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Polls Show Harris Holds Narrow Lead; Millions Travel for Labor Day; Mosquito-Borne Illnesses Update; Vaccinating Children in Gaza against Polio Abbey Onn is Interviewed about Israeli Hostages. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired September 02, 2024 - 08:30   ET

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

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[08:33:38]

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: Vice President Harris making a Labor Day pitch to union workers. In a few hours, she will campaign in the key battleground state of Michigan and Pennsylvania with President Biden joining her in Pittsburgh as she makes this - as he makes a switch from candidate to top surrogate.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is wasting no time responding to Harris' Detroit visit. It's hosting a Zoom call with the UAW members today.

Joining me now to discuss, former congressman from Pennsylvania, Charlie Dent, and Rachel Palermo, former deputy communications director and associate counsel to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Thank you both for coming in this morning. It's Labor Day. You didn't have to drive everywhere - anywhere hopefully. Hopefully you're safe at home.

New polling out over the weekend, let's talk about this first, from ABC/Ipsos, shows Kamala Harris with a 52 to 46 lead with likely voters, which isn't a whole lot different from the pre-convention numbers, which was at 51 to 45 in Harris' favor.

Rachel, what does this tell you Harris has to do? Because it does not appear that she got that bump that most people expect to happen after a convention.

RACHEL PALERMO, FORMER DEPUTY COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR AND ASSOCIATE COUNSEL TO VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Thanks so much for having me.

In the month prior to the convention, Vice President Harris completely turned the race around. She had galvanized voters across the country and gained support. And it's not only Democrats who have been supporting her, it's also some Republicans and independents. And so, the convention was a great time to tell her story.

[08:35:02]

But given the fact of how the polls are, it's going to be a tight race. And that's why she's taking nothing for granted. It's why she's going to two important states today, both Michigan and Pennsylvania, in order to talk directly to voters. And she needs to keep that consistent campaign schedule, which she plans on doing, of traveling the country and really letting no stone go unturned.

SIDNER: Charlie, you know, you know Pennsylvania like nobody's business. What does she have to do there and what is Trump doing there that is working for him?

CHARLIE DENT (R), FORMER U.S. REPRESENTATIVE: Well, Harris and Biden are going to be in Pittsburgh today at the annual Labor Day Parade. And it particularly in western Pennsylvania, Harris does need to explain herself on the fracking issue. That is a very big issue out there, particularly among working class - working voters. A lot of white working voters out there, frankly. And she needs to do a better job explaining herself on that issue because in western Pennsylvania, outside of Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is, you know, she's going to be beaten badly. So, she's got to try to cut down those margins. And so she needs to do some explaining out there.

On the flip side, you know, she's doing, I think, rather well in the Philadelphia metro market - media (ph) market, where, you know, where women's issues, reproductive rights, certainly resonate very strongly. And I think she's got some advantages there. Trump is going to try to, of course, run up the numbers in the rural areas and what we call the t, the central part of the state and across the top and all the ex- urban (ph) areas. That's what he is going to do. Trump is going to - obviously, he's going to pound the way on inflation and on fracking. She's going to pound the way on women's rights and, of course, and on January 6th.

So, those are the advantages. So, we'll see how this plays out. But it's very tight in Pennsylvania, make no mistake about it.

SIDNER: We've seen Donald Trump himself sticking out some different and perhaps confusing positions on the issues surrounding reproductive rights and abortion. Just, from your perspective, Charlie, what you've been hearing from him, I know that some conservatives are pissed with him about his sort of waffling on this issue. But there is the general public that was, you know, very unhappy with the ending of Roe versus Wade.

What do you see - why is he doing this? What do you - what do you see his strategy is here?

DENT: Well, I think voters are experiencing whiplash from Donald Trump on the issue of abortion. They just can't quite figure out where he is.

I think Trump's real problem is, he understands he has an enormous vulnerability, as does the GOP writ large, on reproductive rights and abortion. I was the last House Republican to vote in support of reproductive rights. And I can tell you right now that his position is unpopular. He knows it. And so he's going through these gymnastics to try to demonstrate that he - he's trying to sound like he's almost pro-choice, which he was before he was a presidential candidate. But, of course, he's - he's a bad messenger because he's the one who's boasted and bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade, which, of course, has led to the erosion or loss of reproductive rights for many women in many states.

So, Trump just can't seem to find a position, a consistent position. And, frankly, the whole GOP has been having problems post-Dobbs, how to message this issue? Is it a state issue? Is it a federal issue? And they just can't get out of their way.

Trump has disappointed and angered many of the pro-life and evangelical communities. They're mad. They're saying he's unprincipled. Well, yes, he's a transactional guy. They knew that. And now they're having to deal with it.

SIDNER: And, Charlie, speaking of the transactional nature of this, he has said that he thinks insurance - and he was going to have insurance pay for IVF. I am curious what you make of that, Rachel, hearing that from Trump. And his Republican colleagues have really lambasted that idea. But the public may like the idea of insurance having to pay for IVF. What are your thoughts?

PALERMO: You think with this what we need to do is take a step back and think about the fact that Donald Trump put up three justices on the Supreme Court with the intention that they would overturn Roe v. Wade. And they did. This happened two years ago. And since then, abortion rights have been taken away from women in states across this country. But there's other rights that have been taken away too. And one of those is in vitro fertilization. Before Roe v. Wade was overturned, women in America weren't talking about, am I going to still have access to IVF? The reason why this is even a question is because of Donald Trump. And there's only one candidate running who thinks that women should be able to make decisions about their own bodies, but also about when and how to start and grow their families.

And so the contrast is very clear on this issue. And I think any conversation otherwise from Donald Trump is a distraction from the fact that he's the person who took away these its rights in the first place.

SIDNER: All right, Charlie, I do want to ask you about something Donald Trump said over the weekend. He, during an interview, said that he had every right to interfere in the election. Of course, you have a legal right, and they exhausted all of those and the courts went against them in every single turn, 60 different courts.

[08:40:06]

Does this hurt him? Does this help him with his base and hurt him with independents and others, or does it do anything? Is it just another Donald Trump ism?

DENT: Well, no, I think that the fact that Trump continues to say he had the right to interfere in the election is a big net negative for him, particularly among swing voters, independent voters.

Yes, sure, among the most ardent MAGA voters, this is great news for them. But for everybody else, they're looking at this and questioning his judgment once again. I mean, again, as a former elected official, I can assure you that if I ever picked up the phone and called a county election official and said, hey, I need 2,000 votes, just, you know, deliver them to me, or caught on tape, I would have been investigated and prosecuted. And that's what he did essentially with Brad Raffensberger down in the state of Georgia.

So, I think this is a huge net negative. Of course he had the right to litigate, you know, what he considered to be election irregularities in the states. But he did. He lost dozens of times. And now he continues to fight that battle. It's a losing battle for him and it - there was a losing battle in Pennsylvania when Josh Shapiro just hammer Doug Mastriano over that and abortion rights. If I were Harris, I'd take the Shapiro playbook in Pennsylvania on the election denial.

SIDNER: All right, former U.S. Representative Charlie Dent for us from Pennsylvania, and Rachel Palermo, appreciate you both for coming on this morning.

John.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, we are midway through the Labor Day travel rush this morning. If you are on the roads, good luck. You can see the national average of gas, actually it's the shoulders, is $3.33 a gallon. About 17 million people expected to pass through the airports by Wednesday.

CNN's Pete Muntean live this morning at Reagan National Airport.

How many people have passed behind you so far? Two more. That makes how many?

PETE MUNTEAN, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: You know the line is dying down a little bit, John. We are through the biggest part of the morning rush here, although this is so big because it's the last opportunity that folks have to get away for the summer after what has been a huge summer for air travel. In fact, the biggest summer ever for air travel. About a quarter billion people, 250 million people pass through TSA checkpoints between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Today is going to be one of the biggest. They're anticipating 2.66 million people at airports nationwide.

Friday was even bigger than the forecast. TSA thought that 2.8 million people would pass through airport security checkpoints nationwide. The number was actually 2.9 million people.

The good news here is that cancellations and delays have remained relatively low. They really peaked on Thursday when bad weather moved through the mid-Atlantic.

I want you to listen now to passengers we talked to at the beginning of this rush. They said, they were going to take all of the snags and snarls in stride.

Listen.

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CHRISTIAN FLORES, TRAVELER: Not really. We do this - I'm - we're regulars. We travel for work and for leisure and family all the time. So - and coming in here and seeing that it's not the crowded and traffic was pretty light. So, if I had any problems, they went away.

Yes, so we'll see how Monday looks. At least today looks good. I'm glad I'm not flying tomorrow. But we'll see how Monday turns out.

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MUNTEAN: One thing that TSA says you will see more of, something that is new for this Labor Day travel rush is facial recognition technology at more and more airports. It was a small test for a while. Now it has expanded to about 80 airports nationwide. You have seen the scanners probably at airports. You put your driver's license in the machine, the camera on the machine matches your driver's license photo with the live photo. They say it's way more accurate than a human doing that check. So, that is at more and more airports right now. And the idea is to get you through security a little bit faster.

The numbers here, the terminal two, north checkpoint at Reagan National Airport, about five minutes or less to get through standard screening and TSA precheck right now. That's down from the peak we saw earlier. People were waiting about 20 minutes in line, John.

BERMAN: All right, well, 20 minutes, that's too long, but I like the five to eight much better.

How are the roads this morning so far, Pete?

MUNTEAN: The traffic will be bad today, John, because there are still people working. And AAA says the confluence of afternoon commuter traffic and people coming back from the shore or vacation destinations, that will make things a big mess. In fact, here in the D.C. area they're saying on the PW Parkway, 295, between Baltimore and Washington, traffic will be 40 times greater - sorry, 40 percent greater than the norm around 3:15 this afternoon. So, you really have to plan ahead. The best time to leave, before 10:00 a.m. this morning, or wait until after 8:00 p.m. tonight according to AAA, John.

BERMAN: The roads will be bad. Don't sugarcoat things, Pete. Tell us like it is. Thank you very much for that. As always, great to see you.

[08:45:01]

Sara.

SIDNER: This morning, a health warning. Summer may be coming to an end, but the risk of mosquito borne viruses is not. More bad news, sorry.

CNN's Meg Tirrell joins us now with some tips on how you can protect yourself and your loved ones.

Let's start with eastern equine encephalitis. It's a whole mouthful this early. What is the latest update on that? Because its deadly.

MEG TIRRELL, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: It - it can be deadly.

SIDNER: It can be.

TIRRELL: So, this is scary. And a lot of us haven't really heard about this too much, but we have had six cases in five states so far this season. And, unfortunately, mosquito season goes until the first frost wherever you are. And so we've still got some time before we get to that cold whether.

So, this mostly has been concentrated in the northeast. There has been one case in Wisconsin in terms of the human cases and one death in New Hampshire. This is a virus that is spread by the bite of an infected mosquito. Very rare. There are an average of 11 cases have been reported each year in the United States. So, we're at six right now that we know about.

In the rare cases where this travels to the central nervous system and affects the brain. It can be fatal in about 30 percent of cases. And people who survive it often have ongoing neurological issues. Most people, if they get infected, it doesn't cause disease. But in those cases, it's quite scary. There was a 41-year-old man in New Hampshire who died from this just recently.

And so the ways to protect yourself, same way you protect yourself against any mosquito, wear an EPA-registered repellent. So that includes something like DEET or picaridin. You can go on the EPA's website and find ones that definitely work. Wear long sleeve shirts, pants, treat your clothes with permethrin. Check your house or your surrounding area where you live for water outside because that's where mosquitoes breed and it can get really bad. Use screens on your doors and windows. And avoid being outside from dusk to dawn because that's when mosquitoes primarily bite. And we've even seen some towns in Massachusetts implementing curfews or closing public parks because they want to try to protect folks when mosquitoes are biting the most.

SIDNER: I don't know why it works, but Skin So Soft (INAUDIBLE) for some reason, like as a kid, that really worked for me.

TIRRELL: Yes.

SIDNER: Mosquitoes love me. They're the only thing that really, truly loves me.

TIRRELL: Oh, we all love you.

SIDNER: How do you - how do you deal with West Nile virus?

TIRRELL: Well, in a similar way. So, West Nile virus is actually the most common mosquito-borne disease in the United States and it's much more widespread. If you look at a map of this, you can see, it's really across the U.S. And Texas has been hit particularly hard. We have been hearing a lot about this because Dr. Fauci was hospitalized for West Nile virus. This still is not a particularly common diseases. And I've been hearing from mosquito control experts, it's not actually necessarily a particularly bad season even yet. We've had fewer than 300 cases reported in the U.S. Typically we see between 1,000 and 3,000 total. We're still in season. Until that frost comes, everybody protect yourself from mosquitoes, and ticks too.

SIDNER: Got to wait for the frost.

TIRRELL: I know.

SIDNER: Good God those things are resilient.

TIRRELL: But pumpkin spice season though.

SIDNER: Oh, I know it's pumpkin spice season. We are well aware.

Thank you so much, Meg Tirrell. I appreciate it.

John.

BERMAN: It's not just mosquitoes that love you, Sara Sidner.

SIDNER: Oh, John.

BERMAN: Turtles love you more.

All right, this morning, the streets of Israel flooded with protesters demanding a ceasefire after the murder of six hostages in Gaza.

And Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson publicly supports implementing a code of ethics for the Supreme Court.

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[08:52:40]

BERMAN: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has expressed support for a binding code of ethics for the Supreme Court. On "60 Minutes" she stated such rules are pretty standard for the federal judiciary. Justice Jackson also noted that there is no clear reason why the court should be exempt from these standards.

China and the Philippines trading blame after their ships collided in the South China Sea. Both say the other deliberately rammed the vessels. This is the latest in a long running and escalating tension between the two countries.

This morning, new aerial attacks from Russia on Ukraine, just as children are returning to school. Ukrainian officials say the strike involved a combination of cruise and ballistic missiles and attack drones. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expressed gratitude to, quote, "everyone who has made the school year possible, including teachers and those helping to defend Ukraine."

Sara.

SIDNER: All right, this morning, a massive effort is underway in war- ravaged Gaza to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children against Polio. We reported the devastated family whose child now has the disease.

CNN's Nada Bashir joins us now.

Nada, how successful or unsuccessful was the day trying to vaccinate so many children?

NADA BASHIR, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Sara, we've heard from the U.N. Agency for Palestine Refugees describing the first day of the vaccine rollout as a success. It seems to have gone as planned for the first day. And according to the World Health Organizations, some 87,000 children were vaccinated against Polo on that first day of the vaccine rollout. So, a significant sign of progress there.

But, of course, there is a huge challenge ahead for the U.N. and for those medical workers on the ground. If we just take a look at the figures. The U.N. says it is aiming to vaccinate some 640,000 children under the age of ten in the Gaza Strip. That equates to around just over 90 percent of children under the age of ten within the enclave.

And, of course, this is taking place across 12 days, three, three-day phases, which are essentially going to be carried out between September 1st and September 12th. The first phase, that three-day phase focusing on central Gaza. We saw vaccinations taking place in Deir al-Balah yesterday. That second phase focusing on southern Gaza. And then the third and final phase focusing on northern Gaza.

And of course, what is crucial here is during these three-day phases, there has been a call for a three-day pause in fighting from both sides of the conflict.

[08:55:05]

Take a listen to this message from the U.N. Agency for Palestine Refugees yesterday about the significance and the importance of this pause in fighting.

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LOUISE WATERIDGE, UNRWA SPOKESPERSON: It's been an extremely complex vaccination campaign. Probably one of the most difficult we've seen in the world. We have had ongoing bombardment. It has stopped this morning. It's quite quiet now. We are hopeful that this will last throughout the campaign. This is very critical because we simply cannot vaccinate children while they are running for their lives.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASHIR: And this is a message we've been hearing, of course, around humanitarian operations in general in Gaza, the need for a cessation of violence to fully operate these humanitarian campaigns. But clearly a sign of progress there. A lot of hope for the future, the next couple of days of this vaccine rollout across the Gaza Strip.

Sara.

SIDNER: It just tells me so much about the humanitarian crisis that's unfolding there. Polio, mostly eradicated in the world, and now there are instances of it there in Gaza.

Thank you so much, Nada Bashir, for your reporting on this.

John.

BERMAN: All right, outrage in Israel this morning after the murder of six Israeli hostages inside Gaza. Huge protests on the street this morning.

With us now, Abbey Onn. She has a family member currently being held hostage and two others who have been killed.

Abbey, thank you so much for being with us this morning.

You posted on Instagram, "a deal could and should have saved them." Why did you write that and what did you mean?

ABBEY ONN, FAMILY MEMBER HELD HOSTAGE BY HAMAS, TWO OTHERS KILLED: One, thank you for having me. And, two, I had five members of my family who were impacted on October 7th, Carmella Dan (ph) and Noya (ph) were murdered. Ofer Kalderon (ph), who is 53 and still being held, and his two children were returned in November because of a deal. It's been nine months since that deal and that deal brought home more than 100 people. And in the nine months since, we've only seen eight people rescued. We know that a deal is the only way to bring the 101, 33 of whom are not alive, home. We need every single one of them and we need them home alive. We see how immediate and urgent this is as we mourn the six people that were executed just days ago. They managed to stay alive for 330 days, only to be executed. We need them all home now, and I think a deal is the only way.

BERMAN: Your cousin Ofer, as you noted, is still being held. Given that he is - he is still there, how did this - just this horrible news of the murder of these six hostages, how did that affect you and your family?

ONN: I honestly I think in the aftermath of October 7th I felt somewhat numb because of the numbers of people that were murdered and tortured and taken hostage. And now 332 days later, we know their names and their faces. And this felt so personal and so devastating to have walked by their posters for the last 11 months to know their families, and to know that they were living just days ago, only to be executed in cold blood and that they could have been brought home. That three of those six were on the list of the current deal that was on the table to have been brought home in the first phase. And that just feels unbelievable, unreal. There was something tangible that there was almost in our hands and another deal almost happened. And to know that they were murdered when they could have been home alive with their families.

BERMAN: Who do you blame?

ONN: Humanity. Right now I feel - I feel like I've tried to be optimistic and hopeful this whole time. I think it would be disingenuous if I said that I wasn't angry at Netanyahu and the Israeli government. I feel that the hostages are being betrayed and abandoned. But at the same time, half a million people took to the streets last night in a democratic protest to say that we want a deal, we want the hostages home. But as an American, I'm looking to strong leadership around the world. I'm looking to Biden. I am looking to all the countries that are sitting at the table to be bigger leaders than they have been in the last 11 months, all of them. This is something that they can make happen. And I'm also angry, of course, at Hamas, which is the awful terrorist organization. They are the ones that stole these people. They are the ones that have held them captive. And they are the ones that executed them. I have a lot of anger right now, I think.

BERMAN: Understandable and justified.

Just very quickly, your view of the protests that have been going on the last day?

ONN: I think they are democratic. I think that this is a country that makes its voice heard when something is important to it.

[09:00:00]

And you saw half a million people take to the streets. They want the deal. They were not out there last night in any sort of violent form. They were out there singing Hatikvah.