, or our principles. We did not expect this result, but we are prepared to respond to this result.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: Trump also facing federal charges in cases in D.C. and Florida. And of course, he threatened to fire Special Counsel Jack Smith, quote, "in two seconds" if he won. Smith is now in discussions with the DOJ, exploring ways to wind down the two criminal cases.
So, what happens next? Listen to our Elie Honig, to sum it up.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ELIE HONIG, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: So, we're going to hear a lot of fascinating, scholarly, constitutional arguments over the next few weeks, about how this goes. Let me just cut to the bottom line: all four of these cases are done, effectively.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: "All four of these cases are done, effectively." Elliot Williams, do you agree? WILLIAMS: I agree. And it's important to think of them as four different cases, sort of in two buckets, right? You have the state cases and federal cases. And frankly, the former -- former, soon to be president, was quite good at lumping them all together into one big, sort of oppressive state coming after him.
Now, the federal cases, there are two being brought by Jack Smith. One in Florida, one in Washington, D.C. One for documents, one for interfering with the 2020 election. Those are gone. Because once the president comes in, as he said, he's going to, quote unquote, "fire Jack Smith." Remove Jack Smith, the prosecutor, at the top of them. Those, in effect, go away.
And that's why you're hearing about Jack Smith right now, trying to figure out how to wind down those cases.
The state cases are a little bit trickier, simply because they exist outside of the operation of the federal government. And state prosecutors can still bring charges and try to lock up a president of the United States. I just don't think any court is going to allow a sitting president of the United States to be, certainly, prosecuted and certainly sentenced while he's president. It just -- as a practical matter, no court, federal or state, is really going to allow that.
HUNT: And Meghan, I mean, when I was listening to Letitia James just there, she's clearly angry. It seems like she's angry about the election result. Is she taking away any kind of -- the way you've started to understand what the lesson was here? I mean, do you think people would tolerate her moving forward with this?
HAYS: No. And I also think that he -- he's the president-elect, and he has duties to do as the president. And I'm not sure that it's good for all us to sit here and talk about his sentencing and all the other things that are going to be happening.
And I just do -- is it fair? No. But is it what probably needs to move on for the country? Yes.
[06:20:03]
WILLIAMS: Yes, I -- yes, I would differ a little bit, only insofar as it's still a pending prosecution that a prosecutor has brought, that a grand jury has blessed and so on. And simply saying, well, we don't really feel like going forward with it, I don't know if that's the best approach.
But what I think in practice happens is, just keep trying to bring it, and a court will eventually say that it can't proceed. And I think that's the right way, rather than just throw your hands up.
TODD: I think Tish James and -- and Juan Merchan, and Alvin Bragg have to, like, also think about the fact that they serve, and they prosecute other people, based on the trust they get from the public and the authority they've been invested with.
And I don't know how you can look at New York's election results --
HUNT: You can say, we were talking about New York's election results.
TODD: -- and conclude, you know, Donald Trump gets 38 percent in Queens. Well, you know, guess what? That's -- these people run in Queens, too. It's --
HUNT: Meghan, you were raising a very interesting point.
HAYS: Because I don't -- the one thing I do have trouble with is he was found guilty by 12 people on a jury, and those are of your peers. And I don't understand how you don't have consequences for that. That is not a prosecutor. That was a jury found him guilty. So, that -- that's where I have a little bit of trouble, just in general, of our justice system.
But I don't know how you sentence him when he's president-elect.
TODD: They chose to bring these charges in an election environment.
WILLIAMS: Sure.
TODD: They put -- they put the American --
HAYS: Totally. That's a whole -- that's a different conversation. But he was found guilty by 12 people.
WILLIAMS: They took years to bring them to trial and dragged their feet, and so on. I just don't buy the argument that, well, because he did well in the electorate, therefore, people aren't going to bless prosecutions.
We cannot be in a situation where we are grafting political polling onto whether prosecutions ought to move forward or not. I mean, I just think Republicans get prosecuted in Republican jurisdictions all the time.
TODD: For sure.
WILLIAMS: And that's OK. I just don't think that, if somebody did well in Queens, he should walk (ph) here.
TODD: The choice was made to involve the electorate in these prosecutions by the prosecutors. When they waited as long as they waited, when they pushed it as far as they pushed it, they asked for this to be -- influence the election.
Well, now the election will influence the prosecution.
HAYS: Well, but he was found guilty by 12 people. And that's where I have -- like, future prosecutions, fine. But what about the one that he was actually found guilty for by a jury of his peers?
TODD: Seventy-seven percent of the American people think it was a political prosecution.
HAYS: But that doesn't matter. Twelve people found him guilty. That's the problem.
WILLIAMS: And somebody just -- people -- people might support Ted Bundy. People might support serial killers. But it doesn't matter if the system finds them guilty.
HUNT: At the end of the day, the judge has enormous power here. Right? And how does the judge consider all of these questions?
WILLIAMS: Is it in the public interest to proceed with this matter? Now, there is a standing conviction, right now, and a scheduled sentencing. He -- he ought to go through with it. Now, he has to decide on the day of, and say, well, I'm going to postpone this until after inauguration day.
It will be odd for him now, after a verdict, to throw the whole thing out.
I really do think you just let it play out, recognizing that he will not end up in jail as president of the United States. He won't. The courts won't allow it.
HUNT: All right. Coming up here on CNN THIS MORNING, Howard Dean, the former Democratic governor of Vermont, joins us to discuss what comes next for his party after sweeping Democratic losses Tuesday night.
Plus, progress is never linear. Mark McKinnon on how he's speaking to his daughters after he says their dreams of the first female president were dashed.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[06:27:12]
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: John Kerry and John Edwards both voted for the war. Then Dick Gephardt voted to spend another $87 billion on Iraq. Howard Dean has a different view.
DEAN: I opposed the war in Iraq, and I'm against spending another $87 billion there. I'm Howard Dean, and I approved this message, because our party and our country need new leadership.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: That was vintage Howard Dean, the former Democratic presidential candidate, back in 2004, calling for a change in party leadership as he mounted one of politics' first true online grassroots campaigns.
Now 20 years later, Democrats are left seeking the same fresh leadership as they enter a second Trump presidency. They don't have a clear leader or a plan.
Now Democratic lawmakers are trying to figure out what this means for the party going forward.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DINGELL: I mean, to be very blunt, as Democrats, we've got to do some soul-searching.
BOYLE: We have to be honest as Democrats. We do have a problem connecting with working-class voters. This started to emerge about a decade ago, and it was focused on white working-class areas. That has now spread.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: Joining us now, former presidential candidate, the former governor of Vermont and former DNC chairman, Howard Dean.
Governor, very good to see you. Thank you so much for being here.
DEAN: I'm chuckling at the -- chuckling at the old vintage footage.
HUNT: It's great, right? I know.
DEAN: Yes.
HUNT: I -- I remember attending --
DEAN: I'd vote -- I'd vote for me.
HUNT: I was in college, naturally. Showing my age a little bit. But I remember attending some of your events, as well as some of your competitors' at the time.
This moment, I mean, you also went on to run the 50-state strategy at the DNC. And you kind of took what Democrats were doing then and tried to make it something that you could argue with across the country.
And obviously, it came down to seven swing states. But we're now in a situation where the Democratic message clearly failed in a broad and deep way. I mean, we're talking about Queens and New Jersey and the margins that Republicans ran up in those very traditionally blue places.
How do you diagnose the problem that was clearly revealed on election day? And what should Democrats do about it?
DEAN: The problem is, we haven't done a damn thing since 2008 about getting out into the grassroots. The Washington -- I always call Washington middle school on steroids, because they work hard, they're very smart, and it's all about them all the time.
You have to -- this goes to the 50-state strategy, which has never been implemented. This goes to being on the ground.
The Democratic Party ought to be putting a lot of money into school board races and into city council races, and into local representative races, including in very red states. And they're not doing that.
[06:30:00]
