Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

New National Poll Has Hillary Clinton Leading Donald Trump; Obamacare Premiums Rising; Interview with RNC Communications Director Sean Spicer; Interview with Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake of Baltimore. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired October 25, 2016 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00] DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We're losing our jobs like a bunch of babies.

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

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 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 25th, 8:00 in east. Election Day is exactly two weeks away.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Sport night.

CAMEROTA: There you go. How many times can we use it today? A new CNN/ORC national poll shows Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by five points, 49 to 44 percent. But Donald Trump says he is winning in the polls he's looking at. He dismisses what he calls phony polls from the media.

CUOMO: Added to the rigged list. Clinton, other side of the ball, has her own challenges. Obamacare premiums are going to soar by double digits in the next year now. What is that going to mean for the race? How does she own this? How does she argue that somehow she's the right agent for change? And right now you have both campaigns heavily concentrated in Florida, each needs those 29 electoral votes. Let's begin the coverage with CNN's Jason Carroll in Florida in Miami. Jason?

JASON CARROLL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: And hello to you, Chris. Early voting underway here in the state of Florida, polls showing that Donald Trump trailing behind Hillary Clinton. But the Trump camp dismissing the polling techniques. Trump himself telling all of his supporters not to believe in those polls showing him being behind.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CARROLL: Donald Trump on the defensive.

DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I believe we're actually winning.

CARROLL: Trump flat out denying he is behind in the 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: 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 poll shows 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: 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: 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." 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.

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN, (D) MASSACHUSETTS: I'm with her. Are you with her?

CARROLL: 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: 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.

(BOOS)

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

BARACK OBAMA, (D) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: What I don't do is like at 3:00 a.m., I don't tweet about --

JIMMY KIMMEL, LATE NIGHT TALK SHOW HOST: You don't tweet?

OBAMA: -- people who insulted me.

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

OBAMA: Most of the time.

(LAUGHTER)

KIMMEL: Most of the time.

(APPLAUSE)

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CARROLL: Both candidates making a heavy play for the state of Florida. Trump has two more stops here today. Clinton has one more today and two more tomorrow. Chris?

CUOMO: All right, thank you very much, Jason, appreciate it.

Donald Trump and Republicans blasting Democrats after news that Obamacare premiums will soar next year. Trump declaring, quote, "It's over for the ACA," the Affordable Care Act." The plan's defenders insist most consumers will not feel the crunch. That gets us into a little bit of a spin game. So we've got CNN's Athena Jones to unspin from the White House, the house of spin.

ATHENA JONES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Chris. It could be sticker shock for millions of people. That's because the premiums for the benchmark silver plan, that's the midlevel plan, are set to rise 25 percent on average on the federal exchanges. That's healthcare.gov. That's compared to a rise of just 7.2 percent last year.

[08:05:00] Now the government says that since the vast majority of people get a subsidy that helps reduce the cost of their premiums, they're not going to feel this in their pocketbooks. The Department of Health and Human Services says that 77 percent of people are going to be able to find a plan that costs them $100 or less a month.

And to be clear, this 25 percent is an average, so it's going to vary from state to state. So you have a state like Arizona which had the lowest premium last year, customers there are going to see an average increase of over 100 percent. But in Indiana the cost of premiums is going to go down by three percent so it will be three percent cheaper.

So what's causing this big jump in rates? Several things. One, enrollees are sicker and costlier than expected. Not enough young and healthy people are signing up. Insurers initially priced their plans too low. And there's also less of a competition in the marketplace with some of the big insurers pulling out, so fewer options.

We know that Obamacare has been under fire from the very beginning and so this news about this big jump in premiums is just more fodder for the plan's many, many critics. And we know that health care is something that's important to voters. Fifth percent of voters told us in our latest CNN/ORC poll that it was an important part of their vote, and that number is higher for Hillary Clinton supporters. It was at 53 percent. So we know this is going to come up on the campaign trail. It already has from Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton is going to have to address this. Alisyn?

CAMEROTA: OK, Athena, thanks so much for all of that.

Joining us now to discuss the state of the race, we are two weeks from election day, I don't have to tell this next man, RNC chief strategist and communications director Sean Spicer. Hi, Sean.

SEAN SPICER, RNC COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR: Good morning.

CAMEROTA: How do you feel this morning?

SPICER: I feel good.

CAMEROTA: You do?

SPICER: I do. A little skip in the air, ready to go.

CAMEROTA: So you're feeling the optimism that the Trump campaign seems to be feeling as well?

SPICER: I do. I do. You look at the numbers where we are in terms of the early vote, the absentee ballots, I think it gives us a lot optimism, whether it's Florida, Ohio, Nevada, or Iowa. In each of those cases we're seeing a lot of optimism not just in terms of what our absentee ballot request and return is, but where the Democrats are. They're down in almost every one of those areas vis-a-vis where they were in 2012. And that enthusiasm gap that we hear about in terms of Secretary Clinton in terms of young voters, minority voters, it's starting to show up.

CAMEROTA: I get it. So the metric you guys are using is absentee ballot requests and returns?

SPICER: No. I think at some point you do have to look at where you were in 2012. So it's not just one thing. We have an unbelievable set of data in each one of those states. We have voter scores for 197 million voters. We know where voters are in terms of the process. Do they vote early? Do they vote on Election Day? Republicans generally vote on Election Day. Democrats need to do well in the early vote, in the absentee ballot returns. So we look at where we were in 2012 and where they were in 2012 and in almost every case we're ahead of where we were in 2012 and they are below where they were in 2012.

CAMEROTA: Let's look at the polls, because I think it's interesting how different the Trump camp sees it than the Hillary camp or even than CNN. So let me put up what CNN thinks are the swing states. So right now today the swing states according to CNN are Arizona, Utah, North Carolina and Ohio. This is our map, the yellow.

SPICER: Right. And I would argue that Arizona and Utah are not swing states. We're very confident in them. We've shored them up, and so, you know, I would dispute that right off the top.

CAMEROTA: OK, now let's look at what Trump's electoral map are and where he thinks the swing states are -- Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, New Hampshire, and Maine. Those are the yellow states.

SPICER: Particularly Maine, too, just to be clear. Maine has a little bit of reach, but Maine two, that second congressional district, Maine and Nebraska are the two states that divide their electoral votes by congressional district. We feel very good about Maine two.

CAMEROTA: Why do you feel very good about Maine two when Clinton is up three points?

SPICER: Because, again, you can be up in one part of the state and down in another, and there's different pockets. We feel when you look at Maine two, the same way that you can do well in upstate New York and not do well in the city, I mean, there's a different makeup in different parts of the state.

CAMEROTA: So in that part of the state you're going to get the electoral votes you think you need. Let's look at Florida. So Hillary Clinton is up there. You think you're going to win Florida?

SPICER: Again, we're leading in absentee ballots requests and returned. We've got over 850,000 more Republicans that have requested a ballot in 2012. So that's close to 1 million so far. As we head into the early vote piece of it, not just the absentee ballot, we feel very good about the number of Republicans that are either voting in person or have requested and returned an absentee ballot. And you look where the Democrats are, and that's the best sign. Polls are great. They give you a guide post. They tell you where you're headed, but at the end of the day as we all know, votes are what win an election.

CAMEROTA: Nevada, you're feeling good about Nevada?

SPICER: I am. You think about it, it's a state that Obama carried twice. It's Harry Reid's --

CAMEROTA: She's up seven points at the moment.

SPICER: Again, I think when you start to look at where we are in terms of what our data shows and where we are electorally, again, the Dems are down 3,000 votes from where they were in 2012.

[08:10:04] CAMEROTA: In terms of requests of absentee votes.

SPICER: And Republicans are up. And again, polls are a sample size. You take 400, 500 people in a state and get an idea where they are. But when you can start to look at who's returning a ballot, that's what counts. The other thing that the polls show is an enthusiasm gap for Hillary Clinton and an excitement for the movement that Donald Trump represents, and that's getting translated into actual votes, requests and returns for absentee ballots.

CAMEROTA: You know, back in 2012 Mitt Romney's team, as you know, famously got it wrong. So much so that on election night they were stunned, I mean, according to reports from inside the room, that they had expected to win. Their data, whatever it was they were looking at, told them that Mitt Romney was going to win. Are you sure that the Republican party has fixed those metrics, whatever they were looking at?

SPICER: Absolutely. We know where the state of the race is. And again, we have 14 days to go. So what we've got to see is a continuation of the momentum break our way. We started to see that in the last couple of weeks, not just nationally but in key battleground states.

So you can -- you can have the best data in the world and lose. You can have the worst data in the world and win. But I think we feel very confident about our handle as far as where the race is, what we need to do going into those final days.

CAMEROTA: Let's talk about what you need to do in those final days because the ground game, there's also a discrepancy in terms of how many staffers are on the ground in some of these key states. We have a graphic we can look at. She quadruples you at least in some of these. Look at Florida. Look at Pennsylvania, 62.

SPICER: That's not accurate.

CAMEROTA: So what is?

SPICER: We've got over 6,000 staffers on the ground in 13 states. So we have trained organizers that are putting in 40, 50 hours a week that have actual metrics. But at the end of the day this goes back to the idea of polls versus votes, voter contact versus offices. When you actually talk about the metric, how many voters are we contacting? How many are we turning out? It shows up. Again, the data doesn't lie. CAMEROTA: Wait a second.

SPICER: Hold on. What matters is how many people are returning an absentee ballot. How many people are actually early voting. Ours are up, theirs are down.

CAMEROTA: Sure, but it also matter many people you get out on Election Day. You have a fraction of the number that the Clinton team has on Election Day.

SPICER: A, I would dispute those numbers 100 percent. I think when you look at the number of people that we have both paid and unpaid that are committed on a full-time basis to getting out, knocking on doors on a daily basis, we have the most sophisticated ground game bar none.

CAMEROTA: You do? Hold on, because that's important what you said. You have a more sophisticated ground game than Hillary Clinton who's been at it much longer.

SPICER: No, she hasn't. That's not true. We've been in the field for three years. We've had staffers in the field. We've documented it. The problem is they went and hired a lot of people in the last couple of months. And they'll say, hey, we've got a huge ground game. We've been out there touting our ground game since 2013. The number of people that have been in those states knocking on doors, making persuasion, voter contact, registering people. We've had people in all of those states now going back four years.

So I get that they just showed up and hired a bunch of people to do hourly work. We've been there for four years making voter contact.

But here's the important point, Alisyn. At the end of the day, what matters is does it translate into votes? As I just told you, the earliest indicators in terms of absentee ballots and early votes are trending our way. The Democrats are down. Republicans are up. So they can talk about the number of offices all day long, but at the end of the day the number of people who are requesting an absentee ballot, who are returning that ballot, and who are voting early are favoring us and not them.

CAMEROTA: But you're not going to win in absentee ballots. You're going to win on Election Day.

SPICER: Absolutely. But the point is what I said earlier -- Republicans do better on Election Day. We've always lagged behind. Democrats have always done better on early vote. What you're seeing in this cycle is we're catching up to them. They're not doing as well as they have in the past and they have an enthusiasm gap. So they can't win by wide margins.

I'll give you an example. In North Carolina Barack Obama had a 300,000 vote lead going in in 2012 and lost on Election Day. Mitt Romney carried it. They have to do tremendously well in a lot of these states, Ohio, Iowa. They need to be winning not just by a little, by a lot. And when we cut into that lead and when they don't do as well that portends very well for us on Election Day.

CAMEROTA: No enthusiasm gap here, Sean Spicer.

SPICER: No.

CAMEROTA: Thanks so very much for all the energy and breaking it down.

SPICER: You bet.

CAMEROTA: Let's get over to Chris.

CUOMO: My head is spinning from that Spicer interview.

We do have breaking news to talk about, though, this morning. There has been a shooting at a freight car America in Roanoke, Virginia. That's where this happened in Roanoke, Virginia. Two people are dead. Two to three others are hurt. Police say the shooter is one of the people who is dead. Officers say the shooter is believed to be an employee or maybe a former employee. Current employees there are now outside of the building as police investigate. They do believe that this situation is over but not yet fully understood.

CAMEROTA: We'll continue to follow that.

[08:15:00] The Mississippi NAACP calling for a federal hate crime investigation after a black high school football player was attacked by at least one white teammate who put a noose around his neck. The school's head football coach said there was only one assailant who was kicked off the team. The local sheriff's department is investigating this incident.

CUOMO: All right. Take a look this video. You know what that is?

CAMEROTA: No.

CUOMO: That is a man chasing his car on a busy highway in Switzerland. That's what they do there it turns out. No, this was a rogue incident.

CAMEROTA: Oh, no.

CUOMO: He was stopped on the side of the road to talk to somebody and the car start to roll away and up chasing it. People luckily slow down, bangs into that sign and he's able to get it. Turns out the man forgot to put on the emergency brake when he pulled over and hopped out of his car. Amazingly, he was not hurt but may face charges.

Can you imagine that this actually happens and you're able to recover the car, right? I don't know --

CAMEROTA: I don't care about the car. The man -- nobody was hurt. Look at this. Look at all of the things --

CUOMO: What do you do? If your car goes into the highway, do you just leave it alone and whatever happens happens or do you chase it? CAMEROTA: I'm not sure that I would chase it across a three lane

major highway. I'm going to use the emergency brakes even at traffic lights now.

CUOMO: You have an automatic. He had a stick shift. That's different.

CAMEROTA: All right. Then, I'm not going to.

CUOMO: Problem solved.

CAMEROTA: There you go.

Hillary Clinton attacking down ballot Republicans. Is she over confident about her chances of victory? We discuss with the secretary of the DNC.

CUOMO: Do you drive stick shift?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Just in case you haven't heard, we're winning not only Florida, but we're going to win the whole thing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[08:20:04] CUOMO: All right. Despite trailing Clinton in just about every poll, Donald Trump says he's going to win pulling off the greatest comeback in election history. That's what it would be.

Joining us is DNC secretary, mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings- Blake. She's a Clinton supporter.

So, Mayor, your constituents come to you today and say even though we have an exchange and we've expanded Medicaid, my costs are going up on Obamacare. I don't like it. I need it to change. Have to go with Trump because a Democrat's not going to change what a Democrat created.

What do you say?

MAYOR STEPHANIE RAWLINGS-BLAKE, DNC SECRETARY: Well, I think that's just ludicrous.

The fact is that Secretary Clinton understands that this is a good system that need to be tweaked and it needs to be fixed. Donald Trump wants to scrap the whole thing and doesn't have a plan for what to do -- what to do next. No one's going to come to me and say that.

We know that there was a time when people could not get health insurance, that being a woman was a pre-existing condition and nobody wants to go back to that. Do we have things that need to be fixed in Obamacare? Absolutely so. But it would be helpful if there were governors -- Republican

governors would get on board and make -- and help us to make Obamacare affordable. They're putting up roadblocks at every turn. So, what I'm hearing is that the opposite. They're not going with Trump and instead they're voting early.

I was in Florida yesterday where people were saying they didn't want to risk being sick on Election Day. They didn't want to risk something happening on Election Day. They wanted their votes to be in the bank for Secretary Clinton because they were fearful of what this country would be like under a Trump administration.

CUOMO: Quick side point and then I'm going to come back on you on the Obamacare, argument. When you were in Florida is it true, in your experience, that African-American communities, when they heard about poll monitoring, when that word started to spread on the Internet and elsewhere, it did play in a specific way to African-American voters that that is somewhat driving early voting. Have you experienced that at all or is that just up in the air?

RAWLINGS-BLAKE: What I saw when I talked to African-American voters in Florida is they hear the polls. They're not swayed by the polls. They know that we've experienced in our culture where people are saying that they're going to support one person and then they get in the polls and do something else.

They understand it is critical for everyone in our community to come out to the polls. They don't want to live in a divided America. They want hope and optimism about our country's future. And the only way many people feel we're going to get that is with a candidate that believes in the greatness of our country now and wants to work to make it better.

CUOMO: Because the concern was poll monitoring, people showing up there can smack intimidation.

RAWLINGS-BLAKE: No, absolutely.

CUOMO: Can smack intimidation and obviously plays with the particular sensitivity of the African-American community.

Back to Obamacare. Trump says, I'm he going to fix it, I have a plan where I'm going to repeal this, I'm going to make it more cost competitive, make it easy for you to transfer across state lines.

Paul Ryan says the same thing, that they have a plan that will make it better than the current.

So, why go with Clinton when you could have something better?

RAWLINGS-BLAKE: They don't have a plan. Saying you have a plan and having an actual plan are two different things. What we've seen with Donald Trump time and time again is he has these magical secret fixes to all the world's problems. The challenge is when you actually call him out on it and ask him for these plans, these policies that he believes in, all he gives you is rhetoric and stump speeches. CUOMO: So, specific to being the mayor of a big city like Baltimore

and you do have big communities of color there, a lot of diversity, they come to you and they say, you know, I'm listening to this campaign and you Democrats have been in control a really long time here. My life is nowhere near what I want it to be.

I may not be getting shot eve time I go down the street the way Trump says, but that's an exaggeration. My reality is not as good as I want. Democrats have been in charge. I'm going the other way.

What do you say?

RAWLINGS-BLAKE: Well, I would say to them I apologize for the fact that, you know, they're even considering believing the hogwash that the Republicans are peddling. They're trying to -- the Republicans are trying to blame all the world's problems on the Democratic leaders when Republicans have systematically through Congress dialed back investments in American cities for years. When the problems evolve because of the lack of investment, because of the lack of resources, they blame Democrats.

It just doesn't work like that. And people are smarter than that. We know that there is a -- when you look at the Republican -- when you look at the Republican Party, all you have to do is look at a rally. Trump's priorities and his focus is evident in every rally that you go to.

[08:25:04] If you look at the Republican convention, you couldn't find diversity there. Not in one state. Not in one section.

We're not going to be fooled by this rhetoric. What do we have to lose? What have we got to lose? Everything. We're not going to gamble on a person who probably couldn't name ten people of color that are close to him.

This is not the America that we believe is possible. Again, Secretary Clinton thinks that we're stronger together and I, like her, believe that.

CUOMO: Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, thank you very much for joining us this morning.

RAWLINGS-BLAKE: Uh-huh.

CUOMO: Alisyn?

CAMEROTA: Fourteen days until Election Day. Voters are already making their voice heard. What do we really know about who hasn't early voted? Who has the advantage? We're going to get the bottom line on all of this, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: OK, I don't know if we've mentioned this. There's two weeks until Election Day, but millions of people are already voting. We just heard from the RNC chief strategist Sean Spicer who said the early results are looking good for Donald Trump. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEAN SPICER, RNC CHIEF STRATEGIST: We have the most sophisticated ground game bar none.

CAMEROTA: You do? Hold on.

(CROSSTALK)

CAMEROTA: That's important what you just said. You have a more sophisticated ground game than Hillary Clinton who's been at this much longer?