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CNN Live Event/Special

Nail-Biter Election Comes Down to Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. Aired 5-5:30a ET

Aired November 04, 2020 - 05:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[05:00:01]

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN HOST: Oh, we have it, OK.

Go ahead. And?

JULIETTA HENRY, MILWAUKEE COUNTY ELECTIONS DIRECTOR: And Donald Trump received 134,355 which was 29.28 percent.

CUOMO: OK. So we're basically there on that. What about remaining outstanding vote in the other counties, ma'am?

HENRY: We do not have that information. I can only report for Milwaukee County.

CUOMO: Do you have any scoop for us in terms of when we may find it out?

HENRY: I don't know but I know that we're hoping everything will be done within the next three hours, but I do know, I -- we did speak to someone in Green Bay. They are at least an hour behind us.

CUOMO: And you are absolutely sure that you have all the ballots counted, there is no X factor, there's nothing else you're waiting on? And in that context, did everything go according to your plan? The dirty word, "irregularities", any to speak of?

HENRY: No, there weren't any irregularities in Milwaukee County. We were anticipating finishing up tonight between 3:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., and I think we're right on target with the 4:00 completion time.

CUOMO: Nothing else? No other ballots to be counted?

HENRY: There will be provisionary ballots and the clerks have reported those. They should be on their website. They reported those to the state.

Those ballots will be counted -- they have until Friday at 4:00 p.m. to count those ballots and return them to our office.

CUOMO: All right.

HENRY: And that will be a part of the official -- this is the unofficial results that you're receiving right now. CUOMO: Yes. Unofficial results but helpful. So, thank you.

And what is that remaining number of ballots that have until Friday to be counted?

HENRY: I don't have that number yet.

CUOMO: OK.

HENRY: And we will know it in the morning when the clerks submit all of those files to us.

CUOMO: All right. Thank you so much. I know it's been a long night. I know being on TV isn't your job and that's not what's going to be exciting right now, but thank you for giving us an unofficial number, that we can help people understand the context of such an important piece of a major election.

Thank you very much and, again, thank you for everything that you did with your team.

HENRY: Thank you so much.

CUOMO: All right. So, just to put a little button on it. She said it is all in. This is the 100 percent except for a group of ballots they're waiting to --

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Provisionals.

CUOMO: Provisionals until Friday. What is a provisional ballot?

MATTINGLY: Well, I think what's going to be interesting, first, is what can we do before the provisionals, right?

Provisionals, you count afterwards. Every state has different rules in terms of how the provisionals operate. But this is where we stand in Milwaukee County right now. look, the lead has now shrunk for Joe Biden. It's under 10,000 votes. We're waiting to see.

She just mentioned that brown county should be coming in within the next hour or so. So that's the next thing we want to keep a keen eye on. We want to see what happens tonight and then you start dealing with provisionals.

CUOMO: Provisionals is, hey, you're sure you're here? You're not in the book. Your address doesn't match up. Fill out the ballot. We'll figure out if it's a legitimate one to be counted later.

Every state does the same thing. That's that bundle. Every state will have that quotient.

So, Phil is right to focus on this part. Is this number too fragile to hold?

MATTINGLY: Don't know. We don't know. The beauty of this is what we can show you. What we can show you is

what's outstanding. The biggest unanswered question when you start to take things down, particularly when Milwaukee County is in, it was the biggest outstanding vote, is the composition. Should find out about Brown County over the course of the next hour. That's what we were told. We know that Green Bay is a significant chunk.

CUOMO: A third of the vote waiting there. You have about 95,000 votes, so you have 30,000 votes?

MATTINGLY: Right.

CUOMO: That are still going to come in in a red county.

MATTINGLY: If those votes come in at 56/41, Donald Trump's a happy guy. That puts him over where Joe Biden is now.

CUOMO: Yeah.

MATTINGLY: Again, the wild card here, this isn't just Wisconsin, it's also in Michigan, it's also in Pennsylvania, is, is the composition because it's heavily mail, heavily absentee, is it primarily driven Democratic because they've been voting heavily mail, heavily absentee? Is it not just the entire country, but is it heavily centered in Green Bay, and is it heavily mail?

Then all of a sudden, just because it's a red county, where Donald Trump is ahead by 14 points doesn't mean that's going to have any bearing whatsoever on the composition of what comes in.

So, what we know at this point in time is the counties with the most outstanding vote, including Brown, including Kenosha, which is still 30 percent outstanding right now, these are Republican counties as it currently stands. These are both counties that Donald Trump won back in 2016.

However, we know Donald Trump won Kenosha County by less than a percentage point. Right now Donald Trump is leading in Kenosha by 21 points.

[05:05:01]

CUOMO: So, let's get a little context from Kristen Holmes. She's looking at this at the voting desk.

How can you help us understand the situation?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, I think I have some answers for you on Brown County. Now, we have not gotten numbers in for several hours. We thought we were going to learn between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. It is now 5:00 a.m.

What we know is outstanding is at least 32,000 absentee mail-in ballots. There are also some in-person ballots mixed in there, but this goes to exactly what we have been waiting to hear. What kind of ballots. Just like Phil was saying, are these. If they are absentee ballots,

will they swing the way we have seen the votes in Wisconsin and across the country swing, which is for Biden? So, that is the big question here. But this does give us some clarity as to what is waiting to be counted or what is waiting to be revealed to us.

We believe that they were supposed to give us results again, between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m.. But that is what is outstanding now. So, at least 32,000 absentee votes. As we know, this does not mean it's the case with these votes. But we do know that overall, Biden supporters tend to favor mail-in voting whereas Trump supporters tend to be the day off.

We are told there are some day of mixed in here, too. But the big number 32,000 at least absentee ballots.

CUOMO: All right. Thank you very much, Kristen. Appreciate it.

So, if that's 32,000 and he gets 56 percent of them, that puts him at 17, 18,000 votes. That puts him over the margin except for the net to Biden, you have one hell of a close race.

MATTINGLY: It's extremely close.

CUOMO: It could be a 22,000 vote win for the president but not necessarily depending.

MATTINGLY: Again, Kristen made the key point. These are 32,000 vote by mail. Absentee. So absentee, even in the most Republican counties have skewed Democratic.

And so, we just -- you cannot extrapolate off what this 32,000 is beyond the fact we know that's the outstanding vote. When it comes in, we'll be able to say break down the 32,000, how did it come in, what did it do for the margins? Beyond that, we're in wait and see mode about how this comes in.

And wait and see mode when there's only 9,000 ballots separating the two candidates in a presidential election is waiting in the wings, that's pretty darn important wait and see.

CUOMO: Right. So, let's put some more heads to it. So, keep thinking about it. Let me know what we have. So, you're at 9,000 votes, what's the number, Phil, 9,673.

So, Harry, help us understand this. Give us a little context. This state wasn't supposed to be anything like this. The president won by 22,000 votes. There was an entirely set of expectations. I'm not breaking your chops about it.

HARRY ENTEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL WRITER AND ANALYST: Please do.

CUOMO: How did we get here? What changed?

ENTEN: I mean, look. It just seems to me that the polling did not accurately reflect what was occurring in these Midwestern battleground states, right? It was that Ann Selzer poll came out. Oh, that's strange. Had Donald Trump up by 7 in the state of Iowa. And we said, if that goes across the state line into Wisconsin, we could be dealing with a much closer race than anticipated, because those two states, voting patterns are very highly correlated.

Turns out that was right. But at the end of the day, Joe Biden is still ahead there right now. That may shift around a little bit, but he's ahead right now, so it is what -- you know, it's --

CUOMO: Don't say it is what it is.

ENTEN: I stopped myself.

CUOMO: I'll tell you why you can't say it. If it's 9,000 votes, and I totally understand what Phil is saying and Kristen accentuated about the preference with mail-in ballots to Democrat registration, how does he hold on to a lead if all of the remaining boxes are red?

ENTEN: If that's green bay, they went for Hillary Clinton. Then you add on top of that fact that it's mail voting, which is even more Democratic, I actually can make the argument that I think Biden's lead is going to expand. I'm not saying that's necessarily going to be the case, but that seems to me to be a very potential possibility.

And I'm wondering, I know Phil is not there right now. Is that taking into account the Kenosha vote that is still out? If it isn't --

CUOMO: No.

ENTEN: If it isn't, I think Biden's lead and our official count could grow on top of that.

CUOMO: It does not include Kenosha because that's a separate count.

ENTEN: No, I know that, I'm talking about the statewide count in Wisconsin. I'm talking about the statewide count in Wisconsin right now, do we have all of Kenosha in, Phil?

CUOMO: No.

ENTEN: No. I would think that vote by mail, which we believe that's what's left out there, could expand his margin even more?

CUOMO: Do you agree?

MARK PRESTON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Look it, he's the forecaster. He knows the numbers.

But I would say this, we knew this was going to happen. We knew that was going to take some time to count these votes. We haven't seen anything nefarious, you know, at this point. If you do look at those numbers --

CUOMO: The county clerk said Milwaukee went exactly as expected. The only ballots left are provisionals which everybody has as part of the bundle. I have been a provisional ballot before when I voted. So the count we expected, okay? It takes time.

[05:10:01]

The race being like this we did not expect, right? Part of the bravado of Biden was that he was 5, 6, 7 points in Wisconsin, no more. 9,600 votes is separating the two right now.

PRESTON: You know what's going to happen? There's going to be a dissection of this presidential race 16 trillion times about how this was run.

But one of the big pieces will be did Joe Biden by not going on the campaign trail in the final week, by not doing a mad dash, we saw Donald Trump go to Georgia, right? Just a couple of days ago.

He went to Rome, Georgia. Now, I was a newspaper reporter down there. Rome, Georgia, is extremely conservative. He went there and riled up his base.

Maybe that might help him carry Georgia. We don't know yet. But we did see Donald Trump out there really trying to fight for every vote at the end.

Joe Biden, they didn't put him out there and that's going to be looked at.

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER: There likely was maybe some closing near the end. The polls suggested that Biden would do much better in some of the Sun Belt states. You had Donald Trump out there in those big rallies.

We talked about them as a health risk, they certainly were, but they certainly probably moved to motivate those voters in those states, in those regions where he worked, particularly those rural, white voters.

It also seems like just maybe the swelling voters that people were predicting, African-American turnout seems like it was about equal, at least according to the exit polls. It doesn't seem like there was a big swell from 2016. We'll have to wait and see.

But a lot of the dynamics that we were talking about, Biden's overwhelming strangle hold with college educated whites, Biden's strength with seniors doesn't seem to have shown up in the way that the polls predicted it would.

CUOMO: We had him plus eight at CNN. "The New York Times" had him plus 11.

I don't know that Trump was ever leading in a poll in Wisconsin against Biden.

ENTEN: Not any poll that CNN would allow to be published on our website or put on air, that's for sure. I should point out again, given what we saw in Milwaukee, that just

gives you an understanding of the difference between the people who are voting in person on election day, and that vote by mail. And that's something to keep in mind as this shifts to Michigan, Pennsylvania, even down in Georgia where there's Fulton County returns which is vote by mail. That's still out.

So, the idea that Joe Biden can't make up the ground in Michigan and Pennsylvania seems to me to be an incorrect assumption. These races are very competitive at this point.

You know what, Chris, at the end of the day it's the scoreboard and right now, Joe Biden still has more electoral votes given to him, at least projected by CNN than Donald Trump does. To me, his pathway to 270 is quite clear at this hour. Of course, so is Trump's.

But at this point, Joe Biden's bid for the presidency is very much still alive.

CUOMO: Feels like Trump is in command of the probabilities here, does it not?

PRESTON: Yeah. Well, and he's in charge of the narrative in many ways. Him going out and giving that speech was widely condemned across --

CUOMO: Hurt himself because he put a shadow on the legitimacy of a count that may well wind up benefitting him.

PRESTON: Yeah, but for him, I think we all know he doesn't care. He doesn't care if he is contradicted down the road.

What he did just a few hours ago was that he riled up his base. There is going to be concern. Give it a few hours. Let's see how all of this shakes out, but let's see really when people wake up, let's talk around the noon tomorrow and let's see what the state of the nation is, because I do think that it's going to be a little bit more fraught than it was Tuesday.

CUOMO: Well, it all depends on what the numbers are up on the board. If the president loses Wisconsin, that is a huge if, these numbers are so slim.

Good news, Wisconsin should give us information within the next couple of hours. As people are waking up across the country, it should really be down to about three states that you're looking at.

Let's bring in Kaitlan Collins, obviously, at the White House covering those comments.

Any backing off of them after he left the podium as is sometimes the case? Are they saying, oh, yeah, yeah, fraud, that's what this is?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: No backing off. This is what they were waiting to do for weeks now. Basically, they thought that President Trump was going to look like he

was ahead and then as the mail-in ballots came in it was going to potentially tip it in Joe Biden's favor. This is basically what the president's campaign aides had been planning on happening. I don't think they expected it happening as quickly as the president was prematurely claiming victory. That is primarily what the president denied a few days ago to reporters that he was going to do.

He said he would not come out and declare victory before it was time. Now he has done that with votes still being counted. And the question, of course, is the criticism we're seeing from the president's own allies. As Mark Preston was just pointing out, people like Chris Christie is talking about how unwise what the president said in the wee hours of morning truly were.

[05:15:05]

And you saw how it stood in stark contrast to what the vice president was saying, who was saying, we're going to be vigilant and let the votes continued to be counted. That's not what President Trump said. He basically argued that he wants votes to be continued counted in places where he is down to Joe Biden, but he doesn't want them to be continued to be counted in places where he is ahead of Joe Biden. He is going to be looking at states like Wisconsin, as these votes are coming in, we're seeing the absentee ballots and numbers coming in with Biden now taking the lead in Wisconsin. It is so stunning to see what the president did, Chris, even though it was really entirely predictable based on what he's been saying over the last few days.

CUOMO: All right. Kaitlan, I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Let me know if anything changes in terms of when we're expecting to hear from the president next. That will be really important because he is going to try to mess with the state of play. That's what he does is to try to play to advantage.

I can't stress this enough. Presidents, even if they're running for a second term, their challengers, they don't determine when an election is over. The process does. That's why it's very dangerous to mess with the legitimacy of a process.

But just know this. This is not about any state or county discovering they had votes that hadn't been counted, OK? Every single aspect of this dynamic of this election has been according to the process as normal, all right?

We're going to take a break right now. More information has just come in about Wisconsin. There has been a change. Joe Biden is in the lead by the smallest amount of votes we've seen tonight, under 10,000. Will it hold?

We will see around we will see sooner than we expected. In an hour or so, we should have an answer about Wisconsin and that will have huge implications for this race.

Stay with our continuing coverage. Stay with CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:21:03]

CUOMO: All right. CNN will bring you a key race alert here. We have Wisconsin that has had a recent change. It just changed again. It's 10 electoral votes are up for grabs and it is the thinnest margin of a major state that we've seen tonight. 8,442 votes separate Biden and Trump. 49.3. 49.0. 89 percent of the estimated vote has come in.

The key part of the story here is the big Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee has 100 percent reported except for provisional ballots, which are not relevant to the analysis.

So, the rest of the vote is in red counties. Then it's all for Trump. No. Maybe not. Why? Because it is predominantly mail-in ballots and those ballots broke unequally for Democrats. How unequally? We don't know. That's why we're watching.

Michigan, 16 electoral votes. 217,000 votes here. You know, a mountain compared to what's happening in Wisconsin. However, 78 percent of that estimated vote, they're big chunks in big areas that Democrats can make up a lot.

Now here is a state that you haven't heard about tonight but there have been a lot of whispers that it could matter here -- Nevada.

All right? Here's why. Six electoral votes, Biden had been up like 25,000, 27,000 votes. Now only 11,000 votes, 85 percent of the estimated vote has come in. We just got a big group of votes from Clark County, which is the home of Las Vegas.

Let's go over to Phil Mattingly. That was expected to usually be a Democratic strong hold. Not now, brought the margin down.

MATTINGLY: Now, Clark has to be the fire wall, right? Clark, home of Las Vegas. This is the biggest county in the state, 72 percent of the population lives in Clark.

If you're a Democrat, you want to roll in Clark and roll out leading by 10 percent, maybe 11 percent traditionally. Right now, with 84 percent reporting, Joe Biden is no longer up by 10 percent. He was until the latest batch of Clark came in.

Now, here's what we don't know about Clark as it stands. With the latest batch, did it include mail? We still know there's 16 percent outstanding.

However, if you look at this right now, Joe Biden 11,000 votes ahead in the state of Nevada. A lot of people throughout the course of the night have been giving Nevada to Democrats assuming they have had a pretty good strangle hold over the last couple of cycles would figure out a way to do it. They always because of Clark County. Figure out a way to do it. This

is close. This is close. I kind of want to go through, if you don't mind, I'll dig back into the map in a second, is go through where things stand. Everything you're looking at has been called, right?

So, Joe Biden 224 electoral votes, Donald Trump 213 electoral votes. We can go ahead and pretty much assume Donald Trump is going to win the state of Alaska. You can, right now, we'll just say for the sake for argument, because he's leading, give him North Carolina.

You give Joe Biden the state of Maine. These aren't called yet but as we can just -- as we try and game this out a little bit. Not going to give Maine, too, yet, because we don't have a final answer. And what does that leave you?

Well, Democrats feel comfortable about where they lead right now in Arizona. But, this is a key but, what happens if Nevada flips red? Talk about pathways here. What is Donald Trump's pathway if Nevada flips red? Well, he wins Pennsylvania and he wins Michigan, guess what? That's it. He can lose Wisconsin. He can even lose Georgia, which we won't have an answer to for a couple of hours.

If he wins Nevada, Donald Trump's pathway gets noticeably easier. Wins Pennsylvania where he's currently up by 650,000 votes. Obviously, a lot of votes outstanding, not making any declarations here. Just saying, Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Biden wins Michigan, Biden wins Wisconsin, Donald Trump wins Georgia, and all of a sudden, Georgia, Pennsylvania, within reach, and Nevada, and Donald Trump is over 270 electoral votes.

[05:25:10]

I'm not saying that's not where it's going, I'm just saying if you start to game this out, Nevada could throw a huge, a huge wrench into the Biden campaign's plans.

So, that's where things stand, right now. You're seeing late vote come in in Clark County. That has narrowed Joe Biden's lead with 85 percent reporting, now leading by a percentage point, 11,000 votes. We've been talking about Wisconsin. We've been talking about Michigan.

We've been waiting for Pennsylvania. We're still waiting for Georgia. Nevada just threw us a little bit of a curveball. Wait to see how that plays out in the next couple of hours.

CUOMO: So, what are we waiting on in Nevada? How much more outstanding are we looking at here and what could it mean? So, what are we looking for?

MATTINGLY: So, about 85 percent reporting right now. Look, the biggest counties is where you're looking for most. And this is traditionally a Democratic county, and Democrats want to have a pretty good margin here. And I think the big question right now, again, 72 percent of the vote coming out of Clark County, 84 percent reporting right now, 16 percent outstanding. The big question right now is composition. The big question is

composition. Is it mail? Is it in person? What are they waiting to count right now that's not in yet? Will this margin start to grow yet?

CUOMO: And, obviously, we're asking these questions, but so are our reporters and in the control room, do we have any indication of what they're going to tell us anything? And we're just at their mercy in terms of when they put -- all right, we're at their mercy in terms of when they put information out.

I don't mean that cynically. I mean, that's way it is with most states. So, it will come when it comes. That's why we're going to keep covering it for you.

So we're waiting on 15 percent of the vote. A majority of it we think is in Clark or no?

MATTINGLY: Well, yes, just because of the size of the state but -- the size of the county. I want to tick through here to give some context as to why Clark and Washoe are so important in the state. Donald Trump wins the rurals and he blows them out of the water.

Look at this, Lincoln County, 87 percent of the reporting, but look at the vote.

CUOMO: Right, 85 percent.

MATTINGLY: The vote, right, 1,200, 1,300 votes. Now, granted, it's gotten very tight. All of a sudden, the rurals matter a whole lot more when you move out of the state.

But let's see what's outstanding in Washoe right now. Joe Biden with an edge in Washoe County, which is traditionally the tossup county. You know, Clark usually goes Democrat, Washoe, we'll see where that goes.

But tick back to 2016, Hillary Clinton won it. Hillary Clinton won it, but she won it very narrowly. Joe Biden has a bigger lead there. If there's 11 percent of Washoe left to come in, does that come in to Joe Biden?

Again, it's the same story, different state, different counties, different composition. What kind of vote is coming in is just as important as where that vote is coming in.

CUOMO: You know, it's 5:27. It's 5:30 in the morning here on the East Coast, so it's 2:00 in the morning there. Let's work the phones a little bit and see if we can get more information on what's happening in Nevada because, look, all of these states that are in play matter but we need to know this or the rest of the analysis falls by the way side.

So, we've run out of information, which means we've run out of analysis.

Don, we're going to make some calls and see if we can get an official to give us guidance about what's going to happen and when, but these margins are getting awfully thin, awfully fast?

DON LEMON, CNN HOST: Probably going to get hang-ups because people are there working really hard, Chris, to try to get this vote. Hope we don't get hang-ups but this is nuts.

I'm going to get you to folks who can talk about it better than I can, and that is Andrew Yang, S.E. Cupp and John Avlon.

Thank you all for joining us. Good to see all of you.

You look nervous.

ANDREW YANG, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: It was a tough night for math. It's a tough night for Democrats. I spent the night talking to half a dozen congressional candidates. They were strong, inspired candidates who raised a lot of money, had a lot of grassroots support and they lost. They lost in many cases by much wider margins than they could ever have foreseen.

You're seeing over performance very consistently by Republican congressional candidates in places like Iowa, Nebraska, Houston, Austin, Texas, that were supposed to be going purple. And this is going to cast to me like a pall over even if Joe does eke out this win, because you'd expect Congress to work with. It looks like Republicans may expand their majority or at least keep a majority in the Senate and maybe even gain a few seats in the House.

LEMON: This is what you do. Why?

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I mean, look, first of all, let me say we've been talking about election week for a long while. So I think everybody understands or should have understood that Donald Trump could look strongest right around this time of day.

Now to Andrew's point, what the polling did not pick up is that Trump is outperforming and that more voters came out, especially in a lot of these purple districts. Everyone has to keep their powder dry, but this isn't over until everything is cast. And remember, in 2018 midterms, it was initially, these Democrats gains were dismissed as sort of a blue trickle.

LEMON: As the days came on --

AVLON: It became a blue tsunami in the words.