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Trump Voters Dismiss Polls, Lash Out at Media; New CNN Poll Shows Trump Trailing by 5 Points; Sen. Elizabeth Warren Joins Clinton on Trail; Obama Mocks Trump on Late-Night TV; Obamacare Premiums Set to Soar Next Year. Aired 9-9:30a ET
Aired October 25, 2016 - 09:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[09:00:21] CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Sounds good to me. You guys have a great day.
CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: You're invited.
COSTELLO: Cool, I'll be there. NEWSROOM starts right now.
CUOMO: Bring the mixer.
COSTELLO: And good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me. Time is running short, so Donald Trump is delivering an urgent message to supporters. Numbers lie and so do the pollsters. The Republican nominee dismissing the avalanche of polls that show him falling further behind. He says those surveys are phony and the media reporting them disgusting.
Election Day now just two weeks away so the race is on. The candidates and their surrogates fan out across key battleground states, but Trump and Hillary Clinton focusing on all-important Florida. We are following all angles for you this morning, but let's begin with CNN's Jason Carroll. He's live in Miami Beach. Good morning.
JASON CARROLL, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: And good morning to you, Carol. Early voting underway here in the state of Florida where Donald Trump is trailing Hillary Clinton in a recent poll by four points, but Donald Trump says, don't put any stock in polls like that.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CARROLL (voice-over): Donald Trump on the defensive.
DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I believe we're actually winning.
CARROLL (voice-over): Trump flat out denying he is behind in the polls as he blazes through the battleground state of Florida.
TRUMP: They are phony polls put out by phony media.
CARROLL (voice-over): Just hours before hitting the trail, Trump did admit he's lagging. TRUMP: I guess I'm somewhat behind in the polls, but not by much.
CARROLL (voice-over): And with only two weeks until Election Day, a new CNN/ORC national poll shows Hillary Clinton up by five points. No matter, Trump is ratcheting up the attacks on his rival --
TRUMP: If you look at her plans for Syria, these are the plans of a child. These are the plans of a person that doesn't know what she's doing.
CARROLL (voice-over): -- the media --
TRUMP: The media isn't just against me, they're against all of you.
CARROLL (voice-over): -- and the 11 women accusing him of unwanted advances.
TRUMP: They were made up. I don't know these women.
CARROLL (voice-over): Trump raising eyebrows over his comments about Jessica Drake, an adult film performer who alleges he grabbed and kissed her without permission in 2006.
TRUMP: This one that came out recently, he grabbed me and he grabbed me on the arm. Oh, I'm sure she's never been grabbed before.
CARROLL (voice-over): This as Clinton works to seal a win in New Hampshire campaigning with liberal favorite Senator Elizabeth Warren.
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN, (D) MASSACHUSETTS: I'm with her. Are you with her?
(APPLAUSE)
CARROLL (voice-over): Both wasting no time hitting the GOP nominee.
HILLARY CLINTON, (D) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: This is someone who roots for failure and takes glee in mocking our country no matter who our President is. Now, that may be who Donald Trump is, but this election is about who we are.
CARROLL (voice-over): Warren capitalizing on Trump's nasty woman comment on Clinton from the last debate.
WARREN: He thinks that because he has a mouth full of Tic Tacs that he can force himself on any woman within groping distance. Well, I've got news for you, Donald Trump. Women have had it with guys like you.
(APPLAUSE)
WARREN: And nasty women have really had it with guys like you.
(APPLAUSE)
WARREN: Nasty women are tough, nasty women are smart, and nasty women vote. (APPLAUSE)
CARROLL (voice-over): President Obama joining the Democratic Trump takedown on Jimmy Kimmel.
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: What I don't do is like, at 3:00 a.m., I don't tweet about --
JIMMY KIMMEL, HOST, JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE: You don't tweet any longer?
OBAMA: -- people who insulted me. Yes.
KIMMEL: You watch Donald Trump. Do you ever laugh? Do you ever actually laugh?
OBAMA: Most of the time.
KIMMEL: Most of the time.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CARROLL: And, Carol, Donald Trump will be heading back to the battleground state of North Carolina tomorrow. A new poll out just this morning, just a few moments ago, "New York Times"/Siena College poll showing Clinton at 46 percent there in the state of North Carolina, Trump at 39 percent.
I should point that a CNN poll released just last week showed a much, much tighter race. But, once again, Carol, Donald Trump not putting stock in very many of these polls at all. Carol.
COSTELLO: All right. Jason Carroll reporting live from Miami Beach, Florida. Trump's final argument not just about the big rig though. He's slamming the big hike jumping on news that Obamacare premiums are about to soar for millions of Americans.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: Americans are going to experience yet another double digit spike in your premium for Obamacare, and it doesn't work.
(APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: In some areas, they are paying 60, 70, and 80 percent more than they were paying last year. It's over for Obamacare.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[09:05:14] COSTELLO: CNN Correspondent Athena Jones has more on Obamacare because the premiums are going up for many people on Obamacare. Athena.
ATHENA JONES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Carol. That's right. We're talking about some serious sticker shock for potentially millions of people, and that's because the premiums on the benchmark Silver plan, that's the mid-level plan, are set to rise an average of 25 percent for plans on the Federal exchange. That's healthcare.gov next year. And that's compared to just a 7.2 percent increase last year, so it's a big jump.
Now, the government says that a vast majority of customers get some sort of government help, get subsidies to help reduce the cost of the premiums, so they won't feel this in their pocketbooks. The Department of Health and Human Services says 77 percent of customers will still be able to find a plan that's going to cost them $100 or less a month.
And to be clear, this 25 percent increase, that's an average increase, so it's really is going to vary from state to state. You take a state like Arizona which had the lowest premiums last year, customers there can expect to see an average increase of more than 100 percent. But if you look at Indiana, the cost for those plans is going to be 3 percent cheaper. So there is some variation.
The big question, of course, is why the big increase in these rates? There are several reasons. Enrollees are sicker and costlier than originally expected. There are not enough young and healthy people signing up for coverage. Insurers initially priced their plans too low. And there's also less competition in the marketplace with some companies withdrawing and fewer companies around to offer options.
So the bottom line here is that, even with those subsidies, a lot of people are going to see a big increase in how much they have to pay to get this coverage. And we know that Obamacare has been under fire from the very beginning, certainly from Republicans, a lot of Republican critics, but there also has been some anger and disappointment even with people who supported the idea of Obamacare.
Take a listen to what former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney had to say about all of this this morning.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAY CARNEY, FORMER WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Obamacare remains, you know, not as popular as I think President Obama would like it to be. There's a whole bunch of reasons for that, but is it something that's going to change, this news, something that's going to change the election? No, it's not.
Remember, the opportunity Republicans had to use Obamacare against the Democrats and win the White House was in 2012. Mitt Romney, a far more credible candidate for President of the United States from the Republican Party, you know, beat us hard over the head with Obamacare. And guess what, the American people re-elected President Obama.
What I think is correct is what Secretary Clinton has said, which is that, you know, she needs, when she becomes President, both parties to help her to make adjustments to the law so that it can be improved.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
JONES: So we'll see what kind of political impact this has at the polls. You heard Jay Carney say when Hillary Clinton becomes President. The vote is still two weeks away, Carol. We'll have to see what happens, and if voters take out their anger on this on Election Day. Carol.
COSTELLO: All right. Athena Jones reporting live from Washington this morning. So let's talk about this with CNN Politics Executive Editor Mark Preston and David Swerdlick, CNN political commentator and assistant editor of "The Washington Post."
All right. You know, Athena was talking about premiums, right? Well, Mark, deductibles are enormous for some of these voters, and I mean enormous.
MARK PRESTON, CNN POLITICS EXECUTIVE EDITOR: Right.
COSTELLO: When I was reporting in Ohio last week, I talked to a lot of people who are on Obamacare. Some people say their deductibles are $7,000.
PRESTON: Right.
COSTELLO: They can't afford to go to the doctor even though they have health insurance through Obamacare. So voters do care deeply about this issue, especially those voters affected by it.
PRESTON: Yes. This is what you would call -- when we talk about pocketbook issues, well, guess what, this a pocketbook issue because it affects people across the board, specifically those, as you said, that are having trouble actually paying for them. You know, Jay Carney's right, this would be a very politically potent issue if there was a different candidate, I would argue with Jay, that was running right now that wasn't muddling his message, that was really hammering this home, specifically in states, as you said, in Ohio where Trump is doing well and even in states such as Pennsylvania.
We're talking about blue collar workers, not white color workers who can pay for it or might be able to get the insurance through their --
COSTELLO: Employer.
PRESTON: -- through their employer. And it's those who have to go out on their own, small business owners and what have you. But Jay's right. I don't think it's going to have an impact on the election, but it will have an impact on people's pocketbooks.
COSTELLO: And you know, David, I have talked to small business owners who say, you know what, you know, we have to tell our employees to go on Obamacare but we know that our employees can't afford Obamacare --
DAVID SWERDLICK, ASSISTANT EDITOR, THE WASHINGTON POST: Right.
COSTELLO: -- so we're paying it anyway. So to say that this will not affect voters and how they vote at the ballot box, it's just simply not true because it does affect them deeply.
SWERDLICK: I think it does affect voters and I agree with Mark that this would be a more effective message for Trump and Republicans if they were running against President Obama this time or if this was 2012, but I still think that 2016 could have been a year where Trump could have driven this message.
[09:10:15] The problem is that if they're going to try and drive it, they've only got two weeks left. Donald Trump has not been able to stay on a consistent message. He has not been able to stick with some core, as you say, pocketbook issues throughout the campaign season, especially throughout the general election season. And so now, I mean, he possibly could drive this message home every day for the next two weeks, but he just hasn't demonstrated his ability to do that. So I do think it could be an effective issue for him, but we'd have to wait and see if they really can drive it to make a difference in some of these swing states like Ohio.
COSTELLO: I think the Democrats could probably handle this issue better as well because Hillary Clinton has come out and said, yes, Obamacare needs fixing and I plan to fix it although she doesn't exactly say how she would accomplish that. But Bill Clinton said something interesting on the trail a while ago that smacked of honesty in most voter's minds. Listen to what he said about Obamacare.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BILL CLINTON, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: You got this crazy system where, all of a sudden, 25 million more people have health care and then the people are out there busting it sometimes 60 hours a week wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It's the craziest thing in the world.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COSTELLO: So, Mark, again in Ohio, people said that was honest, what Bill Clinton said, but then he walked it back a couple of days later. So how does that make --
PRESTON: Oh, well, he had to walk it back.
COSTELLO: I know --
PRESTON: Politically.
COSTELLO: For political purposes, right?
PRESTON: Right.
COSTELLO: But voters' minds, in many voters' minds, that just smacked of hypocrisy.
PRESTON: You know, the irony about Obamacare is, when you talk about dysfunction in Washington in general, the reason why we're in this fix right now or in this problem is because you're not seeing the Democrats and Republicans able to work together to try to cobble something out that isn't going to be perfect -- it's never going to be perfect -- but where they can't get together to try to work on something that will basically work. And I really think, when we look at the approval rating of Congress, for instance -- and it's around, you know, 13, 14 percent -- this is a perfect example.
COSTELLO: Yes. Because, David, Mr. Trump says he wants to repeal Obamacare, right, and put into place something else which he really hasn't described, but that means 21 people will be without any kind of health insurance so that's not really a great answer either for voters.
SWERDLICK: No, there aren't good answers on either side. Democrats are not sort of being as forthcoming as they could about this idea that, look, premiums are going up in part, as Athena reported, because there are not enough younger, healthier people in the pools. That sticker shock that results from the 25 percent increase means probably another year where you'll have less people than you ideally would want signing up for the Silver Plan and the other plans to increase the pool, and Democrats could at least do a better job of acknowledging that, as you say.
And at the same time, Republicans up to and including Donald Trump, up to and including Speaker Ryan, have not been forthcoming about the fact that they have not yet sort of produced a plan that has convinced the American people that their math works definitively better than the Democrats' math. And that's where we are, we are at an impasse on this issue.
COSTELLO: I know. And in the meantime, you know, people are suffering.
SWERDLICK: Yes.
COSTELLO: Mark, David, stick around. Still to come in the NEWSROOM, Trump's rigged election talk resonating, at least, with his own supporters.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Do you believe the polls?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No, I really don't.
BASH: Donald Trump has said that the polls are inaccurate. He doesn't believe them. What do you think?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't believe them either.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COSTELLO: Trump blames the polls and media, the establishment, but will it help him at the ballot box?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[09:17:54] COSTELLO: Let's talk polls.
Donald Trump insists the biased media is showing you dark, phony polls, and his supporters believe him. CNN's Randi Kaye went to a Trump rally in Florida and found a
skeptical and at times hostile crowd.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RANDI KAYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: A lot of the polls are showing that Trump is trailing. Do you believe the polls?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No. I really don't.
KAYE: Donald Trump has said that the polls are inaccurate. He doesn't believe them. What do you think?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't believe them either.
KAYE (voice-over): Many here suggest the polls are wrong, because people are afraid to say who they're voting for. But our questions about the polls were quickly interrupted by this man.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You guys are hypocritical.
KAYE (on camera): I've never seen you before. You don't know me. And so --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, no, but I know your news station and to me it's biased.
KAYE (voice-over): Shortly after that, he agreed to on interview.
(on camera): What do you think about the polls that all seem to show right now Donald Trump trailing?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And I think the polls are trash. It's bologna.
KAYE: Do you believe that these are fake polls?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, yes, definitely, because I see the bias in the whole media. It's because he's not the usual candidate that you would select. You see, he decides himself, right, to be who he is.
KAYE (voice-over): We moved on, asking supporters how Trump can turn things around, given that his own campaign manager acknowledges they are behind in the polls.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Right now he needs to stay point on. He does need to put a structured points out there of what he plans on doing. He has to share with everybody what his agendas are. And --
KAYE (on camera): Will that help win him more support, do you think?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It will.
KAYE: With so many polls, regardless of what you believe, showing Donald Trump trailing, what do you think he needs to say at this point to win the support of more American people? UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Donald Trump needs to go exactly and say what he
did Saturday, as far as his vision and his 100-day, what he will do in the first 100 days.
KAYE: You want more specifics?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That was excellent.
KAYE (voice-over): Supporters here were telling me how Trump needs to stay on message, when, again, things turned ugly.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They're going to chop off everything you say, they're going to twist it.
[09:20:00] CNN sucks.
KAYE (on camera): Nice to see you, too.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: CNN sucks.
KAYE: Nice to see you.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I know who you are. You're a liar.
KAYE: OK.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You're a liar.
KAYE: Nice to see you.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You're liar.
KAYE: You said your piece --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You chop everything up and edit it to your -- you suck.
KAYE (voice-over): Finally, even fellow supporters had enough.
(CROSSTALK)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK. Let us talk. We have the right to answer the questions that they ask.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And I have the right to say what I want to say.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK. You're making a fool of yourself in front of all the Trump fans here.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: CNN sucks.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COSTELLO: All right. So, let's talk about this. Mark Preston is back, so is David Swerdlick, and Alan Abramowitz is here. He's a professor of political science at Emory University and he is a polling expert here.
So, Mark, you can see Trump's words resonate with his supporters -- crooked media, phony polls. He's sort of pitting he and his followers as the whole world is against them and it's working with at least part of the electorate.
PRESTON: It's certainly working with about 1/3 right now. We're looking at his baseline at about 35 percent. I mean, you're looking at an electorate, we talked a little bit about this in the last segment, Obamacare, a very angry, frustrated electorate right now.
And a lot of folks don't understand why those folks are angry or mad. They look at the media, and they look at the political establishment as being against them. And, you know, unfortunately, I mean, that's not necessarily the case.
But when you are so wound up and you feel like that you've been given the short end of the stick, you're going to see situations like that.
COSTELLO: David, Mr. Trump said yesterday -- well, he cited dark polls. Do you know what that means? Dark polls?
SWERDLICK: Well, Trump loved polls while he was winning the primaries and now he's, you know, lashing out against polling in general. I don't want to define what he meant by dark polls, only simply to say that, look, he knows how to read a poll number. There are lots of credible polls out there, Carol.
His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway who has done everything she can do to keep him in this race is a pollster. So they can read polls. If you look at the CNN/ORC poll yesterday, Clinton has a comfortable but not huge 5 point lead, but the numbers are in the details, right? Trump leads two to one among white voters with no college degree and Clinton has a 12 point lead among women voters.
That is the tale of this election. Not dark polls, not media bias, this is a turnout election, a demographic election and you we've been saying now for months, who have a lot of negatives and lean on each other's negatives as their main message.
COSTELLO: So, Alan, you are our expert. You study polls. You're an expert in polls. It's what you've done for the majority of your life, right? So I'm just going to throw out some suspicions that people have about these polls. So, Trump supporters think too many Democrats take part in the polls and that's really why Trump is behind.
Could that be true?
ALAN ABRAMOWITZ, POLITICAL SCIENCE PROFESSOR, EMORY UNIVERSITY: That's very unlikely. First of all, these polls are conducted by many different organizations independently. We have polls at the state level. We have polls at the national level.
We saw the same kinds of accusations made four years ago by supporters of Mitt Romney. They turned out to be completely baseless. So certainly polls can be erroneous. There are always sources of error. There's always uncertainty about exactly who will vote, but the idea that there's some systematic bias across all of these polls and someone is directing it is completely ridiculous.
COSTELLO: Also people think, Alan, that there are many Trump supporters not willing to say they're Trump supporters and they're not being counted in these polls. Is that possible?
ABRAMOWITZ: There's just no evidence of that. If that were the case, then Trump would have outperformed the polls in the primaries. He did not. He does not -- he's not leading in the online polls where people are not speaking to a live interviewer, where there should be no hesitation about expressing their views.
So, again, there's just no evidence that Trump supporters are reluctant express their opinions in response to polls.
COSTELLO: And, Mark, I'm going to ask you this question. So CNN, we have CNN/ORC polls, right?
PRESTON: Right.
COSTELLO: We probably would be a good idea to put out inaccurate polls, right, because in the end, that would just make us look bad.
PRESTON: Right, and just in very basic understanding here is that the news is a news business, right? Our credibility is all we have, right, at CNN. So, why would we put out a bad poll? Quite frankly, why would any news organization put out a bad poll?
Now, you'll have the supporters who will say there's a conspiracy against Donald Trump, but it's ludicrous. But it is interesting about Donald Trump that Donald Trump will cite a poll when he likes it, he will criticize a poll when he doesn't like it. And what he does do, you know, when we're talking about online polls, the nonscientific online polls, he will say, oh, my gosh, those are the polls we need to look at.
[09:25:07] The bottom line is just because Donald Trump says it doesn't mean it's true.
COSTELLO: So, David, you're from "The Washington Post." You're our buddy, our pal. Is CNN colluding with "The Washington Post" when both organizations put out polls?
SWERDLICK: No. As Mark said, news gathering organizations have an interest, a critical interest in credibility, in providing accurate information to the public. Polls aren't always right, but there's no -- there's no collusion. There's no reason for news organizations to skew polls in a way that won't reflect the actual people polled and that won't try and predict as best as possible the result in the election.
Look, Trump can continue to make this case, and it does resonate with that core 35 or 40 percent of support that he has had all along, this idea that the media and the establishment and, you know, other organizations or other trends in our body politic are aligned against him, but there is simply, as Alan said, not evidence of that and, you know, I think the other part of the problem, he's doing a disservice to his voters, right?
I mean, it's not that he couldn't win this election. If there's some huge swell of turnout among his core supporters and Hillary Clinton' core supporters all just sort of like shrug off the election on Election Day, you know, anything can happen. But if you go by polls, Hillary Clinton has a small but sustained lead now in this election and there's only two weeks left in which Trump has to change that.
COSTELLO: All right. I have to leave it there.
Mark Preston, David Swerdlick, Alan Abramowitz, thanks to all of you.
Still to come in the NEWSROOM, a ballot battle playing out in high stakes Georgia. More than 100,000 voter registration applications not yet processed in this toss-up state, so what's the deal?
But first, we are moments away from the start of the g day. All eyes are on key earnings report that comes out this week.
CNNMoney correspondent Alison Kosik at the New York Stock Exchange with more on that.
Hi, Alison.
ALISON KOSIK, CNNMONEY CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol.
So, a flood of earnings reports are rolling in today, big names that you may recognize like JetBlue, Under Armour. But yes, it is fair to say that Apple will get the most attention when it reports after the closing bell today.
The big question everybody's asking, will Apple end the streak of slumping iPhone sales? The biggest publicly traded company in the U.S. unveiled the iPhone 7 last month. So, the first couple of week of sales will be included in the report, although they're unlikely to have a big effect on results.
Still, investors are going to be looking to see if Apple reports decent iPhone 7 sales. Now, despite two quarters in a row of slowing iPhone revenue, the stock is still up 12 percent this year.
I do want to mention one other company reporting today, my personal favorite of the day, it's iRobot. You know this company, Carol, because of the commercial I think we have some video of that little robotic vacuum, you know, doing all the work vacuuming your floor while you sit on the couch drinking a beer. I bet you didn't know this, but this is a technology company that doesn't just build vacuum cleaners like the Roomba that you see there. It also builds military and police robots.
So, this is a public company valued at $1.25 billion. So, it's reporting today. Analysts at this point unsure if it will beat expectations, but I'm thinking it will definitely beat my expectations of vacuuming the floor better than I can do -- Carol. COSTELLO: I'm with you, Alison. Thanks so much.
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(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
