changed its mind on trade. i would like to know that as a person who covers this. right now it's very unclear. we're in through the looking glass. rachel maddow starts right now. >> thanks, my friend. >> you bet. >> thanks at home for joining us. the most famous presidential debates of all are the ones that were on television. nixon/kennedy, 1960. and everybody knows that story, right? there's a million different explanations. there's a million different nuances and back stories and bits of history in terms of why those nixon/kennedy debates went the way they did in 1960. but one of the thins i always thought was interesting about those debates is they didn't set a precedent, at least not immediately. after those 1960 presidential debates, the first once on tv, they did not do another presidential debate on tv for another 16 years. they did them in 1960. they didn't do televised

presidential debates again until 1976. and by 1976, it had been so long and the last ones had been such a huge deal back in 1960 that by the time they decided to do them again in 1976, everybody was very excited. but if you watch the coverage from the 1976 debate leading up to the first 1976 debate, weirdly, knowing what we know now about how those went, it's kind of ominous and eerie. it's weird. like they had an inkling of what was about to go wrong. >> the thin man with the blue jacket and searching eyeses is bill carruthers, mr. ford's cosmetic advance man. he's searching for risks, anything among the lights, the cameras, the podiums, the equipment, the atmosphere that might distract mr. ford. he's at ford's podium now rehearsing the sound system. >> quiet, please. >> yesterday the stand-in candidates could not hear the

stand-in panelists or each other and sometimes the loudspeakers howled. >> this is a bad mike. >> the candidates will walk in with their miniature mikes already on. >> candidates will be miked with a -- premiked by the white house with lapel mikes and cables coming right down the jablgts and down the pant leg. >> by the time their pants legs are plugged in tonight, the sound system aught to work right. >> that was before the debate, "nightly news" 1976. turns out the sound system did not work right in that first debate. it was incredible. this again the first presidential debate on tv in 16 years. it was the first one in color. it was 1976, jimmy carter, gerald ford having a presidential debate on tv for the first time since nixon/kennedy. and something went really, really wrong. it happened right after this sort of weird little moment where president ford inexplicably called the nsa

nasa, which was weird. then right after he did that and the moderator turned the it over to jimmy carter, he started in on his answer about intelligence agencies but then, watch what happened. >> and i'm glad that we have a good director in george bush. we have good executive orders and the cia and the dia and nasa or the nsa are now doing a good job under proper supervision. >> governor carter? >> well, one of the very serious things that's happened in our government in recent years and has continued up until now is a breakdown in the trust among our people in the -- >> the pool of broadcasters from philadelphia have temporarily lost the audio. it is not a conspiracy against governor carter or governor ford and they'll fix it as soon as possible.

>> the pool audio from philadelphia has been lost momentarily. we hope to have it back any minute. we don't know what's happened to it. again, the pool audio from the walnut street theater in philadelphia has been lost. we hope for the moment. we are, needless to say, trying to restore it. we do not know what has happened to it. both candidates have lost a more or less equal number of their words. i can't hear them either. so i don't know what it is we're not hearing. i think they have stopped because they have been told the sound has been lost. i think they've stopped talking. >> the amazing thing about this moment in the 1976 debate, after the country had waited 16 years since the last televised debate, is that when they had this sound

failure, it really wasn't a momentary thing. and they did keep talking for a while but we couldn't really see their mouths that clearly so we don't really know. the sound drop in that debate lasted for 27 minutes. and for those 27 minutes gerald ford and jimmy carter just stood there, ultimately they just stood there not talking, not really doing anything, not fidgeting, just holding still for 20 solid minutes while worked on it. was this the end of the debate? are they going to finish? carter was in the middle of an answer. what happened here? >> ed newman is saying something no doubt interesting, but i haven't the faintest idea what t is because i can't hear it. >> it occurred 27 minutes ago and the fault has been dealt with and we want to thank president ford and governor

carter for being so patient and understanding while this delay went on. governor carter was making his response and had very nearly finished it. he will conclude that response now, after which president ford and governor carter will make their closing statements. governor? >> there has been too much government secrecy and not enough respect for the personal privacy of american citizens. >> it is now time for the closing statements. >> go ahead and finish your thought, governor. it was 27 minutes ago that you started this thought and we don't really know where it cut out so we don't know how far you got in your thoughts before people couldn't hear you and you've been standing here for 27 minutes. but go ahead and wrap up. complete your thought. really weird, right? really strange. but sometimes at debates, at presidential debates weird things happen.

that was the first debate in 1976. jimmy carter won the election. four years later the incumbent facing off against ronald reagan. that was the most watched debate of all time until the 1980 record was broken last night. that 1980 debate also had something crazy happen. nobody knew about it in the time, but somehow the reagan camp got hold of jimmy carter's debate prep materials. again, nobody knew it at the time, but that's nuts, right? they only had one debate. reagan clearly won that debate and won that election. it wasn't until three years into his time in office that his campaign somehow getting the sitting president's prep materials ahead of the last debate became a real scandal. it actually became a criminal investigation. >> now the fbi is involved. the justice department announced there will be a full criminal investigation of just how the

staff of president reagan acquired jimmy carter's campaign briefing papers during the '80 campaign. at the same time president reagan says he has nothing to apologize for. >> the president was in california today talking about education, but questions about the briefing material shadowed him. what did he think of the criminal investigation. >> what i need to say. i asked this and they're doing it. >> will you apologize to jimmy carter? >> i haven't done anything to apologize for. >> will you apologize to jimmy cart carter? i haven't said anything to him, he says there. but there was a congressional investigation but nobody was ever prosecuted for the ronald reagan campaign apparently stealing jimmy carter's notes ahead of that debate, the one debate they hold in the 1980 campaign. something similar happened in 2000. george w. bush and al gore were debating. somebody working for bush's media adviser was caught and

convicted after she packed up a videotape of one of george bush's debate practice sessions and mailed the videotape to the al gore campaign. when the gore campaign received it, they did the right thing and handed it right over to the fbi. a woman did a year in prison for that one. weird stuff happens at debate. in the last election cycle in 2012 you might remember that first debate between mitt romney and president obama marked by an abnormally terrible performance by president obama. he's usually a good debater. but that first debate against romney in 2012, you all remember, right, he just didn't seem into it. his heart didn't seem like he was in it. mitt romney was superaggressive and obama was laid back. being held on the neat of barack

and michelle obama's wedding anniversary. so yeah, maybe his mind was elsewhere. weird stuff happens in debates. weird circumstances intrude on debates sometimes. but even when an appreciation for that rich weird history that we've got as a country, last night's record breaking debate between hillary clinton and donald trump i think will go down in history not for the weirdness of any circumstances surrounding the debate or any technical failures or criminal scandals. last night's debate will go down in the history of weird american debates just for the sheer amount of weirdness that happened on stage. >> she's saying russia, russia, russia. maybe it was. it could be russia, it could also be china, it could also be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds. okay? we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. it is a huge problem. i have a son, he's 10 years old.

he has computers. he's so good with these computers, it's unbelievable. the security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. >> i have the feeling by tend of this evening i'm going to be blamed by everything that's ever happened. >> why not? >> why not, yeah. why not? >> somebody who has been very vicious to me, rosie o'donnell. i said very tough things to her. and i think everybody agrees she deserves it and we shouldn't feel sorry for her. >> i say nothing. i then spoke to sean hannity, which everybody refuses to call sean hannity. i had numerous conversations with sean hannity at fox, but nobody calls sean hannity. if somebody would call up sean hannity -- >> negotiate down the national debt of the united states. >> you're wrong. >> no, i'm not. >> murders are up. >> new york has done an excellent job. putin, but putin is playing a

really tough long game here. >> wrong. >> the invasion of iraq. >> wrong. >> that has absolutely been proved over and over again. >> wrong. >> he actually advocated for the actions we took in libya. i hope it would be a good deal. >> not. >> but i concluded it wasn't. then he called her miss housekeeping because she was latina. donald, she has a name. >> where did you find this? >> alicia machado and she has become a u.s. citizen. you can bet -- >> oh, really? >> -- she's going to vote this november. >> all debates are a little bit weird. but just take it at face value. the number of interruptions, verbal outbursts, uncontrolled noises. not! shouted out individual words. wrong! by one of the two people on stage. something we've not seen before in a presidential debate. my single favorite tick moment,

yelling wrong, wrong, wrong, like he was a button on a sound board at an a.m. radio show. that moment where he just yelled not like there was suddenly a heckler at the back of the classroom. not. it was hard to narrow it down. but the best one was where he said, okay. when hillary clinton started talking about african-american and latino communities. >> we need law and order. and we need law and order in the inner cities because the people who are most affected by what's happening are african-american and hispanic people. it's very unfair to them what our politicians are allowing to happen. >> secretary clinton? >> well, i've heard donald say this at his rallies, and it's really unfortunate that he paints such a dire negative picture of black communities in our country. >> oh. >> the vibrancy of the black

church. >> black communities in our country. ugh! what do you have to say to people of collar -- i say nothing. i say nothing. black communities in this country. ugh! mr. trump also at one point bragged that he gets tons of credit and he's very proud of the fact that he allows muslims and black people to golf at one of clubs. he said he gets incredible credit for that. he's proud of that. this is a strange, strange, strange debate. everybody thought that the challenge for hillary clinton and for the moderator, lester holt and for the media covering it was going to be raw fact checking, the number of untrue things that donald trump has said on the campaign trail that he's not used to getting called on live and in realtime. he did say a lot of untrue things. george bush signed nafta, donald trump did say that climate chiang was a hoax perpetrated by

the chinese. he did not drop his allegation that president obama is secretly foreign after the president published his long form birth certificate. he kept up with it for five years. the murder rate in new york city hasn't gone up. tt dt was in favor of the iraq war before it started. hillary clinton has not been fighting isis all her life. hillary clinton was not the originator or the proponent of the idea that president obama's birth certificate was fake. trump did suggest that he would try to negotiate down the national debt of the united states. the fact checking certainly could be done. most people can do it off the top of their heads. but the fact checking didn't end up being the hard part of how to process this or understand what just happened and what was unusual about last night. the hard part of this ended up being, you know, the random aside about his 10-year-old son

and how good he is with computers in the cyber war and nobody calling sean hannity and nobody has sympathy for rosie o'donnell anl this mysterious 400 pound person in a bed, in a bed? who should be blamed instead of poor russia who did nothing wrong. what is hard to put in context because there is no historical precedent for it. is the randomness, the bizarreness of the pronouncements from the stage. the insecure ping-ponging around every sentence like every comma offers a new alternative and a new option for a different direction to go in because this sentence was heading nowhere from the top. that said, in some ways there is a case to be made that we did see it coming. the american people as a whole appear to have had some inkling that something unusual was going to happen in this debate. a lot of people watched. today is the day to have some

sympathy for the falcons. the falcons beat them and nobody noticed. last night's monday night football game had roughly 8 million viewers which was the lowest for a monday night football game in over a decade. pity the falcon, i guess, because americans knew enough to tune in to see that spectacle. 8 million people were watching football, 84 million people were watching last night's debate. that's not only a record, that's not counting the number of people streaming online. that's just television viewers. in a lopsided performance of the two contenders of the debate did lead to some strange follow-up news today. donald trump initially praised the moderator, lester holt, of nbc news as doing a quote, great job and being very fair. today the trump campaign started denouncing lester holt as if he somehow skewed the debate against trump. they also today repeatedly raised the prospect that trump's

microphone was somehow tampered with. he believes he couldn't be heard last night. i'm not sure anybody who actually watched that debate would believe that was a problem. initially last night immediately following the debate clinton campaign chair john podesta raised the prospect i think jokingly, that donald trump's performance was so bad he'd skip the next two. everybody thought that was either joking or maybe partisan trash talk on the part of the clinton campaign chair. but this morning, rudy giuliani was saying is on the record that if it were him, he would in fact refuse to participate in the next two presidential debates because this one was so unfair. he said he wasn't necessarily advising trump to skip the next two debates but he said if he were the candidate he sure would. trump saying he does plan to participate in the next two debates. that was his word exactly, he said, sure. his campaign has now raised the

prospect that that won't happen. will there be two more debates? we'll see. if the two additional debates do happen, if this was not the one presidential debate of the 2016 presidential election that we saw last night, there is an important question, that is hard to answer, in terms of what's about to happen next. and the question is this -- does stuff this weird start to seem normal once we get to see it more than once? all right. we have never before seen a presidential candidate act as strangely or speak as strangely or behave as strangely as donald trump did last night in this at times surreal truly weird debate. he interrupted hillary clinton more than 50 times. he told dozens of very easily disprovable lies. i'm not counting like complicated policy lies where it really is just a disagreement about how things are likely to work out if somebody implements their plau, blah, blah policy. really simple lies. over and over saying thins like

i never said that when he's on record on tape saying just that. it was such a weird performance with the grunting and the sighing and the sniffing and the yelling out, not and wrong like a heckler at your own event. it was weird. and the question is will it still seem weird if and when he does it again and then again if we have two more debates where this candidate continues to behave that way? does that become part of our normal expectation for how candidates are expected to behave at presidential debates? because his strangeness is a mixed bag for us as a country and as a participatory democracy. there's a reason 84 million people knew to tune in and watch this thing last night. more people than watched any other presidential debate in u.s. history. it's a mixed bag, though because it does get people to pay attention. but the most important stuff that we said last night was not the hilariously strange stuff that made you point at the tv

and spit out your beer and lose a drinking game. the most important stuff last night was stuff that was deeply, seriously, scarily wrong. it was not him sniffling through the debate and advertising his trump holt in washington, not the random aside about rosie o'donnell or the computer skills of his son. it was bigger than that and it was worst than that. and that's next. [ cough ] shh. i have a cold with this annoying runny nose. better take something. dayquil liquid gels doesn't treat a runny nose. it doesn't? alka-seltzer plus cold and cough liquid gels fight your worst cold symptoms including your runny nose. oh, what a relief it is!

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in a normal year, in normal politics, this would be what's usually described as a teachable moment. >> mr. trump, dr. carson just referenced a single-most important job of the president. the command, the control and the care of our nuclear forces and he mentioned the triad.

it's an executive order. what's your priority among our nucle nuclear triad. >> we need someone who we can trust, who is totally responsible who really knows what he or she is doing. that's so powerful and so important. >> the three legs of the triad, do you have a priority? >> i think to me nuclear is just the power, the defb station is very important to me. >> the power, the devastation is very important to me. republican candidate donald trump during the republican primary, he had no idea what the nuclear triad is. it's admittedly a kind of annoying washington phrase. but it's not that obscure phrase. even if you never participated in a conversation about it or read a briefing on it or even just read about the nuclear triad. you can almost sound it out, right? use your words. tri means three. so you can kind of almost figure it out even if you didn't know.

what's something about nuclear weapons where there's like three options, like a trio of option. you can almost make it up. the nuclear triad is the three ways we can launch nuclear weapons. we can launch them from the air, the airplanes, from the sea, from submarines and we can launch them from the land, from land-based nuclear missiles. that's the nuclear triad. land, sea and air. not everybody knows that off the top of their head, but surely like just as surely everybody running for president should know that because that's the potentially humanity-ending part of your presidential responsibilities. presumably if you want to be president, you take that a priority if you can't spell it, sound it out, count it off on your fingers. but that scary bad answer having no idea what the nuclear triad was, that was in december.

he had nine months to bone up for the next time someone asked him about nuclear weapons. last night he got his chance. >> on nuclear weapons, president obama reportedly considered changing the nation's longstanding policy on first use. do you support the current policy? mr. trump, you have two minutes on that. >> the first use policy. our country, the united states, is the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war. nobody has used nuclear weapons in war since then. if you know one nuclear thing other than the fact that the united states has a bunch of nuclear weapons, you should probably also know that we have used them. and even though president obama considered changing u.s. policy this year to say that, actually, we never again will use nuclear weapons first. we'll only use them if somebody else uses them against us, he did consider that change, but u.s. nuclear policy famously, forever, since we did actually

drop the bomb on japan twice, we do have a first use policy. obviously. obviously. we would use nuclear weapons first before somebody used them on us. obviously, look at what we did with it. that's the question. do we keep that first use policy or do we change it as president obama has been considering? do we change it and promise to never again launch a first nuclear strike in do we keep it or do we change it? >> on nuclear weapons president obama reportedly considered changing the nation's longstanding policy on first use. do you support the current policy? mr. trump, you have two minutes on that. >> i have to say that, you know, for what secretary clinton was saying about nuclear with russia, she's very cavalier in the way she talks about various countries, but russia's been expanding. they have a much newer capability than we do. we have not been updating from the new standpoint. i looked the other night i was seeing b-52s, they're old enough

that your father could be flying them. we're not keeping up with other countries. i'd like everybody to end it, just get rid of it, but i would certainly not do first strike. i think that once the nuclear alternative happens, it's over. at the same time, we have to be prepared. i can't take anything off the table. >> i would certainly not do first strike. i can't take anything off the table. saying you certainly would not do first strike is by definition taking something off the table. you get that, right? donald trump last night was pledging simultaneously to keep first use of nuclear weapons as u.s. policy, keep it on the table and he also simultaneously pledged to get rid of first use of nuclear weapons as u.s. policy. he promised both that he would keep it and he would get rid of it. does he know which is the policy right now?

does he know that it is a policy that is currently in place and has been in place for decades and that he is pledging to keep it while simultaneously proposing to reverse it which make nos sense and is a big deal if a would be, could be u.s. president doesn't make sense on nuclear weapons. after complete whiffing the nuclear triad thing in december either donald trump did no research on this topic because he wasn't worried about his ignorance on the subject or worse, maybe he did try to learn about it but he learned it wrong. he tried and still that's the way it came out. lots of presidential debates have weird unprecedented moment. but we've never seen anybody get this close to controlling america's arsenal with no interest or aptitude for learning the most basic things about it. constipated?

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and hand-slice avocado. there's nothing "or something" about it. good evening. here's what did it. the capacitor. a tiny electronic component costing less than a dollar. a capacitor broke out last night in an amplifier they were using to feed the pool sound to all the networks plunging ford and jimmy carter into silence for 27 minutes and irritating maybe 90 million people. that's why. >> weird stuff happens at presidential debates all the time including in 1976 when they lost sound for 27 minutes. and we now know it was that less than a dollar capacitor and that blew out in an amplifier. weird stuff happens all the time. joining us now is michael beschloss to talk about what we should see as truly weird, truly unprecedented about last night's

debate. great to see you again. thank you for being here. >> thank you, rachel. i think you've been doing great on that. >> judging this from a historian's perspective, obviously it was a bit of a spectacle last night and there was, i think, an unusual contrast in demeanor between the two candidates and just sort of on-set behavior. when you look at the clash last night, is there anything about it that seems unprecedented to you? >> the biggest one is the one that you mention which is donald trump asking to be the first president of the united states elected since 1789 and george washington with no military experience, no political experience at the national level, no government experience, and so you would think that that being true, the first thing he would make an enormous effort to do is to educate himself about what you rightly call the most important power a president has, which is to launch nuclear weapons against another country. that's not only the most

important power the president has, it's almost the only one he can do immediately without a check by congress or the supreme court. so when you have them make a statement such as the one he made last night about no first use, contradicting himself, you sort of wonder does he not take this seriously? was he briefed, he didn't remember it. why was he so unprepared. >> has there been either in modern times or historically speaking more broadly, i guess, have there have been other very serious national security gaffes or screw-ups or professed misunderstandings at debates? >> the biggest one was also you were talking about '76 carter verse ours ford, this that was the first debate with the audio problem. and that's where jrld ford said the united states -- there will never be a soviet domination of eastern europe under a ford administration. he had his head handed to him within about 48 hours. his polls began to drop.

he had been going up. that was one of the closest elections in history. and i think it's very fair to say that if ford had not made that one statement, if you deleted that from history, ford would have been elected that fall rather than jimmy carter. but that was a gaffe, an offense of much smaller magnitude than the one we're talking about last night. >> michael beschloss, thank you for giving us your perspective here. >> we'll stay tuned. won't we. >> hopefully it won't be for more nuclear news tonight. guess what guys, i switched to sprint. sprint? i'm hearing good things about the network. all the networks are great now. we're talking within a 1% difference in reliability of each other. and, sprint saves you 50% on most current national carrier rates. save money on your phone bill, invest it in your small business. wouldn't you love more customers? i would definitely love some new customers. sprint will help you add customers and cut your costs. switch your business to sprint and save 50% on most current verizon, at&t and t-mobile rates.

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one of the most powerful surrogates the hillary clinton campaign has right now is first lady michelle obama. well received appearances at the democratic convention and earlier this month in virginia. she's now going to be out tomorrow headlining two hillary clintonents both of which will be in pennsylvania. we've also just learned that first lady michelle obama is about to take her case for hillary clinton nationwide. it's a tv spot by the first lady that this tv show got ahold of exclusively tonight. we'll show you that new ad in just a minute. we got it before anybody else did. that's ahead. ♪

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if you grew up as a catholic kid who didn't go to catholic school, you may remember spending one afternoon a week after school going to a kind of a weekday version of sunday school to get you ready for your

confirmation which happens in the catholic church in this country when you're around 14 or something like that. as a not particularly good catholic kid, i once got thrown out of my wednesday afternoon ccd class for wearing a shirt to that class that said on the front of it "jesus is coming. look busy." which i thought was hilarious at the time. sister jacinta did not agree. but in poly-sci terms jesus is coming, look busy, that's an actual thing. it's called the hawthorne effect. that's next.

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♪ using 60,000 points from my chase ink card i bought all the framework... wire... and plants needed to give my shop... a face... no one will forget. see what the power of points can do for your business. learn more at chase.com/ink the hawthorne effect. that's a term that was coined in the 1950s by a researcher named henry a.lansburger. a series of experiments that were carried at a factory

outside hawthorne. they carried out studies to increase or decrease the amount of light that workers were getting to see what effect that would have on their performance. they changed their working hours, break times. what they found was that every time a change was made to the workers' conditions, productive improved. and it doesn't matter what the change was. more light, less light, early breaks, late breaks, didn't matter. short-term productive went up when they made the change. what they concluded, to their surprise, was that workers' productive wasn't increasing because of their varying physical changes to their surroundings. productive was increasing because workers knew they were being watched by these people who were studying them. they essentially became more productive for the simple reason that they knew they were being monitored. that's the hawthorne effect. people improve their behavior just for the fact they know they're being observed. so jesus is coming, look busy. that's a version of the

hawthorne effect. after a debate like last night, everybody tries to figure out who won the debate. this need nor immediate data. even in that vacuum you get a ton of quick online snap polls that are unscientific. the samples aren't weighted. anybody been vote. you can vote as many times as you want. those polls are garbage. they're fun, but they are garbage. one poll taken last night, cnn poll. that showed hillary clinton winning the debate, 62% among 27% among registered voters who watched the debate. real poll, real data, statistically significant results. the hawthorne effect. all the people in the cnn survey, the one scientific poll taken after the debate, all were called ahead of time and asked to watch the debate and then called after the debate to find out who they thought won.

there's a reason cnn did this. they weren't wrong to do it. there's a rule that says that pollsters aren't allowed to call late at night. they had to set it up this way to get people's permission to call them after the debate. they knew they had to watch the debate and they'd get a late call and asked questions about it. knowing you're going to be observed in terms of your opinion, that can change your behavior. they may have watched the debate in a different way. but for now, that cnn poll is the best piece, maybe the only piece of hard data on last night's debate. we did also see at least two focus groups of undecided voters also suggesting that hillary clinton won the debate. the mainstream press by and large seems to think that hillary clinton showed a superior command of the issues, that she dominated the debate. until more real polls come out, not online garbage, vote as many times as you want, we won't really know for sure what if any

effect the debate will have on real voters' opinions. you may have watched the debate and thought like a lot of people it wasn't even close, it was a complete wipeout. right now there is only one poll to support that these. so we don't really know. because in some quarters hillary clinton winning the debate was not the consensus at all. in that world, donald trump at worst fought it to a draw and at best donald trump delivered a stunning knockout performance. and a trip to that alternate reality is next.

you know how you've heard all day how hillary clinton cleaned donald trump's clock in that in that debate? you were not watching fox news, were you? >> this was an enormous, historic victory for trump. >> mr. trump hardly disqualified himself. >> i think in the end, it was something like a draw. but i do believe that the draw goes to the challenger. >> she had to prove she was likable. and he had to prove that he wasn't a lunatic. and in the end, he proved that he was pretty solid. >> i think trump won because he didn't meltdown. >> she's so robotic, so plastic. >> it was all about the temperament, did he have the temperament to be commander in chief. that's what a lot of people were wondering, you kind of go, yeah, kind of looked like it. >> fox news channel on last

night's deebl, seriously. i swear i did not make that up. that was not something from a different time. that's what they said about last night. joining us now is steve kornacki, thanks for being here. >> happy it to be here. >> i wanted to show the alternate reality of fox news. it highlights the fact that we don't really have data on who won the debate, or do we? >> there's a couple snap polls. cnn's the one that's been doing it the longest. they take a poll in the hour right after the debate. they call people up and ask who people won. they came back with a poll and said 62% clinton, 27% trump. they even said you're doing this "on the fly." they probably had too many democrats in this. take it with a little grain of salt. there's also a u-gov poll with a27% margin for hillary clinton.

they're the close eppst things have to scientific data. the snap judgment, hillary clinton was the winner last night. it also comes to the other catch there is four years ago the snap judgment after the first debate was overwhelming that mitt romney had won over barack obama, and that didn't result in the end of the election. >> it foreshadows if it's going to change people's voting behavior. when would something like this, if it was a clear win in either direction, i would think it would more likely be a clear win in hillary clinton's direction, when would that start showing up in national polls and swing state polls? >> the next week. we have so many polls coming out. you can really start tracking the movement more precisely. >> to 2004. kerry came into the debate with george w. bush, september 30, 2004, john kerry was in danger of being blown out in that

election. the average was about a7-point bush lead. john kerry was widely seen as the clear winner of the first debate. he gained nearby five points. the march jen shrunk -- the mar. you saw in had that first week and even four years ago you saw it with romney and obama. obama came in about four or five points ahead of mitt romney. came out of it about a point and a half, to points ahead. didn't went the election for romney. that's the wildcard. people on the trump side say even if donald trump didn't win the first debate, neither did mitt romney or barack obama or george bush. george w. bush in '04, you came in ahead.

when you're obama in '12, you are ahead. you can take a loss. >> so we'll watch to see what the effect is on the polls and the durability. but he's in a worst place than she is. stay with us. on the road again ♪ [ front assist sounds ] [ music stops ] [ girl laughs ] ♪ on the road again ♪ like a band of gypsies we go down the highway ♪ [ beetle horn honks ] no matter which passat you choose, you get more standard features, for less than you expected. hurry in and lease the 2017 passat s for just $199 a month.

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click or call. with another new flavor you never saw coming... grilled, glazed korean bbq shrimp. and try as much as you want of flavors like new parmesan peppercorn shrimp. just come in before it ends. are you registered to vote? do you know for sure? do you definitely remember registering? i'm going to put in four slides. if your state begins with a-f, it's listed here. that's the date by which you have to be registered if you want to vote in this year's presidential election. as you can see, time is getting short. these are states g through l. you see registration deadlines. generally this is the date in which a registration has to be postmarked.

here's the third. these are states that begin with m and n. alphab alphabetically. there is your registration deadline. it's coming up. and here's o through w, ohio through wyoming. these are the registration deadlines if you want to be registered in time to vote for president this year. today is national voter registration day, which is conveniently timed to remind people, right now ahead of all these deadlines, that it's time to get yourself registered. in a lot of states you can register online. in some states you can go through the process of registering and voting in person on the same day, but you know what? it's better to be safe than sorry and get registered now than hope you remember later. now the trump campaign doesn't appear to be doing something special for voter registration.

the clinton campaign went wild. they're pegging all their candidate and some surrogate appearances to national registration day. this is the first time this has been seen anywhere. for the first time, michelle obama has cut an ad for hillary clinton, pegged to national voter registration day. you'll see what pops up at the end. >> our children watch everything we do. and the person we elect as president has the power to shape their lives for years to come. hillary has spent her entire career bringing folks together on behalf of our kids, because she believes every child deserves a chance to succeed. hillary will be a president our kids can look up to, a president who believes in our kids and will fight for them every day. that's why i believe in her. i hope you'll join me. >> i'm hillary clinton and i approve this message. >> we got that exclusively tonight. it's the first time it's aired anywhere. but it's due to air in national

battle ground states. i will vote.com is where you can go to get voter registered in every state. alternatively, you can watch the rachel maddow show during one of our patented clip and save moments. if you are not registered by the deadline in your state, none of us are going to listen to you whine about it. don't suffer in silence. check your registration. that does it for us tonight. >> now it's time for the last word with lawrence o'donnell. >> a quick quiz before you go. who, who among these o'donnells am i not related to? okay? >> okay. >> nbc news kelly o'donnal, nora o'donnal. hunky actor chris o'donnell or america's sweetheart, rosie o'donnell. who among