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Sanders Struggles In Meeting With NY Daily News Editors; Can Trump Avoid A Contested Convention?; Mississippi Governor Signs Religious Freedom Bill Into Law; Backlash Over Anti-LGBT Laws; Stage Set for Delegate Fight at GOP Convention. Aired 7:30-8a ET

Aired April 06, 2016 - 07:30   ET

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

[07:30:00] VAN JONES, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: He can deal with that. The challenge is just you're going to be head-to-head for two weeks in the capital of the world and there's an opportunity for either side to make a mistake here, and a mistake here will cost you big time.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Lisa, Van, thank you. And how great is it for you that next week we're going to have the CNN debate with Hillary and Bernie in Brooklyn? The boogie down in Brooklyn. That is going to be a big moment. There's a lot at stake that night. Don't need to hype it any more than that.

Now, another little thing to tantalize you. There are big questions coming out of last night for Hillary Clinton, not just about the state of play now but where it goes from here given what we see in the polls and what we're seeing with Bernie Sanders. Who better to answer for her campaign than herself? She will do that at 11:15, as it says on your screen. We're going to ask her the questions that have come up today -- Alisyn.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: OK, Chris, looking forward to that. Back to the Republican field and the dual between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. How big a blow was losing Wisconsin for Trump? The drama builds, as do the chances for a contested convention.

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[07:35:00] CAMEROTA: Donald Trump looking to rebound in his home state of New York in two weeks after a loss in Wisconsin last night. Can Trump get the delegates he needs to lock in the nomination before the convention?

Joining us now is Trump's senior adviser, Sara Huckabee Sanders. Sara, thanks so much for being here.

SARA HUCKABEE SANDERS, TRUMP SENIOR ADVISER: Thank you. Good morning, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Good morning, Sara. I want to ask you about the statement that the campaign put out last night -- that the Trump campaign put out last night after Cruz's win. Let me just read a portion of it for our viewers and get you to explain it. Basically, the campaign says not only was Donald was he, meaning Cruz,

propelled by the anti-Trump Super PACs spending countless millions of dollars on false advertising against Mr. Trump but he, Cruz, was coordinating with his own Super PAC, which is illegal, who totally control him. Sara, what is your evidence that Ted Cruz is coordinating with his Super PAC?

SANDERS: I don't know about the specific evidence of coordination with the Super PAC, but what I do know about is that Donald Trump has had over $70 million in attack ads spent against him, and I think that what's they're referring to in terms of the powers that control Ted Cruz.

Ted Cruz is a Wall Street-funded candidate. He acts like the ultimate outsider but in reality he's one of the ultimate insiders. And I think that that's what voters are really going to be looking at, particularly moving forward and moving into the next couple of contests is who's going to be the outsider that shakes things up.

CAMEROTA: But Sara, you're the senior adviser for this campaign. The campaign -- Trump's campaign is accusing Sen. Cruz of a federal crime. Don't you need to present some evidence of that?

SANDERS: Yes, I think that will come in due time. But I think Super PACs have really muddied the waters a lot this cycle. I think we've seen a lot of candidates do this and I think one of the big questions, and it's a very gray area and I experienced it a lot in multiple campaigns, is how far can the Super PACs go?

Ted Cruz's Super PACs have put together countless rallies on his behalf that he's attended, and typically that's a really gray area that, frankly, the FEC hasn't ruled on. And I think that after this cycle, and maybe even in the next several months, we're going to see some changes happen because of that and they're going to have to make some big decisions and rule on whether or not candidates can actually participate in that type of activity.

CAMEROTA: But to be clear, do you think that Sen. Cruz is actively coordinating with his Super PAC, which is a federal crime?

SANDERS: I think it's something that we need to look at. I don't know, specifically, whether or not he is directly engaged, but I do think it's something that is worth taking a look at and something we need to spend some time investigating.

CAMEROTA: Do you think the campaign went too far in putting out a statement accusing him of a federal crime if you don't have any evidence right now?

SANDERS: Again, I don't know the details on whether or not -- I wasn't with the campaign last night. I'm here in Arkansas. They may have something I haven't seen. But, again, I think that there is definitely a pattern here of behavior that should be looked at and should be something we're focused on.

But I think moving forward the main thing we need to be focused on is who's going to win this election, and I still think that's going to be Donald Trump, particularly -- there's no question that Ted Cruz had a good night last night -- a good win in Wisconsin, but Donald Trump also won delegates. He's still several hundred delegates ahead of Ted Cruz, several million votes ahead of Ted Cruz.

And I don't see any other states, at this point, that Ted Cruz has the potential to do well. I don't see anywhere where he may even pick up a win. Last night there were 42 delegates at stake. Moving forward you have 267 delegates left this month alone, and Ithink Donald Trump will take the lion's share of those delegates and expand his lead by an even greater margin by the end of this month.

CAMEROTA: In terms of the math it also gets complicated for Donald Trump. As you know, he has to get to 1,237 -- that number -- in terms of delegates. And to do so he has to win 60 percent of the contests coming up. Ted Cruz has to win 88 percent. John Kasich has an even harder road of winning 125 percent.

Now, 60 percent is not what Donald Trump has been winning by. He's been winning by about 46 percent. So what is your plan if it comes to a contested convention? How do you believe Donald Trump is going to come out of that convention as the nominee?

SANDERS: Well, I think it's the same plan that it's been all along, and that's to connect with voters and we'll be connecting with delegates. We've got an extremely strong organization. We're working hard to prepare for that. But, again, I do think that we're the only candidate poised to get to that 1,237 before the convention takes place. I do think it's very possible that Donald Trump gets there. It's not only possible but likely. We're moving into territory that certainly belongs to him.

I think Ted Cruz, as you mentioned -- he has to win 88 percent. That's not going to happen, and I hope that when it becomes mathematically impossible for him to clinch that 1,237 he'll do what he's been calling on John Kasich to do, and that's to get out of the race when he sees that there's no path forward for him.

[07:40:00] CAMEROTA: Sara Huckabee Sanders, thanks so much for being on NEW DAY.

SANDERS: Thank you, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: What's your take on all of this? Tell us what you think the numbers look like. Tweet us @NewDay or post your comments (coughing) --

CUOMO: How many times have I told you, you have to at least --

CAMEROTA: I'm going to get through this.

CUOMO: -- switch to filtered cigarettes. You can't just keep rolling those cowboy cigarettes.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: She's been sick for the past two days.

CAMEROTA: You know what? I feel that rolling my own is healthier, but I --

CUOMO: I'm talking cigarettes.

PEREIRA: Oh, goodness.

CUOMO: Remember where you live. It's actually Connecticut. Very different laws there. Good to know. All right, Alisyn's sick. She's a trooper. We all know that. Here's another provocative question that's going around this morning. If you are gay, does that mean that you should be treated differently? We thought this answer was decided for this country, but not so much. Apparently not in parts of the south. We're going to debate controversial new religious freedom laws next.

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[07:44:00] PEREIRA: Growing backlash over controversial new laws in Mississippi and North Carolina. Mississippi's governor signing a sweeping religious freedom bill into law that businesses to refuse service to LGBT people. In North Carolina, PayPal pulling out of a planned global hub in Charlotte over a similar law. More than 100 CEO's now calling on that state's governor to repeal that law.

Joining us now, Sarah Warbelow. She is legal director for Human Rights Campaign, and North Carolina state representative Paul Stam. He is co-sponsor of House Bill 2. I'm hoping we can have a thought- provoking conversation with the two of you. Thank you so much for joining us and bringing both of your voices to this.

[07:45:00] Paul, I want to start with you. Some are wondering if this is a move by the conservatives as a new strategy in response to SCOTUS's ruling on gay marriage. We've seen North Carolina and Mississippi now passing these laws. What's your reaction to that?

REP. PAUL STAM (R-NC), NC HOUSE SPEAKER PRO TEM: I read the Mississippi law last night. There's not a lot of overlap between it and North Carolina's law. North Carolina's laws were a reaction to a really extreme, weird ordinance passed by the city of Charlotte a couple of weeks ago.

PEREIRA: Sarah, extreme, weird ordinance? What do you think? How do you respond to that?

SARAH WARBELOW, LEGAL DIRECTOR, HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN: Nonsense. This is perfectly standard. The city of Charlotte passed an ordinance similar to one passed in Minneapolis in 1975. We have over 40 years of experience with core non-discrimination ordinances at the city and state level that provide basic protections to LGBT people in every area of their lives.

PEREIRA: So what we've seen in North Carolina, specifically, is that there are big corporations that are saying hey, we're going to pump the brakes on doing business with you. We've seen PayPal canceling a new operation center in Charlotte. It was going to have employed 400 people. We see Lionsgate was planning to shoot a pilot for Hulu. They've now

moved that to Vancouver. The NBA is reconsidering having its 2017 All-Star game in North Carolina. One hundred twenty voices of businesses, Paul, have responded and say we're not OK with this. How do you respond to that?

STAM: Sure, let me talk about PayPal and the NBA. A couple of things I don't understand. When PayPal made its announcement that it was coming three weeks ago, North Carolina had the same law on discrimination that it has today. I don't know if they were unaware of that. Secondly, North Carolina, today, has the same law statewide as about 32 other states.

And the third thing, and this is the same with the NBA talking about not bringing an All-Star game to Charlotte, the Charlotte action is what PayPal and NBA said they wanted to see. So they're punishing Charlotte? Only Charlotte will suffer from that, not the rest of the state of North Carolina. It's like calling in airstrikes on your own position. Weird.

PEREIRA: Sarah, what's your response to that?

WARBELOW: The North Carolina law is uniquely terrible. I think maybe if some of the legislators would understand it better -- if they'd spent more than 12 hours shoving it through from both Houses and signed into law. It strips away protections for people of all characteristics -- race, sex, disability.

It forces people to file lawsuits at the federal level instead of the state level like they used to be able to do so. It stops cities from protecting their residents and visitors, including LGBT people. And then has outrageous provisions making a subset of women -- transgender women and girls -- enter into men's restrooms in public buildings, from libraries to some of the major airports in the city. It's truly outrageous and that's why we've seen, overwhelmingly, businesses opposed. We don't want this to happen.

PEREIRA: Let's let Paul respond, Sarah. Go ahead, Paul.

STAM: Almost none of that's accurate. I'll take a few of the points. They claim we took away rights for the handicapped or disabled. No, we have an entire other statute with full remedies and comprehensive coverage for those with disabilities. We took away no rights for those based on race, color, national origin.

We did not force people into the wrong restroom. Quite to the contrary. The Charlotte ordinance applied to 20,000 businesses within the city of Charlotte that would then have to change all of their company policies. Our bill only applies to government buildings and public schools.

PEREIRA: We know there is a new law, as well, in Mississippi and we can pull that up really quickly -- some of the things it denies. Denial of services based on belief marriage is between a man and a woman, sexual relations are reserved to marriage, gender is determined at birth. Sarah, we know that these kind of laws can affect the bottom line of a state. Can Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation -- can they afford that? We need a quick response from you.

WARBELOW: I think not. Already, businesses have spoken out, including major employers like Toyota and Nissan. This is bad for business, it's bad for the reputation of Mississippi, and the state really can't afford it.

PEREIRA: We likely will be talking about this for some time. I want to thank you both, Paul Stam and Sarah Warbelow. Thank you so much for joining us on NEW DAY -- Alisyn.

WARBELOW: Thank you for having us.

[07:50:00] CAMEROTA: OK, Michaela. Ted Cruz's big Wisconsin win raising the likelihood of a contested Republican convention this summer. How will the battle over delegates go? We'll explore that next.

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[07:54:00] CUOMO: All of these different numbers -- magic numbers, delegate numbers, percentages. Let's break down what exactly the state of play is now and going into conventions on both sides. And we've got the man to do it all for you right now.

CNN delegate analyst Mike Shields joins us. Now, Mike is the former chief of staff at the RNC and president of a Super PAC that advocates for conservative issues.

Thank you for being with us this morning because we're so numbers- focused now, but we need some context. Take us through it. I've been joking around that 1,237 sounds like a Fibonacci number but there's no more goal than ratio anymore. We don't really know how people get to it and how they don't. Tell us what the realities are.

MIKE SHIELDS, CNN DELEGATE ANALYST: Well, the reality is that a majority wins and so you have to have 1,237 delegates, as you said. That's 50 percent plus one of the delegates that will vote on the floor of the convention in Cleveland.

And so, everyone has seen these political conventions before and they're sort of made-for-TV scripted events where you have people speaking on the stage and they may have caught that there is a vote at some point that's sort of a pro forma thing. Those votes are going to be real in what would be a contested or open convention, and the candidates have to appeal to the delegates of the convention to vote for them. And that's the way that it used to be in history --

[07:55:00] CUOMO: Sure.

SHIELDS: -- in both parties all the way until -- right around 1972 we started having these primaries that kind of changed that. It looks like now, after last night's results, that we're heading to a Republican convention that's going to be an open convention.

CUOMO: So much like "House Of Cards" it's scary. Hopefully, it doesn't get any more like it. Now, when we're looking at how this happens you make an interesting point. You have to get to 1,237, not necessarily before the convention, but at it. So the idea -- even if Donald Trump were to get there, would he keep them at a convention?

On that point, we just had a Cruz team member say to us hey, we're working Rubio, we're working Jeb Bush, we're working the ground in Arizona and Louisiana. Why? What is their play?

SHIELDS: Well, because they're actually appealing to the delegates, and I think after last night you're going to see two campaigns being run by these candidates. One is to the voters, appealing to them to vote for them to win bound delegates at the convention.

The other is to run a campaign actually to the delegates. The delegates are people, they're going to be at the convention, they have their own wishes, they have their own beliefs about who the nominee should be. So you want to get delegates that agree with your candidate because the delegates that you win in a primary are bound, but they're only bound to vote for you -- they only have to vote for you on the first ballot.

If a candidate doesn't get to 50 percent on the first ballot, after that they are unbound and they can vote for whoever they want. So now you have to appeal to those actual delegates, themselves, and win them over so they will vote for you on subsequent ballots after the first ballot.

CUOMO: So, Mike Shields is not impressed by the notion that Cruz needs to win 88 percent of the remaining delegates to get to 1,237. Trump needs to reach 60 percent plus of the cull until then because you're saying it's not over just because you're in the primaries. The game in some ways, you're suggesting, might not start until the convention.

SHIELDS: Well, look, it is still possible for one of the candidates to win a majority of bound delegates before we go to Cleveland and then you would have what we traditionally have seen in the last 20 years, which is a presumptive nominee. It doesn't look as likely after last night.

And so, yes, what that means is you're going to have to have this played out on the floor and so you're going to have people duking it out all the way to Cleveland and trying to angle themselves. There have been candidates who have gone into -- Walter Mondale, for instance, went into the Democratic convention in 1984 as the leader, but short of the number of delegates. And he won over enough of those delegates to vote for him, so how big the gap is also matters. So you're still trying to complete for delegates.

If, for instance, Donald Trump goes in and he's only 40 delegates short. Where there's delegates going that are already unbound, there might be some delegates for another candidate he can win over. He might be able to close the gap of 40. If he's down by say 200, then that's a different thing altogether and it looks much more likely he'd have multiple ballots after that. And so, not only are they appealing to the voters but they've got to try and close that gap in the delegates before they get to the floor in Cleveland. CUOMO: It's interesting you mention 1984 with Mondale. That was a big motivation for my pop when he went there to give his now-famous speech, was that wow, are we going to have this convention come together or not?

So, that takes us to if we're going to go to a GOP convention and have it be contested -- have it be open and these votes be meaningful, the way you suggest, what do you see in John Kasich? Does it make sense to you that he's staying in the race? How real do you think his chances are there, even if he goes one and 49, as Ted Cruz suggested?

SHIELDS: I think the scenario for John Kasich or anybody else, frankly, would be if you have -- for instance, the front-runner gets there and there's a ballot and they don't make it. So they did not get to 50 percent plus one. Then you have a second ballot and the second person doesn't make it. They don't get to 50 percent plus one. At that point you're going to start saying well, neither one of these candidates could get 50 percent of the delegates. We now need to start looking at other candidates that can have their names put forward in the nomination.

And so, there's a rules meeting the week before the convention. It's made up of the delegates. So there's a rules committee of the delegates that are getting elected to the convention. They're going to set the rules for the convention and they will determine which candidates are going to have their names placed in the nomination and how are we going to proceed with these votes.

But I think what Kasich is trying to do is have his name out there, amass some delegates. He's actually -- the person who's in third place is still Marco Rubio. But Kasich is trying to get himself into a position where what if neither one of the first two candidates get to 50 percent plus one? I'm here. I'm presenting myself as a candidate that could also be someone who could have his name placed in the nomination and perhaps get 50 percent plus one on the floor of the convention.

CUOMO: Perhaps John Kasich's biggest push right now should be with those rules committee member and make sure they don't extend rule 40(b) that gave that 8-state distinction to whether or not you could be on the ballot at the convention. Mike Shields, it's great to have you on NEW DAY. Welcome to the family. There's tons to talk to you about. We're going to have you on plenty. Thanks for setting us straight on how the delegates work.

SHIELDS: Thank you.

CUOMO: That's a big issue. You're going to be hearing a lot about the numbers this morning because of what happened in Wisconsin.