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Trump On Verge Of Victory After Battleground Wins. Aired 5- 5:30a ET

Aired November 06, 2024 - 05:00   ET

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

[05:00:51]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Four electoral votes from victory.

Welcome to CNN's special live coverage of "Election Night in America". I'm John Berman and it is just seconds after 5:00 a.m. here on the East Coast.

The presidential race is officially undecided, but officially is doing a lot of work in that sense. The winner appears more and more obvious by the minute.

Donald Trump is on the cusp of clinching the Oval Office and becoming the 47th president of the United States. The battlegrounds that we said would decide the race have all broken for, or may soon bend toward, the Republican.

The three big ones already in the Trump column North Carolina Georgia, Pennsylvania. The four still on the board heading into the ninth inning and showing a Trump lead of sizable Trump lead, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin, again ahead, or declared in all seven of the battleground states.

So how did Donald Trump do it?

Like 2016, he ran up the score in the rural areas. But unlike 2016 or 2020, he seems to be rewriting some of the DNA of his political coalition, cutting in to the traditional Democratic advantages with women, perhaps Black voters, definitely Latino voters.

Some key states have not yet been called. Stand by for a key race alert.

All right. As we just said, four states, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, and Wisconsin, still, at this point, CNN has not made projections there, but let's walk through them one by one.

And Arizona, with 11 electoral votes up for grabs, Donald Trump is ahead by some 50,000 votes, still a lot of votes to be counted there. But Donald Trump ahead.

In Nevada, Donald Trump is ahead by 57,000 votes, which is a pretty sizable margin in a fairly small state, 89 percent of the vote in there six electoral votes up for grabs, a fairly comfortable lead at this moment in Nevada.

In Michigan, 15 electoral votes up for grabs. Trump with 120,000-vote lead. Now that actually has just grown over the last few minutes, 94 percent of the vote in. We will check very shortly to see where some of that new vote just came electoral votes up for grabs. Donald Trump ahead by 110,000 votes, 97 percent of the vote.

In one important thing to remind you, every state you're looking at right there, states that Joe Biden won four years ago, states that Donald Trump is now leading in. Any one of these states at this point could put him up on top of the 270 electoral votes he needs to win the White House.

Let's take a look right now at that math. You can see right now Donald Trump already has 266 electoral votes. Vice President Harris at 219. So practically any state still on this map save Alaska now would put him over the top 270. And he is leading in almost all of these states, say, New Hampshire and Maine at this point.

So this night into the morning very much, very much in Donald Trump's favor. Let's go over to the magic wall now and talk to Phil Mattingly, and talk about a few of these states where we just saw a new votes be tabulated, Michigan.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yeah. Let's start in Michigan, because what we've been waiting for, 90 percent, 94 percent reporting Donald Trump with a significant 120,896 vote lead significant, at least if you compare it to his 2016 margin when he first collapsed, the blue wall, we've been waiting for this county right here Wayne County, the largest county in the state, more than 17 percent of the voting population have been hanging around. About 55, 60 percent of the vote had been reported. That's now jumped up to 81 percent. The biggest takeaway from this new batch of vote that has come in is it did not dramatically move this margin.

BERMAN: I think it moved in the other direction. I think it moved in in Trump's favor.

MATTINGLY: Either way, not good news for the Harris team as they've tried to watch this regular cornerstone of Democratic vote gathering, vote kind of turnout in the state of Michigan. This is where you run it up big.

[05:05:01]

Yes, the suburbs are critical, but this is the driver for Democrats in this state. It was for Joe Biden back in 2020.

And the reason I mention that is because look at the margin. Look at where Harris is right now with 81 percent reporting. Now compare it to where Joe Biden was underperforming by about four points, where Joe Biden was in the biggest county in the state, the biggest vote driver in the state, and it doesn't just stop there.

We were checking here earlier. This is 2020, Joe Biden in Oakland county, suburban county that really kind of turned towards Democrats, kind of the new when we talked about realignment and the realignment that was going to balance out Trumps strength in rural counties in the blue wall states like Michigan, Oakland County was what Democrats would point to. You combine that with Wayne County. Well underperforming by two points here as well.

So where Donald Trump has run up margins in the places he was supposed to run up margins doing better than he did in 2020, in a number of counties, Kamala Harris is underperforming.

BERMAN: Just very quickly in Michigan, where is there still vote? We say 94 percent reporting at this point, 117,000 vote lead. I guess it did just shrink a little bit. But where are there still votes?

MATTINGLY: So the size of the bubble tells you how much vote is outstanding. The blue bubbles are in counties that Kamala Harris is currently leading. The red bubbles are in counties that Donald Trump is currently leading. You look at the size of this bubble right here, which is, of course, Wayne County. And you see there must be a huge amount of vote.

And that is I mean, comparatively in the state in terms of what's outstanding, they've got 19 percent in the biggest county in the state. That's a lot of vote there. Is it 150 plus thousand votes that will all go to Kamala Harris? Seems pretty unlikely at this point. But there's a reason this race hasn't been called. It means that were still trying to get a read on where the vote is outstanding.

You take a look, though, and that is that if you pop up to one of Donald Trumps strongholds this is Macomb County and this is actually a really important point here. Macomb County back in 2016, I remember as that night started playing out, getting text messages from Republican operatives on the ground in and around Macomb saying, I don't know what were seeing right now, but this is unlike anything we've ever seen.

And that was him blowing out Republican vote in Macomb. Back in 2016, he won Macomb by more than 11 points, helped drive him to his narrow victory. Here you flip up to 2020. Trump held on to Macomb, but the margin narrowed. The margin narrowed.

What's happening this year?

BERMAN: That's 17 points. That is a huge win.

MATTINGLY: It's enormous. At the same time, Oakland is underperforming. At the same time, Wayne is underperforming Democratic margins. That's your -- I mean, that's your game it hasn't been called yet. Well see what comes in with Wayne. But you're -- you said ninth inning earlier. Were like two outs in the ninth inning right now as we continue to watch this come in.

BERMAN: And maybe two strikes or more at this point 94 percent. And we're going to keep watching Michigan. We're going to keep watching Wisconsin. Phil, will come back to you in a little bit.

In the meantime, let's go over to Harry Enten here and talk about some of the exit polling and what we are learning about shifts in rural urban suburban voters.

HARRY ENTEN, CNN SENIOR DATA REPORTER: Yeah, I was -- I was enjoying your little conversation with Phillip over there. And I want to kind of zone out and sort of look at the national picture, right?

We'll talk about the suburban vote first. Look, Donald Trump is up by two points in the suburbs. This was where Kamala Harris's campaign said we're going to expand Joe Biden's margin. In fact, what happened was it flipped the other way. Biden had won in the suburbs by two points.

But what about rural counties as well? Right. We've been talking about the fact that Donald Trump has been running up the score in the in the rural counties, and what do we see in rural counties?

We see look at this margin. Holy smokes. What is that? That's 63 -36. That's a 27 point margin.

You go back four years ago, Donald Trump won in rural areas but he only won by 15 points. So he's doing ten point more than ten points better in the rural areas. And then, of course, Kamala Harris might have -- even if she couldn't balance it out in the suburban areas, maybe she could do it in the urban areas you see Kamala Harris winning in the urban areas, but she's only winning by 23 points, four years ago, Joe Biden won that group by 22 points. And so she's only doing a point better in the urban areas.

The bottom line is, Mr. Berman, when you look at the rural areas, you see Trump expanding upon his margins. You see in the suburban areas, he flipped it from four years ago. And in the urban areas, Kamala Harris is just doing a point better that math, simply put, doesn't work for Harris. It's a big reason why Donald Trump isn't just doing well in Michigan, but why he's doing well across the nation.

BERMAN: All right. Harry Enten, thank you very much.

Let's speak with our panel. I'm here with Mark Preston and Professor Leah Wright Rigueur.

We're after 5:00 a.m. on the East Coast. This might be a time when people are starting to wake up if they got any sleep at all. And they're looking at this and saying what just happened?

MARK PRESTON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Look, I think we've just seen Donald Trump -- you know, for all the criticism that Donald Trump is going to get and he deserves an incredible amount of criticism, what he has shown us is that we are a divided states of America. We're not a United States of America.

Look, we come from all different parts of the world, and we come here in this big melting pot and we think that we're homogenous, you know, stew. And the fact of it is, we are not. And I think that's what we've seen not only in this election, but we've seen that when Donald Trump came on the scene back in 2016.

BERMAN: I will say counterpoint to that, though, and believe me I'm not saying that were all going to join hands and start singing songs together -- Harry just pointed out, professor, that Donald Trump improved like in cities, in rural areas, in the suburbs also.

[05:10:10]

It's kind of an everywhere improvement from 2020 for him, and certainly for Republicans what they've done in the past.

LEAH WRIGHT RIGUEUR, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: So I think one of the things that we have to pay attention to is what the electorate was telling us over and over, and over again, they said very specifically that they wanted change. We knew from the beginning, I've been saying for several weeks now since Kamala got into the race, that whoever was the change candidate or that voters perceived as the change candidate would win the election.

We also know that they said very specifically that they were feeling the burden of the consequences of the pandemic. So even as you have an administration that has a historic highs when it comes to the economy, we're still seeing on a macro level across the country urban centers, suburban centers, rural areas that people are saying it is not translating I am still feeling the pain of inflation, of high rents, of high mortgages, of colleges. I cannot afford to live.

And the last thing that we heard is that a number of Americans said over and over and over again that they felt like they were being left behind. That is incredibly important, because when voters tell you that they feel left behind, they are also telling you that they want to be heard, that they want you to make a deal with them.

And the thing that Donald Trump, I think does well, I don't necessarily know that he ran a better campaign, but what he does well is he picks up on those grievances and he says, I hear you and your grievances are valid.

BERMAN: Look, I mean, people Democrats, you know, over the last four years kept on pointing the economic numbers and saying, hey, they're actually pretty good. They're pretty good.

The issue is you can't tell people how they feel. People feel how they feel at some point, and you can't tell them they feel otherwise.

Harry Enten has made his way over to sit down with us.

And one of the things that you've already started hearing over the last few hours, and you will undoubtedly hear for the next several days, if not weeks. If not years, is the idea of a political realignment that Donald Trump is changing the shape and the coalitions within the parties, what have you seen that supports that argument?

ENTEN: I mean, look, you can look at Latinos in the exit polls and see that Donald Trump is doing better than any Republican candidate has done since the advent of exit polls back in 1972.

You could look in my home county, where I grew up in the Bronx. We were having some fun over at the magic wall. You know, the Bronx is one of the most diverse counties in the United States, high levels of Hispanics and African Americans. And Donald Trump is doing the best for a Republican candidate since the 1980s.

The bottom line is this, we had seen so many signals in the pre- election polls. John, you and I did all those segments in the morning showing that Donald Trump was showing historic strength among Hispanics and African Americans.

A lot of Democrats doubted those pre-election polls. It turns out as the vote is coming in this evening, those pre-election polls were dead on.

PRESTON: I got to tell you. Like I like to tell a little the anecdotal story and coming over here this evening and got into an Uber and my driver was from Senegal, and he said, what's going on in the presidential election? And I said, well, it looks like Donald Trump is going to win.

And he said, great. And I said, oh, interesting. So why are you so supportive of Donald Trump?

And he said, two things. The economy money, money, money. And then he said abortion, which I thought was interesting. I thought that was interesting at that point.

But the reason why I say that is, you know, my response to him was, you know, do you get angry at his language and some of the things that he has said? And he just laughed it off. He said, no, like, you know, you can't take that for serious.

It's basically, I'm more interested in how many dollars I'm going to be able to take home every week than more you know what Donald Trump might say that could offend me?

ENTEN: You know, very interestingly, ill point out, you know, we talk about, you know, the class divide in this country. We often say college non-college educated, but now the income has inversed itself. So if you look at the exit polls right now, Donald Trump is winning among voters who made less than $100,000. Their family income for the year, while Kamala Harris is winning, those who made $100,000 or more, the bottom line is Donald Trump has flipped politics on its head.

It is a realignment. It's a race realignment. It's an education realignment. It's an income realignment. It's even an age realignment as well, with Donald Trump doing historically well, at least over the last 20 years, among voters under the age of 30.

BERMAN: Professor, you wanted to jump in there?

RIGUEUR: Yes, I do, and I want to -- I just want to be careful here because I do. Well, I do think that there is a realignment, I am not necessarily sure that it is tied to the Republican Party or even specifically anything that Donald Trump has done extraordinarily well.

That in a lot of respects, there are things that we are seeing particularly on the exit polling and polling leading up to the election, where voters said over and over again that, you know, they didn't like the things coming out of his mouth that the majority of voters, including voters who ended up voting for Donald Trump, said that they perceived him to be xenophobic, bigoted racist, all of these things.

But that there is also a realignment happening around how Americans interact with politics and how they think about how politics operates.

[05:15:04]

So they are increasingly used to this kind of vitriol, nasty -- nastiness around politics. But that also extrapolates out to these other things, right? UFC, we saw Dana White on stage with Donald Trump, but we also see that this is a normal part of like Joe Rogan of YouTube, of the streaming era.

We also know that people became far more comfortable with this during the pandemic when they were isolated and in their silos. So with the explosion of things like the manosphere or you know, these kind of interactions I think were beginning to see people who are different kinds of voters and including being transactional voters.

So I would really cautious in Republicans in mandate because it may actually be something else altogether.

BERMAN: And that is, again, a discussion. I know well be having later today, tomorrow in the next few days. What kind of a mandate, if any is this? We will see how it all develops.

In the meantime, they are still we are still counting votes in several important states. Donald Trump poised with almost any movement at this point to officially get over that 270 electoral vote map.

Stay with CNN our special live coverage continues election night now. Election morn in America.

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[05:20:13]

BERMAN: All right. This is CNN's special live coverage, "Election Night in America". Stand by for a key race alert.

And these are the races we're still watching even though Donald Trump clearly ahead in all four right now, any one of these states would put him over 270 electoral votes. What he needs to win, you can see he is winning by 50,000 votes in Arizona, he's winning by 57,000 votes in Nevada, up by 120,000 votes in Michigan and 110,000 votes currently in Wisconsin. As we said, he's a 266 electoral votes right now, any one of those four states would put him over the 270 electoral votes that he would need to officially be the president elect of the United States, in that moment could come at this point at any time.

Now, our Harry Enten has been looking through the exit polls.

And, Harry, you and I have been talking for weeks now. What are the metrics that generally predicts victory or points you in a direction? Is who has the higher favorability among the candidates?

ENTEN: Yeah, its exactly right. You go all the way back since 1956. The more popular candidate has won in every election except for one.

But take a look at the numbers we have here. Who has a higher favorable rating? Harris or Trump? It's Kamala Harris who has the higher favorable rating than Donald Trump. And yet, of course, Donald Trump is on the verge of victory. So how the heck did he do it?

Well, look at that 8 percent that said neither and that 2 percent who said they had a favorable view of both the candidates? I haven't met any of those 2 percent, but apparently they're out there.

But let's take a look, amongst those who said that they had a favorable rating of neither candidate, this looks very much like 2016. John, look at this advantage for Donald Trump. It's a look at this. Among that 23 percent who had a favorable view of both of them again a substantial double digit advantage for Donald Trump.

So the bottom line is this, Mr. Berman. Yes Kamala Harris, better like than Donald Trump. But that 10 percent of the electorate that either like neither of them or like both of them going overwhelmingly for the former president and that, my friend, has made all the difference in the world.

BERMAN: So the double haters and the double lovers.

ENTEN: The double haters and the double lovers, maybe we can get those two groups together. They make quite the pair.

BERMAN: I think we just coined that last phrase right there. All right, Harry, thank you very much.

Let's go back to Kasie and her panel.

KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: Yeah. My eyebrow is stuck to the top of my head, John Berman, you and your double lovers.

All right. Who wants to take this? I mean, 2 percent of Americans like both of these people. First of all, who are they but second of all, that does seem to really underscore the depth of the division in this country and not really bode well necessarily for the next four years -- Bakari.

BAKARI SELLERS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, I don't know, if anybody thinks the country is going to come together because Donald Trump is the president of the United States, they're delusional. That's kind of first and foremost.

I think that the first couple of months of the Trump administration are going to be jarring for many people. I think the executive actions, you'll see the unfettered rein and the new cast of characters we have that are emerging on the political scene who don't have much political experience.

(CROSSTALK) SELLERS: That's what. Who might you be? That's what the I mean you know, you'll have a Kennedy close to government. Which kind of warms the soul on its face until you find out that were talking about RFK Jr.

And then you have Elon Musk who concerns me with his kind of unfettered access to everything. And as a billionaire oligarch, I mean, but this is what America I keep going back to this. And one of the things that I'm not going to do is sit here and reject the notion of this is what the people wanted.

America always gets what she deserves. But in this particular case, you -- you're going to have Donald Trump, you're going to have Elon Musk, and you're going to have RFK, Jr. And if that puts fear or trepidation in your heart, I think that's rightfully placed. If for some reason you love the risk in that joy to still a Kamala Harris phrase, then so be it but we have to be --

HUNT: Well, in terms of what America wanted, I mean, it looks like Trumps going to win the popular vote, which he didn't before.

SELLERS: No.

HUNT: Right?

SELLERS: I literally just said, that's what I just said. That's what America -- like America gets what she deserves. That's what they wanted.

HUNT: Okay.

GEOFF DUNCAN, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think the problem is that elections, the way you have to win an election now, sets a candidate up for failure in the actual job that they run for, right? So you think about all these things that Donald Trump has to do now, right? He had to do and say all these things to win the election.

And now he's got to go execute on an economic plan. He's got to go execute on an immigration plan. He's got to go execute on a foreign policy plan and the delta between what you have to say to get votes on the trail versus what you have to do to be effective. And I think that's -- that's this anomaly.

This is the 2 percent that shows up that are the thin margin that doesn't like either side because it's shirts versus skins. It's tribalism at its finest on the campaign trail. And you never get back to where you actually solve problems.

Nobody is going to solve these problems with campaign rhetoric.

[05:25:03]

SELLERS: But just real quick to piggyback on what Geoff said just briefly. Let's extrapolate what you said to the foreign policy realm, because right now immediately, you have Putin and Ukraine. What does Donald Trump do with that? I think we all know what we believe he's going to do with that.

We also have a war raging in Gaza. What does Donald Trump do with that?

I mean, and so when you're talking about that delta people are, you know, there are people who literally you know, they're on Twitter. They're out in the streets.

They would - I think Shermichael might may know this. They say they were voting for Donald Trump because we don't want any more wars, right, that it's America.

HUNT: I mean, that's one of the things I heard on the train.

SELLERS: That's America first. So the question all the time, the question I think that question that Geoff brought on is something that will be --

KRISTEN SOLTIS ANDERSON, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: On the exit polls only a few voters said that foreign issue. But if they did, Donald Trump won those voters by an enormous margin. I mean, it's very easy to talk about this election as being its the economy, stupid right?

And there is an element of incumbent parties around the world have been following the Democrats or the incumbent party hasn't been great, even though it's been getting better. People haven't been feeling it. But I think there's something even bigger going on here.

When I ask voters in my focus groups and we did this in a survey to what is this election about to you? Very few people said its about the fact that milk is expensive, very few people said its about the fact that cost of living has gone up, some people did, but most people talked about it at a much higher level, just a feeling that stuff's not working. Nothing's working, it doesn't feel like someone like me has a voice anymore.

And I think for Democrats, they're very surprised to discover that a majority of Americans think that Donald Trump is the solution to, rather than the cause of that problem for a lot of Americans.

SHERMICHAEL SINGLETON, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: You know, in 2023 pew research had an analysis that came out, and it talked about how more Americans are more pessimistic about the future and have fond memories of the past. You see that in the exit results. Donald Trumps approval ratings have increased. His standing is certainly stronger than it ever has been.

He's improved his margins across various demographic groups, despite months and months of messaging from Democrats about his character, or about what a potential second term of a Trump administration would look like, voters still said, we hear you but we don't care because we think that this guy is better on all of these other things. We remember that fonder time in the past with him. Things have not been great for a lot of people over the past four years. Many people voted for President Biden and the vice president, thinking that this would be a new direction. And that hasn't been the case, Kasie. HUNT: Alex, one of the things that I keep thinking about is that for

so long and obviously Biden was in this race for the vast majority of it. So for a long time, it was comparing him to Donald Trump but I think that this dynamic continued when Kamala Harris was at the top of the ticket, and that was strength versus weakness and that really, you know when people talked about Biden's health and how old he was, it was really about whether or not he was a strong leader, how much of that was at play here?

ALEX THOMPSON, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: You can see it in Trumps paid advertising. You know, they never tried to play into sort of, you know, she's -- racist trope of an angry Black woman. Instead they actually usually played the fact that she was laughing, right? They tried to make her.

And that was that was really a synonym for being weak, for being flip. And that was a big, serious. Yes. Unserious. Like not ready for it.

And in every single ad, it was weak, dangerously liberal, failed, right? That was like their thing on the air in every single ad. And you know the internal tumult in the Democratic Party is only just beginning. And they just like seeing my phone just in the last hour.

I mean, it's pretty incredible just the amount of sort of second guessing that's already going on. You know, one person already involved in the Harris campaign said, people are just super depressed because this morning the leadership of the campaign was expressing like extraordinary confidence. They felt that they were definitely going to win.

You know, the -- and that was different from 2016 to 2020. Donald Trump was the underdog in both those races. If you talked to the Trump people, they'd be like, we think we can make it, but maybe not you know, it sort of recalled 2012, which I know you covered, where both campaigns felt pretty confident going into election night. And then it clearly went one way.

HUNT: Yeah, it's I will say, you know, I spend my election nights talking to dozens of sources at once, and when I asked them tonight before the polls closed, who was poised to win this election, I mean, overwhelmingly, they all said even those who had previously expressed, uh you know, thoughts that well, okay. Donald Trump is on path to win this said, well, you know, at this point I kind of feel like Harris has this edge.

So, I mean, I think that that point is, is, well-taken because obviously it was incredibly repudiated here.

I mean, Karen where do you come down on this question of whether or not you know, Biden shouldn't have run here? And would that have decided what the outcome differently?

KAREN FINNEY, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Yeah. Look, I think if Biden had decided not to run sooner, let's say in the first place.