Return to Transcripts main page
CNN Live Event/Special
CNN Has Projected Joe Biden To Be Next President Of The United States; Pennsylvania And Nevada Called For Joe Biden, Providing Him With Necessary Electoral College Votes To Become President-Elect; Control Of U.S. Senate Uncertain As Two Georgia Senate Races Move To Run-Offs; Republicans Gain Seats In House Of Representatives While Democrat Retain Majority; Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) Is Interviewed On Joe Biden Becoming Democratic President-Elect. Aired 2-3p ET
Aired November 07, 2020 - 14:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[14:00:00]
DAVID AXELROD, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: And it had a tremendous effect. We talked, we should celebrate the incredible turnout that came out. But he drove it. And he drove his people out, and he drove his opponents out. And what you're seeing here is a sense of relief that that pressure valve has been --
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: You're saying it goes beyond just --
AXELROD: It's not just. With Obama, it was very much about him. In this case it's about Joe Biden, but it's also about the end of a period that many people felt brutally inconsistent with their view of the way it should work.
Let me just say one thing, Gloria. On all this conjecture about what Trump will do and will he -- he has not conformed to any of these rules, laws, norms, institutions of our democracy. I don't anticipate he will now. But the real question is, Jeff Zeleny said there's going to be a task force, a coronavirus task force named Monday by Biden. What level of cooperation are they going to get from the government that is in place now and for the next two months? There are all these substantive things and work that needs to be done. And it is --
COOPER: That is the tradition, that there's cooperation.
AXELROD: When we made the transition from Obama to Bush, in every conceivable way, there was coordination between the Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration. And it wasn't because they were ideologically together on everything. It was because that is how it's supposed to work. And this is really, really important. Honestly, I would love to see President Trump display a regard for these rules and laws and norms that he hasn't for four years. I'm not anticipating that, but I'm very concerned about what the absence of this cooperation could mean, particularly in the midst of a public health crisis.
GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: I think what you might have is people like Tony Fauci and Deborah Birx cooperating on their own and deciding to make themselves very available, make all their information very available to the Biden task force, because they obviously have disagreed with what this administration has done. I don't think the Biden task force will be asking Dr. Scott Atlas any time to go sit in on their meetings. So in that sense, I think there may be cooperation.
AXELROD: They may have a lot of time, because if the reports are true, they may be out of work.
BORGER: They may be out.
I want to add one thing about Jimmy Carter sending out this congratulations. I'm waiting for George W. Bush, because Jimmy Carter, Donald Trump has never been a member in good standing at the presidents' club. We all know that. We all know he doesn't like any of them. He's tweeted about them, particularly, Bush. And the question is, at some point, or at what point, I should ask, will George W. Bush come out and congratulate Joe Biden?
He did not participate or endorse in this campaign, which was telling in and of itself. But so long as these legal challenges are going on, the question that I have is about a lot of Republicans, but including the former president, when is he going to come out and say, OK, you lost. Joe Biden won, and I need to congratulate him, because as David is saying, in his own transition, he was so remarkable with the Obama administration. And clearly, he understands how important this transition is. And I'm just wondering whether he's going to put his them on the scale and say, you know what, he won.
RICK SANTORUM, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I don't know of any president who's been more apolitical since he left office than George W. Bush.
BORGER: But it's not a political statement.
SANTORUM: The point is, he didn't go out and campaign for his brother when his brother was running for president. So let's just put that in context here, that to sort of now turn to George W. Bush as someone who is going to set the tone, George W. Bush when he -- and I've met with him a few times, not many times, but a few times, and he is done. He's done. And so don't look, I'm just saying, don't look for him to sort of put, step into this moment.
BORGER: So is he going to wait?
SANTORUM: Because it's been very clear he's not -- he's letting the country go its own way, and he's not going to be putting the stamp on it one way or the other. That's number one.
Number two, these celebrations, which is an opportunity in my opinion, I'm not saying this to be critical -- they're not about Joe Biden. They're about Donald Trump. Let's just -- it's releasing the pressure. The oppression is over, and all the things that you guys are saying here, it's not about, wow, Joe Biden.
[14:05:02]
And again, I'm not saying that to be critical. I'm saying that it's an opportunity.
COOPER: In what way?
SANTORUM: It's an opportunity because in a sense, in many respects Joe Biden come back to this town with not a big agenda that the people think he has that that's why they voted for him. They didn't vote for him because of his agenda. They voted for him because he was not Donald Trump. So he has a lot more flexibility.
And again, coming back to Georgia, Georgia, Georgia, and what's going to happen down there in the next two months, with a Senate victory or two Senate victories by Republicans, and not this -- Joe Biden didn't run on a big -- he, in fact, made a very big point of the fact that he wasn't the hard left, and he was going to be more of a conciliator. So there's not this clear agenda that I think the public, the majority --
VAN JONES, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I will say, there's certainly a lot of expectation. So this is, now we're going to see Joe Biden's political skill, because on the other hand, he wants to have a reset. On the other hand, he owes his base a lot. And you have an African- American community that expects to be treated like the people who delivered. There should be no apology for it.
One good thing about Donald Trump, he removed the taboo of speaking directly to black people about black stuff. He said I'm going to do a platinum plan for you black people. And he made no apologies. Affirmative action, I feel guilty about that. It's got to be for everybody. He said, I'm going to help you black folks. And so that removes a taboo. Biden can now reach out to the black community, not to the exclusion of anybody else, but to say, listen, here's what we're going to do.
And I think the African-American community is uniquely deserving of that level of support and investment, given the investment of the African-American community in this party. And I think we should be very clear. This is not about left versus right.
A lot of the things that would be good for the African-American community would be good for anybody, but we've got to get past -- I don't think the Trump administration felt any remorse or guilt about helping white male evangelicals and that kind of thing. They embrace their base. We want to be embraced.
I also thing that -- now, how does Biden do that? Is Biden going to be able to meet, I think, the just needs of his base. Don't forget, the black community has been knocked on its butt by COVID. We got hit first and worst, both in terms of health, in terms of wealth, in terms of job loss. We are in pain. And the person that Biden defeated was willing to talk about that directly, Trump. People didn't like it, but he was talking about it. Can Biden do that?
At the same time, can he reach out to those same suburban voters and some Trump voters and say here's what we're going to do on infrastructure, et cetera. But it's not a left versus right pressure. There will be some left pressure on Medicare for all, whatever. That's not his problem. His problem is he's got a bunch of people of color who have got just practical needs. If they don't get met at all in the next four years, the country has a problem, not just Biden.
BORGER: Can I just respond. I think that the people in this country grew more enthusiastic, Biden supporters grew more enthusiastic about his candidacy as time went on, and you saw that in the polling. And it is because they got to know him, and his personal decency came through. His empathy came through.
So while there is obviously anti-Trump, anti-Trump in the demonstrations out there, I wouldn't underestimate the fact that Biden voters decided that they really wanted this guy and he was the man for the moment, because you couldn't put him in a box. He had 47 years of public service and you couldn't say, OK, is he a raging socialist as Donald Trump tried to portray him? So there was a little bit of Joe Biden that people could look at and say, I like that about him, I like that about him. But most of all, they're celebrating his values.
So while it is anti-Trump, it's also celebration about American values and dignity and what people want to see in a president of the United States.
SANTORUM: I agree. I agree with your point that they saw Biden as an alternative to the friction that Donald Trump created. My point was, they didn't, a lot of people, Van's people did, but a lot of people didn't vote for him because of they thought he was going to come with a very strong leftwing agenda.
In fact, he was trying to make, I'm not going to stop fracking, I'm not going to tax the middle income, I'm not going to do all these things. I'm not Bernie Sanders. I won because I'm not Bernie Sanders. But those are not the people in the streets. My point, those are not the people in the streets right now.
[14:10:06]
AXELROD: I don't know what you mean by Van's people but --
SANTORUM: They're progressives.
AXELROD: There is a really deep concern in this country about health care, OK. And Joe Biden spoke to it. There's a really deep concern about the imbalance in our economy where you can work as hard as you can and can't get ahead if you're an average person, and if you are privileged to start with or if you're on Wall Street or in a C-suite, you get, through good times and bad, pandemic, recession, you come out OK.
And they want to see action on things like health care, on child care. These are not -- you guys think these are left issues. These are life issues for most Americans, and that is what has changed. But the debate has shifted. And Biden did speak to that in the campaign. I think people did understand that he was more likely to do something about the problems that were touching their lives, at least the majority of people who voted for him. So I would not underestimate that. I think it's really important.
But you're right, Gloria. We should give him his due. I don't want to in any way deprive him of his due. Joe Biden became more popular through the final months of his campaign. That's pretty unusual. He was under assault. President was beating up on him, and he became more popular as people got to know him. And I think that is a credit to him.
BORGER: That question, cares about people like me, does this person care about people like me? Joe Biden kept going up and up and up. He cares about people like me. Donald Trump went in the other direction.
COOPER: There was value for him just in purely political terms, in terms of getting elected, in not being as present on the campaign trail. Not only did it make it a harder target for President Trump to attack and try to define, it also allowed different kinds of voters to come see different things in him without being confronted on a daily basis with different policy positions, and, as you said, pick the part of him that they liked and say, OK, that's enough for me to vote him.
BORGER: And it allowed to differentiate himself by giving speeches about policy, about COVID, about American values, and not being at rallies all the time where you're just playing with the crowd. So if they ran a different campaign, but it worked to their advantage.
And as someone here was saying here before, what may have happened with Donald Trump, is that the more people who saw him at the rallies, yes, it brought out some voters, but more maybe some undecided voters saw him at the rallies, they were hearing grievance after grievance about himself and what he was suffering, not their own grievances.
SANTORUM: In Biden was so popular in the positions he was getting, then why did not a single Republican lose a House seat? Why did Republicans pick up seats in the House? Why did Republicans pick up state legislatures? Why did the Republicans maintain control of the Senate when they were given no chance to do that?
BORGER: Because Donald Trump was his own worst enemy.
SANTORUM: The point is, the policies --
AXELROD: Trump -- you know this, Rick, you said it earlier. Trump did whip up a huge turnout among his base, and in districts and states where Republicans have a natural advantage, they reap the benefits of that there. I don't think --
SANTORUM: My point is a lot of people who voted for Joe Biden because they didn't like Donald Trump voted for Republicans down ballot, which means policy-wise, they wanted Republicans, they liked the policies. They didn't like Donald Trump.
AXELROD: I was looking at the Senate race. The Republicans who won for the Senate in those, except for Susan Collins, they ran almost neck and neck.
SANTORUM: But they all ran ahead.
COOPER: The challenges facing, you talked about President Obama on 2008 when you went to visit him soon after he had declared, and you could see the weight of that. The weight of what the challenge is that he faces, and he and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris face, they're very aware of the difficulties that they are stepping into, even within their own party.
They have -- there's a lot of expectations from hundreds of thousands of people who march this summer, and a lot of people calling for defunding police, which Joe Biden never called for, said he wasn't supportive of. And you could look at the poll results and you could look at the election results and say there's not a lot of Americans who have a lot of support for that across the country.
AXELROD: Right, but Biden -- Biden didn't run on those issues.
[14:15:00]
And he was right in the debate, it didn't endear to a lot of Democrats when Trump was attacking him on health care, and he said you must be mistaking me for some of these other people who I beat in the primary. He positioned himself as a center left Democrat. It's going to govern as a center-left Democrat. And I think that there's a lot of support nationally in the middle of that electorate.
But, as I said to Rick, I think the goalposts have been shifted to where you can't ignore an issue like health care. You can't ignore an issue like the wage gap. These things have become life issues for people, and they're not left issues for people. So I think Biden will govern as a center left Democrat, but that doesn't mean he's not going to have a progressive agenda.
BORGER: The thing about Biden is that he has been here before. When you guys were elected, you had the economic crisis. And he knows what it's like to kind of get in there and go. And I think they're ready for it. I think they understand the moment they are in. And that is why you're going to have this COVID task force named on Monday. I think Joe Biden gets it because he's been there.
A lot of people say he's been in government for too long, 47 years. He understands how to get things done. He considers himself a pragmatist. And I would argue that if you end up with a Republican Senate, it's going to make life a little easier for him because he's going to be able to say to Van Jones, this is what we can get. Don't -- the perfect can be the enemy of the good, right?
JONES: I think there's a real danger here, and I think we're going to have to come together as a country to deal with this. You have two things that don't go together. You're almost certainly going to have gridlock. If nobody does anything any different, if McConnell says I'm going to make him a one-term president, if the left says we're going to fight until the last dog barks, you're going to have gridlock and rising pain and fear on both sides. Those two things don't go well together.
You have people in the urban environments -- don't forget, people are standing in food lines right now, food lines in America, two or three hours to get a little box of food that's to last all week. People are facing an eviction crisis right now. People are facing a health care disaster right now. So you've got real pain, economic pain in the urban parts of this country.
They need relief. In the rural parts you have economic pain and also cultural fear. The Senator just said, are they going to crack down on Christianity? You've got rising pain and fear on both sides and gridlock in the nation's capital. That is the most dangerous thing for this country.
So it's going to take real political skill on Biden's part, it's going to take some real political courage on the Republican's part, and it's going to take -- I don't think people are thinking this thing all the way through. The Supreme Court may knock out Obamacare next week or next month. Now you're going to people who don't have health care insurance. These are the kind of things you can lose your country over.
And so Joe Biden is coming in -- I think America is blessed to have this guy. I think they're blessed because I think he does have those political skills. I think he wants to bring people together. He knows how to cut deals, but it is going to take people, including me and you, Senator, to get together and find a path forward, or we're going to have a big mess.
SANTORUM: You look at things that Joe Biden can do without Republicans or the Congress. Increasingly, and this is one of the concerns that conservatives have right now, and many voters have right now, that started, in my opinion, started by Barack Obama, and I complained about it vociferously, and then even expanded more by Donald Trump, and I complained about it vociferously, was the use of executive orders. And executive orders that could be counter to what, in my opinion, or take -- draw to the greatest of what the statute says.
And so how far is it going to go? He's going to get huge pressure from the left on immigration, for example, and other things to try to redo the legislative landscape just by executive order, and say, well, I can't get things from Congress, so I'm going to do this.
Trump did it, Obama did it, and in some cases, got slapped down by the courts for doing it. So how far is Joe Biden going to go? That's number one. If you want to show that you want to work on a bipartisan basis, then you don't go out right away and sign all the executive orders on immigration and bypass --
AXELROD: I remember when Mitch McConnell said that his principle goal, this was in the first term of Obama, was to defeat President Obama. And if you come to the table with that attitude, if you come to the table with the attitude that I'm going to try and weaponize these issues in a way that will disadvantage the president to defeat him, if you do that in the middle of a crisis, and that's what we faced in 2009, you may get rewarded politically, but it really is a dereliction of duty.
[14:20:10]
SANTORUM: And so that brings up another issue -- hold on, this brings up another issue that is really important, because obviously the Democrats weaponized the Russian investigation and all these investigations on Trump throughout the entire time, and then impeachments, and things like that. We know there's this issue out there, hanging out there with respect to the Biden family and what the Republicans may do in the Senate. Look, I'm just saying, this is an issue. And I'm suggesting Republicans should pause here a little bit before they go hog wild into doing what the Democrats did four years ago in trying --
JONES: I would agree on that. I will say that something has to be done to give relief to the immigrant community, and I hope Biden does do something.
BORGER: I think it's interesting to hear you talk about executive orders now, saying, oh, I don't want Biden to do this, when this has been a president who's been governing by executive order.
SANTORUM: I said I disagree with --
BORGER: And if Biden wants to undo some of the things that he believes Donald Trump has done that are wrong, then he'll do it by executive order.
SANTORUM: As Trump did it to Obama.
BORGER: As he said, he's not a fan of executive order, but this is one way that you can get things done quickly. It's just the way things operate right now, and I fully expect that Joe Biden is going to do that the first week after he becomes president. Some of that may have to do --
SANTORUM: How far he goes, how far does --
JONES: Gloria, I agree with you. There's going to be some culture war stuff that the right is not going to like. We're going to have to do something on immigration. We can't keep mistreating folks at the border. We can't keep mistreating Dreamers. That's going to have to stop. That might make people on the right mad. But Gloria, what I think is that he's going to have to do some of that, but then he's going to figure out some way to reach out. And I'm saying, that's what I think --
AXELROD: You're right, Van. When I was in the White House, and Biden was the Vice President, he had the best ear of anyone there for working class white voters, or Americans. We weren't talking about voters. And what the impact of various policies would be, how they would be received. He had an ear for that. He had an instinct for that.
That will serve him well in the project that you're talking about, and that's one of the reasons why he will be a good person for this time. But if they fail to act on those issues that you mention that are of immediate urgency, anyone who stands in the way of trying to help the American people right now in a really difficult time does so at their own political peril, I think.
BORGER: One thing I think Biden won't do is try and inflame the situation. And what we are used to is a president who stirs the pot any chance he could get. And what we've heard from Joe Biden in his speeches so far is, unite the country. Even if you didn't vote for me, I want to be your president, too. I'm going to listen to you. So it's a totally different tone.
And the question is whether the people in the Senate, in particular, who are on the losing side of this, are so stuck that they can't move a little because the country is so polarized. And we know we've got gerrymandering in the House, and there's very little advantage to conservatives for moving to the center because they're going to be primaried on the right, and we understand that that's the process. And we have to find out if Joe Biden is living in an outmoded world, whether this is the art of the possible.
COOPER: Just on a logistical -- for the next several weeks, obviously, President Trump is still president of the United States and will be up until the time he's not. How much -- you talked about the cooperation that usually takes place, given what is still going on the Trump side of this equation, what do the next months look like in terms of -- if Vice President Biden announces this coronavirus task force on Monday, does the sitting president start to, traditionally, take into account what the incoming president wants?
AXELROD: Traditionally -- I'll give you an example. Barack Obama asked George W. Bush to extend some aid to the auto industry until March of 2009 because G.M. and Chrysler were in distress, and he wanted some time in office just to consider what the steps were, the long-term steps that should be taken to deal with that situation. And President Bush embraced the short-term relief at the request of President Obama.
[14:25:02]
There are a lot of issues that are transitional from one administration to another. Right now, particularly in the middle of a crisis, where coordination and conversation would be very -- and normally your chief of staff, the incoming chief of staff would be talking to the team that's coming in, and there would be a high level of coordination. I have great fears that that's not going to happen here.
COOPER: Let's go back to Wolf.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: All right, take a look at this. CNN now projects also another win for the president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden. CNN projects that Nevada and its six electoral votes will go for president-elect Biden. That will bring his total right now up to 279 electoral votes. You need 270. He's got 279 right now. Trump still has 213.
Let's go over to John King over at the magic wall to see what's going on right now. That number could go up and up and up. There's still two other states where the president-elect could get some electoral votes and build it up potentially to 306.
JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: It could, Wolf. And on this decisive day and a day of celebration for Joe Biden and for the Democratic Party and of course for Vice President-elect Harris, this is a critical calculation. You know now you will take over. In 74 days there will be an inauguration outside the United States capital and Joe Biden will become the president of the United States because of those 20, Pennsylvania.
But now we've just added Nevada, which gets you to 279. And now in a divided America after a very polarizing election where, yes, Joe Biden got a record number of votes, but so did Donald Trump. Donald Trump got the second number of votes ever in a race for presidency. We don't expect him to go away. We expect him to leave the White House but not to go away.
So if you're Joe Biden, what happens with the rest of the map is actually quite critical. Pennsylvania and its 20 puts you over the top. What an important victory for Joe Biden. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, that's what he said at the beginning of the campaign, when there was so much doubt in the Democratic Party about is this the right man for this nomination, he said, I'm the best guy to do that. Today, he can say, I told you so. That's not the way he's going to say it, but he's going to say look at that, I said I could do it.
So the challenge now, Wolf, when you think about this is you're looking at this map, what a statement this would be. Georgia may well go to a recount, but Joe Biden's lead has increased. We'll go into those numbers a little bit later. Now since Bill Clinton in 1992, 1992, that's the year we met in Little Rock Arkansas, not since then --
BLITZER: We both covered that.
KING: Not since then has a Democrat turned that state blue. It's important, Joe Biden is going to have an evenly divided Senate. Maybe the Republicans are in charge by a seat or two, maybe the Democrats are in charge in a 50-50, he's going to have an evenly divided America. It helps a bit to be able to say I won in Georgia.
And right now also Joe Biden is leading here in Arizona, again a state no Democrat has carried since Bill Clinton in 1996. It would help, again, to be able to say, if you're Joe Biden to say, I'm stretching the map. I won in Georgia, I won in Arizona. Does it win you a lot of votes?
That will be the challenge for Joe Biden ahead. But if you can build this map up to 306, and we do believe the rest of this. We're not done yet, but we believe the rest of this, President Trump has been leading. We're still counting votes in Maine, second congressional district. Maine and Nebraska are the two states that allocate their electoral votes by congressional district.
Let's assume the president wins this one. Come along with me here, there we go -- it doesn't want to go. There we go. Maybe it's my fingers have lost their heat sensitivity. Who knows? North Carolina, the president's leading. In Alaska, the president is lead. So it's a possibility, 306-232. If you're into history and nostalgia, and things like that, it was 306-232 --
BLITZER: Four years ago. KING: Four years ago. It was a flipside, 306 to 232. And it's actually
interesting, you see the circles on this map. Nevada we had circled because we expect Joe Biden to carry that. We just called it, and so Joe Biden will carry that. That was a Clinton state. But this is the important part for Joe Biden politically in an evenly divided country. Will it work, we'll see. But he can argue, I flipped that, I flipped that, I flipped that, and he can argue, I flipped that and I flipped that.
So that is a big deal. When you have a map changing election, it gives you some leverage in the political conversations. Again, how much will be the challenge now that Joe Biden has proven, remember all the doubters at the beginning, right, is he the right man for this moment? Can he beat Donald Trump? Should the Democratic Party elect this man from the past to lead it into the future? He's the president-elect now, and this map will help him make the case.
Is he up to it? That will be the next challenge, but as was just being noted in the other conversation, President Trump is president for 74 more days, 73 more days. Joe Biden will put together his team. And again, you look at the map --
BLITZER: Four years ago, I just want our viewers to know.
KING: That was four years ago. That was four years ago. Let's flash forward to now. I wanted to use it as an example to show Donald Trump won, we remember what that did to the Democratic Party. Joe Biden can say a little bit, again, it's not the way he talks, but I told you so, look what I did. I promised you I would change this map and I delivered on my promise.
In the governing challenge, it helps to be able to say you made a very big, dramatic political statement. Still have to get the votes, still have to venture policies. He's going to have to deal with internal Democratic fights as well as then an obstinate Republican Party that is still going to have ex-President Trump trying to hold in its grip. So the challenges are huge. So the bigger you can run up the total, the more leverage you have.
[14:30:08]
BLITZER: Four years ago, Trump said he won in a landslide when he had 306. Let's see what he says about Biden winning potentially if he wins these two other states with 306.
KING: To that point, to that point, remember, not since George H. W. Bush -- we have we had three successive two-term presidents in a row, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. It is hard, it is hard to defeat an incumbent president.
So when you, a, defeat that incumbent president, even though he got more votes, Donald Trump got more votes now than he did four years ago, when you defeat him, and then you defeat him with a number like that, it gives Joe Biden some leverage. He says it's a mandate. That's the question to be answered ahead.
BLITZER: So far, more than 4 million votes.
Let's go to David Chalian. David, CNN was first to project that President-elect Biden was the winner of this election. Walk us through our decision desk, our folks came up with that and we made this decision. It's not just the decision you make or I make or John King makes. There are a lot of people involved with this.
DAVID CHALIAN, CNN POLITICAL DIRECTOR: No, we have an entire team of professionals. They are statistical professionals and experts. And you know all eyes were on Pennsylvania. We were watching that Pennsylvania vote come in. And as we kept saying, we needed more vote to get to a certain threshold, an extraordinarily high confidence threshold, that there was no way that Donald Trump in second place was going to able to overtake Joe Biden in first place in the state of Pennsylvania.
We were looking at that in Nevada and Arizona and Georgia where Joe Biden was leading as well, but in the state of Pennsylvania, we finally after that last batch of votes that came in from Philadelphia late this morning, we were able to see the margin that Biden had in Pennsylvania grow beyond 30,000 votes.
Knowing what we knew about everything outstanding, the provisional ballots not yet counted, some of the mail ballots not yet counted, and how they were behaving and where they were coming from, from within the commonwealth, that got us to the extraordinarily high level of competence, like 99.7 percent certainty that there was no way that Donald Trump was going to be able to overtake Joe Biden, and that was able to make the call.
But I do just want to add to what John King was saying broadly here. When you do look at how Joe Biden put back together, rebuilt that so- called blue wall that he promised he would, and expand a little bit into the sunbelt in Arizona and Georgia, in these extraordinarily polarized times in American politics, winning the middle still matters.
And what you see across the electorate nationally, remember, Donald Trump four years ago, he won independents in this country, people that identify themselves as independent. He won them by four points. Joe Biden won them by 14 points in this country, and he did in a lot of the states where he flipped them from Trump states not to Biden states.
So although we are polarized, and it was certainly a high turnout election, obviously, and both sides got their bases out, there was also an argument to the middle, to the political middle of the country that Joe Biden won pretty resoundingly.
BLITZER: Speaking of turnout, John, let's take a look at how amazing how many Americans voted in this election. There's a coronavirus pandemic. we had record, record numbers, 93 percent of the estimated electorate out there, so far, we've counted that. But look at those numbers.
KING: And so there's conversations about this election that will continue for months and years. Here's one lesson we hope every state takes, and the national government takes as well. You give people more opportunities to vote, even in a pandemic, you can vote by mail, you can vote early more, expand that, look what happens. Look what happens. That is a record setting number for a candidate, a victorious candidate, for president of the United States.
And guess what. Democrats won't like this. That is the second highest vote total for any candidate for president of the United States ever. Turnout was up in this election. Everyone should celebrate that. Republicans aren't celebrating today, or at least not Trump supporters, but that is a number to celebrate.
And let's just look at this right now. Let's look at this right now. The lead for Joe Biden, more than 4.1 million votes. Remember four years ago, Democrats remember this well, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote quite convincingly. Not that convincingly. And guess what? I'll just turn off the -- guess what.
We're not done here. We're not done here. Let me turn this off. I'm sorry, make that go away. Let's look out at California right now. Turn that off so that doesn't come up. Look at what has to be counted still. Only 77 percent of the vote counted in California. This is a blue state. That number for Joe Biden is absolutely going to increase.
And again, I was talking earlier, 306 electoral votes, Joe Biden believes gives him some leverage. David Chalian just talking about winning the middle, that is important. How important we'll see. We live in polarized times, but more votes from California. They're still counting in New York state, 81 percent there. It's a big blue state. Joe Biden getting nearly 60 percent of the vote.
So there is no doubt, there is no doubt that Joe Biden's lead in the popular vote will extend itself as we go forward. That's important too. How important? That's what the first 100 days of the new administration will tell us, but when you have a sweeping win in the Electoral College, when you have a dramatic, historic win in the popular vote, and when you can say look at my margin.
[14:35:5]
Now, Republicans will say, OK, but that's all out in California, it's all out in New York. How did you do in the red states? Sure, that will be the fight ahead. But it helps. It helps.
BLITZER: Show us Texas.
KING: It helps.
BLITZER: You bring up Texas, one of the interesting things about Texas is remember all those Democratic hopes. Democrats have high hopes, and they have moved Texas slowly their way. In a presidential year, though, what we did learn is that Texas is still tough. It's a tough pull for the Democrats. They're making progress.
You see Houston, Harris County. You see Dallas is blue and the suburbs around it, Austin, San Antonio, Laredo, out in El Paso blue, but all this red in the middle -- 52 percent for President Trump. Look at the vote total up. You go back four years ago, 52 percent for President Trump. Hillary Clinton at 44 there if you round up. The third party candidates had a bit more influence, but 43.5 for the Democrats four years ago, 46.
So Joe Biden and Democrats can make the case, maybe it's another step forward. Democrats I think have been overly optimistic about how quickly they can flip this state, but there is no doubt, there is no doubt that they are making more progress, and that's because of the growth, especially Harris County where Houston is. Again, physically it's the size of Rhode Island. If it left Texas, it would be the 25th largest state in the United States. This is a growing powerhouse in American politics, Harris County, Texas, within the state and beyond.
And those are the things we'll go through over the next few weeks. Today is decisive today. Joe Biden becomes president-elect. Kamala Harris is about to make history as the first woman and first woman of color as vice president. And we will study all this as we go through the next several weeks to see what changed.
I've been going through some of the states, and actually not a ton changed in terms of we look often -- I can put them up here for you. This is America be county, right, America by county. And you look at this map, and again, Democrats win on the coasts. Republicans tend to win in the middle. Democrats get mad when you show this map because it looks so much more red, and yet the Democratic candidate has an overwhelming win the popular vote.
That's because, yes, the coasts are more populous than the middle of America, but middle of America still gets two senators, right. So Democrats always say, we have more people because we have more votes. That is why they have a House majority. But if you watch all this play out, and Wolf, just one thing I want to show you. One of the things I look at are pivot counties.
There are more than 200 of them, 206 counties that voted twice for Barack Obama and that flipped to Donald Trump. So one of my questions coming into 2020 was how many of those can Joe Biden pull back? How many of those can he say I understand you didn't like Hillary Clinton or you didn't like Washington. I speak to you. Please come back. Not all that many, as we look. Not all that many. We'll get a final total. Some places are still counting, not all that many.
But in the state that made Joe Biden president, two of the three, Erie County, and North Hampton County did flip back. In a state that is incredibly close, Pennsylvania, Joe Biden did what he needed to do here. And again, Joe Biden will view this as a big victory, because this is what he set out to do on day one when a lot Democrats said he couldn't do it, blue collar places.
You grew up in Buffalo. You know what Erie is like. This are blue collar, hardworking people, people who work with their hands, middle class families. It's very close. It's very close. But this is the kind of win that Joe Biden will take. It was close, Erie County four years ago, 49-47 for Trump.
Joe Biden gets it back just by a little bit, as you come up to 2020, but you say just by a little bit. When you take this off, sometimes just by a little bit matters. Just by a little bit made Joe Biden president.
BLITZER: It's a 34,414 vote lead the President-elect Biden now has over Trump.
David Chalian, the national picture, record numbers of voters out there, and Biden got more than 4 million more votes than Trump, but there's still plenty of votes out there. We don't have the full picture, and it could take days and days until all those votes are actually counted.
CHALIAN: It could take a week or two until we really get a sense when all the certification deadlines come and we get that final approved total in each of these states. You remember Wolf in 2018, when the Democrats had that big wave year in the House of Representatives, so many of those races were in California that helped deliver the Democrats their majority. We had to wait for a while, many days for all that vote to get counted and get a real sense of the picture.
And I think the same is true here, especially given what we've just experienced over the last five days. This election during a pandemic when so many Americans were voting by mail for the first time, and these election officials across the country, God bless them all for doing their jobs, it just takes a while to count all the mail vote.
So we're going to be a few days, a week or so, 10 days maybe until we have a real picture of that final tally in the national popular vote, until we have a real sense of just how much Joe Biden did expand the map. And I just think you don't want to draw too many conclusions about how America settled finally into this election until you see that full vote total at the end of the day. We know Joe Biden and Donald Trump each made history here as the two presidential candidates with the highest vote total in American history.
[14:40:05]
It was a hugely engaged electorate, and they got their sides out, obviously Joe Biden more so. And I just think when we get more and more of this vote in, especially from California, you're just going to see Joe Biden's lead in the national vote grow to an even greater place in history.
BLITZER: And explain to our viewers, David, why there was this record national turnout, so many millions of people actually voted one way or another, whether early, day of, mail-in, absentee, they voted in these huge record numbers even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
CHALIAN: Yes, well, one is the access to vote, if you're voting by mail, and this will be studied now, does that bring more people into the process? At the end of the day, did that get more people engaged in voting because it was something they could do in their home and then drop it in the mailbox. There were so many states, Wolf, especially states across the Midwest, that really had no big history in vote by mail, in absentee voting. You needed a real legitimate excuse in order to get an absentee ballot
in a lot of these states. And that went away with the coronavirus. So those states said, no, you don't need an excuse anymore. Now you can vote by mail. And there was a lot of encouragement from political actors on the Democratic side, specifically, to do so.
And so I think you're going to see how an electorate that has experienced what it's like to have multiple options and multiple ways to cast its ballot, and it may be something that's now here is a part of our future long after coronavirus, hopefully, goes away.
BLITZER: Very, very important, indeed. You know, John, we're talking about the Democrats winning the White House, but there's a House of Representatives that's been at play as well. The Democrats look like they're going to still be in the majority, but they've lost a bunch of seats.
KING: So the margins mean everything because I'll break it down in just a second. So Joe Biden will be president. We'll have a Democratic president. Donald Trump will leave. But right now the balance of power in the Senate is still up in play. They'll be two run-offs in January and Georgia, but it will evenly divided either way. Either the Republicans will have it by a seat or two, or the Democrats will get it 50-50, so an evenly divided Washington there.
So what about the House of Representatives? Here's where we came into Election Day, 232 Democrats, one libertarian, and 197 Republicans. And so where are we now? We're not quite to the finish line here. We'll Still counting in some of these races, but the Democrats are down to 222 seats at the moment. This is ahead, 222 seats where Democrats are leading right now, 213 where Republicans are leading. This is very significant -- 15 Republicans are leading in districts right now held by Democrats. Only three Democrats are leading in districts right now held by Republicans.
Now, these are the races we have called, and you see the numbers go down because we're still counting votes. just like in the presidential race, we're still counting votes. The Democrats will hold the majority. They have 212 right now called, Republicans, 197.
But again, the final composition, how much of a majority does Nancy Pelosi have assuming she is reelected as speaker, how does Joe Biden have relationships with that House, how many of the centrist Democrats, Kendra Horn in Oklahoma, for example, gone. So what is the composition? Is it more liberals because more conservative Democrats lose? Do they put pressure on Joe Biden on issues like climate change and on health care and then he has to deal with the Senate calculations?
So the presidency is the big story today, obviously, because Donald Trump is now going to be a one-term president. Joe Biden will become the president-elect in 74 days. But this is a fascinating finish for Joe Biden, and you're trying to figure out how much leverage do I have? Again, last night he said he believes he has a mandate. We will hear from him tonight outlining policy agenda. He will have Democratic allies in the House, but a smaller majority, without a doubt, a smaller Democratic majority in the House, and then the uncertainty of the Senate.
So as he plans these early steps for the next several days, at least, and through the middle of January when it comes to those runoffs in Georgia, Joe Biden cannot be exactly sure of the balance of power and the leverage he will and not have in Washington when it comes to huge issues. Remember, he's promised to act on climate change. He wants a fundamental different tax code than Donald Trump.
He wants to build on Obamacare. Remember the fights on Obamacare back in the Obama administration? Barack Obama then had a Democratic House and they had the Senate at first, and then the Republicans came sweeping in the 2010 midterms. So there are big issues on the table in a very still evenly divided Washington, even though we'll have a new Democratic president.
BLITZER: You and I spoke to several of the House Democratic leaders over these past several weeks. They were expecting to gain seats, the Democrats would gain seats in the House. They're losing seats in the House of Representatives, so they're obviously deeply disappointed in that. The Republicans have been picking up seats.
KING: And that gets back to this, that does get back to this, that the president of the United States lost. The president of the United States is a one-term president. The president of the United States who said I can't believe I would ever lose to Joe Biden, any election I lose in is rigged. Well, he lost to Joe Biden, and it's not rigged.
However, however, he did, because he did turn out his vote, because of that record-setting vote, President Trump actually helped his party in this election. There's no doubt about that.
[14:45:05]
When you look at the close Senate races, when you look at least a handful or more of Republican gains in the House, Republican turnout was up, and when it comes to House races, Republican turnout has to be up where Republicans live in those House districts. There's absolutely no question President Trump helped his party even as he lost this election. That is just undeniable.
And you see it in places like North Carolina where we haven't called this yet for the president, but he is leading here, and the Republican candidate leading in the Senate race. There's just absolutely no question, even in South Carolina, Lindsey Graham was on the ballot. Everyone thought, is that a close race. Wolf, in the end, it was not. Donald Trump carried South Carolina. Lindsey Graham, his friend, won reelection. Wolf?
BLITZER: Take a look at this, John. We'll show our viewers the celebrations that are going on around the country, celebrations that Joe Biden is now the president elect of the United States, and whether in Atlanta or Chicago, Washington, D.C., New York, Philadelphia, people have just gone out on the streets. They are so excited, so happy right now.
They're celebrating. This is in Washington near Lafayette Park over there. The Black Lives Matter Plaza, as it's called now. You see the folks in D.C., And this is Philadelphia what's going on in Philadelphia right now. They're so excited. They're wearing masks. There's not much social distancing, but they are at least wearing masks. Jake?
JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Wolf, among the historic firsts that are occurring with this election, one that probably not a lot of people care about, but my next guest does, Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware. Joe Biden will be the first president from Delaware. Congratulations on that, and congratulations on your friend becoming elected president-elect, Senator.
SEN. CHRISTOPHER COONS (D-DE): Thank you, Jake. This is a remarkable day where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are now clearly on track to be our next president and vice president. And the people of Delaware are just jubilant. There were tears of joy, cow bells, cars honking, people cheering in my neighborhood when the announcement was made that a number of major news organizations had called the election for Joe Biden.
And frankly, I think Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Lewis and John McCain are looking down on us and smiling. It was thrilling to hear the sounds of jubilation that you just played from cities and towns across the country. We've got a lot of tough work ahead to bring this country together, but today is a day to celebrate.
TAPPER: Have you spoken with President-elect Biden today?
COONS: I have not spoken with him yet today. A number of the senior members of the campaign team and I have talked and texted. But I'm excited for his speech tonight. There will be a record crowd at the river front and fireworks that I think will light in the sky for all Delawareans.
TAPPER: Delawareans. What does Joe Biden need to say in his first speech to the country as president-elect? What are you anticipating that he'll do?
COONS: Well, Jake, the thing about Joe's campaign for the presidency is he's been remarkably consistent since he first announced in Philadelphia last April to that landmark speech he gave recently in Gettysburg, to recent remarks in Warm Springs, Georgia. He's been focused on bringing our country together, on governing as an American president, not a Democratic president, and as someone who's got the vision and the plans to bring us out of this mess, to address the pandemic, together with his vice president to build back better our economy, and to tackle long unresolved issues of racial injustice.
This is an historic day, not just for Joe in Delaware but for Kamala Harris and for all of us who are excited to see the first black woman who is the daughter of immigrants ascend to the vice presidency. This is a day where I think Joe's message and Kamala's message will be one of unity, focusing on the very challenging work ahead, and of respecting the differences between the 75 million Americans who will have voted for Joe and Kamala, and the roughly 70 million who will have voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and finding a way forward together.
TAPPER: Let's talk about those 70 million, because President-elect Biden has talked for a long time about his desire to unite the country, to heal divisions, 70 million Americans didn't vote for him. I get 75 million did, but how to unify the country when the nation is so deeply divided?
COONS: It's going to be challenging. But I'll remind you, the American people have become exhausted with four years of just relentless chaos, with tweeting at 3:00 in the morning, with unpredictability, with a president who is more skilled at maintaining a reality TV audience than he was at actually leading as president.
And so Joe's going to have to come out of the gate with a number of initiatives and proposals that will be focused to win bipartisan support, and that will be challenging in the Senate, particularly if Mitch McConnell is the majority leader.
[14:49:58]
But the things that are right in front of us to do -- tackling the pandemic, developing and distributing a vaccine, coming up with a bipartisan investment package that will rebuild our roads and bridges and buy American and put people back to work, these are things that can and should be bipartisan initiatives before we get on to some of the more challenging issues like health care or climate change.
TAPPER: All right, Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, longtime supporter of former vice president, now President-elect Joe Biden, congratulations. Drinks on me at the Rusty Rudder tonight.
(LAUGHTER)
COONS: Thanks, Jake.
TAPPER: Talk to you later.
DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: That was some beach humor.
(LAUGHTER)
TAPPER: A little Delaware bar.
So you get a little sense of the joy people feel about their hometowns by how obnoxious I am about being from Philadelphia. That's an entire state that has never elected a president before, and now Joe Biden is not just a Delawarean. He is the most famous Delawarean in the world.
BASH: Chris Coons has Joe Biden's old Senate seat.
TAPPER: Yes.
BASH: And so not only is Joe Biden a mentor to him, he is a predecessor in the United States Senate. And he, like so many Democrats, worked really, really hard to get Joe Biden to the place he is today as president-elect. One of the questions I have as I was watching him is will he -- CNN projected that he's going to go on for the second full-term in the Senate. He was up on the ballot with Joe Biden, but is he going to stay there? Is he going to go into a Biden cabinet?
He's an important member of the Foreign Relations Committee. So that's one question that leads me to think about all the other spaces that Joe Biden is going to have to fill, and how he's going to have that balancing act that we were talking about earlier.
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: And Coons, in addition to being a very decent person, as we all know him to be, is one of the more moderate Democrats. And there's been a debate about what some of the more liberal Democratic allies of Joe Biden will want in a cabinet. But it seems to me that Joe Biden has been in a particular lane as a politician.
And it seems to me that his instincts would be in elevating people who double down on his message of being an evenhanded president, even while he is an unapologetic Democrats. I wouldn't be surprised to see if someone like a Chris Coons ends up doing something, though he just won his seat in Delaware.
I've always been thinking about just this period of time. The next couple of weeks he is not the president yet, but the current president has just left the golf course, and really seems to be not focused on the remaining parts of the job. He is obviously focused on fighting the fact that Joe Biden was elected president. So I think there's going to be a huge vacuum, and Joe Biden's going to actually have a lot to do right now to fill that vacuum.
TAPPER: No, absolutely.
I do want to say something. I don't want to throw cold water on the whole notion of what Biden's going to be able to do, but progressives were disappointed in Obama administration because Barack Obama governed as center-left politicians. Barack Obama was not the wild- haired liberal that people depicted him as. He was center-left.
He was very much in the mold of Joe Biden, even though their styles are very different and probably their personal politics are a little bit different. But that's how he governed. And the Republicans were as obstructionist as they could be once they got control of the Senate. I don't know what Mitch McConnell is going to do. He's got a real decision ahead of him.
BASH: You're right. He got -- one of the reasons why he partnered so strongly with Donald Trump was because he got so many judges on to the bench, never mind three Supreme Court judges. But maybe he'll look at Joe Biden as his former dealmaker, and they can actually make some good policy for the country. Hope springs eternal. I know. Let's just be hopeful today.
(LAUGHTER)
TAPPER: Joe Biden wins this historic race for the White House and will be the 46th president of the United States of America. He and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will speak live tonight, 8:00 p.m. eastern.
There's more coverage ahead before that, of course. Stay with us. Our special coverage continues with Anderson Cooper and Erin Burnett right after this quick break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
