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CNN This Morning

Warnock Beats Walker, Giving Democrats 51st Senate Seat; Since Launch: Dinner With Racist, Convictions, Taxes, Legal Setbacks. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired December 07, 2022 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00]

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Shaq --

(LAUGHTER)

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: That was seven-foot-tall Shaq getting launched into a Christmas tree. But I think that has happened before.

(LAUGHTER)

LEMON: Kenny Smith, or maybe it was Barkley last time. I don't remember. The shove sent him tumbling right into and leaving his feet sticking out like the Wicked Witch in "The Wizard of Oz." Shaq joking that it was revenge. He is going to get his revenge on --

HARLOW: And now he jumped into the tree.

LEMON: Oh, my gosh.

HARLOW: Why can't we do that on this show?

LEMON: You can.

(LAUGHTER)

HARLOW: All right, CNN THIS MORNING --

LEMON: Continues right now.

HARLOW: -- without the Christmas tree dump, starts right now.

(LAUGHTER)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. RAPHAEL WARNOCK (D-GA): Here's my promise to you. I will walk with you even as I work for you.

(APPLAUSE)

WARNOCK: Because -- because here is what I've learned as a pastor. You can't lead the people unless you love the people. You can't love the people unless you know the people. And you can't know the people unless you walk among the people.

(APPLAUSE)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: Good morning, everyone. It is Wednesday, December 7th. It is the morning after the election, the runoff. That was incumbent Raphael Warnock celebrating his historic victory over Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate runoff, closing out a bruising midterm cycle for Republicans.

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: Yes. I'm Kaitlan Collins, live in Atlanta. Warnock's victory, Don and Poppy, as you know, may only be one more Senate seat, but it could make all the difference for Democrats come January. They now will have that 51 to 49 edge in the new session, a real working majority, and a buffer against moderates in their party who blocked key legislation over the past two years.

HARLOW: Walker becoming the latest Trump-backed and really picked candidate to lose a crucial swing state matchup. Despite the loss, Walker struck a positive tone in his speech last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HERSCHEL WALKER, (R-GA) U.S. SENATE CANDIDATE: I'm not going to make any excuses now, because we put up one heck of a fight.

(APPLAUSE)

WALKER: That's what we got to do, because this is much bigger, this is much bigger than Herschel Walker. And I told someone this the other day. I said, you guys, I've done a lot of stuff. You talk about Heisman Trophy, talk about all the athletic awards, business awards I've won. But the best thing I've ever done in my whole entire life is run for this Senate seat right here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: This morning, the 2022 midterms are finally behind us. Democrats, you can say defying the odds, really defying history by actually gaining a seat in the Senate during a midterm. Mr. John Berman live at the magic wall this morning to show us how it all happened. Good morning to you, sir.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: I actually read that this is the first time since the 1930s that a sitting presidential party has defended every Senate seat in an election. So history is --

LEMON: Defying history.

BERMAN: Defying history.

You can see Raphael Warnock with a 95,000 vote edge. In the election one month ago he led by 37,000. So you can see he expanded that growth. How? One thing we haven't talked about this morning, Don, is the black vote. I think that's really worth looking at here. You had two African American candidates here obviously. And Raphael Warnock made a concerted effort, it was decisive in his victory. Black percent of population, you can see the areas with the darker colors have the denser black population there.

And I'm just going to circle them. You have this area right here, this area right here around Augusta, and this area right here, OK. Now, I take this map up and put up the partisan map, you can see blue. They voted largely for the Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock. Blue. Blue. This is where Raphael Warnock ran up the margins. Look at Fulton County. We've been talking about this all morning. This is the most populous county in Georgia, 279,000 votes. He won by more than 200,000 votes in this county. So mobilizing the black vote was key to that victory.

One other thing we talked about is Republican troubles in the suburbs, how they've been losing the suburbs in terms of the percentage of the vote. Cobb County, Raphael Warnock won by 19 points. We should you how Mitt Romney in 2012, just 10 years ago, he won this county by 12 points.

So you're saying, is have reversible? Can Republicans do anything here? I'll point you to this. You see a 19-point margin. Let me right that down, 19, plus 19 for the Democrats. Bad plus sign there. Plus 19 for the Democrats. Look at the gubernatorial race. Brian Kemp, who was reelected as a Republican governor, he only lost Cobb County by four points. That's a huge difference from 19 points. He lost by some, what, 14,000 votes while in this Senate runoff, Herschel Walker lost by 53,000 votes. It's just a very big difference.

[08:05:08]

Republicans may not be able to Cobb County, but they could lose by much smaller margins. The issue here seems to be the candidate choice here. Herschel Walker, it's easy to say, OK, then, Republicans just nominate better candidates. Maybe. But in primaries we've seen across the country not just in Georgia but sometimes in other states as well. You'll remember Pennsylvania. Woo don't have to think that long ago to when Mehmet Oz, the Trump backed candidate in Pennsylvania, won the nomination and ultimately went on to lose that race pretty handily to John Fetterman.

LEMON: It's trending in that direction for --

BERMAN: It's the candidates. Right now, if Republicans aren't picking candidates who can appeal to a broader base, they're have trouble.

LEMON: Mr. John Berman, appreciate it.

BERMAN: Don Lemon.

LEMON: We'll see you. Thank you very much. Kaitlan?

COLLINS: We'll let John Berman work on those plus signs. But for now, let's bring in CNN's chief national affairs correspondent Jeff Zeleny, CNN national politics reporter Eva McKend. You both were at the respective watch parties last night. You were at Senator Warnock's, you were at Herschel Walker's. We listened to a little bit of Walker's concession speech earlier, but something he said about the Constitution stuck out to you. I want to play that moment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HERSCHEL WALKER, (R-GA) U.S. SENATE CANDIDATE: One of the things I want to tell all of you is you never stop dreaming. I don't want any of you to stop dreaming. I don't want any of you to stop believing in America. I want you to believe in America and continue to believe in the Constitution and believe in our elected officials most of all, continue to pray for them because all the prayers you've given me, I felt those prayers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COLLINS: He said, "believe in the Constitution." Of course, you can't really ignore the fact that that comes as Trump is under fire for what he said about terminating the Constitution.

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Without question. He also said believe in our public officials, believe in the country. It was really striking to hear those words last night, and it seemed to us it was off the cuff. There were no teleprompters. He is not known for giving long speeches or having speechwriters, per se. So him saying that I thought was very interesting and really thanking the state of Georgia, but urging people to follow their dreams and believe in really institutions.

And there was not a whiff of election denialism in his concession speech last night. Yes, he did not mention Senator Raphael Warnock, so perhaps it was not the tradition kind of a concession statement. But I thought it was pretty gracious for him to do that after really suffering a humiliation in a respect by losing by 95,000 some votes, almost three time as many as in the November race.

COLLINS: And I don't think Warnock mentioned Walker necessarily, either, buy Warnock did talk about that fight for early voting, because, of course, he had to file that lawsuit for that extra day of early voting. He talked about what that meant for this race.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. RAPHAEL WARNOCK (D-GA): State officials said that we couldn't vote on Saturday.

But we sued them and we won.

(APPLAUSE)

WARNOCK: Each of us has value. And if we have value, we ought to have a voice. And the way to have a voice is to have a vote.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COLLINS: Clearly that extra day meant a lot to his campaign he felt like. EVA MCKEND, CNN NATIONAL POLITICS REPORTER: It did, Kaitlan. When it

is all said and done, I wonder if this Saturday voting is going to be one of the key ingredients to that Democratic success last night. I was on the ground during that day of Saturday voting, and it was just a hugely galvanizing issue for the Democratic base. Yes, they won in a practical sense, right. You had these college students showing up, registered voters in Georgia, some who didn't vote in the general election but were home for the Thanksgiving weekend, showing up in droves to vote for Senator Warnock. But also, it reignited this debate over voter access, over voter suppression, that is a deeply animating issue for Democratic voters.

We've been talking about inflation. We've been talking about abortion. This put voting rights front and center once again. And I think that was hugely helpful to the Warnock campaign.

COLLINS: And Warnock seemed to really take advantage of what that new voting law looked like that Governor Kemp signed into law. Those early days of voting, focusing on that, while the Walker campaign seemed more focused on getting people out and voting yesterday. There was a lot of reflection on what he was like as a candidate overall and how much that had to do with this race. He still got 1.7 million votes. But I was struck by this quote that was published in "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution." This is from an adviser to someone that tried to primary, that ran against Walker in the primary. He said that Herschel was, quote, "like a plane crash into a trainwreck that rolled into a dumpster fire and an orphanage, then an animal shelter. You kind of had to watch it squinting through one eye between your fingers." Obviously, that's harsh, but is it a reflection of the kind of campaign that Walker ran.

ZELENY: There's no doubt. Look at all the controversies just month after month.

[08:10:00]

It's almost remarkable in some respects that he got as close as he did because of that. But as we have heard and talked about for months, Senator Mitch McConnell talked about the quality of candidates. He simply was not as qualified of a candidate as Senator Warnock. At the end of the day voters, as they often do, really size the person up for the job to which they are applying for. And Herschel Walker never really made the case for why he should be the U.S. senator from here in Georgia. But it was an historic race without question. We didn't even really lean into the history much of it at all. Eva, you were on the ground here for the whole time and heard that. He seldom talked about that.

MCKEND: He did, he did. And as for Walker, he still had his supporters. And I think Republicans are still trying to figure out what type of candidate they want to run.

But there was definitely a mood shift from the general election to the runoff. I will say this, though. I think that Republicans I think you can't run I think a Walker in Georgia, right. Senator Warnock's campaign both relied on liberal voters as well as moderates and independents. And I don't know if this sort of a Walker candidate, this hugely dynamic figure could maybe perhaps work in another state, but it just did not seem right for the state of Georgia.

COLLINS: Absolutely not. Jeff, Eva, thank you both for your reporting on the ground here this week.

ZELENY: Sure.

COLLINS: All right, Poppy, back to you.

HARLOW: Kaitlan, thank you very much. And we want to play, everyone, Kaitlan, some of the sound of this great interview that you did yesterday with a voter in Georgia, Republican voter who struggled with his decision and his vote. Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COLLINS: Was it difficult for you to vote for Herschel Walker?

ED CORDELL, GEORGIA VOTER: It was. I have to look at the ladies in my family with a straight face and say that I voted for Walker.

COLLINS: And what did they think?

CORDELL: They have their own opinions. They respect mine, but there were a few shakes of the head.

COLLINS: How much did Governor Kemp coming out on the campaign trail for him factor into your decision.

CORDELL: If he had not come out, it would have factored into it.

COLLINS: You wouldn't have voted for him?

CORDELL: I might not have.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: There's that, says a lot.

Joining us now to talk about all of this, Republican Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, the state everyone is talking about this morning, Geoff Duncan, New York Democratic Congressman Mondaire Jones, and CNN chief political analyst Gloria Borger. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. I'm going to start with you, because that voter made a difficult choice for them as a Republican, but ultimately was saying the Republican vote is what's most important to me. What did you do in terms of voting?

LT. GOV. GEOFF DUNCAN, (R) GEORGIA: And I've talked about this for a week here. I knew what I was going to do. I waited in line. And I walked in and got my card, and walked up to the Dominion machine, and stared at two candidate that neither earned my vote or my respect politically, and I walked out without voting for either one of them.

HARLOW: What does that say about your party, many of them getting behind Herschel Walker? Governor Kemp at the end, after he won he own reelection, but despite all of it, getting behind him?

DUNCAN: I think that the race was 2.8 points right now. A huge part of that is because Brian Kemp did offer his brand behind Herschel Walker. It's a huge, it's a huge set of light on the issue. We've got some new directions for the Republican Party if we're going to move forward. It's 10.37 points is really the separation of victory, Brian Kemp won and what Walker lost by, you add that together. Herschel Walker should have run a parallel campaign to Brian Kemp and won by the same margins. We got a lot of work in front of us.

LEMON: Congressman, I was just speaking to John Berman and he brought up the vote that he believes that the numbers show helped Raphael Warnock win, and that is in largely populated urban areas, African American vote. The African Americans in Georgia got behind this, despite what they say, well, there was suppressive tactics and all of these things, you cannot underscore how important that was to Raphael Warnock's win and would not have happened without that.

REP. MONDAIRE JONES, (D-NY): The black community sport of the senator was critical. By the way, there was voter suppression. We saw a recent example of that in an attempt by Republican officials in Georgia to cancel early voting on Saturday. And of course, every court to consider the matter rejected it. That early vote was important. It's why the senator emphasized it.

And of course, black folks in particular were inspired by the Senator's candidacy. But it was a multiracial, multireligious coalition as the Senator mentioned in his victory speech last night. And I'll just tell you, as an African American, I share the view of many African American people I met with when I was stumping for the Senator down in Georgia myself, which is that folks were personally offended by Herschel Walker's candidacy. It is so clear that he is not qualified to serve in the United States Senate and that national Republicans chose him because they thought that his race would make him competitive with black voters. What we heard last night from black voters who voted was that they would not the be patronized. And that's why the Senator was reelected.

LEMON: This may be the only thing that you two agree on about him not being qualified. I don't know if you'll agree on the voter suppression.

[08:15:00]

DUNCAN: Well, I'll narrow it down. I don't think it was a national push for him. I think it was one person that pushed for him. That was Donald Trump. And that was the fatal tragedy from the get-go.

HARLOW: Picked -- handpicked. Gloria.

LEMON: But Lindsey Graham and others --

HARLOW: Let me just get Gloria in here.

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: And let me just say about Black voters. I mean, exit polling during the election showed that over 90 percent of Black voters supported Warnock. And I mean, when do you ever see numbers like that? And so, to your point, yes, that's accurate. And that leads to another point about stuffing candidates down people's throats. And that's a question about Donald Trump. It's a question about candidates that were more celebrity than qualified.

And I think Herschel Walker fits into that category. And voters we saw in this runoff and throughout this entire election season decided that they were going to look at candidates, they were going to look at their characters, they're going to look at their qualifications, and they were going to vote on the candidates. And that's why we saw a lot of ticket-splitting here.

So, no matter what Kemp could do, very popular one, 200,000 more votes than Walker in the -- he couldn't pull them across the finish line.

LEMON: Well, we saw that the ticket is splitting in the voter panel that did some -- people voted for Kemp in the general and said, you know, I can't -- you know --

HARLOW: And we saw it all over the country.

LEMON: So, to your point, Gloria, about the Black vote, right, and what -- and voting on candidate quality, I think, you know, Republicans -- and maybe you can say this is just Donald Trump who, you know, wanted -- who put Herschel Walker in there, but Republicans still supported him. So, what is the lesson for Republicans because they underestimated, you know, how against Herschel Walker, that many in Georgia would be -- that it would actually motivate people to go vote for Raphael Warnock.? And also, women's reproductive rights, because many people that they spoke to, reporters on the ground said reproductive rights was on the ballot.

BORGER: And it was and it was a large issue. But I think the lesson for Republicans is get your act together. Figure out who you are as a party. You know, they've been defined for many years now by Donald Trump. And they have to figure out who -- what the party represents. Pick your own candidates. Get younger voters if you can. Get a minority voters if you can. But figure out what you -- what you stand for because right now, I think given the result in Georgia, people are probably scratching their head saying, well, what is this party?

You know, we're heading into a new Congress. You're going to have Republicans in charge of the House, Democrats in charge of the Senate. What do Republicans want to do to define themselves beyond investigations?

HARLOW: So, let's let the Lieutenant Governor, the Republican here.

LEMON: I do. I want you to respond. But let me just put this up because I think it's good to what you were talking about. This is a former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. He says, conservatives' hostility to the Biden administration on our term tends to -- on our terms tends to blind us to just how effective Biden has been on his terms. We dislike Biden so much. We pettily focus on his speaking difficulty, sometimes strange behavior, clear lapses of memory, and other personal flaws Our aversion to him and his policies makes us underestimate him and the Democrats.

DUNCAN: Donald Trump set that tone and narrative in his campaign against Joe Biden. He attacked him for all of those superfluous issues that are that are shallow. We can never let Donald Trump let us get to this spot again. We got two years to get our act together. We have to coalesce around the fact that we want to win the White House in 2024. And it's going to take a serious-minded, policy-minded individual that truly wants to be a leader, not just, you know, win a campaign and be a hero on Twitter, but somebody who's legitimately prepared to understand the policies that are conservative-natured, use empathy to understand the other side, and use a tone that invites people to join us on this journey.

We got two years to get our act together. I'm still looking for somebody that wants to step up.

HARLOW: Those are two really important words that I don't hear a lot in politics, empathy, and -- no, really. Like, empathy and invite. So, thank you for those.

LEMON: Did you want to -- did you have something -- Gloria, I think she --

BORGER: Look, I totally agree with you. I mean, this -- we've had years of grievance politics.

HARLOW: Yes.

BORGER: And what we heard last night from both Walker and Warnock were speeches that were not full of grievance.

HARLOW: That's true.

BORGER: You know, Warnock's main theme of his piece was I see you, and it was very affecting speech. And that's what people want to hear. I think maybe they're done with grievance politics. But we'll have to see --

LEMON: We'll see.

BORGER: -- how that plays out.

LEMON: Thank you. It's good to see all of you.

HARLOW: Thanks, guys.

LEMON: I really appreciate it.

So, speaking of the former president, Herschel Walker's defeat is the last of a long list of midterm losses for Trump-backed candidates capping off a rough first month of Trump's 2024 campaign. Wow, it's like crazy, right? It kind of lackluster. How as you move forward from here? We're going to talk to Maggie Haberman. That's next.

I could kind of --

HARLOW: Thank you, guys, very much.

LEMON: No one's really -- he's not getting the, you know, spotlight.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:20:00]

HARLOW: All right, welcome back. Let's set the table here because former President Trump is only three weeks into his 2024 presidential campaign. And those three weeks had been turbulent and that is an understatement. Trump announces his bid for the White House on November 15th and since then, let's look at what has happened.

He sat down to dinner with disgraced rapper Kanye West and a holocaust denier and antisemite Nick Fuentes. House Democrats obtained six years of his federal tax returns. A day later, an appeals court, the 11th Circuit, denied him a special master review of those documents seized at his Mar-a-Lago home. And that same day, a federal judge ordered top White House lawyers to testify in a criminal grand jury investigation into the efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

And that brings us to this weekend when Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution. Remember when he did that becoming president? Well, this weekend, he called to terminate the Constitution. And then this week, a jury convicted his organization, the Trump Org on 17 counts, all counts of criminal tax fraud.

LEMON: So, let bring our CNN Political Analyst and New York Times Senior Political Correspondent Maggie Haberman. Good morning, Maggie. Good to see you this morning. I got to ask you about last night. It was another blow for a Trump-backed candidate. So, where does this put Donald Trump in the whole scheme of his candidates and his trajectory moving forward? Because this is another loss for him and a big obvious one.

[08:25:16]

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, Don, it's been a bad midterm cycle for him. Not every candidate who he endorsed is somebody who he recruited, but a bunch of them were. Herschel Walker is one of the people who he treated as almost a mini-Donald Trump, somebody who had a history of personal misconduct allegations, specifically abuse. Trump predicted to me when I interviewed him last year that none of this was going to matter for Herschel Walker, that obviously it wasn't true.

Other candidates who espoused Trump's lies about the 2020 election lost. Basically, voters in the midterms returned a verdict that they don't want a lot of Trumpian behavior in their candidates. And to your point, this kept a number of losses in other areas of his life. He is still the front-runner for the nomination. (AUDIO GAP) that voters are actively turning away from him in his base, but it's not an auspicious beginning to his third campaign, that's for sure.

LEMON: Well, speaking to Republicans this morning, some of them saying it on the air, some are off saying that his announcement was basically a dud considering, you know, that he's the former president of the United States and the sort of the stranglehold that he has had on this party. Listen, I think David Urban said it. Well, he did say it on there. He still believes he's going to be the nominee, but there are many Republicans who are saying -- Scott Jennings said, I don't know, you know. And then the former -- the Lieutenant Governor of Georgia now saying, you know what, I don't think he's going to be the nominee. His announcement was a dud.

HABERMAN: His kickoff speech was pretty muted. And you know, for somebody who once upon a time use this line about Jeb Bush, I dare say low energy, because he was reading off a teleprompter, and he wasn't talking about the things he wants to be talking about, which is still the 2020 election. And that's just not what most Republicans are focused on.

I will say, I think two things can be true at once, Don. I think Dave Urban is correct that Trump still remains the front-runner for the nomination, again, until voters show that they are actively seeking an alternative. And it's not just donors, and it's not just the chattering class, Trump is going to remain in a strong position. But he is more vulnerable than he has been in a very long time. And we'll see how that plays out.

HARLOW: Dig into that a little bit, Maggie. You said, until voters show. Do you -- do you mean only in a Republican primary or are you looking for things before that from voters?

HABERMAN: I mean -- I mean, in polling, Poppy. Until we get -- you know, we're not going to see anything in terms of voters for a year. We're not going to know, you know, what happens in caucuses or primaries. We don't actually know what the calendars are going to look like. But we're not going to know where voters choices are for a while. We do know these early polls before other candidates are actually (AUDIO GAP) are not that meaningful.

So, I think until we see whether when he actually is out on the campaign trail, which I assume will happen at some point early next year, whether Ron DeSantis does run -- Mike Pence, does he run? Mike Pompeo does he run? I think until we know the answers to all of those, Trump remains in a pretty strong position. But we could see shifts.

HARLOW: Maggie, we just had last hour Alvin Bragg on, the district attorney of Manhattan who won that case against the Trump Organization yesterday on all 17 criminal counts of tax fraud. And I mean, we were trying to get answers from him, Don and I, on OK, what does this mean for Trump himself, any criminal charges, hush money payment investigation? What are they going to do? You have such deep reporting on this. What do you think happens now to the Trump Organization?

HABERMAN: I don't think this is good for the Trump Organization. I think it raised questions, among other things, Poppy, about what new business they're going to be able to attract. Although to be fair, it's not as if partners in business that they might have been engaging with weren't aware that there was this width of corruption around them in terms of allegations (AUDIO GAP) district attorney. I think it is going to make things very hard. I think there's a question about how long they stay a New York company. Do they try to relocate to Florida which is where Trump is and where most of his family is.

But this is the company that was the launchpad for Donald Trump. It helped him, you know, establish himself as a businessman and then sort of create this hype around himself that was not always met by reality. And this is a huge, huge, huge blow. Even though he was not charged personally here, this is very problematic for him.

LEMON: Maggie Haberman, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

So, coming up, the family of a fallen officer snubbing top congressional Republicans at a ceremony held to honor law enforcement who defended the Capitol on January 6. I'm going to ask those family members why they did it. That's ahead.

HARLOW: Georgia's runoff election setting a pandemic record in terms of who came out to vote and daily ballots cast since the pandemic started. We will be joined -- Kaitlan will be joined by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger next.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. RAPHAEL WARNOCK (D-GA): You got me for six more years.

CROWD: Six more years! Six more years! Six more years!

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:30:00]