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CNN Poll: Clinton Leads Trump by 5 Points; Obamacare Premiums Set to Soar Next Year; Is Trump's Battleground Map Too Optimistic? Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired October 25, 2016 - 06:00   ET

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

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: The system is corrupt, and it's rigged and it's broken.

[05:58:27] SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D), MASSACHUSETTS: Get this, Donald. Nasty women are tough. Nasty women are smart, and nasty women vote.

TRUMP: They are phony polls put out by phony media.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The brand of politics Hillary represents is not something that goes into 140 characters.

TRUMP: Repeal and replace Obamacare. It's only getting worse.

HILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: He shouldn't be a role model for our kids or for anybody else.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to your NEW DAY. It is Tuesday, October 25, 6 a.m. in the East. Up first, election day is exactly two weeks away. A fortnight.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Well said.

CAMEROTA: As John Berman would say. National polls show Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by five points, 49 to 44 percent in the final stretch of the campaign. But Trump says he is winning. He dismisses what he calls phony polls from the media.

CUOMO: There's a lot that can still happen. Look what just hit the trail. Clinton facing a new challenge. Obamacare premiums are going to soar by double digits next year. Now, what's that going to mean on the race? Trump and Clinton are battling it out for votes in Florida, big 29 electors down there. We have it all covered. But let's begin with CNN's Jason Carroll in Miami.

Good morning, Jason.

JASON CARROLL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, good morning to you, Chris. You know that the Trump campaign says that the large crowds that they

draw at their rallies shows that this candidate is doing well. They say that the media is ignoring it, and they say the pollsters are just getting it all wrong.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CARROLL (voice-over): Donald Trump on the defensive.

TRUMP: I believe we're actually winning.

CARROLL: 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: Just hours before hitting the trail, Trump did admit he's lagging.

TRUMP (via phone): I guess I'm somewhat behind in the polls but not by much.

CARROLL: 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 (on camera): 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: ... the media...

TRUMP: The media isn't just against me. They're against all of you.

CARROLL: ... and the 11 women accusing him of unwanted advances.

TRUMP (via phone): They were made up. I don't know these women.

CARROLL: 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: This as Clinton works to seal a win in New Hampshire, campaigning with liberal favorite Senator Elizabeth Warren.

WARREN: I'm with her. Are you with her?

CARROLL: Both wasting no time hitting the GOP nominee.

CLINTON: 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: 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. I've got news for you, Donald Trump. Women have had it with guys like you. And nasty women have really had it with guys like you. Nasty women are tough. Nasty women are smart. And nasty women vote.

CARROLL: President Obama joining the Democratic Trump takedown on Jimmy Kimmel.

OBAMA: What I don't do is, like at 3 a.m., I don't tweet about...

JIMMY KIMMEL, HOST, ABC'S "JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE!": You don't tweet in the middle of the night?

OBAMA: Insulted me.

KIMMEL: You watch Donald Trump, do you ever laugh? Do you ever actually laugh?

OBAMA: Most of the time.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CARROLL: And Chris, a poll out just last week here in the state of Florida showing Trump trailing Clinton by four points. Early voting underway here in the state right now. Trump making two stops in the state of Florida today. Clinton making one stop. Tomorrow, Trump heads back to the battleground state of North Carolina -- Chris.

CUOMO: Jason, you make a lot of good points. People do have to remember this is all in real time. Voting is happening every day. So every event can have an immediate impact on the result.

Donald Trump and Republicans are blasting this news that Obamacare premiums are going to soar next year. Trump is declaring that it's over for Obamacare. Defenders say consumers won't feel the pain. That's a little bit of spin, and we're going to get into it with CNN's Athena Jones live from the White House with more. Crunching the numbers.

ATHENA JONES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Chris.

That's right. Sticker shock could be awaiting millions of people when they go to sign up for health insurance through Obamacare this year. And that's because premiums for the benchmark silver plan are set to rise an average of 25 percent for plans offered on the federal exchange. That's Healthcare.gov.

That's compared to an increase of just 7.2 percent last year. So it's a big jump.

Now, when you look at the plans offered by both the federal exchange and the states that run their own exchanges, the increase is a little lower at 22 percent, but it's still significant. As you mentioned, the government says, since the vast majority of

Obamacare enrollees get subsidies to help lower the cost of their premiums, a lot of folks won't feel the sting of this in their own pocketbooks. The government says 77 percent of customers will still be able to find a plan that costs them $100 a month or less after the subsidies.

It's also important to remember this 25 percent is an average. So it's going to vary across states. For instance, in Arizona, which had the lowest premium last year, customers there can expect to see an average increase of more than 100 percent.

Meanwhile, in Indiana, the price for the benchmark plan will actually decrease by 3 percent. So it'll be 3 percent cheaper for them.

Now, the question is why this big jump in prices? There are several reasons. One, insurers -- enrollees are sicker and costlier than the insurers expected them to be initially. Not enough young and healthy people are signing up. The insurers initially priced their plans too low, because they were trying to gauge the market. And there's also less competition in the marketplace. So that means there are fewer people offering plans.

[06:05:11] Of course, Obamacare has been under fire since its inception. And so this news provides more fodder to be its many critics, from House Speaker Paul Ryan to Donald Trump, who said yesterday this increase in premiums means Obamacare is over.

And health care, we know, is an important issue for voters. In our latest CNN/ORC poll, 50 percent of voters said it was important to them. And that number is even higher for Hillary Clinton's supporters, at 53 percent. So this is something that is very likely to come up on the campaign trail, something she's going to have to address -- Alisyn, Chris.

CAMEROTA: That is a safe bet, Athena, that Donald Trump will be talking about this as often as possible. Thanks for all that reporting.

Joining us now to talk about that and more, CNN political analyst and Washington bureau chief for "The Daily Beast," Jackie Kucinich; CNN political analyst and "New York Times" political reporter Alex Burns; and CNN political analyst David Gregory. Great to see all of you.

Before we get to Obamacare and what this means for the race, let's just talk about the new CNN polls that have come out, because they're very interesting. They're divided, actually. Donald Trump win in some demographics. Hillary Clinton wins in some.

Let's look at the overall. OK, let's start with women. There you go. Hillary Clinton wins with 53 to his 41. He, however, wins with men. Alex, 48 percent to her 45.

CUOMO: And the spreads are different than we've been seeing in the polls and otherwise. She had -- she had like a 20-point spread with women. Not in this poll. Trump is over that threshold, Mark, of 40 percent that we keep talking about, you know, at 43, 44 percent. So that's different.

CAMEROTA: Let's look at independents, that all-important voting bloc and how they're doing at the moment. Trump has 45 percent to her 41 percent. He is winning with independents.

Let's look at college-educated white voters versus non-college- educated. Clinton wins. If you have a degree, she gets 52 percent, he gets 41. No degree, he gets 62 percent, she gets 32.

Alex, what do you see in some of these numbers?

ALEX BURNS, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: I think in that last breakdown, it really shows you the story of Trump's campaign. If you have a Republican candidate who is not winning or at least coming pretty much even with college-educated white voters, it is extraordinarily difficult for that person to win the presidency.

He makes up for some of it by that staggering margin...

CUOMO: Two to one.

BURNS: ... with non-college-educated white voters. But what we've seen pretty consistently is it's just not enough. And this is one of the more encouraging polls for Donald Trump. A five-point margin is actually a bit than we've seen elsewhere, which is not that great when you're this close to election day. And as Chris mentioned before, when you already have people voting.

So if it's five-point -- it's a five-point deficit today, that's a five-point deficit that's showing up in election results today. And it means that the deficit he will need to close next week may be even larger.

CUOMO: Jackie Kucinich, headline for you out of this poll.

JACKIE KUCINICH, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: You know, when you look at all the issues people care about, Donald Trump is still winning on the economy. He's losing in all the other -- terrorism and foreign policy, but the economy is what a lot of people end up voting on at the end of day; it ends up being your pocketbook. So this poll is a bright spot for Donald Trump amid, you know, some other news that might not be as good.

CAMEROTA: Go ahead, David.

DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: I just want to say, in 2012, the Real Clear Politics average of polls I think was within a percentage point difference. And then, ultimately, President Obama won re-election by four percentage points. He won by eight percentage points in 2008.

So if you're somewhere in between that spread, you look at the race kind of in this position at this point. If it's four or five points or maybe it's more that she's ahead, you project that forward, which is why it looks like a commanding victory. No Democrat has ever won those voters who have a college degree over a

Republican. So if Professor Ron Brownstein were here from Atlantic, right, he would say that this is just such a huge deal, particularly because of the fact that he's also losing terribly among minorities, among women, and among the young.

And so you look at this talk about rallies versus get-out-the-vote. If this is where the race is, what changes the dynamic? We can be in two weeks of this tit-for-tat of what we're seeing on the campaign trail. But Clinton's in a much stronger position to get out her vote. She's got the surrogates. She's got the assets. She's got all of these get-out-the-vote efforts, all the celebrities that seem to cotton to the Democratic Party. That's a pretty strong way to finish.

CUOMO: We're actually going to get into the infrastructure, because we keep talking about voting machines and registration machines and getting out the vote. Really, we don't know what that mechanism and what the advantage is. We're going to go through that today.

Now, one of the things that Trump is doing -- you've got 14 days, right? The layer in this B.S. sandwich, the mayonnaise is true. Right? There's always one part that's true, which is...

CAMEROTA: Tasty.

CUOMO: ... polls -- a lot of people, certainly 60 percent of that one group, certainly, are eating it. And he's saying these polls are bogus. Now he loved the polls during the primaries when they showed him on the ascendant.

[06:10:06] But there is a big range, Alex. Right? You know, and that is -- it's confusing to people. And the margins of error are different. That's confusing. So how is CNN at 5 but then another reputable place it is 12? What are the assumptions you see that account for that?

BURNS: Well, and you even see this when you talk to the campaigns and the two parties. The underlying assumptions that they use to build their polling model.

Who do we think is going to show up on election day? How many Democrats? How many Republicans? Does enthusiasm among voters matter, or does just being registered to vote matter?

These are all questions that pollsters wrestle with every day. The fact that there's variation is not evidence that there's anything rigged about these polls.

And for the most part, virtually every pollster I've ever dealt with, they work very, very hard to get it right, not to rig the results, because they're looking for clients in the future who want to get it right.

CUOMO: Right. And that's why we do the poll of polls. So if you just saw that graphic we put up there, I think it added up to all the different ranges of margin. What, 39, so 39, 5. Almost 8 points is what they're saying her rough, rounded score is. Maybe that's the best one.

BURNS: But the key thing here is that we're talking about a variation in Clinton's lead. We're not looking at, you know, a range of polls, some of them show Trump up ten, some of them show Clinton up ten. Right? It's either Clinton up by a huge margin, Clinton up by a small margin, or you know, the race roughly at a dead heat. But the dead heat polls are getting fewer and fewer.

KUCINICH: But what you're hearing...

BURNS: By the way...

KUCINICH: I'm sorry.

CUOMO: No, go ahead, Jackie. Go ahead.

KUCINICH: What you're hearing from the Trump campaign, though, is they are keeping their fingers crossed for the silent majority of voters who maybe these polls aren't picking up, whether or not they exist. And they're pointing to things -- I mean, look at the Mitt Romney campaign. Their models were wrong going into the final weeks. They're hoping all of the models are wrong and that all of these voters that are voting for...

CAMEROTA: Well, they're only looking at battleground states.

KUCINICH: Totally.

CAMEROTA: The campaign is looking at battleground states.

KUCINICH: Totally.

CAMEROTA: They see different numbers. In the battleground states, they're less concerned with the national numbers.

KUCINICH: I think that's state -- I think a lot of the campaigns are like that. Very true.

CAMEROTA: They think that there are still good signs for Trump. Yes, go ahead, David.

GREGORY: Well, so fine, so look at that. Where is Trump spending his time? He's in Florida. He's in Ohio. He's in...

CUOMO: Pennsylvania.

GREGORY: ... North Carolina. He's got to play defense. And he's way behind in Pennsylvania and has been for a long time.

But he's got to play defense in North Carolina, which went for Romney in 2012. Apparently, Pence is traveling out to Salt Lake City, Utah, not traditionally a battleground state, to play a little defense there.

And by the way, Hillary Clinton, if she wants -- she's happy to slug it out in North Carolina and Florida, because she could certainly lose Florida. She could certainly lose Ohio. She's got multiple paths to 270. She's starting to look at how she gets to 330, 350 electoral votes at this point.

And by the way, the -- the inside the polls, Trump's deficiencies with young people, with women, with voters with college degrees, with minorities, these have been present. These deficiencies have been present since last year. There has not been -- even before the primaries you haven't seen any movement. These were the same problems he had before the primaries.

CUOMO: OK. So you have a flawed man. You have a flawed candidate. But what unites all those people and what overrides their feeling about politicians in general is their pocketbooks, their wallets.

And this Obamacare thing will make a difference. People who are paying it and dealing with the exchanges, if your state has one, knows that this is more expensive. And people said, "Bill Clinton laid it out right." You do have this slice of those who are working in small businesses who aren't getting advantage out of Obamacare right now. And now you hear about the premiums going up 22 percent.

And they believe that the good explanation on the left is, well, the subsidies are going to go up, so you won't feel it. That, to many, makes it worse. So it's more expensive on both sides. How big could this be?

BURNS: I think it's probably going to be a bigger deal for Republican Senate candidates, Republicans trying to keep control of Congress, than it is for Donald Trump. Because most of the voters who are rejecting Trump are doing so not on the basis of policy but on the basis of character, on the basis of questions about national identity and sort of social values.

CUOMO: You really put a pin in my balloon there. I built it up. I had my hands moving. Then you were like...

BURNS: For another Republican candidate, if you imagine a universe where -- a parallel universe where John Kasich or Marco Rubio is the Republican candidate right now, this would be devastating for Hillary Clinton. But it's hard to counteract what people think about your character with an argument about policy.

CAMEROTA: OK. Hold your thoughts. Panel, we want to talk to you more. But first, the Trump campaign is revealing their road to 270 electoral votes. But their map looks nothing like CNN's map. So is the Trump campaign's path to victory too rosy? We're going to look at the battle of the maps next on NEW DAY.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:18:27] CUOMO: All right. We're just two weeks from election day. Just 14 days from today. You've got early voting already going on in many states. So then comes a memo released by the Trump campaign manager, giving us an inside look into how they see the electoral map. And it is very different.

So let's discuss. Let's ring back our panel: Jackie Kucinich, Alex Burns and brother Gregory.

All right. Let's look at the Trump map. OK. Here's what they're putting out, and they're saying -- and the real identifying difference is going to be battleground states, denoted by yellow on this map.

Notably, if you look to your left, you'll see those two yellow squares have red in between. That's Utah and Arizona. Everybody else has those as battleground states. But the headline is there are a lot fewer battleground states than, say, compared to the CNN map.

Put up the CNN map. All right. So CNN has there being a lot fewer battleground.

CAMEROTA: Four to 12.

CUOMO: Right. And Trump says there's a lot more in play. David Gregory, when you look at this map, you know, one of the headlines is they say Utah and Arizona are very much in it. But they say you've got 12 states up for grabs as opposed to four that people like CNN are saying. And then Trump layers on top of it, and this is being done because it's rigged and its biased.

But assuming it's just based on quantification and calculation, how do you see it?

GREGORY: Well, I just don't -- I don't see how they -- how they get there. I'm playing around here with my own map. Two-seventy to win. You can give Trump Florida. You can give him Ohio. You can keep North Carolina as a toss-up state.

You give her Pennsylvania, where she's up, way ahead. New Hampshire, give her those. Keep Arizona and Utah for Trump. I've got her at 278. So -- and by the way, she's ahead in Florida. She's ahead in North Carolina. She's even ahead in Ohio.

[06:20:16] So you know, even if you were to take away Wisconsin, you know, she's still on the cusp of winning. So there's so many ways for her to win. And she's leading in Arizona, which I'm keeping and they're keeping firmly in his column.

So you know, again, there's -- some of this is therapy over reality for them. But the reality is, even if they're right -- and again, we don't know who comes out to vote. That's why we show up on election day. It still seems very, very narrow for him to get there.

CAMEROTA: Well, I'll tell you how they get there. I mean, Kellyanne Conway is, of course, a -- you know, esteemed pollster. She's done this for 30 years, as she likes to point out. But she says that they're deadlocked in North Carolina and Ohio. Trump is ahead in Ohio.

So Jackie, let me tell you what she says, how their math works: "Over the past month, polls have shown us winning Iowa, Ohio, Maine, Florida, Nevada, and North Carolina. If we maintain our leads in those six states, we can reliably claim 266 electoral votes. Hillary can claim 193. We'd still have four electoral votes to go." That was in a memo yesterday to donors. So that's their latest math.

I mean, maybe it's pie in the sky, but she's a pollster. She knows how to crunch numbers.

KUCINICH: And her client is Donald Trump and his donors. So it does seem overly rosy, as we were just discussing.

I mean, they had Michigan in play in that map. They had Colorado, which has a high Hispanic population, which Donald Trump has not done well with. Pennsylvania has sort of been a white whale for Republicans. And there's nothing really -- there's nothing really that's saying he's doing overwhelmingly well there.

CAMEROTA: You know, what they would say, when we talk to them, is that when you drive around some places in Pennsylvania, you see Trump/Pence, Trump/Pence, Trump/Pence.

KUCINICH: Yard signs don't vote.

CAMEROTA: Yard signs everywhere. They don't vote, but they do show enthusiasm.

KUCINICH: Sure. But you know, the -- they're someone's job to put yard signs on highway overpasses. If it's places where you don't usually see them -- I was talking to a Republican yesterday who said this. If you're seeing yard signs, let's say, in old town Alexandria, which is right outside of D.C., tends to be a very liberal area, then it's like, hmmm. But you're not really seeing that.

It's like crowds don't vote. When you see big crowds at rallies, for example, that doesn't necessarily mean -- it could show enthusiasm, but it could just be people coming out to a rally. All that matters is election day and the early voting numbers that we're seeing.

GREGORY: Who comes out on election day is so important. I mean, this is why -- this is why this get-out-the-vote effort is so important. Because even the model in 2012 showed something. And then Obama voters simply overwhelmed at the polls. And that's why this question of is the race over that's so competitive. You're either suppressing or driving up...

CUOMO: That ties into the signs, though. The difference between -- I've said this for a while now. And I'm -- you know, I've been around this a very long time, but I'm no pollster. I don't see the confidence that Clinton gets the turnout that Obama did and, you know, alleviates this disconnect with the signs versus the voters. But that's why we do show up on election day.

What's your last point?

BURNS: Look, I think that the presence of Trump yard signs, the size and nature of Trump's crowds, this tells you something important about the nature of his support and the kind of campaign that he has run and the degree to which, you know, wearing a Trump sticker is sort of a cultural signifier in a way that wearing a Clinton sticker really isn't in the same way. But you talk to Republicans outside the Trump campaign who see their

own internal polling, and even some of the Trump internal polling, that map that the Trump campaign put out is not what the Republican Party sees.

CUOMO: We'll put it as ambitious.

Another thing that goes along with an earmark of the enthusiasm of the Trump campaign are mean tweets. All right, and that's not a segue. That's real. Mean tweets are a big part of what comes along with the Trump campaign.

So we had President Obama on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" last night, reading some of the mean tweets to him. Priceless. Here it is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: "My mom bought new conditioner, and it sucks, it isn't even conditioning my hair. I blame Obama."

"Barack Obama, bro, do you even lift?"

Well, I lifted the ban on Cuban cigars. That's worth something.

"President Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States!" @realDonaldTrump.

@realDonaldTrump, at least I will go down as a president.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CUOMO: Oh, he dropped the phone!

CAMEROTA: David Gregory, how do you rate the humor?

GREGORY: You know, it's funny. In an interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin, that was actually something that Barack Obama was rather proud of, that he's had this kind of range to do everything from slow- jamming Jimmy Fallon or being on with Kimmel and reading tweets. So he's had some game in that respect.

And, you know, look, when you're a popular president, as he is, in terms of approval rating, you're a pretty effective surrogate. And right now he's micro-targeting these groups that they want to show up. He's doing his best, Cuomo, to make sure that, you know, that Obama coalition comes out in 2012. And he's made it very clear that it's his legacy on the line, too.

CUOMO: Yes, he's right to a certain extent. But I'll tell you, if he wants to read more mean tweets about him, I've got much better ones than the ones he read. I've got worse ones, about my mom. I get worse things.

All right. Thank you very much, panel. Appreciate it.

CAMEROTA: That's horrible. CUOMO: So she is not just a mom. She happens to be the first mom to

also run a Republican presidential campaign. What is it like being Donald Trump's cleanup person all the time? Kellyanne Conway, you've gotten to know her through this campaign, but she is much more than what you think. Ahead on NEW DAY.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: Time now for the five things to know for your new day.

A new CNN/ORC national poll shows Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by five points, 49 to 44 percent, with just two weeks until election day.