Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

Report on Trump's Pandemic Response; Thousands of Poll Waters to be Deployed; Biden's Shortest Path to the White House; Pope Endorses Same-Sex Civil Unions. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired October 22, 2020 - 06:30   ET

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

[06:30:00]

DR. ALI KHAN, DEAN, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA MEDICAL CENTER'S COLLEGE OF PUBLIC HEALTH: To what we all know, which is that we've always had the tools to get this disease contained. And if we had used those public health tools, at not just the national level, but the national, state, and local level, we would have had a marked decline in deaths. Anywhere from maybe 10,000 to, if you want to take the worst-case scenario, France, you know, 160,000 deaths. So there's a whole lot of people who are dead in America that, completely preventable, that would not have been dead if we had used science and good public health tools.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: And, Dr. Khan, I mean I guess we knew that intellectually, but seeing them qualify it with a death toll, with actual numbers of how many lives could have been saved, is just really striking. And one of the things that the Columbia study says is that we a model. It's not -- this isn't all just hypothetical. We can look to another country that did it decidedly differently than the United States. South Korea. And what they did was the testing and the tracing and the isolating of people who were sick and proportionately, OK, so if you look at both of our populations, their death toll is 78 percent lower times small -- 78 percent times smaller than the U.S.

And so this isn't just theoretical anymore. We now know what it could have looked like if the government had done those kinds of testing and contact tracing.

KHAN: Oh, absolutely, Alisyn. It's completely sobering the number of preventable deaths in America. I mean there's no doubt this is, you know, the worst case of public health malpractice we've ever seen in this nation. And we've discussed previously on this show that if we had followed the path of South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Rwanda, I mean, I can go all over the world of countries with excellent leadership and state and local public health response using tools that we have that have protected their populations.

And this is not just about what could have been saved, which, you know, we always want to think about how many lives could have been saved. I want to talk about how many lives can be saved. So we're busy waiting for a vaccine, but while we're waiting for a vaccine, there's over 700 deaths a day in America. Seven hundred preventable deaths in America that would be preventable by using these public health tools, right? Excellent -- you know, the controlled triad we've talked about before, excellent leadership that's evidence-based, uses metrics and data to make decisions, make sure we drop community transmission with test, trace and isolate, and, finally, engage the public to make sure that we're all wearing our masks, to make sure we're washing our hands and social distancing.

I hate to say this. It's not rocket science. We know what the tools are to get this disease controlled in America today.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: I have to say, I think that's exactly the right take with 60,000 new cases a day right now, if we're still doing not much, I think that is a sobering, sobering thought.

Dr. Khan, important new guidance from the CDC. They've changed their guidance on what is considered a close contact with an infected person. It used to be that it was 15 continuous minutes next to a person who was positive. That's actually a long time. Think about that. How often are you, for a solid, continuous, 15 minutes within six feet of someone. Besides my wife, the only person is you, Alisyn Camerota. Seriously.

CAMEROTA: Every morning. Every morning.

BERMAN: You -- you and my kids, right?

Now, what they say, Dr. Khan, is a total of 15 minutes over a 24-hour period, which seems to me, at least, to be much more common and change the way we at least think about how often and how much we're masked and how often and how much we're being really careful.

KHAN: Yes, good point, John. So there was never anything really magical about the 15 minutes. And, actually, CDC's change really reflects what community practice already is, what's happening at your local and state health department.

So think of it two different ways. Why would you say one 15-minute exposure is a significant exposure, but if you have ten, 14-minute exposures during the course of 24 hours, that doesn't count as a significant exposure? And I'm sure the two of you can think of circumstances where you can have a pretty intense exposure that's less than 15 minutes that's really significant.

BERMAN: What it means, Dr. Khan, is all of us, mask on. We've got to be very careful much more of the time.

KHAN: Mask on.

BERMAN: Thank you so much for being with us.

CAMEROTA: Thank you, Dr. Khan.

KHAN: Always a pleasure. Thank you.

BERMAN: So for the first time in decades, thousands of poll watchers will be deployed across the nation on Election Day. We have brand-new details on how both campaigns plan to do this, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:39:13]

CAMEROTA: Election Day is still 12 days away, but already nearly 41 million Americans have cast their votes. That is close to surpassing the total early votes cast in 2016. It's also almost one-third of the total votes cast in that 2016 election.

So, this morning, CNN has learned details about how the Trump and Biden campaigns plan to deploy thousands of poll watchers on Election Day.

And CNN's Kristen Holmes is live in Washington with more.

What have you learned, Kristen?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Alisyn.

Well, the poll watchers are going to serve as the backbone to both the Biden and Trump campaign legal strategy on and after Election Day. We've learned that both of these campaigns are doing meticulous training with these poll watchers in the law so that they know exactly what to look out for.

[06:40:03]

And they expect the poll watchers to report any anomalies in real- time. By anomalies I mean long lines, broken machines, issues with voter rolls.

And we should keep in mind that actually poll watchers in some states can watch people counting the mail-in ballots. So that's something else that they are expected to report back on.

Now, both sides have a different strategy for reporting it. One, Democrats are launching a new app that will put the incidents in real- time, send them out to a virtual boiler room for the campaign and volunteers to decide how to act.

Now, Republicans, they are setting up command centers in person in various key swing states in order to deal with this in real-time.

And this is really the largest involvement of poll watchers we've seen in decades. In part because of a 1982 decree that severely limited what Republicans could do with poll monitoring. And that expired this year.

So all of this is to say that you should expect more lawsuits and, in an election that really has already been so rife with lawsuits and litigation.

And only that note, we do want to point out that the Supreme Court, last night, did grant a request by the state of Alabama in order to ban curbside voting. The state had said that this would lead to mass logistical problems. And voter rights groups had said that this was actually very helpful during a pandemic because it helped elderly or disabled people who wanted to vote in person, but couldn't wait in those long lines. And the three more liberal-leaning justices agreed with those voter advocates.

So interesting to watch, particularly if you think about the Supreme Court makeup as we head into today.

CAMEROTA: Kristen, thank you very much for all of that reporting.

So new polls give Joe Biden plenty of reasons to be optimistic heading into Election Day, but some Democratic operatives see reasons for concern in key battleground states. And Ron Brownstein is up early to explain it all to us, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:46:01]

BERMAN: So just 12 days left to vote. And thanks to the founding fathers, this is not really about who gets the most votes, but where they get them. The Electoral College.

Our friend, Ron Brownstein, has this fascinating new piece on Joe Biden's shortest path to the presidency and Dr. Ron Brownstein joins us now.

Ron, thanks so much for being with us.

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Hey, John. Good to see you.

BERMAN: Look, I'm going to cut to the chase here. The shortest path is to flip the three rust belt states that Donald Trump won from the Democrats basically.

BROWNSTEIN: Right.

BERMAN: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. We can put that up. If -- if Joe Biden does that and nothing else, he ends up with 278 electoral votes and wins. And maybe Joe Biden and his campaign are especially well suited for just this task, you write.

BROWNSTEIN: Yes.

BERMAN: Why?

BROWNSTEIN: Well, look, this isn't what you might have expected, right, right after 2016? I mean Donald Trump's breakthrough in the rust belt among non-college whites was so profound and those voters are still about half of the electorate or more in 2020. Many Democrats might have thought they had a better chance in the sun belt for 2020.

But two things happened in the interim. One is that we saw in the rust belt in 2018 a pullback from the Republicans, not only among the non- college -- not only among the college whites who were retreating from Trump everywhere, but also significantly among some of those blue collar whites, particularly the women. And the second thing that changed is they nominated Joe Biden. If you were going to draw up a candidate in the lab to solve the Democrat's long-standing problem of turning out more younger, non-white voters across the sun belt in states like Arizona or Texas or Georgia, it would not be a 77-year-old white guy who's been in politics for 50 years.

On the other hand, if you're going to draw up a candidate to try to win back some of those blue collar, you know, historically Democratic voters who broke towards Trump, that might be Biden. And both of those things combined have made this -- the rust belt somewhat surprisingly a better bet for him right now than the sun belt.

CAMEROTA: But, Ron, I did zero in on one graph in your recent piece about how the support for Trump may also be more energized than it was.

BROWNSTEIN: Yes.

CAMEROTA: You talked to a Wisconsin-based Republican strategist, who ran George W. Bush's campaign there in 2004 --

BROWNSTEIN: Yes.

CAMEROTA: Who is, quote -- you quote as saying, my sense of what I see, particularly in rural parts of the state and smaller cities, is that the Trump vote is more energized now than it was four years ago.

So explain that.

BROWNSTEIN: Well, look, I mean, you know, the way Donald Trump won those states, Alisyn, four years ago, was that he turned out more rural and non-college white voters than the pollsters expected. And there are some Democrats who are nervous that in the early voting, they see signs of, again, tremendous engagement among those voters, particularly in the rust belt states.

But Trump faces a couple of challenges in replicating what he did last time.

First of all, it's unlikely that turnout will be as depressed in the large metro centers that include a lot of black voters along the rust belt, whether it's Detroit or Philadelphia or Milwaukee or Cleveland. And, also, he's losing ground significantly in most of these white collar suburbs. Places like Oakland County, Michigan, or Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, or Franklin County, Ohio, or Polk, which is Des Moines. He is not going to run as well.

So the challenge is that even -- oh, and I guess the third thing is that matching the margin among the blue collar whites is going to be hard for him because of the retreat that he's seeing among seniors, many of whom are whites without a college education.

So while there is the potential for him to turn out more of those voters than the pollsters expect, again, because he does -- you know, if there's nothing else that Donald Trump can do, it's turn out his voters. The problem he's got, even if he increases the numerator, the denominator is getting bigger. Everybody is voting at a higher rate. And it's harder to have a turnout differential benefiting your side if the entire pool is getting that much bigger.

BERMAN: I just want to put up P-114, and this gets to something you were saying there, that the president's margin among non-college whites --

BROWNSTEIN: Yes.

BERMAN: Right now, according to the polls, is a lot less.

[06:50:00]

It's a lot smaller in Michigan and Pennsylvania than it was in 2016.

BROWNSTEIN: Yes.

BERMAN: Half in Michigan --

BROWNSTEIN: Yes. Yes.

BERMAN: And two-thirds of what it was in Pennsylvania.

And then coupled with, Ron, what is Joe Biden or how is Joe Biden or what are the Democrats doing or what evidence have you seen about them trying to pull in more urban voters or more suburban votes?

BROWNSTEIN: Yes.

Well, first, I mean, John, I am struck, if you look at the polling across all of these states that are, you know, within any degree of competitiveness across the rust belt. So the big three, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and then kind of the next tier, where Trump is hoping to contest Minnesota and the Democrats are within reach now in Iowa and Ohio, Biden's coalition looks extraordinarily similar across those states. Where there are large African-American populations, he's winning about 80 to 85 percent of them. He's winning 55 percent or more of college whites in all of those states, except maybe Ohio. And that is an improvement from 2016.

And then, most significantly, he's coming in right around 40 percent among non-college whites in all of those states. And we look at the polls that came out yesterday, it was 41, 41, 44, 42. That doesn't sound like great shakes (ph), but it is a significantly improvement over Hillary Clinton, who did not get above 37 percent, I believe, in any of those states among the blue collar whites in 2016.

So, in a way, Joe Biden is doing the job that he was hired to do by the Democratic Party. I mean you don't -- as I said, you don't nominate Joe Biden to be the one to solve the problem of energizing more younger, non-white voters. His calling card from the beginning was that he could win back some of those folks that we've all been interviewing in diners in the rust belt since 2016, and the evidence is that he's doing just enough of it, particularly among the women. CAMEROTA: Ron Brownstein, thank you very much for giving us your analysis of where we are at this moment in time. Always great to talk to you.

BROWNSTEIN: Good to see you guys.

CAMEROTA: OK, so Pope Francis making a seismic shift, endorsing civil unions for same-sex couples. How are Catholics responding? A live report from the Vatican, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:55:38]

BERMAN: Reverberations around the world this morning after Pope Francis chose to speak out in support of legalizing same-sex civil unions. This is a major departure from his predecessors and a departure from catholic dogma.

CNN's Delia Gallagher live in Rome.

And this really has caused quite a stir, Delia.

DELIA GALLAGHER, CNN VATICAN CORRESPONDENT: Well, that's right, John, we've heard from both sides, both in praise and criticism for the pope's comments.

Let's take a look first at what the pope actually said. These were comments made during a documentary film, which premiered last night in Rome. According to the catholic news agency, the pope said homosexual people have a right to be in a family. They're children of God and have a right to a family. What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered.

So we've heard praise, but we've also heard criticism from some catholic circles because this does represent a change from the position of the pope's predecessors. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were against the legalization of same-sex unions.

We have to say that Francis, however, has, in interviews in the past, shown an openness to legal protections for same-sex couples, but he's made the distinction between that and marriage, which he says should be between a man and a woman.

But, nonetheless, important comments from the pope because it is the first time that he has directly supported the legalization of same-sex unions.

We should also add, John, of course, these were comments made in a film. We do not yet have anything official from the pope or the Vatican in terms of a document or official change in teaching on this. So we'll have to wait and see how it develops.

John.

BERMAN: Yes, I understand it was in a film and it may not have been this year, but, still, it seems very clear and very deliberate what he said.

Delia Gallagher, thank you so much for being with us.

NEW DAY continues right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are not going to tolerate foreign interference in our elections that threatens the sanctity of your vote.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have already seen Iran sending spoofed e-mails designed to intimidate voters and damage President Trump.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just given the track record of DNI Ratcliffe, you have to address what he says with some skepticism.

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: We literally left this White House a pandemic playbook. They probably you'd it to, I don't know, problem up a wobbly table somewhere.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Look, it's all over the world. It came out of China.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That was the most at-once blistering and at-once mocking assessment President Obama has ever delivered on his successor.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.

Welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is NEW DAY.

And we're just hours away from the final debate between President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. The last, best chance for either candidate to change the course of this election, if that's possible.

Nearly 41 million Americans have already cast their votes. That's 89 percent -- 89 percent of the total early vote cast in 2016, 30 percent of the total vote cast four years ago. A lot of people voting already. So much interest in the future of this country.

Why? No doubt the coronavirus pandemic playing a central role. And that will be the focus and should be the focus of tonight's debate.

A new study from Columbia University states at least 130,000 deaths and perhaps as many as 210,000 could have been avoided with earlier policy interventions and more robust, federal coordination and leadership. Better leadership could have saved lives.

Overnight, 1,124 new deaths were reported in the United States. Nearly 63,000 new cases. That's the high -- no, former President Barack Obama delivered a blistering rebuke of President Trump's handling of the pandemic during a campaign stop last night. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: Look, I get that this president wants full credit for the economy he inherited and zero blame for the pandemic that he ignored. But you know what? The job doesn't work that way. Tweeting at the television doesn't fix things.

[07:00:02]

Making stuff up doesn't make people's lives better. You've got to have a plan.