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Trump, Biden Hit Key Swing States with Four Days to Go; Pharma Companies' Vaccine Timelines Haven't Come True; Texas Early Vote Surpasses State's 2016 Vote Total. Aired 11:30-12p ET

Aired October 30, 2020 - 11:30   ET

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

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JOHN KING, CNN INSIDE POLITICS: The battleground states get most of the attention as we enter the campaign's final weekend and the race to 270 electoral votes impacted this year by record shattering early voting.

CNN is lucky to have correspondents fanned out across these key battleground states. Let's start today with Bill Weir in Madison, Wisconsin. Bill?

BILL WEIR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: John, here in the Badger State, about one in three-quarters of a million votes are already in. The state normally casts around 3 million, so they are bracing for a busy Election Day. There are 200 National Guardsmen on standby just in case a lot of volunteers at various municipalities around the state go sick due to COVID as the virus just tears through the state at alarming rates.

The president will be in Green Bay today for a rally there, a makeup rally for when he cancelled when he had COVID-19. Meanwhile, Joe Biden down in Milwaukee, one of the few places where the black vote is not turning out in the numbers they enjoyed in 2008 when Barack Obama won here.

To check things next door to the east, let's go to my friend and colleague, Miguel Marquez, in Michigan.

MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hey there, Bill. We are in Oakland County, just north of Detroit. This is the suburbs, the all important suburbs. Donald Trump is Oakland County today a rally. This is a place that Hillary Clinton in 2016. Donald Trump then went on to win the state by 10,704 votes. It is a place where Joe Biden and Barack Obama will appear in their first joint appearance as well tomorrow.

Early voting going on very, very heavily here mostly by mail, but this line behind me, these are people who are coming in to do early voting in person. You have to go to your clerk's office for your ballot, it's a bit of a process, there is a line, but you can do it. And that's how motivated many of the voters are here.

Another place where voters are motivated, Pennsylvania, and that's where you find our colleague, Sara Murray. Sara?

SARA MURRAY, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Miguel. I am in Westchester, Pennsylvania, one of those Philadelphia suburbs, a place where the president needs to stop the bleeding in addition to running up those numbers in red states. More than 2 million voters across the state of Pennsylvania have already sent in their mail-in ballots here. It's more than 115,000. They can't start counting them yet but they can start sorting them.

And these counties have added a lot of heavy machinery to do just that so they can hit the ground running on Election Day. And, look, it's going to be a busy run-up until Election Day, a day before the election. Joe Biden will be here. Jill Biden will be here. Kamala Harris will be there. Just a look at how important this state is right before Election Day, John.

KING: Sara Murray, I see those machines as well. Lots of workers getting to work, it's important and God bless them all, these people trying to count the votes across the country. Sara Murray, all of our correspondents, grateful they're out there in these final days.

Voters in two battleground state may have to adjust their voting plans. A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that absentee ballots in Minnesota must be received by Election Day, and any received after have to be separated.

The court ruling set aside a plan to allow those absentee ballots to come in as late as a week after Election Day, as long as they were postmarked on or before November 3rd. The Eighth Circuit of Appeals Court in that ruling said, quote, there is no pandemic exception to the Constitution. Better to put those voters on notice now while they still have at least some time to adjust their plans and cast their votes in an unquestionably lawful way.

Another decision in Butler County, Pennsylvania, an unknown number of absentee ballots have yet to be delivered to voters who requested them.

CNN's Kristen Holmes joins me now with the latest on these countless voting challenges. Kristen?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, John. I mean, we are four days out of Election Day. We're talking about missing ballots and new court cases and deadlines changing. I mean, this is really, truly, crazy stuff right now. And people are fixated. They don't know what they are supposed to do.

[11:35:01]

They're watching this. And in Minnesota, you're hearing these state officials telling everyone, do not mail your ballot. If you are sitting on a ballot, you thought you're going to pop it in the mail, you have a week, don't do it. There are drop off locations that are open until 3:00 P.M. on Election Day, and that is your best bet. And that is because of this appeals court ruling. They decided that that extension was against state law and that all of those ballots that came in after 8:00 P.M. had to be segregated.

Now, the big question is what if I mailed by ballot yesterday or two days ago. I live in Minnesota. I thought I was going to have an extra week, what happens to my ballot then? Well, that is a great question, John,and not one that the court of appeals answered. They kicked that decision back to a district court, again, four days before an election.

Now, we are expecting this to go up through the court system. Take a listen to what the governor said yesterday.

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GOV. TIM WALTZ (D-MN): And I think, you know, this will obviously go further up the -- up through the judiciary to get a decision. But at this point in time, people can avoid all this by simply by going and dropping their ballots off in person. And in Minnesota, we have same day registration so they can vote on Tuesday.

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HOLMES: Okay. So here we are, Minnesota missing ballots, missing ballots in Pennsylvania, Butler County what we know right now, no known number of the missing ballots, however they have received 10,000 plus calls, people who thought that they had requested a ballot, who did request a ballot, haven't received it. The Butler County elections director there, he is seeming to blame it on the Postal Service, but not a great problem to have in a critical swing state just before an election.

KING: Well, it is not. And it just reminds us the burden is on everybody watching, unfortunately, if you haven't gotten your ballot or if you have a question, you have to figure it out yourself, don't trust the post office, make a plan, get it done.

Kristen Holmes, grateful for your help everyday as we sort through, some of this is very confusing.

Up next for us, back to the coronavirus, and Dr. Anthony Fauci gives an update on the vaccine timeline.

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KING: We know the president's prediction of a coronavirus vaccine before Election Day was wrong. And we also know some of the drug companies racing to develop a vaccine have been overly optimistic about the timeline. Pfizer, for example, predicted it would know by the end of this month if its vaccine candidate works or not, that data still unavailable as we close out October.

There is still hope that at least one of the vaccine candidates will be ready by the end of the year. And Dr. Anthony Fauci predicting today that when one is ready, others are likely to be close behind.

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DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: Pfizer and Moderna both went into phase three on July 27th. Close behind them is the AstraZeneca, and the Johnson or J&J or the Ansen (ph) trial. And then we have the trial of Novavax and then, ultimately, we have Sanofi. So we would likely, Francis, start seeing results from Moderna and Pfizer at approximately the same time.

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KING: Joining us now is Dr. Paul Offit. He's the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. Dr. Offit, it's good to see you again. You have, for months, been a voice of caution saying just don't believe these predictions, these things get complicated. Where do you see where we are right now? We certainly won't have it by Election Day, and that is Tuesday, but when people still talk about the end of the year, do you see that as possible?

DR. PAUL OFFIT, DIRECTOR, VACCINE EDUCATION CENTER, CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL OF PHILADELPHIA: It's possible. The only group that really knows this is a group called the data safety monitoring board.

They are looking over each of these trials. They're a firewall between the company and the trial itself so that they know who's gotten the vaccine, they know who's gotten the placebo, they now who has gotten sick and who hasn't. So they are the ones who have the best idea of exactly how we're doing.

I think the way this is going to play out, John, is that the question is going to be how much uncertainty are we willing to live with. The size of these trials are typical of any vaccine trial that we've ever done for the 70 years. I mean, Moderna is 30,000-person, Pfizer is 44,000, J&J, 60,000, that's those biggest as any trial we do (ph).

The difference between these trials and every other trial in the past is how long we're studying it. I mean, these will be six-month studies. So are we comfortable with safety for six months? Are we comfortable with efficacy for six months? And I think the answer is, in essence, we're going to have to be. Because on the hand, we are facing now upwards of 230,000 deaths from this virus, so the benefits are huge.

KING: Right. And that is one of the things. I go through the case counts every day, we're above 80,000, or on average, I guess, 76,000 but posting 80,000 new cases a day, 100,000 a day is in our near future.

The IHME projects that by February 1st, 399,000 Americans. So you see we're almost at 229,000 now. They have predicted we'll get to 399,000 by February 1st, which, understandably, anybody watching this, is where is the vaccine and where are therapeutics.

Does the fact that the case count, that the trends right now, as bad as they are -- the vaccine development is inside a firewall, right? Are you affected by the politics of the day, if you will, the numbers of the day or do you keep blinders on?

OFFIT: Keep blinders on. I mean, I'm part of the FDA's Vaccine Advisory Committee and we will view these data as they become available. And when we view this data, we will hold them to the same standard, we hold any vaccine, which is, would I give this to myself or my own family?

[11:45:06]

We're not members of the government. We're not members of the -- especially with the pharmaceutical industry. So we'll give it a clear, unvarnished, honest opinion of what we think about this vaccine.

KING: Dr. Offit, grateful, as always, for your time, your insights and your steady voice of caution and science. It's been helpful. And we will stick with you as we go through into these final phases.

Up next for us, we go back to the campaign trail and some early voting numbers in Texas that are simply mind blowing.

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KING: A state that rarely gets attention in the final weekend of a presidential campaign is setting records and demanding we pay very close attention this time, Texas. Look right there. Today, word more than 9 million Texans have already cast ballots, that surpasses the state's 2016 total, and there are still four days to go.

Today is the last day to add to that in early voting Texas. The Dallas Morning News puts it this way, entering the home stretch, in El Paso, Texas, turning out to vote, and in Harris County, Houston, one of the largest counties in the country, this headline, increasingly blue Harris County would help swing Texas to Biden.

Let's discuss with CNN Senior Political Analyst Ron Brownstein. He joins me now.

And, Ron, again, just that we're talking about Texas tells you a lot. Let's start with Harris County, because in land mass, it is bigger than Rhode Island, and in population, it would be the 25th, it would be right in the middle, it would be the 25th state in terms of population if Harris County broke off as a state. The voting there is off the charts. It is emblematic of what, the suburban revolt against this president?

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, it is really emblematic of changing politics of the entire country, and how Texas is joining that changing politics. I mean, basically, under Donald Trump, we have seen a widening divide between metro and non-metro America. I mean, as I wrote in The Atlantic, you could draw a beltway, an imaginary beltway around every major metropolitan center in the country. And inside of that, it is getting more blue, even as it remains largely red outside of that.

For years, John, Texas was essentially immune to that transformation. It started in the '90s on the coast, extended to Northern Virginia and Colorado in this center (ph). But Texas was bypassed, not any more. You look at the five biggest urban counties in Texas, the counties involving Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Fort Worth. 2012, OBAMA won them by 130,000 votes, 2016, Hillary by 560, 2018, Beto by 790,000, six times as much as Obama.

And you look at the turnout levels we are seeing in these metros, it is entirely possible that Biden will win them by more than 1 million votes.

So even if Trump's rural strength allows him to hold the state, the trend line is pretty clear toward a much more competitive Texas given those metros or all the jobs and economic activity is happening.

KING: Which is why Texas Republicans are petrified, because even if the president holds on narrowly, they see huge gains in House districts, U.S. House districts, and they see giant gains in the Texas legislature for Democrats. So they see this as a turning point, if you will.

Senator Harris is there today. She's going to Fort Worth, she's going to McAllen and she's going to Houston. Explain -- you just went through this, the map, of what's changing. Explain why that is vote targeting smart.

BROWNSTEIN: Right. So a great political scientist at University of Houston, Richard Murray, has tracked long-term trajectory of the vote in these three regions. And the basic story is that the metro centers, the four big metro regions, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio and Houston, are now probably going to hit 70 percent of the total vote.

And that is where Biden has to run up the score. You see that reflected in her being in Houston. He probably needs a margin of somewhere 900,000 to 1 million when you include the suburban areas around urban centers that I mentioned.

The next piece for the Democrats is the valley, largely Hispanic parts of the state. And that's where they are struggling. Historically, there are not many competitive races in November in the valley. The competitive races are in the primary.

Nobody spends a lot of money there. Bloomberg and others are spending a lot of money in metro Texas trying to flip the statehouse. There hasn't been the money for the valleys. So Democrats are worried that they won't get the vote they need, the margins out of that to offset what is still likely to be a 3-1 advantage for Trump among the rough little over 20 percent of the state that is rural. I think that the decision here, Texas will tip on how much of the vote is ultimately cast in these urban centers versus how much is cast in the rural, because you know Trump is going to have a margin somewhere around 1.2 million or so in the rural areas. And if the share of the overall is a little bigger than the urban, you can come closer to that rural number and then the valley can put you over the top.

More likely, you'd still say the safest bet, Trump squeezes it out but there's no question about what the handwriting is on the wall.

KING: Going to make a lot of fun math on Tuesday night, maybe into Wednesday morning. Ron Brownstein, appreciate you helping setting it up. It's one of the fastest changing political dynamics in the country. Thank you.

Coming up, how the new spike in coronavirus cases is impacting the final days of this campaign.

And many families are struggling, of course, with the demands of work, parenting and educating kids in this pandemic. It's been especially tough to some young fathers, which brings us to CNN Hero Sheldon Smith.

For the last decade, he's talked parenting and life skills to hundreds of young men of color in Chicago who want to be better dads. When COVID-19 caused layoffs for many of them, Sheldon took action to make they had the resources and the support they need.

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SHELDON SMITH, CNN HERO: The message that I'm trying to spread is that black fathers are important. When businesses were closing and doing layoffs, we wanted to just make sure that our fathers knew that we were there for them.

How many boxes of food you need?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just one box.

SMITH: We give you two.

The young men in our program have beautiful hearts and they are volunteering their time so that they can be better fathers.

And right now, we are talking about the injustices in America that need to be changed. We have to continue to believe and work together and not make it about when a death occurs that this is the time we need to stand up. Right now, as a country, as a nation, we have an opportunity to change and show the world what we're really made of. Once you invest, build and believe, you bring about a different solution.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right. Thank you so much.

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KING: To see the full story, please go to cnnheroes.com.

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