♪ this sunday the president and the pandemic. >> i didn't lie. >> bob woodward reveals president trump knew how deadly the coronavirus was. >> what i said is we have to be calm. we can't be panicked. >> at the same time he was saying this. >> now you treat this like the flu. >> one day it's like a miracle, it will disappear. >> mr. trump on the defensive. >> they wanted me to come out and scream, people are dying, we're dying. >> and under attack. >> he lied to the american people. >> even hearing from his own experts. >> when you downplay something

that is really a threat. that's not a good thing. >> my guest this woman republican national chairwoman donna mcda osterholm. >> plus the the man who led the to be's russia investigation until he was taken off the case because of his anti-trump breaking overnight the western wildfires reaching epic proportions, with at least attacks. >> president trump's three dozen dead vulnerabilities are exponentially greater than any thousands of miles of fires and president in modern history. dangerous air conditions in the >> peter strzok suspected then u.s. and beyond. $100,000 reward has been and still believes president is offered for the gunman involved compromised by russia and he in ambushing two police officers joins me this morning. who are fighting for their very also, epic wildfires. lives. as the united states fast >> there is no down time because approaches 200,000 deaths mother nature doesn't give us that. attributed to coronavirus, >> a deadly wave of fires president trump holds a packed burning in california, oregon house indoor rally late last and washington state. night in nevada. >> everything is a total loss. nfl kickoff weekend with >> millions of acres burned, plenty of meaning and messages thousands evacuated and no end from players and coaches alike we've got all ur in sight. we'll have the latest from the scene of this latest climate disaster. joining me for insight and analysis are nbc news capitol

hill correspondent kasie hunt. editor in chief of the atlantic jeffrey goldberg and republican strategist al carden as. welcome to sunday. it's "meet the press." >> from nbc news in washington, the longest-running show in television history, this is "meet the press" with chuck todd. good sunday morning and we're going to get to all of the political news of the week and boy is there a lot of it in just a moment, but we're going to begin with the epic wildfires out west. fires burning in california, oregon and washington state have now consumed some 4.7 million acres this year alone. at least 33 people have been killed throughout the pacific region and with many people missing officials fear the toll will go much higher. whole towns have been wiped out by these fires which have consumed areas the size of some of our smaller states and the tragedy has renewed warnings that unless we take serious steps to control climate change and now scenes like these will

become more and more common, perhaps maybe it is too late that this is the new normal. nbc news' aaron mclachlan. aaron, set the scene and is there any hope that the weather changes will help firefighters combat these flames? >> hi, chuck. the president is expected to visit california tomorrow. he will meet with fire officials and scenes of utter devastation await him, as you can see. acre after acre of scorched landscape, thousands of homes destroyed, lives lost or forever changed. we were speaking with a single mother of five from oregon. staying with her boys in a motel. she said at least they have each other, at least they made it out alive because so many haven't. fire officials say conditions have improved over the past few

days creating a window of opportunity for firefighters, but winds are expected tonight and the situation could change very quickly, chuck. >> erin, what about the air quality? we've seen reports that even sports events and the nfl has a couple of games in california. we know the air quality is bad. is it so bad that people are told to stay indoors? >> reporter: you know, chuck, the nfl had been looking at possibly canceling the san francisco 49er game scheduled for today here in california, but that game is going ahead. they are monitoring the situation very carefully considering the california governor gavin newsom was here earlier this week. he said this air is the e gi equivalent to smoking 20 packs of cigarettes. >> unbelievable.

erin mclaughlan on the ground in california, stay safe yourself and be careful breathing the air yourself. if you want to help the victims of the western fires and if you don't have a pen and pencil handy, go to meet the press.com and we will tweet that out. president trump went on offense against joe biden he found himself playing defense. there was the continuing fallout in which he was reported to have called american who died in war losers and suckers. it was in bob woodward's book "rage" and the audiotapes that went with him. we know mr. trump knew the coronavirus was far worse than the flu and chose to mislead the public to avoid panic so the president claims. not surprisingly, mr. biden attacked mr. trump for the life and death of the american people

and conservatives and not many elected ones defend the president saying you don't yell fire in a full theater. it's possible the virus is baked into the polls, but every day spent explaining his silence on the coronavirus is another lost opportunity, another day off the calendar when mr. trump could be going after biden instead of defending himself. >> this whack job that wrote the book, he said well trump knew a little bit. they wanted me to come out and scream, people are dying, we're dying! we have to be calm. >> president trump doing damage control. defending his choice to mislead the public and knowingly play down the coronavirus for months at the same time acknowledging its seriousness to bob woodward in private. >> you just breathe the air and that's how it's passed. it is also more deadly than even

your strenuous flus. this is deadly stuff. >> we're finding very little problem. you treat this like the flu. >> to woodward. >> it's turning out not just all people bob, just today and yesterday some startling facts came out and it's not just older. >> yeah. exactly. >> young people. >> publicly. >> young people are almost immune to this disease. the younger the better. >> the president admitted to woodward he intentionally minimized the danger. >> the vast majority of americans, the risk is very, very low. >> i wanted to always play it down. i still like playing it down. >> yes, sir. >> because i don't want to create a panic. >> why did you lie to the american people and why should we trust what you

madam chairwoman, welcome back to "meet the press." >> thanks for having me. great to be with you, chuck. >> i want to start with the bob woodward tapes and let me play one excerpt of what the president said and ask you about it on the other side. here it is. >> i wanted to always play it down. i still like playing it down. >> yes, sir. >> because i don't want to create a panic. >> if the president had a history of playing down things, that might be believable, but considering what he did with immigration and the caravans and violence in the city, this isn't a president who tries to incite panic or trying to fire folks up. this doesn't seem to match that. it looks to a lot of people as if the president didn't want to panic people because he's worried the virus hurts him

politically. why shouldn't folks view this comment through that lens? >> i disagree that the president took political calculations into a global pandemic like we've never seen before that has decimated, not just our country, but countries across the world. the president was calm and steady and methodical. he canceled travel from china on january 31st. he created the coronavirus task force on february 9th. he created a plan to get the private sector engaged to ramp up ppe and ramp up testing. these are things you want from the president. think about if he would have said, this is awful, there would have been a run on the banks and the grocery stores. as it was it was hard to get what we needed from the grocery stores and it was at a time of unrest and uncertainty and history will look back on him

well as to how he handled this pandemic. >> the president also fought a masked mandate and sort of was discouraging for people to wear masks. he rushed and encouraged governors to open up states too quickly causing the second rise of this. see everything you just said there, that was a few actions, but they've not been consistent. i mean, if we'd had the president endorsing wearing masks earlier there's plenty of scientific studies that that would have saved lives. so the president -- it's hard to accept what you just said considering how hard he fought mask wearing. >> i think 2020 vision in hindsight is always perfect, right? but as a new pandemic hit our stores and as a new virus came we were all being told by dr. fauci, by the scientists we should wear masks and i went and donated masks to a local hospitals, n95 masks i had. and i remember being on

airplanes thinking if we should or shouldn't and it was a new virus. to say that he should have known then what we know now isn't really fair. as the sciences come forward, the president has said we should wear masks on. >> no, he hasn't. >> wait a minute. >> madam chair, he didn't say that. >> no. look, he's never encouraged mask wearing. he waited months to encourage mask wearing and he defied mask wearing and finally he did a tweet about wearing a mask. he refused to wear it in public and now you have a political divide in this country. do you not see the direct correlation between the president not encouraging mask wearing and the fact that fewer republicans wear masks than independents or democrats? >> i don't think this is politically dividing at all. i wear a mask, my kids wears a

masks. this isn't a republican or democrat thing. >> you're talking about the president. >> this is about individual freedom. >> and the president wears the masks, too. the president has worn this and he has said this. the reality is it's sad that it's become political. this is a president who seis willing to work with every governor. states are navigating this differently. the governors have autonomy over their states, but the president has provided the resources and the leadership necessary to lead us through a very difficult time in a virus that none of us could have predictioned or prepared f that the virus has shown to be so strong and virulent in our country and across the world. >> right, but how do you account that it's the united states of america that accounts for 25% of the world's deaths? >> well, we do have more testing and i do think we have -- we had hot spots in new york where

nursing homes were getting patients put back in who were sick. tlrp m there were missteps there by the governor as well as michigan and i would like to see transparency. we have passed 100 million tests. we just bought 150 million rapid tests from abbott labs that will change the way we can handle this pandemic and help us get back to work and get our economy going, so the president with what he did with the private sector very quickly made sure that nobody went without a ventilator who needed one and got the ppe at the level that he needed to be and made sure the icu beds weren't filled up and that hospitals were able to deal with the capacity. i feel like we are in the right space and moving forward with this vaccine and of course, we all need to remember, this is a virus like we've never seen before and the president has led us through uncertain times with the democrat party who is politicizing a time of crisis when usually people come together. >> i think there is a lot of people that take issue with most

of what you said there considering how the president continues to try to downplay the severity of the virus. we are still have a case load that is much higher than the western world. again, you can say all these things the results speak for themselves. we have -- you compare us to the rest of the western world and we have failed. is there any way to look at this and compare to the western world and say that we've done better than other countries? >> i will just tell you right now if democrats were in charge, if joe biden has his way go look at his statements in january when he said the president was being xenophobic. >> he's not the president. >> no, no. he was running for data and had the same data and same information and while democrats were trying to impeach this president this president was taking decisive action so i think it's disgusting to take a crisis in the country and lay it at the feet of the president and where did the outrage of china as we hear more and more stories

and research that they knew about it earlier and they weren't transparent and the w.h.o. who had one job, chuck, one job to warn the world about a pandemic and they failed and this is a president saying we're going to hold you accountable and we're not going to give you hundreds of millions of dollars and this is a president who took decisive action early on that was derided by democrats. so he saved lives with the actions he has taken and the fact that we've ramped up -- and the fact that we're close to a vaccine is because of this president. >> you just said that the w.h.o. didn't warn, didn't do enough to warn the world of a pandemic. the president of the united states has admitted that he's purposely downplaying the severity of this virus to not panic the public. >> no, chuck, he's not. he's trying not to panic -- >> he said that. ? he said he wasn't going to create a panic. what would it mean if the president came out and said the sky is falling and everybody should be panicked? he presented calm and a steady hand and a plan and that is what

a president should do. we just commemorated 9/11 this week and i watched andy card walk over to george bush and say the second tower is hit and george bush didn't stand up and say america's been attacked by terrorists and everyone panic. they created a plan and presented calm and certainty in a difficult time. what's happened this time is democrats are politicizing because we have an election instead saying let's work with you, mr. president and make sure we're fighting a virus like we've never seen together. >> you keep accusing the democrats of mrit sizing, was there a report in politico that political operatives at hhs are manipulating data and manipulating some of the cdc recommendations before they go public in order to, quote, fit the president's positions. that is the definition of politicizing the pandemic, is it not? >> we haven't -- i haven't seen that. i don't know anything about that, but i do know nancy pelosi

has called it the trump virus. how is that not politization? how is that not a disgusting thing to say it is being killed by the trump virus. this is affecting every american, republican and democrat. i have lost friends from this virus. the president has lost friends from this virus. this is personal. to do that is not in the best interest of the country. we are already divided. usually in crisis we come together. let's show the best of america. the president selling to is willing to work with everyone. >> why aren't they working with this president? >> rona mcdaniel, chair of the rnc, i appreciate you taking a few minutes and spending some time and sharing your perspective with us. >> thanks for having me. >> joining me now is dr. michael osterholm, the director of infectious disease research and policy at the university of minnesota. dr. osterholm, welcome back to

"meet the press". >> good morning, chuck. >> let me start with the explanation you heard there, you heard from the president and the woodward tapes. this feels like, this looks like revisionist history to a lot of us. the president saying he intentionally played this down. was that a mistake? >> let me say at the outset, i'll give you a balls and strikes analysis of what happened over the past eight months. number one is the fact that we none public health as well as in general response with crisis, telling the truth never causes panic. if you just tell people the truth they will respond and they will trust you to continue to tell you the truth and the great leaders of the world have done that. number two is the fact that we do have to separate out the early days of what happened versus what happened after those early days. on january 20th, i issued a statement saying this will cause a pandemic that was widely circulated. i got a lot of negative feedback from democrats and republicans from my own colleagues saying

that we were scaring the hell out of people. don't do that, okay? so i think those early days and many people were confused, but by march we then begin to know what was happening and if you look at the track record from that time on when it was clear and compelling that we had a major pandemic, that's where i think we have to hold the record to match up with what we were trying to do to prevent this pandemic. i will say one last point is science has to rule the day here. science is what got us to the moon and allowed us to build medieval cathedral and eradicated smallpox and polio. i hope we stick with the science and not the rhetoric that we're hearing right now. >> speaking of science, walk us through what we're staringa for the next three to six months. dr. fauci used a phrase we're going to have to hunker down. i guess for you, i'd like for you to give us a definition of what hunker down means and it

certainly looks like a new spike is coming, but what do you see? >> yes. looking forward where we're at right now, i -- tony and i are completely on the same page. we were now levelled off at 40,000 cases a day which if you think about that, when the house was on fire back in march and we will, with the colleges and universities opening with the spillover that's occurring and with people experiencing even more pandemic fatigue and wanting to be an indoor airspace with other people as we get into the fall, we'll see these numbers grow substantially. the vaccine does become available, it won't be in any meaningful way until the beginning of next year and it will take us months to vaccinate the population of just this country, so i agree. we really have another 12 to 14 months of a really hard road ahead of us and that's what i'm concerned about today. i don't go back and replay february and march. i play right now, what is our

national plan? we don't have one. we have 50 state plans that in many cases are so different, so divided and based on good science so yeah, we have a long road ahead. >> dr. michael osterholm, it's always the straight talk from you, the bluntness and the reality and it's why you're on this program as often as we invite you. sir, thank you for your expertise. >> thank you. thanks, chuck. when we come back, the man who led the fbi's russia investigation and remains convinced that the president of a golf course is designed to be difficult. to challenge your thinking and test your execution. but great minds are driven to seek out the complex. they see what others don't, from an angle others won't take. they learn that embracing those challenges is what sets them apart. i am justin rose, and we are morgan stanley.

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welcome back. this past week we heard in microsoft that hackers from iran, china and especially russia have escalated their attacks on our election system and there was president trump's rudy giuliani who found himself playing down his contacts with the ukrainian lawmaker who was said to be a russian agent and

ended up sanctioning. one person very familiar with shenanigans is peter strzok. he was removed over personal anti-trump text he sent to a colleague with om h a book "compromised, counterintelligence and the threat of donald j. trump." mr. strzok, welcome to "meet the press" and let me just s.t.a.r. start with your theory of the case of why you believe president trump is compromised. >> am go, chuck. it's great to be here. i think it is clear. i believe at the time in 2016 and i continue to believe that donald trump is compromised by the russians and when i say that i mean that they hold leverage over him that makes him incapable of placing the national interest and national security over him. i recruited spies during that time and i defended against those people who were being

recruited in our government. one of the largest ways that foreign govern aments gained leverage is through financial entanglements and if you look at the financial enterprise, particularly with russia, with russian monoes and those related to organized crime and other elements that those interactions have placed him in a position where russians have leverage over him and are able to influence his actions. >> is your job -- was your job then to figure out if the russians were using that leverage or simply to identify the leff rverage they could hav? >> both. when we opened the cases commonly known as cross fire hurricane in the summer and fall of 2016 those were not looking at the president. they were not looking at his campaign. they were looking at a discreet set of individuals based on an allegation we had received that russia had offered to coordinate the release of information to help the trump campaign. when we later then after director comey was fired opened

the case on to the president himself that was a very broad investigation. on the one hand it incorporated a question of whether or not the president had committed obstruction and it also had a counterintelligence element to that and that's very broad in nature. it's looking first and foremost what the russians are trying to achieve and the way they're doing it, but that is very broad and it certainly would include looking at the president's financial entangle ams. >> there's been multiple explanations, one is he wants to get along with him better. a second is simply hey, people are con flighting just because he has some views of the world that are similar to putin people conflate that and the other argument is hey, this administration has been tough or russia. they'll cite things like sending lethal defensive aid to ukraine, taking action and so on. did any of that give you pause during this opening of this investigation? >> sure, of course, it did. look, the president is in charge

of united states foreign policy. he sets the foreign policy agenda of the united states. he campaigned on wanting to bring russia and the u.s. closer together. that's not the issue. the things that are what he lef. when he says that he has no financial relationship and dealings with russia at the same moment his attorney is dealing, and trying to make a deal for a trump tower in moscow, that lie is known to vladimir putin. trump obviously knows he didn't tell the truth, so things like that, and it's not the overt actions toward warning about a relationship with russia and it's the lies that time and time again he tells that russia can use over leverage with him and he considered deeply with argument after argument and sou but conclusively the concerns we had about russia are merited and it was the appropriate thing to do to look into them. >> i'm curious, if you were still in your job today and

you -- i'm going to issue two sets of facts. four years ago the lawyers were working with the russians in secret on trump tower moscow. four years ago, rudy giuliani has been working with folks in ukraine trying to drum up information to hurt joe biden and he works with a known russian operative that ends up being sanctioned by the u.s. government, what do those two facts tell me about the president? >> it tells me he is surrounded by people wo haho have pervasiv with the russians. his foreign adviser, and his former national security adviser who didn't tell the truth to me and who pled guilty twice to not telling the truth about his contact with the russians and now obviously with rudy giuliani

dealing with somebody that the department of treasury recently said this last week had been an agent of the government of russia and their intelligence services for over ten years and look at that pervasive pattern of contact. it is not without exaggeration that there is no president in modern history who has the same broad and deep connections to any foreign intel service and let alone a hostile government like russia. >> when you rdz the mueller report did you conclude no collusion? >> absolutely not. i concluded the opposite. >> my sense was when you look at it, mueller was focusing on violations of the law and the standard to be able to establish in a courtroom this something occurred is very, very different from the intelligence person and judge whether or not there was a concern. when i read the intel committee report almost 1,000 pages laying out all of these areas of

intelligen intelligence connections between trump and his campaign in russia, that's extremely concerning from the counter intelligence concern because a relationship is a completely different from proving something in a court of law. >> given what happened to you in this episode, do you look at what happened and say to yourself i put myself in a compromising position, i shouldn't have done that and that's on me or do you believe you were unfairly singled out? >> chuck, i understand that, you know, people would ask that question. i certainly regret sending the text messages that were absolutely weaponized and used to bludgeon the work of the fbi and the special counsel. i'll always regret that, but at the same time the way that those were weaponized was unprecedented and it's part of a pattern of activity where this administration has gone to lengths that no other administration has ever done that anybody who dare speak the truth or speak out whether it is in the impeachment hearings with

regard to ukraine, the whistle-blower if somebody dare speak the truth of this administration, this administration has shown no boundaries in going after people in ways that frankly, is shocking, are shocking and are inappropriate. >> and are you still confident the fbi is immune to this, that you're not used as this -- that basically, okay, we sense the message, back off? >> i think the women and men they know in the fbi, they are brave and they're fearless and they're dedicated to doing the job and getting to the bottom of whatever lies in front of them. i can't help, though, that under an attorney general that is sitting there day after day saying there was no basis to launch these investigations in 2016 which is clearly demonstrably ludicrous. there's no way that doesn't have a chilling effect on not only the fbi, but all of the branches and departments of the -- the executive branch of the government. i think the fbi, the people they

know and knew are holding. i am deeply concerned what another four years of president trump will do to destroy the traditional independence and objectivity of to admit i have a ton more questions. thankfully i have a podcast and i will invite you to get lengthier. it was an easy read, as well. >> good. >> kudos to your writing abilities. congratulations on your book and thank you for coming on the air sharing your perspective. >> thanks so much for having me. >> you've got it. >> when

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welcome back. the panel is joining us. jeffrey goldberg, editor in chief who is out with his new book "in crisis," and kasie hunt and al cardenas. jeffrey goldberg, i don't want to demoralize you about the atlantic's book that's being launched, but i want to put up the trump book club of this last sort of ten days that we've seen a deluge of what i would call new information about the president or perhaps information that people feel the need that needed to get out before the election, and i actually, jeffrey, think that your reporting from last week about what the president had said about those that served from the military fits into this. the woodward book and the woodward tapes that's into this, is that what we're watching going right now? >> yeah. i think you're seeing more and

more information come out about trump and his views. what's so interesting about this moment is -- there are two things. one is that much of the material that's coming out is being provided by donald trump himself. that's pretty unusual 60 days or so out from an election and his various confessions to bob woodward. at this moment there is an awful lot of shadow boxing going on by donald trump. he keeps raising old issue, old meaning a week old, a year old, four years old with so few days between now and the election you'd think he would stop arguing with past slights or past stories that he didn't like, but you know, last night he was -- he was arguing with hillary clinton again at a rally and so it's fascinating to watch how he can't let go of particular issues and he keeps those issues alive in the news cycle. >> jeffrey, you were telling me, he has tweeted about the

atlantic story that you wrote over 60 times since it went public. what happens every time he does to the atlantic's website? >> you know, this is an interesting thing. we get more readers to the story every time he talks about it, and so it's -- if i were advising him and i'm not, but if i were advising him i would say stop drawing more attention to these claims especially when you're in a very tough race and american people at a particularly dire moment, pandemic, virus want solutions and want some ideas about where we're going. >> al cardenas, you've been in campaigns for years and i've heard from every campaign operative the only thing you can't buy is time and this looks like another lost ten days for donald j. trump. >> it is and every day counts in these races although i'll tell you, sadly or tragically, i think lying has become a character defect from the

president that's been accepted by many of his supporters. i don't know if 20,000 lies or many more lies being exposed in these books are as serious as they are making a major meaningful impact in the outcome of a race. i think people on his side and the other side have bought into the fact that there's huge character defect from the president of the united states and for some reason, people are accepting it as a norm and that's a challenge being faced in the election. stacy hunt, this is your beat, capitol hill and you deal with this as al just described and we said some conservative his been trying to back up the president on the no panic and we know not many of them were elected. they were as quiet as they've been and they're pretty quiet in the trump era. >> they are, chuck, and just when you think that you've gotten to the bottom, the worst possible thing you could throw to a member of congress or republican who has to defend the

president under something like this, something else happens and you know, i actually asked mitch mcconnell, the republican leader about this this week and he didn't want to answer the question. he said that's a question for the white house. i don't have anything to add. he had said at the time that he hadn't seen the woodward book and we had read to him out loud the key portion of it that we are now talking about here today. i do think that there's a sense that this particular episode in woodward's book and also jeffrey's reporting and it was an aggressive one-two punch, but the sense is that this might actually make a difference, and i know we've said that over and over again and that it never erce starting with what happened with john mccain back in 2015, but there are more people saying to me, privately, this is really, really difficult to grapple with and one of the pieces of evidence they point to is the fact that the president is out there trying to explain himself. a lot of times with these

controversies, he either keeps going and keeps making the same claims or he stops mentioning it eventually. this, he clearly is feeling pressure to try and say no, i was trying to do the right thing and i think that's really telling. >> well, it's interesting. we've had a ton of battle ground state polls and al we noted all of the different battleground states and just the trump number we put up here because there is a pattern and al, i think i'll get it, 41, 42, 43, 44, 44 and only in three states is donald trump at or above the numbers, and he trails in all 43 states. how much of a red flag is that? >> well, that's a huge red flag. frankly, with respect to florida, if the republicans don't win florida the president doesn't win florida, he doesn't win. there isn't a single model out

there that the president getting to 270 electoral votes without winning the state of florida and the fact that he's under in florida is quite shocking because historically if you look at florida, every incumbent except one who won florida the first election wins it the second time and you know, the voter registration numbers have narrowed to the republicans' favor in florida and so forth. you take florida and you take the other two states where he's still under and the other ones where he's at 42% and the number of undecided voters are so low, that's a real red flag. >> hey, jeffrey goldberg, i wanted you -- your book is one of the things you say in the introduction to this book on the best of the atlantic over the last four years is how maybe you and frankly, i think you speak for all of the media, we all underestimated how to cover this president and how to cover his mischaracterizations and lies. tell us a little bit more.

>> i think we were not trained for such a novel kind of approach to truth and to populism, and even to these authoritarian impulses that you see. you know, we've spoken about this in the past. he -- you know, somebody who doesn't -- i mean, as al just mentioned there's 20,000 or more li lies documented by "the washington post" when a president is called out for lying they usually trim their sails a little bit or they apologize and explain. what you have here is a new phenomenon for all of us and we're not sure what to do. it's taken us a long time to call a lie a lie. >> as i've said, the only way to understand this is to realize he doesn't have shame about it and when we lose our ability to shame a politician we lose a lot of our power. that's for sure. >> i'm going to pause the conversation there.

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ask your doctor about the more than seven years ago. ♪ ♪ welcome back. "data download" time. national polls do not tell us as much about who can win the electoral college as battlegrounds do. let's break down the marist numbers in pennsylvania and florida. first, pennsylvania. mr. trump won the state narrowly in 2016 by a percentage point and in our most recent poll biden is up by nine points so where is that edge coming from? biden is doing worse with non-white voters than the 2016 exit poll and biden has made big gains with white college graduates. clinton and mr. trump were tied with those voters and now it's

biden by 25. many of those white college grads live in the philadelphia suburbs. hillary clinton won those four counties by 14 points in 2016. now biden has doubled that edge. he's up in those counties by 28 points in our poll. then there's the most conservative central pennsylvania region of the state. president trump carried that area by a whopping 28 points in 2016. today, against biden, mr. trump's lead in central pennsylvania is down to just two in our poll. now let's look at the state of florida. the latest nbc news/marist poll, the race is currently tied. biden is struggling with florida's hispanic voters than hillary four years ago. he's doing well with particularly white college grads and first, the miami gold coast region. hillary clinton won those counties with the large hispanic population by 27 points in 2016, but biden's lead there is now

down to 15 which has allowed mr. trump to move slightly ahead among hispanics statewide in our poll. then the area in tampa where there are lots of college graduates where mr. trump won them in 2016. today, biden has flipped remember, it is results than i about the voter pools in the states and national pools can reflec (stasha vo) i really don't remember not being able to braid. [laughs.] (stasha vo) i used to braid my brother's hair, my sister's hair, neighbor's hair. (stasha vo) when everything shut down, i thought, "you know what? people have been asking for online classes for the longest." it was amazing. business kept growing and growing and growing. (stasha vo) i feel blessed that i can still connect with others. support others. and i am still going.

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welcome back. al cardenas, florida, florida, florida. that's where i'll focuses right now. michael bloomberg, the big headline is this morning out of "the washington post," michael bloomberg is pledging $100 million just to democratic pacs and campaigns that are assisting joe biden there. we had the numbers from our poll that showed donald trump

performing very well with hispanics and biden only holding his own because he's overperforming in the north and with white voters. al, what is the south florida latino problem for joe biden and can it be fixed? >> they have the danger of committing political malpractice in florida, if you listen to peter strzok, dan coates and others and retired military leaders. to say that democrats are suspicious and soft on socialism compared to donald trump's outright relationships with putin, north korea, et cetera. i mean the cuban-american community should be on fire with respect to donald trump's record with communist leaders, but none of that is being played out as it should. you know, the woodward book, that's going to resonate big in our military voters in florida, 22 bases, hundreds of thousands

of retirees and he's got to fix the problem with the cuban american community and if it's a low turnout in florida, republicans have the edge and if it's a high turnout, democrats historically have the edge and right now it's a turnout and all about fixing the problems with hispanic voters in south florida. lastly, in six days the ballots go out to the overseas voters from florida and the 24th, the absentee ballots go out to all of the floridians and pretty soon after that they start early voting. so if bloomberg's going to spend that money he better do it soon. >> he's going to do it pretty quick. >> hey, kasie hunt, you have michael bloomberg weighing in with money and we also have this from bernie sanders. here is the headline, bernie sanders expresses concerns about biden campaign. let me read a quote who was the campaign manager for bernie sanders saying this, he's been in direct contact with the biden team and has urged them to put

emphasis on how they will raise wages and lower the cost of prescription drugs and expand healthcare coverage. hey, joe biden, speak more on economic issues. >> it does sound that way, chuck, and that, of course, was at the root of bernie sanders' campaign for president and his focus on being -- and we've talked about this in the past, not management, being kind of on the side of the union worker. it's interesting to me that they're choosing now to put this criticism out there. they had developed a pretty good rapport in term was figuring out how to come together as biden became the clear nominee. so i do have a question about what more might be going on there, but the reality is that bernie sanders is kind of the last person that you want in the context of this florida conversation. that is kind of why that message the trump campaign message has gotten a lot of traction.

>> there's no doubt. you know, jeffrey goldberg, we are in the stage of the campaign where you do have a lot of decisions. are they campaigning enough? they're not talking about the economy enough. look, the polls have held steady, but -- i understand the fear, but is it -- is it well-placed fear or not? >> it's probably not entirely well-placed fear in the sense that the polls have been -- remarkably, unusually steady and that trump keeps self-owning in a kind of way. it's not surprising that bernie sanders is arguing for what bernie sanders is arguing for. the same with other people. i think the biden campaign's advantage right now or one of their advantages are that they are focused on winning rather than litigating old arguments,

and the trump -- and one of the things they're obviously trying to focus on doing is throwing trump off his game constantly and trump is easily thrown off his game. so you know, the anxiety is totally natural. the stakes are extremely high, but on the other hand this campaign is not going badly for him so far, but of course, we don't know what the next 50, 60 days hold. >> no, we don't. as stewart stephens says about donald trump, he is the dog that chases every car. great panel. that's all i have for today. thank you for watching. we are going to leave you, though, with images on how we mark marked september 11th in this country 19 years later and weal be back next sunday, because if it's sunday it's "meet the press." ♪ ♪

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