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tv   Anderson Cooper 360  CNN  November 4, 2024 1:00am-2:00am PST

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wants to lock you up, kamala harris wants to lift you up. >> we talked a little bit about the vice president pivoting her closing argument to the american people just a week ago she talked about character and the democracy the new cnn poll reveals those only 8%, 6% in terms of importance for the average voter. which suggests that the internal polling from the harris campaign says that this isn't a message that most voters want to hear. listen to are motivated by. strategically smart for her to pivot. will it make a difference? numerically this late in the game i am not sure. >> what voters do want to hear about is kamala harris and maya rudolph's tiktok that they did after snl point the reason why it was so phenomenal is that i found out about it from my 17-year-old daughter, maia luna who said the very make next day said mamma mia and she loved it. one of those people is going to be the next president of the night united states .2 i don't think it is maya rudolph. thank you very much. up next to lorca's life.
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down to the wire. both candidates spend this final sunday before election day blanketing the background about what the campaign is thinking. with more than 70 million early ballots cast, this is what sunday looked like for vice president harris. the former president, tim walz and jd vance. four battleground states, plus new hampshire. the vice president overnighting detroit after speaking there this morning. in east lansing a short time ago. he she did not mention the former president by name. >> two days to go. ready. you ready? in one of the most consequential elections of our life time and we have momentum. it is on our side. can you feel
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it? >> the former president speaking tonight in macon, georgia after making news at a prior stop in southeastern february. he said he wouldn't mind if someone shot news crews. >> i have a piece of glass over here. and i don't have a piece of glass there. i have this piece of glass here. but all we have really over here is the fake news; right? and to get me somebody would have to shoot through the fake news and i don't mind that so much. i don't mind. >> campaign spokesman said he was quote, actually looking out for their welfare far more than his own, which only makes sense if you don't actually listen to what he said. >> and to get me, somebody
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would have to shoot through the fake news, and i don't mind that so much. i don't mind. >> later in north carolina he seemed to think he was in pennsylvania. >> we have great republicans running and you have one of the best of all right here david mccormick. you know that. david, is he around some place? >> he wasn't there. he then corrected himself saying you know we just left him. north carolina, five other battleground states are all within the margin of error. but it is this poll from iowa's des moines register which is getting a lot of attention. it shows vice president harris within the margin of error but three points ahead of the former president in a state he won by more than eight points. we'll talk to the pollster behind it later on in the show. the potential paths for each to 270. at this point, which candidate has the advantage in the electoral college if any?
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>> if you look at the data, neither. essentially you just put up the seven battleground states. essentially a tie in all of them. harris claims some momentum. you can find some nuggets in the polling that suggests maybe anecdotally. a little bit of momentum for harris, maybe. this is presidential race number ten for me. i've never been here on a sunday night with a race so close and complicated. if you just go through the average of the poll shows dead heat. either candidate could win all of these states. you see the seven yellow states here. those are the tossup states. they could have a heavy weight match. if you look at the polling, harris has had a small but consistent lead in michigan and wisconsin. you put those two there for her. if you look at the average of our polls of all of our battleground states, pennsylvania is a tie. trump has a slight lead. either candidate could win this race.
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trump has a lead there and a slight lead out there. that get ios you to 262 for trump. 251 for harris if it they played out as our averages are right now. what does that mean? if it played out that way, the conversation we've been having. the biggest prize, battleground pennsylvania would decide it. under this scenario, harris won that, gets to 257. either way you would need one more. the only thing left on the board is that. the 19 in pennsylvania. so if you look at this race and you come back to n the quote unquote easiest path for the vice president is just win the blue wall. she wins those three states. she's the next president of the united states on this sunday night. can she do that? yes. is it also possible donald trump wins those three states like he did in 2016? that is possible too. there is a little bit of data that suggests slight advantage for her but i would just caution everybody to say we'll count them tuesday into wednesday and beyond, this one is that close. >> how does all this compare
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back to 2016 and 2020? >> that's where it gets interesting. i want to remind you on this night in 2016 we had hillary clinton projected to win 268 electoral votes. she was leading in all of the blue wall states. she lost all three of them. be careful. let's get through the election. there are surprises out there. on this night in 2020, we had a pretty clear sense. in this map to pick up georgia and arizona. in 2020 we had a clear climate. in 2016 we had advantage clinton. although there was some evidence of late trump momentum. in this campaign right now, you come back to where we are tonight, you have a campaign with seven battleground states as close as they can be with perhaps a smidge of evidence of late harris momentum. >> perspective from our commentators. david, you've seen a lot of campaigns. this is exhausting. >> i think i know now.
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>> i feel like we've had this conversation every day for i don't know how long. >> i think i've said -- humility is the order of the day. no one really knows. it's so close. nothing would shock me. it wouldn't shock me if one or the other candidate took five of those battleground states or more. it wouldn't shock me if it was very close advantage to one or the other. but i will say this, when you have a situation like this you look at the campaigns at the end of the campaign. it is a profound difference because kamala harris, people have criticized her for being cautious. caution and being deliberate and being -- executing at the end of a campaign. that's a real advantage. her message is down. it's coordinated with her tv. but here's the other thing. donald trump is as out of sync as she is in sync. you know, he
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-- >> just to see them juxtaposed. >> who looks like the winner up there. he said in an interview in the atlantic tim alberta wrote another amazing piece in the atlantic embedded in the campaign. he reported that someone said to trump complimented him on the fact that his campaign was very disciplined, the most disciplined and he said discipline, what does discipline have to do with winning with? he may find out on tuesday because he's taken the campaign off its message every night. now we're showing footage of him talking about reporters getting shot. you think anybody in his campaign headquarters wants that to be the story on the sunday before the election? so i mean, i think if donald trump is keeping an enemies list at the end of this campaign, he might want to pencil in donald j. trump on the top line. he will be the guy who beat himself. >> do you think this is as close as the polls seem to
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show? >> i'll remain humble as our wise sage on the panel is telling us. it is close but what i do think is different is that he is saying things about the press, he still had the rally from a week ago. that actually feels like it was a month ago at this point. >> which one? madison square garden? >> when we think about how time is moving with this campaign. especially since she's only been running for 100 days. i think there are people who will leave out of their house on tuesday morning and make decisions based on this comment because i -- one thing i won't be humble on. i made a mistake and said i don't think there's that many undecided voters. i think there are people looking for pathways to vote for kamala harris and donald trump is giving them to them. >> i would not be surprised if it came down in either direction. statistically tied. i look at who has the better ground game and who has the stronger closing message. very much that is kamala harris. if you look at the stats on the
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number of doors they're knocking in every one of the battleground states it's massively outpacing where the trump campaign should be. they've outsourced a lot of that infrastructure. elon musk is behind some. a lot of money has been diverted to this election integrity efforts. kamala harris has screw you money. she's gotten an ad taken out on the sphere in las vegas. you've got that. >> it's what many people dream of. >> on top of that, a disciplined closing message. she's not talking about trump. she's not calling him a fascist. she's talking about a future looking turning the page message, juxtaposed to donald trump. in 2016 there was a core message. america first. securing the border. i could not tell you what the message is. it's all over the map. the momentum is on one side. i think it's statistically so close. >> so as ax points out i would rather be talking about other things than the event. >> probably right now.
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>> i would. right. so i mention there was a great ad out rfk shanahan put this ad out on unity. fantastic commercial. they've been running. it's spectacular. the messaging isn't in sync. i was on the ground in 2016. i was driving the bus and to think there was some sort of coordinated messaging, tighter discipline t it just wasn't true. there was more enthusiasm. trump is a leader of a movement. he's not a politician. he's a leader of a movement. >> you're saying there was more enthusiasm in 2016? >> there's more coordination now. in 2016 it was chewing gum, tape, it was, you know, there was no organization. there was no get out the vote effort. there was no anything. we were running against the clinton machine. there was this grinding every day. >> is he the same candidate? >> yeah. i'll remind you, i
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was there. remember the access hollywood tape? donald trump -- i did the first public event with donald trump after that came out. i was going to that event thinking we'll see how many people show up and it was packs. >> he was a dynamic candidate in 2016. he wasn't disciplined but he was dynamic. there was an energy. i was with him in 2020 and he sounds much different now than even in 2020. there's a lack of focus. there's a lack of ability to stick to his script. >> the campaign in 20 i think was dead man walking campaign in 20. this campaign has energy. he's talking about he's in the wrong state. if you've been on the plane, you're in four states in one day. you don't know -- >> you're doing an admirable job, but he is not the same guy. let me just say one other thing. stepping on your time. just as a practitioner who has been through this, one of the
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reasons why the comment that the vice president made on the view got so much after you guys trapped her there, she said when she said sort of said no t i can't think of where i would differ with him. i think she was being polite. it it was the worst thing she could do. it seemed like she was affirming the message of the trump campaign. he is every day going out now and affirming her message about him. >> i agree. >> i do -- even if he is the same person from 2016, 2020 and 2024, people are tired of it. there was a freshness about it in 2016 and i'm not saying his base is not, his base is riled up. when you look at that gender gap, it keeps growing and growing. when you have last sunday when you talk about somebody handling her -- women don't like to be talked about like that. we don't like that, okay? we didn't like that -- people didn't like the access
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hollywood tape but it was something different. eight years later it's old. >> the new york times has a really good editorial where they go back -- they talk about all these folks, energy. they said you may not like to hear this but after interviewing 800 people we think trump may win. this is not, this is the new york times. >> lay into the new york times. >> we'll check in with both campaigns. also talk to pennsylvania's secretary of the commonwealth after the former president accused election officials of there fighting so hard, he said, to steal the election. also a look inside some of the unprecedented efforts to keep election day safe and secure. be right back.
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looking at additional fencing going up in washington where the vice president and second gentleman live. vice president harris spent part of her weekend on saturday night live playing opposite maya rudolph. >> i wish i could talk to someone who's been in my shoes. you know, a black south asian woman running for president. preferably from the
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bay area. [ cheers and applause ] [ laughter ] >> i don't really laugh like that, do i? >> a little bit. now kamala, take my palm-ala. what do we always say? >> keep kamala and carry on-ala. >> traveling with the vice president joins us now from east lansing, michigan. what's the vice president's message in this final stretch tonight? >> on the sunday night live version of that, her last michigan rally. you can see behind me, people are clearing out. there were thousands of people here. many of them have voted but she was sending a message to those who haven't. she said her campaign is not about being against someone, it's about being for something. this is a dramatically different closing message than we've heard from her even in recent days when
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she was drawing a deep contrast with donald trump. that is over for this period. she's trying to end on an optimistic, hopeful message. trying to encourage her supporters to get out the vote. they believe this is a contrast in its own right. they see how former president donald trump is ending his campaign. she's doing so in a different way. the michigan part of her campaign at least involving her is in the books. her campaign obviously with surrogates will be out throughout the day tomorrow. it is all about pennsylvania. she has stops across the commonwealth. anderson, her best strategy, she believes, her advisors tell us is through the blue wall in pennsylvania, michigan, wisconsin and of course that blue dot in omaha. but there is no doubt they are feeling optimistic. but she also said this race is not over. she encouraged everyone here, particularly those who have voted to find others who haven't. anderson. >> thanks very much.
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what's your sense much what the coming hours will look like? what have you heard today? we played some of what he said today. >> the former president's closing message is not exactly what his allies or advisors would hope it would be. i've been told by these allies, by these campaign officials he was going to deliver a message of unity. that's far from what we've seen. as i'm sure you played earlier in the show, he had a number of clips where he seemingly was going off the rails on a variety of different topics, at one point bitterly complaining for at least ten minutes about polls that came out that showed him trailing behind kamala harris. a lot of his speech was profanity-based. he's had a sort of sluggish and hoarse voice at various times. i can tell you from talking to the people close to the former president, they are all exhausted and ready for this election to be over. but in addition to that, a lot of them are exasperated. particularly some of his allies who really believe he could win on tuesday, however, they
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believe that the messaging he's been putting forward, particularly what we saw today is not the way to do it. i had one ally say how hard is it to go out there and just say kamala harris broke it, i'm going to fix it. instead what we have heard him do is go off on a number of tangents. a lot of them with violent and dark rhetoric as he heads into tuesday. his campaign has been feeling hopefully optimistic or at least slightly optimistic. they've been looking at different tea leaves. every person you talk to knows every vote counts and they do believe this rhetoric is not helpful towards his campaign as he heads into tuesday. >> is it just my monitor or can you not see his face? >> he has a hat on and his coat so it's underneath a shadow right now. it's kind of covered up. >> seems wooered. >> if you look closely you can see it up there. he has a shadowy look going on right now. >> sorry, i was looking at
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different monitors thinking maybe it was just the monitor. >> no, you can't really see his face. >> back with the panel. some lighting would be good. was it a good idea for her to spend time on saturday night live? >> i think so. it's a risk. you can go on there and you can bomb and that's not good, but that was really funny little skit. but the best part about it, she seemed relaxed. she seemed human. she got to show a little self-effacing humor which is always winning in a politician. they took a little bit after risk in doing it. they diverted their schedule a little bit. i think it was a great thing to do. >> there was a moment from the former president's rally in north carolina last night he laughed at i guess a vulgar joke someone told about the vice president to the crowd. i just want to play this. >> it's terrible when kamala says she worked at mcdonald's. she never worked there. i did. i did a little bit. this place
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is amazing. just remember, it's other people saying it. it's not me. >> yeah. >> i mean we don't like to be called prostitutes as women. it's as simple as that. if the leader says it, his followers, that's what followers do. they feel that they are given the permission structure which is why for the last four years many of us have said there's a responsibility to stop this type of language and behavior. i want to just point out one thing that was discussed about the reporting on the momentum. the word momentum when we talk about sports you're either behind but it's moving in your favor or you're tied. and that's what i keep hearing from the harris campaign is we're not winning yet, but we can score enough points to get over even if it we just win by one point. that's what she's asking her supporters to do. you also see this in the rallies. i know we talk a lot about comparison. i remember rallies in 2016. i remember
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beyonce and jay z and bruce springsteen. she has cardi b who wasn't even going to vote four months ago coming out. they're reaching different people that are not traditional voters that we talk about donald trump turning out low propensity voters. if they go to the polls, they will vote for kamala harris. >> that momentum thing was great. i feel like i'm sitting next to coach walz. >> my dad would be proud. >> the gender gap could go either way. donald trump may have made a brilliant but high risk strategy. targeting people like jake paul and the joe rogan podcast and the characters. do those translate to large numbers at the polls? i don't know. in doing so they did alienate women. on top it have you fall into the trap of things like the tony
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hinchcliffe guy. kamala harris has a 10 to 15 point advantage with women. if you have more women turning out, that could end up determining the election. >> and so, you know, we watch john king say could it come down to one state, pennsylvania. >> you love that. >> i wish i was there right now. i'm trying to help out a little more. when you look at the numbers in pennsylvania, i talked to ax about this. i talked about this a little bit. you look at the numbers, you look at -- i talk to some other leading democrats in pennsylvania. where do you think she falls in the vote total. obama 2008, obama '12, clinton, biden? that's what this is about, math. she's not going to outperform biden. she's going to fall short there. she's not going to outperform biden in philadelphia. biden got more votes than obama in 2008 because he was viewed as a
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pennsylvanian. where's she going to be winning those big numbers? he's not going to win philadelphia but he's been increasing his vote teal piece by piece. he had a 90,000 and 120,000. if he does 50,000. it's about losing less in philly and the suburbs. he's going to do well in bucks county. if kamala harris doesn't crush is in the philadelphia suburbs, she's going to lose. >> to the discussion earlier, it seems like he's intentionally doing things to pump up the vote in the philadelphia suburbs. >> that's one of the issues. this ad running nonstop. people watching the show, rjc ad running that has like four jewish mothers lamenting they don't like donald trump but they're concerned about their kids and anti-semitism and they think trump is going to make them safer in is some of the same narrative. we don't like trump, we're going to vote for
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him. >> i think you want her to perform like obama 2012 in philadelphia where he actually increased his black voter turnout by 4%. if she can do that, people thought he had maxed out in some places. he had not. he went, he found people who had not engaged in our democracy. if she can do that. that's what i mean with some surrogates. >> romney campaign. i just want to clarify i wasn't saying he was pumping up the vote for himself. i think everything he's doing is pumping up the vote for her in suburban areas around the country. >> it's going to be coming down, again, this is a game of inches and the nikki haley op-ed. we don't like donald trump, but on the economy, on israel, on things we think he's just better. >> i think nikki haley might be one of the only haley voters for trump at this point though. when you have nearly half a million puerto ricans in pennsylvania and then you have that gap and then the doubling down on it after the fact and
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not an effort to clean up. that is the thing that's going to matter. you have icons of the latino pop culture come out like a jennifer lopez. that stuff does matter in the final stretch. this is what i'm realizing talking to people we say they're only whatever percentage undecided. they're making up their minds as we speak. >> they're not just independent white voters. there's a lot of people who are deciding. i think in addition to the campaigns ground game, there are millions of doors being knocked by independent expenditures. seiu knocked 5 million doors. people working in state house races knocking 100,000 doors. those are the things you look to convert. >> in the state of pennsylvania let's not forget we have a big senate race going on. dave mccormick is spending gobs of money. we're campaigning for him everywhere. mccormick may not be trump voters. they're going to be coming to the
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polls. there's this unique dynamic. you don't have a second tier candidate. makes it much easier for people to vote for trump and mccormick together. >> thanks very much. coming up, more on that new poll out of iowa and what it might signal for other more hotly contested states nearby. a long exceptional track record. she joins us next.
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like this and from such a well respected pollster with such a long track record in iowa has some wondering if harris may overperform inned midwest. today while speaking in pennsylvania, the former president attacked the pollster and said the poll was skewed to favor harris. >> i got a poll i'm 10 points up in iowa. one of my enemies just puts out a poll i'm three down. why announce a poll that's highly skewed toward democrats and liberals? why do they do that? when they read it they interviewed far more democrats than republicans. why did they do that? why did they do that? i guess there's a law they have to say that. they would have preferred not having to say that. >> i'm joined now by j. ann selzer whose firm conducted the poll. back with us is david axelrod and john king. how surprised were you at these numbers? what would you make of them? feel free to respond to
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what the former president said. >> oh, thank you. thank you for having me. we first saw the numbers on tuesday morning. monday night was the first night in the field. i walked in to the office and i'd seen overnight the unweighted data and it had harris leading and my assistant said did you see the data and i said i'd like to see weighted data. so the weighting is how we take care of things that would make our poll unrepresentative. we align things with a known population and we extract from a larger group the people who meet our definition of likely voters. that is people who have already voted and people who say they will definitely vote. when former president trump says we interviewed more democrats, well that's what came out of our data. we did nothing to make that happen. i'm a big believer of keeping my fingers off the data so we did the way we did it when he won in our
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final poll twice in two election cycles. very same method. >> he said you're an enemy of his. clearly that's not the case. you have had polls in the past which have shown, you know, that hillary clinton wasn't going to do as well in iowa as people thought. so you have been, you know, delivered news which has upset democrats and upset republicans and people all over the map in the past. >> right. without favor toward one side or the other. i think that the best news i can deliver -- and this is true of my nonelection rough-related clients. my best shot at what's true. because then you know what you're working with and you can make adjustments as you need to. but i can't see that there's any advantage to me or my career in messing with the numbers. there's no
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upsides. >> they know you and respect you and they want to answer you questions. what sticks out to you and feel free to ask. >> quick piece of history. this is the 2020 map. let's bring out iowa. a lot of people are probably saying that can't be possible. look at that big trump win in 2020 and look at this big trump win in 2016. but mr. axelrod at the table as well. it's possible. but iowa voted for obama in 2012 and 2008 as well. the people of iowa follow the news. there are a lot of independents in iowa. as i bring it up right now, despite what the former president just said i've known ann for a long time. she's one of the best in the business and she's right. the data is what the data is. you report the data. you talk about it. here's interesting ann in your poll among female voters in iowa overall a 20 point gap. 56 to 36% number one. now i want to bring up independents. you're always looking late in the campaign. if the democrats
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are royal loyal to their candidate. where are the independents going. these are independent female voters. 57 to 29. my question for you, ann would be why. the six week abortion ban in iowa took place a couple months ago. trump has been dark in his rhetoric insulting the vice president. is it something she's saying? something he's saying? something within chaste changing the above? >> i'm going to go with all of the above because i can't single one thing out. i will note our previous polls this year in february and in june trump led with independents. so what happened between june and september? biden left the ticket, kamala harris joined it, there was a surge of enthusiasm. there was a surge in the proportion of people we talked to who said they would definitely vote. that was our criterion in june. now we have an additional criterion if you've already voted. especially among older people
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it's over 90% incidents of people we talked to in that age group who say they're going to vote and they tend to vote for kamala harris and women in that age group specifically and strikingly. >> ann, let me ask you something. i don't want to geek out here because you sort of touched on it. we hear a lot of pollsters and nate cohn wrote about this this morning talking about nonresponse bias that to try to explain why polls have been so off in the past few cycles in capturing some of this infusion of trump voter that they hadn't spoken with and hadn't been included in their sample. so trey tried to find ways to account for that and cut that number down. you don't believe that is the way to go, explain it. >> well, i can control what i can control. i can weight to
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known population parameters. >> when you say weight, i think a lot of people don't know what that means. what does that mean? >> it will sound very antidemocratic. some people get a little more than one vote and some people get a little bit less than one vote. if we end up in our sample and we take a sample of all adults in the state of iowa and if we've got too many who are older or too many that are women we adjust it to look like the census. so we're weighting within congressional districts because they're not all aged appropriately, some of them have state universities and so on. but we want to adjust our data so it looks like a cross section of the state of iowa when itment cops to age, sex, geography and particular race sometimes. education not so much any more. from the bigger pool we pull out the 808 who met one of our criteria.
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they've voted or they say that they will definitely vote. so from that, you know, cross section, proper cross section of the state if older people are more likely to say they're going to vote, they show up in more plentiful numbers in our likely voter sample. it's just that easy. so what i say is i'm allowing my data to reveal to me this future electorate. and the people who are using, the exit polls or the recalled vote which i don't think of as very reliable at all, i call that polling back ward. so they're adjusting their data to fix the last mistake. i've always allowed my data to show me without fear or favor my best shot at what this future elect to a the is going to look like. >> can i second john's point which i've worked with you, ann, over the years. you've polled races i was involved in
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and you are a person of great integrity and skill. when you say something you listen. >> ann selzer, great to have you on. thank you so much. up next, the former president tries to scare voters in pennsylvania about voter fraud and election security. the commonwealth's top election official joins us next to respond.
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in a speech in pennsylvania the former president spent several minutes stoking fears about voter fraud in pennsylvania. >> look at what's going on in your state. every day -- talking about extending hours. what? whoever heard of this
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stuff. we should have one day voting and paper ballots. they spend all this money on machines and they're going to say we may take an extra 12 days to determine. what do youthy happens during that 12 days? what do you think happens? these elections have to be -- they have to be decided by 9:00, 10:00, 11:00 on tuesday night. bunch of crooked people. these are crooked people. >> well joined now by pennsylvania secretary of the commonwealth who oversees the election process there. i appreciate you being with us. the former president offers no evidence obviously for what he's saying. what do you think so these allegations when he's talking about there should be one day voting, paper ballots. claiming if it takes 12 days to
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count all the votes he's making allegations there's 12 days of cheating and voter fraud essentially. >> well, it must be some sort of misunderstanding because every voter in pennsylvania whether they vote by mail in advance of election day or vote in person on election day is voting using a voter verified paper ballot. there's a paper ballot record of every vote that's cast in pennsylvania to tabulate the results and is used in two audits tone sure those results are accurate. >> yeah, i mean they've been making this -- they've been lying about paper ballots even the dominion voting machines which they've had problems with, those have paper ballots. on wednesday a pennsylvania judge did grant a request ordering a three day extension to bucks county deadline for in person return of mail-in ballots that were allegations of election interference from republicans from trump allies. can you explain what happened
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there? >> yes, in pennsylvania we don't have early voting the same way many other states have early voting. we have mail ballot voting in advance of election day and we have voting in person on election day. there's an opportunity for voters to go to their local board of elections to apply in person for a mail ballot. they file an application, the board of elections processes that application and if approved provides the voter with a mail ballot that they can complete on the spot and return right then and there. and bucks county was one of the many counties that really had a lot of people showing up and there was a court order to extend that, those offices -- those hours to apply to vote by mail for three additional days. it has been interesting and it's a very peculiar phenomenon. i
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ran elections in philadelphia in 2020 that republicans -- and i'm a republican, republicans have gone from suing to close down board of elections offices for voting by mail to seeking to have those office hours extended for days to have people vote by mail. >> how frustrating is this for you? obviously this is just probably the tip of the iceberg of what we expect to see over the next several days or weeks, who knows. you're a republican, you care about the sanctity of the vote. there's no evidence of widespread voter fraud. there hasn't been, these are lies. how frustrating is this for you? what do you say to voters? >> anderson, i was a republican election commissioner in philadelphia elected in 2011 and reelected in 2015 and reelected in 2019. i have investigated hundreds of allegations of voter fraud and that's why i feel like i can speak with some degree of
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authority and knowledge about when it occurs and when it doesn't occur and when it it does occur the extent to which there's evidence of it. allegations of widespread voter fraud in pennsylvania are completely and totally unfounded. voters should have confidence that we will have a free, fair, safe and secure election in 2024. just as we did in 2020. >> i appreciate what you do and appreciate your time. thank you. coming up next, inside election security preparations in one battleground state.
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police forces across the country increasing security efforts for election day and beyond with deep divisions over the election. the long shadow of january 6th attack on the capitol. police in a number of cities are on alert. >> know where those polling locations are. don't go unless you're explicitly requested to respond. >> police departments in battleground states across the nation are gearing up for the 2024 election like never before. >> i've been in this business for 25 years. i can't think of an election where we have had as much planning and preparation for safety, a lot of that has to do with what happened on january 6th. >> if it is reported to us -- >> cnn granted access to a madison, wisconsin police briefing on what officers
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should anticipate. >> what we look for in criminal intelligence is not only day of protecting the ballot, if there's going to be any protest activity. >> it's interesting because the battleground states, the you all been talking. >> me and thousands of police chiefs all over the country are really taking this very, very seriously. so if something happens in another part of the state i want to be aware of it. i want to be able to let folks know this is what happened in georgia or arizona or pennsylvania. >> it's not only problems on the ground that worry police chiefs, they're concerned with social media. >> the disinformation worries me. we will be responsible for correcting that narrative. >> cities say they're ready. in philadelphia courts are canceled on election day to free up hundreds of officers. in georgia panic buttons have been installed at precincts that will alert law
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enforcement. in arizona, plain clothes officers may deploy in parking lots of voting sites. >> our first path is also to deescalate and to see if we can just defuse the situation. >> a lot of focus on november 5th election day. law enforcement is also very concerned about the days after the election. as votes are being potentially tallied. and also the certification process which takes place here at the capitol in december. >> the apprehension is about what happens after that. if the will of the people, you know, isn't done or people don't accept the results. >> this is your ballot. activate it. >> for pat butler who's been an election volunteer for nearly five decades she says she isn't worries. >> for people to see people coming out to vote, it's remarkable. >> do you feel like you need to prepare differently?
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>> we want to prepare for worst case scenario. i do believe that depending on who wins or loses the tenor of the conversation will change. we hope there's a concession speech and it allows people to heal and move on. to put what appears to be a divided country back on the same path. >> now have there been any specific threats? >> so far everything seems to be okay. it's what they're worried about is really interesting is the days and weeks after. if there is this tallying -- this is going to take a while to get a decision here. that's what they're worried about. that's when people sort of are going to stew and anger is going to build. they're concerned about the days and weeks after the election. >> countdown to election day continues here on cnn. it's monday, november 4th right now on this special edition of