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Democrats Face Angry Constituents At Town Halls; More Than 350 Cases Of Measles Reported In The United States; Former Surgeon General Urges RFK Jr. To Become Vaccine Champion. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired March 20, 2025 - 12:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:31:12]

MANU RAJU, CNN ANCHOR: Democratic voters are getting tired of waiting for their leaders to figure out how to battle President Trump.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They can go F themselves is how I feel about it. So what are we doing? We need to fight back.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When our people in here (INAUDIBLE).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So who is --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are demanding for an arms embargo, you don't take any frickin action. You ignore us. That's not what representation looks like.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let me tell you --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are not interested in hearing that you are in the minority. We know that. We want you to show some of the backbone and strategic brilliance that Mitch McConnell would have in the minority.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

RAJU: All right, joining me now is Evan Roth Smith. He's a founding partner of the Democratic polling firm Slingshot Strategies. Evan, thank you so much for joining me this afternoon. That was just a small slice of the anger that we are hearing from, seeing from the Democratic base. How concerned should Democrats be that their voters are not just angry at Republicans, they're angry at their own party?

EVAN ROTH SMITH, FOUNDING PARTNER, SLINGSHOT STRATEGIES: Well, Democrats should be very concerned. And voters are telling the party exactly what they want, right? Not just how angry they are, but where they want us to focus. They see Donald Trump by way of some of these government cuts that he's entertaining and Elon Musk is implementing, threatening some of these core programs like Social Security, like Medicare, like Medicaid, that are third rails of American politics. And you do hear Democrats talk about, you know, these things as third rails, right, with enormous electoral consequences when they're threatened. And what we wanted to do with our recent polling is to make sure that's really the case, is to see just how damaging it is that Trump is allowing Elon to threaten these programs and understand how much of a vulnerability that creates for Donald Trump.

And our answer is, it creates an enormous vulnerability. Elon Musk, by targeting these programs and specifically by targeting these benefit programs like Social Security, like Medicare, like Medicaid, is creating and is dragging on Donald Trump's approval ratings, his favorability ratings. And voters are questioning Trump's judgment. Democrats need to take advantage of that and really go after this threat that Elon Musk posed (ph).

RAJU: But Evan, in a Fox News poll that came out today, Donald Trump actually hit his highest approval rating ever, actually 49 percent. And Democrats have received poll after poll, including the CNN poll, had only 30 percent approval. That is a record low in CNN polling from -- since it's been doing it in the last three decades or so.

So something is clearly going wrong for the Democratic Party. What is it?

SMITH: Well, there's plenty going wrong. The biggest thing that went wrong is we lost an election pretty badly, right? And we have no power in Washington to speak of. And as we saw over the last few days with the discussion over the continuing resolution and what the Senate should do, when we do have moments of -- to utilize our power, there's enormous internal debate over how the Democratic Party should be picking its fights.

And what we see is that the clearest and most opportune way to pick these fights is around these core benefit programs like Social Security, like Medicare, like Medicaid, that voters expect Democrats to stand up for and go to the mat on, right? All this other stuff is noise. And so much has happened since Donald Trump became president, all sorts of reckless cuts and attacks on different government agencies, these executive orders.

But when push comes to shove, the Democratic Party is supposed to be the party that protects Social Security and Medicare, that protects the programs that help people who need it. Part of the problem we have as a party is we're not zeroed in enough on these things, right? This will always be a winner for the Democratic Party.

And the more that we can make it a loser for the Republican Party and for Donald Trump, the better we'll do, and voters will respond to that. Right now, it feels like we're not doing enough to pick this fight.

[12:35:03]

RAJU: Yes, I wonder, do you think that given that, do you think that Chuck Schumer bungled how the Democrats handled the piece of leverage last week to keep the government open? And how would you characterize his job in carrying out the message that you want them to lay out?

SMITH: I wouldn't go so far as to say it was bungled, right? Schumer clearly had legitimate concerns about how government shutdown could be remembered or how it could spread the blame, right, between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party over some of these cuts. And I think he would prefer to pick a different fight.

But my belief and what we see in our data is you have to -- even if in the end, you don't shut down the government, you have to extract some concessions. They, you know, they should have found a way to get Republicans to make clear commitments on these benefits programs that they could go out and say, we fought back. We stood up for these things that Donald Trump has allowed Elon Musk to go after.

RAJU: Yes.

SMITH: And may --

RAJU: Do we still have Evan? All right, I think we might have just lost Evan. We'll see if we can try to get him back.

My panel is -- actually, we'll try to see if we can get him back, but we're going to go to a break here.

Coming up for us, top Democrats are hitting the road as the party struggles to unite behind a leader. Guess which 2024 contender wants to fill the void? We'll tell you after a quick break.

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[12:41:06]

RAJU: Will the real leader of the Democratic Party please stand up? We don't know who that is yet, but Tim Walz may be auditioning for the role. CNN's Isaac Dovere reports that the Minnesota governor and Kamala Harris' former running mate is back on the road, trying to find his voice and fill the void.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

GOV. TIM WALZ (D), MINNESOTA: I know it's a dark time, but I was saying on my phone -- I don't know if some of you know this on the iPhone -- they've got that little stock app. I added Tesla to it to give me a little boost during the day. 225 and dropping.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

RAJU: And well, lucky enough, Isaac Dovere is here. Lo and behold. Thanks for coming back for this, Isaac. Just a reading of something what Tim Walz told you when you were backstage at this event. He said, I don't -- he's talking about Trump here. He said, "I don't think there's any limit to where he goes. The limit will be what the American public will put up with when they push back. This has happened everywhere when these authoritarians have come in. One day it looks like they're absolutely infallible and in total power. And the next day, they and their entire families are gone". What was your takeaway from the message that he is trying to push in the aftermath of their loss last week?

EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Well, a couple things. I asked him, OK, so how dark are you? And he said, I'm dark. It's going to get very dark. He really does think a lot of bad things are going to happen here, including that Trump will defy judges. He said that he thinks Trump will arrest a political opponent soon.

He also thinks that the Democratic talk so far since the election has really fallen short. And he is self-aware enough to say, well, if I had the answers, then maybe we would have won. But he also -- what he said is, it's -- you need to listen to what the people who are showing up at these events are going to be saying.

And there were over 900 people there with us in Eau Claire on Tuesday night. He was in Iowa and Nebraska in the days before. There's a lot of people who are talking about some of the things that we've been talking about at this table, healthcare, education, just feeling a lot of anxiety about what's going on.

And as far as -- look, these are Democrats who are showing up on a weeknight for Tim Walz --

RAJU: Sure.

DOVERE: But they do want to see more of an active presence, an active fight from their leaders. And they're not seeing that out of Washington.

RAJU: Is --

DOVERE: Sorry.

RAJU: Is he -- I was going to say, how receptive was the crowd to his message when they're there?

DOVERE: They were very receptive. And I think that importantly, another thing that I put into the piece is that, Tim Walz got picked for the ticket because he was seen as, like, authentic and effortlessly off the cuff. And then the Harris campaign --

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Right.

DOVERE: -- locked him up in a silo as they locked her up in a silo and ran a campaign that was not engaging. One of the questions that I hear from Democrats all the time is not, was it -- should Kamala Harris have gone on Joe Rogan. But would she have been able to go on Joe Rogan, right, with the way they ran that campaign?

The Tim Walz who was on stage on Tuesday night that I saw is more like the Tim Walz that I saw before he got picked for the ticket than any point during the campaign.

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: But he allowed himself to be locked up. DOVERE: Oh, absolutely.

ZELENY: That he give any sort of a regret or a point to that. I mean, he's not a new politician.

DOVERE: No.

ZELENY: He's been around for a very long time. He knew that he was being cloistered.

DOVERE: Totally. And I said to him, I said, should you have been doing events like this during the campaign? He said, yes. I said, did you ever say that to the vice president or the campaign staff? And he said, well, you know, I came on and I was going to -- I wanted to be a team player, and that's what I was doing.

There was an -- this was something that I reported about at the time during the campaign. There was a way that he sort of subsumed himself to things and felt intimidated by what was going on that obviously did not work out for the last year.

ZELENY: It also shows the bottom of the ticket that cannot overshadow the top.

DOVERE: Totally, yes.

ZELENY: I mean, that's just how it is regardless of who it is.

RAJU: How badly damaged is Tim Walz?

LEIGH ANN CALDWELL, CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT, PUCK: Well, every time Tim Walz speaks, you see the MAGA warriors making fun of him left and right. So, you know, four years in politics, though, is a long time to recover. I don't know if, you know, Tim Walz's political choices between now and then, what they're necessarily going to be.

[12:45:08]

But the Democratic Party is desperately searching for a leader. They're desperately searching how to reconnect with voters and with a message. And that is a path that I am told by many Democrats they worry about, that the onslaught of Trump creates a party to become so reactionary that they can't -- don't have time to figure out how to get back to what they want to be.

RAJU: And we're seeing some folks on the left trying to tap into the unrest within their base. Bernie Sanders, of course, as well as AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are hitting the road. They're doing a number of town halls and events starting tonight at Las Vegas and Nevada.

They're also in Las Vegas. They're also in Tempe, Arizona. They're going to be in Colorado tomorrow on two stops. They are also in Tucson on Saturday. You can see on that screen that they're fighting oligarchy. That is their message. What do you make of, you know, AOC -- we had a poll out this weekend that said that more voters view AOC as connecting with Democratic voters, see them -- her as connecting with their core values than pretty much anyone else.

There's still a lot of people that didn't -- 30 percent didn't know who connected with their core values.

SEUNG MIN KIM, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Right.

RAJU: But still, she was above, say, the more established names in the party.

KIM: Right. I think one reason for that is because she is a very effective communicator. And that is such a big part of being a leader in this party, when you are out of power in basically all of the ways in Washington. And your power really is reaching voters directly through how you are communicating, what your message is.

And I think we can all agree, AOC has a talent for that. But it also shows just how hungry the party is for just to give them some direction. I know there's a lot of grappling at the start of any administration, especially for Democrats, right, on how to respond to Trump.

Do they work with him? How do they respond to their constituents, their voters who actually voted for Trump? How do they deal with that --

ZELENY: In a primary that they didn't really get to have last summer.

KIM: Yes, definitely.

ZELENY: Having a primary that was a continuation of the 2016 with Bernie Sanders and AOC that was cut short five years ago because of the pandemic. So that's what all of this really pent up issues are out there, this unresolved question. And that's one thing that is so different about this moment in time.

Eight years ago, Donald Trump unified Democrats. Now he divides them. We don't know if that will last. But that's what is different about this moment.

DOVERE: And these questions about national leaders. Also, look, I talked to a House Democrat who was elected in a district that Trump won, who said, go home, Tim. That his -- that people like the Coach Walz persona, but that referred to me as red state -- red district tourism.

And so there is a lot of anxiety of whether the Democrats want to connect with not only Walz and Harris, but anyone in the National Party, even Bernie Sanders. They say that they've got 51,000 RSVPs for his events over the next couple of days. Are those 51,000 people who are swing voters or who are going to be voting in the midterms in the next presidential election? We don't know.

RAJU: Yes. All right. Well, a lot more to discuss. And also, the big dance starts today.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Heyo. RAJU: Maybe three of your teams might not have gotten in. So don't interrupt us all --

KIM: That's all right. That hurts.

ZELENY: University of Nebraska at Omaha claiming the Mavericks.

RAJU: OK. All right. Who's your team?

CALDWELL: NC State did not make the tournament this year.

RAJU: No.

CALDWELL: I chose Florida.

RAJU: OK.

KIM: OK. Well, Iowa mens did not make.

RAJU: Womens did.

KIM: Yes. The Iowa mens did not make the tournament this year. Coach was fired. But the women are in. Always rooting for the women.

RAJU: What about you, Isaac?

DOVERE: I went to Johns Hopkins University for college. It's not renowned for its basketball program.

RAJU: Yes. Well, as the -- as I'm hosting the show today, there's one right answer -- University of Wisconsin.

All right --

ZELENY: Go Badgers.

RAJU: Go Badgers. And the name John Tonje. You'll all be saying the name John Tonje. I just -- I hope I didn't hex them for the game this afternoon.

KIM: You probably did.

RAJU: Montana was very much probably.

All right, go Badgers.

All right, up next, America is getting a crash course in herd immunity. We'll tell you why a former Trump surgeon general is sounding the alarm on the growing measles outbreak. Stay with us.

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[12:53:31]

RAJU: There have now been more than 350 cases of measles reported in the United States. And the outbreak is raising alarms for current and former public health officials, especially as vaccination rates among children are lagging in parts of the country.

CNN Medical Correspondent Meg Tirrell joins me now. So Meg, walk us through what we're seeing.

MEG TIRRELL, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Manu. So we are seeing quite a large outbreak that's centered in West Texas right now. And Dr. Jerome Adams, who's the former U.S. surgeon general who served from 2017 to 2021 in Trump's first administration, is sounding the alarm on the fact that the United States potentially is losing herd immunity to things like measles. And that's why we're going to see such large outbreaks.

In West Texas now, we've seen this grow from the end of January now to about 279 cases. And it's spread from West Texas to New Mexico and to Oklahoma. Altogether, with that major outbreak and then cases we're seeing across the country, we've seen more cases now so far in 2025 exceeding 300 than we saw in all of 2024 and all of 2023.

So this is quite a large year. And we're hearing warnings from folks like Dr. Adams, who wrote a piece for CNN.com about this, that we are going to see more. The vaccination rate, for example, in the epicenter of Gaines County, Texas, of this outbreak is 82 percent among kindergartners for measles vaccines.

So Dr. Adams is warning that this could be a legacy for RFK Jr., the Health Secretary. He says his legacy, quote, "Will be defined not by what he said in the past, but by what he does now. He will be remembered either as the vaccine skeptic who turned vaccine champion or as the man at the helm of HHS when America made measles great again. For the sake of our public health and our children, we should all hope it's the former, not the latter".

[12:55:16]

So Manu really urging RFK Jr. to consider wholeheartedly embracing vaccination as the best way to end these things. We should also note, Manu, a lot of eyes on who the Trump administration picks to lead the CDC after it pulled its nomination of Dave Weldon last week. And that should be a signal on how they're planning to go here.

RAJU: Yes, abruptly pulling that nomination as the confirmation hearing was happening and also questions about RFK Jr., how he might respond. Meg Tirrell, thank you so much for the latest reporting on what is obviously a very concerning public health trend.

All right. Thanks for joining Inside Politics. CNN News Central starts after a quick break.