taylor's top five songs online have over 7 billion views. when she pushes something, people hear it. at the end of this new video, it has taylor swift urging people to sign a petition backing the equality act. and after 11 hours today, i can tell you this new video is already the number one trending video online on youtube with over 10 million views in these first 11 hours, and that legislation drive has over 241,000 signatures. wow. that's it for us. "hardball" starts now. the trump campaign calls leaked polls ancient news. let's play hart ball. "hardball." good evening, i'm steve kornacki on the eve of his official 2020 campaign launch, a leak of internal poll numbers has rattled president trump and his re-election campaign. a leak the campaign is calling ancient news.

now, the data which is from march shows the president trailing former vice president joe biden in 11 key battleground states. some of this data was first reported on late last week but nbc news has now obtained even more of the trump campaign's internal numbers. numbers that show trump trailing biden in states like north carolina, iowa, georgia and ohio, these all states that trump won in 2016. and the president is only leading biden by two points in texas, a state that hasn't gone to a democrat since jimmy carter back in 1976. now, the trump campaign is cutting ties with some of its own pollsters after the leak of this data, according to a person close to the campaign. nbc news reporting "the internal polling paints a picture of an incumbent president with serious ground to gain across the country as his re-election campaign kicks into higher gear." here's what trump said about those poll numbers during an interview with abc news. >> even your own polls show you're behind right now, don't

they? >> no, my polls show that i'm winning everywhere. i don't know -- >> we've all seen these reports 15 out of 17 states, you spent $2 million on a poll and you're behind in 15 out of 17 states. >> nobody showed you those polls, those polls don't exist, george. i just had a meeting with somebody who is a pollster and i'm winning everywhere. >> there is new polling as well, though, from fox news that appears to back up the leaked trump campaign numbers. these are the new head-to-head numbers for the president nationally against some of his most likely democratic opponents. they are consistent, these findings, with what other pollsters are finding from other outlets. a ten-point advantage over the president for joe biden. nine points for bernie sanders. elizabeth warren, kamala harris, pete buttigieg, all of them also ahead of the president, whose support tops out in any of these matchups at 41%. for more i'm joined by robert costa, national political reporter for "the washington

post." eugene robinson, associate editor and pulitzer prize winning columnist for "the washington post" and rick tyler, former national spokesman for the 2010 cruz campaign. all three are msnbc political analysts. robert, let me start with you. and let me, in fact, put this up on the screen from our own paper's reporting on this. you say "trump world is trying to wave a red flag in front of the president to warn him that his 2020 re-election battle is going to be a tougher fight than he's willing to acknowledge. that is why people close to the campaign said that unflattering internal poll numbers leaked about matchups with joe biden and other democratic contenders in key states." so take us inside the conversations the president is having with folks about 2020 when the topic of his political standing comes up, the topic of these polls, his own campaign polls comes up. is he in denial about the basic numbers that are being presented to him? >> there has been a red flag that has been waived by certain people in the president's orbit ever since the 2018 elections when they saw suburban women and

other key voting blocks depart from president trump, depart from the republican party. there is a divide right now in the president's circle between those who think the key is to stoke the president's political base and those who say they should be moving a little bit more towards the center, but they're seeing some of these numbers in different important states really start to tick off, and they're not doing what they need to do, they feel, in some of these states they won in 2016. >> we see the president's public reaction. i think what i'm curious, though, is privately. is there a sense that this news is resonating with him, that he's acknowledging it privately or is his attitude saying, hey, the polls looked bad for me in 2016, i won, so i'll ignore them now? >> he has always had disbelief when it comes to many polls, both internal polls and public polls, so some advisers in trump's orbit are reluctant to bring to him negative information because they know he'll have a negative reaction to it. so they sometimes try to gently guide him towards acknowledging the steep climb he faces ahead of 2020 while also remarking to him privately by saying many of

your core voters are still there. it's a dance for many people who surround president trump because they know how sensitive he is to the polling issue generally and to numbers that seem to be negative, and he always wants to project confidence. that's so much part of his brand, both as a businessman and as a politician. >> yeah, gene, it's interesting to me just thinking back to 2016, i can think of how many moments in that campaign there were public polls out there, there were reports of, you know, rnc and rnc analysis of all the battleground states i remember seeing a couple of days before the election in 2016. always seemed to pointing that donald trump is behind. donald trump is poised to lose this state. donald trump is poised to lose the election. ultimately, you got a president here who is the president of the united states. psychologically from the standpoint of somebody on his campaign trying to get his attention, trying to change his behavior, his approach, by looking at polls, can you reach somebody who won an election when he heard very similar messages three years ago? >> well, apparently not yet. apparently you can't reach donald trump yet with that --

with the message that you cannot win an election with 41%. you know, this -- look, he should have started if he wanted to win re-election, he should have started soon after his election in 2016 or after he took officer in 2017. he should have tried to widen his appeal, his coalition, to bring more people in. he's done the exact opposite. he's had a total, complete consistent base strategy firing up the base. not a single gesture to try to reach out and embrace more potential voters. and in the end he's staring at numbers like these. now, it's early, of course, the national polls this early. what do they mean? well, the one message i take away is that 41%. you can't win with that. >> so, rick, also that 41%, low 40s, i think not coincidentally at all, that's where donald trump's approval rating clocks in and that's where it has clocked in basically his entire presidency.

on a bad day maybe he'll fall somewhere into the high 30s. on a good day maybe he'll reach into the mid-40s, but i think one way of looking at these numbers, whether it's the internal polls or all the public polls you have out there, these are numbers consistent with any president who has got the approval rating donald trump has had. >> yeah. i think that's an accurate reading. and a president whose approval rating, you know, oddly has never really breached 50%. it's never been at a level that you could confidently say this looks like somebody who is going to be re-elected. he didn't look like he was going to get elected in the first place to a lot of us. maybe there is special juju about donald trump and elections, but these numbers, as you said, very consistent with his low approval numbers and they don't budge, really. >> so, rick, if you want to take it from a trump optimist standpoint here just

strategically. if he wants to pull a rabbit out of the hat again, get reelected in 2020 with numbers you would normally look at and say nobody's winning an election with these numbers, i think one thing that seemed to help donald trump in the end in 2016 when you looked at those exit polls was the unpopularity on election day of his opponent. hillary clinton's favorable rating was down to 43% on election day. trump's was low too, but it created just the opportunity he needed there. what are the odds there that donald trump with all the democratic names you see out there will be able to lower his democratic opponent in 2020 to that same number? or is this group of candidates you see out there potentially not going to fall that low, not going to be lowerable to that level? >> well, let's start here, steve. as you know, the latest nbc poll has donald trump at 44%. he started his presidency at the exact same number, 44%, so nothing has changed with donald trump. donald trump is congenitally incapable of hearing any bad news about himself or his campaign, so his pollsters have

been unable to present him with the bleak news that's ahead of him. what he did with hillary clinton was to make her more unpopular than he was. that remains his only strategy was he cannot -- he has proven over and over again as eugene was saying, he cannot expand a base. he cannot collect more voters to his side. instead, as bob costa points out, he continues to lose them. so his only strategy is to smear whoever his ultimate democratic opponent will be. now, here's the problem for the democrats. it will be easier to smear and define a candidate who has low name i.d., which, frankly, is most of the field. besides bernie sanders and joe biden. so -- because they've raised like $100 million. $100 million could do terrible, terrible things to one's public image, but that will be his strategy because he has no vision for the country. he has no real legislative agenda that he can point to. he can point to a good economy,

but that's not really a whole lot that he can point to. even polls are showing that most americans who -- who looked at the tax cut, which was this big accomplishment, don't think that it benefitted them personally or benefitted anyone other than the wealthy. >> i can show you also from this "washington post" story here what folks around trump and around these polls have been saying. is that 2020 will be exponentially more difficult than 2016 and everyone needs to realize that, a source close to the campaign explained. obviously, look, in 2020 the president will be an incumbent president. this is not going to be an open seat election to succeed a two-term incumbent. so there may be fundamentally a difference there. but robert costa, in terms of that idea of trying to make the opponent as unpalatable as possible, something that donald trump and his campaign were able to do in 2016 with hillary clinton. you heard donald trump last week say, hey, i think joe biden, that's the guy i'd most like to run against. that's the public bravado you're getting from trump. is that matched by what you're

hearing and seeing privately or do they read the strength and weakness of this democratic field differently behind the scenes? >> privately, many republicans who work with the trump campaign or on capitol hill tell me that they -- they would really like to paint the democratic party with the socialist brush in 2020. and to define the democratic party as democratic socialists and they think that's the way to -- both by stoking their own voters on immigration and trade and the republican party, but also trying to alarm moderate to independent voters by saying the democrats are socialists. that's the way they maybe have a path in a state like wisconsin, michigan or pennsylvania, ohio, to try to make sure the working class voter who went to them in 2016 stays with them in 2020. they are worried about someone like vice president biden who with a more moderate persona, his link to the obama administration from eight years as vp, could be a real threat. >> so that's an interesting question there, too, gene, just strategically then for democrats. invoke the name socialism.

you had bernie sanders out there last week giving a defense of democratic socialism. you've got biden with the implicit memb implicit message of, hey, you know, these things won't stick to me. strategically where does that leave a candidate like warren, somebody running on the themes that i think bernie sanders stresses economically but not necessarily leaning into the kinds of labels he would lean into? where does that leave somebody like her? >> well, you know, it's where she is. basically she's been very clear at saying i'm not a socialist, i'm not a socialist, i'm not a socialist. at the same time she's been, i think, ahead of many of the other candidates in laying out her specific policy agenda that has some across the aisle appeal. she does well in crowds of those white working class voters. she does better than a lot of people thought she would do. and, frankly, her campaign in general is going better than a lot of people thought it would. so we'll just have to see how that evolves.

is sh she, i think, is perhaps more vulnerable to the kind of sliming that trump is going to do to the democratic nominee than biden would be, but it's early to even say that. let's see how they perform. let's watch the first debate. let's see how the candidates stack up. >> rick, take a look at that map in 2016 that donald trump was able to put together, that electoral college coalition with. where do you see the biggest -- which states is he most vulnerable in? which should he be watching the most closely right now? which should give him the most worry right now in terms of something different potentially have happening in '20 than in '16? >> well, clearly in pennsylvania where joe biden is doing very well, according to his own poll, wisconsin, michigan, and surprisingly florida, which is a swing state, but there really is not a scenario for victory if donald trump is going to lose florida. but if he loses those other three states, he'll have to make it up somewhere else. he's losing in places like north carolina. like, it's close in georgia. it's two points in texas. of course i'm quoting his ancient poll now, but, you know,

that's -- that's -- that seems to be where he's at and, you know, we'll see if he can improve on that. the history shows us that he can't. >> okay. rick tyler, robert costa, eugene robinson, thanks to all of you to being with us. and coming up, there is increased support for impeachment when it comes to democratic voters but is the view of impeachment changing among democratic lawmakers in congress? going to talk to one member of the house next. and later, chris matthews is going to join us with a preview of tonight's "deciders" town hall event. you're watching "hardball." rs" n hall event you're watching "hardball. a t"" "i've seen a cat without a gri, but a grin without a cat." hey, mercedes, end audio. change lighting to soft blue. the completely reimagined 2020 gle. with intelligent voice control and available third row. your adventure awaits. visit your local mercedes-benz dealer for exceptional lease and financing offers. mercedes-benz. the best or nothing.

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welcome back to "hardball." a knew nbc news/"wall street journal" poll shows a shift in public opinion on impeachment. 27% of americans now say there is enough evidence to begin impeachment hearings. that is up ten points in the last month. 24% say congress should continue investigating to see if there's enough evidence to impeach the

president. the rising support for hearings comes mostly from democrats whose support for impeachment is up 18 points over the last month. a separate poll from fox news shows 43% of voters support impeaching and removing trump. that poll shows support for impeachment and removable among independents up 15 points over the course of the last year. president trump reacted with a tweet contradicting this polling tweeting, "almost 70% in new poll say don't impeach. so ridiculous to even be talking about this subject." but democrats might be facing increasing pressure to go forward with impeachment. here's what congresswoman alexandria ocasio-cortez said yesterday. >> i think every day that passes the pressure to impeach grows, and i think that it's justifiable. i think the evidence continues to come in, and i believe that with the president now saying that he is willing to break the law to win re-election, that -- that goes -- that transcends

partisanship, it transcends party lines and this is now about the rule of law in the united states of america. >> joining me now is democratic congresswoman marcie kapter of ohio. thank you for taking a few minutes. you are not one of those, i think it's about five democrats in congress now who have been calling for impeachment, come out and publicly said it. is it there a chance you may join them or do you say, no, we're not going to go forward with impeachment? >> well, first of all, you need very thorough investigation before you move forward with impeachment, but for me personally, impeachment isn't enough. it isn't about one person, it's about the ring around the president. many of them looters. many of them, in my opinion, treasonous to this country. paul manafort being one of them. and already over six individuals have been convicted. some are trying to work out deals but we really need to

remove the corruption and we need to remove those who are supporting the enemies of liberty. i really think that's what's at stake in this election that's coming up. >> you say -- you say in the election. are you drawing a distinction there saying the way to get the president out of office, the way to address these issues is through an election and not through impeachment? >> well, i don't know whether the committees have jurisdiction will have completed their work. you know the administration's been withholding information and it's been hard to get the evidence that the is necessary to move forward with the proper findings. so words are el chacheap, but wu move forward with an impeachment effort inside the house where it will start, you have to make sure that all of your information is locked down, and, frankly, it's not secret that this administration has held back information repeatedly. all the individuals, whether it's michael flynn, whether it's michael cohen, whether it's paul manafort, i don't care which one

you pick, they lied and they withheld evidence, they did not tell the truth, and so you're not working with an administration or the ring around the president who have been forthcoming. it makes it very, very difficult. and justice meets out slowly. but i believe that it needs to meet out methodically. >> do you -- >> and this ring goes well beyond the president. >> okay. but on the question of the president, you've read the mueller report, i assume. do you believe based on your reading of the mueller report that the president committed obstruction of justice? >> i cannot tell from the mueller report because there are so many redacted pages. it appears to me that the president, he doesn't look like he's innocent. he looks like he's trying to feed the publicity around his own situation. what would it matter to him?

he has most everything in the world that he wants, almost. and for his own reputation to give us the information that we want. so he's withholding evidence. >> okay. but you say you can't tell -- you're saying -- you're citing redactions here. does the mueller report leave open in your possibility -- leave open in your mind, excuse me, the possibility that the president committed obstruction of justice? >> oh, absolutely. >> okay. so why not have -- i guess the question i'm trying to put together what you're saying here. if you've read the report, you think the report doesn't answer all the questions and the question exists in your mind of obstruction of justice possibly being committed by the president. is that not grounds to go forward with an impeachment investigation? >> well, i think investigations are occurring. we have some excellent committees, actually six of them. i'm not on those committees, but they are i believe going over to the white house this week trying to obtain information that we

need. the law isn't like a very quick insta breakfast. the law takes time and we have to pin down facts and we have to get the information in order to do that. so politically it's easy to say, oh, we're going to do this. and -- but to actually have the evidence in hand so that you can do proper hearings and so forth, that's what the committees are seeking. they're working very hard to do that. >> the argument, and i guess my question to you then is do you disagree with this? the argument has been made that by convening a formal impeachment inquiry, having a formal process under way that the power to seek the kind of information you're talking about getting is increased beyond what democrats and members of congress enjoy right now. >> they haven't convinced me of that. >> all right. congresswoman marcie kaptur, not signing off on impeachment right now. appreciate you taking a few minutes. >> thank you very much. all right. and coming up, we're going to go live to dayton, ohio. that's where chris matthews is holding a special "deciders"

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welcome back to "hardball." we are less than three hours away from a special town hall event, "the deciders" hosted by msnbc's own chris matthews in

dayton, ohio. this is the second in a series of town halls that will be focused on issues that voters care about as they decide who will be the next president of the united states. tonight's town hall brings us to dayton, dayton, ohio, a county that went to obama in 2008, obama again in 2012, but it flipped to trump in 2016. trump's margin of victory in montgomery county was just 1%, though. now that we are 2 1/2 years into the trump presidency, do voters there feel the same way? would they vote for trump again in 2020? well, chris matthews joins us now from dayton, ohio. chris, really looking forward to this event. let me ask you, that's the bottom line question, has anybody's mind either way where you are changed in the last couple of years? >> well, steve, we'll find out that tonight, and i think that as you all know, all the polling you've looked at, about 80% to 90% of republicans have held true to trump. the democrats don't have unanimity like that behind anybody, so they're going to eventually have to make a choice

between whoever the democrats cook up and trump again. and we don't know that until we see it, until they see it. but what i'm trying to do tonight is get the attitude about trump. does it bother them that he's vulgar, that he doesn't tell the truth, that he has a character problem, he makes fun of people's physical appearance, he makes nicknames up. does it bother them that his foreign policy seems to make no sense or is it just about us against them? they don't like the democratic or republican establishments. they still don't like them. and the same reasons they voted against them last time they'll do it again. i think that's the open question. i hope it's going to be wild tonight. i think it will. there is a lot of anger out there on both sides. >> you did one of these in pennsylvania a few weeks ago. it was gripping television. i don't care what side of the aisle you're on. you really did have a look there in this room. you're probably going to have the same thing tonight, from what i understand, of the conversation that america is really having in -- maybe we don't always see on tells. television. >> yeah because we live in our own bubbles.

if you live in washington, d.c., you're probably surrounded by a lot of liberals, intellectuals well-educated people wealth a point of view. they have no problem with big government. they like big government. they like all the liberal programs. they're pro-choice. they like trade. they don't have any problem with immigration. you get outside that bubble, you get into another bubble where people are very angry about immigration, very angry about the trade situation with china and they want to see something done and they want it to be a little rougher, their politics. so i think we're going to bring those two bubbles together and see them pop. >> you know, it's interesting, you mentioned trade out there. we keep seeing these polls that joe biden supposedly the best positioned democrat to take out trump, especially in a place like ohio. this the -- put it on the screen there. this is the trump internal data. they got biden apparently up by a point there in ohio. but on trade biden, isn't he ultimately as vulnerable as clinton was on that? when you talk about nafta, when you talk about these big trade deals? >> well, certainly because, i

mean, tpp was probably for that. he was definitely for nafta. all the democrats were pretty much pro-trade, at least at the top back in the '90s. to clintons, all of them were pro-nafta. hillary i don't think was pro-nafta. she turned against tpp eventually. sherrod brown is probably better fixed to represent this state as a senator. he's a very tough guy on trade, as we know. bobby casey in pennsylvania. the rust belt states, if you will, they're represented by democrats, debbie stabenow, who are very tough on the trade issue. they're more attuned than maybe biden. i bet biden switches on this. if he wants to stick with the -- rather, get the working class voter, the working person out here, the woman and the man, depend on trade to change to start picking up some of this industrial market, he's going to have to shift as well. >> you know, you guys on the ground there were talking to some voters in dayton. let me just play a clip of this. some of the voters there about the president's behavior, his conduct in office versus his

performance on the economy. take a listen. >> people don't like exactly how he goes about doing it, but he -- that's trump. whether you like it or not. but the bottom line, he's getting things done. >> economically, for me, it seems to be, like, 100% better. >> you know, if i would want a preacher up in the white house, i would have voted a preacher guy in. >> i thought that comment from the second gentleman there saying economically things feel 100% different. what's your sense on the ground? how widespread is the feeling on the ground in their everyday lives that there is a measurable difference now to three years ago? >> well, we're going to hear that tonight. we're going to hear -- as soon as we do the show tonight. what i'm seeing in the numbers is that this county, for example, is about, you know -- the state's about $1 more an hour. so it's not a lot. it's $1 more an hour since trump took over in terms of wages. the unemployment rate, however,

has been dramatically cut down to about a point statewide. about two points in this county. so people -- there are jobs out there. they're not good-paying jobs in many cases. so the progress of the wage per hour hasn't been able to keep up with the stock market or with -- or with the general unemployment rate situation. so we're going to hear a lot of anecdotal information. i might ask the question could anyone raise 400 bucks if they needed it in an emergency. ask people if they're all just living paycheck-to-paycheck and really hanging on by their fingertips economically. i expect we're going to hear different cases. not everybody is doing the same. >> chris matthews out there in dayton, ohio. 10:00 eastern tonight. "the deciders." you're not going to want to miss this one. trust me. thank you, chris. coming up, we'll turn to the democrats. new polls show shifting fortunes for the democratic contenders ahead of that all-important first primary debate right here on msnbc. keir going to go inside the

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all right. welcome back to "hardball." well, next week middle of next week they are all going to be on staging to. well, not quite actually. it's two stages. two nights. ten candidates a night. 20 candidates for president. the democratic race. how does the democratic race stand heading into that debate next week? well, some brand-new polling we can take you through here. first of all, here is a national poll. national democratic race. this was the fox news poll out this weekend. and, again, it shows you this is kind of the holding pattern, i think, heading into the first debate. joe biden over 30%. clearly in the lead. clearly the front-runner. not overwhelming in a way we've seen with some in the past, but certainly he has created separation since getting into the race. the question, of course, then becomes, how is he going to perform? the spotlight of that debate and the spotlight that's going to come after that. biden has only been campaigning kind of intermittently.

think that's going to pick up after the debate. this is sort of where he starts. let's see what happens once he takes the stage. bernie sanders, the runner-up in 2016, a distant second in this poll and a jumble of other candidates who have moved up giving chase to sanders. they're all trying to stand out, obviously, in this debate. one of the interesting divides we've seen, continues to be the case, i'll show you on the democratic side. the divide around age. this is the overall number. folks under 45 years old. biden leads but barely. 21% for biden. look at that. sanders right behind him, 18%. this is folks under 45 years old. completely different campaign. completely different election when you flip it around to over 45. look at biden's support. it explodes. it doubles. he goes from 21% to 42% people over 45 years old. sanders, his is practically cut in half. he goes from 18% and right on biden's heels all the way back to 10%, losing to him more than

4 to 1. a lot of democratic voters over 45 years old. there are a lot of voters who are over 45 years old. we don't always talk about them, but that's been one of the sources of strength joe biden's had and one of the reasons he's the front-runner now. it's the strength particularly from older voters. we also got the readout from key early caucus states. iowa, biden continuing to lead now. there is sanders, remember, 2016, sanders came close in iowa. almost knocked off hillary clinton. all of a sudden you see elizabeth warren getting some traction now in iowa. double digits for her. buttigieg at 11% in iowa. how about new hampshire? similar number for biden there. interesting number to keep an eye on as the new hampshire race unfolds. sanders and warren both neighbors. vermont next door to new hampshire, massachusetts as well. interesting thing to keep an eye on. we see south carolina. able is one of biden's sources

of strength early on. look at the lead he's got in the poll. we've seen other polls in south carolina that have him significantly ahead and the big reason is that joe biden in south carolina and nationally so far has been doing substantially better with black voters than with white voters. it's been a big source of strength for him. south carolina, the democratic primary electorate is more than 50%, more than 60% in 2016 african-american. biden right now continues to run very well with the african-american voters. it's why he's ahead so much in this south carolina poll and it's another reason why he has that lead going into the debate nationally. so that's where things stand right now, but obviously when they get on that stage everything subject to change. we will see. several of the democratic contenders took part in a major event today focused on poverty and inequality. we've got a live report from the poor people's campaign presidential forum coming up. you're watching "hardball."

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and our government belong to all of us, not just wealthy campaign contributors. >> those were some of the democratic presidential candidates who appeared at the forum for the poor people's campaign held today in washington, d.c. and i'm joined now by nbc news political reporter ali vitali at the event. you see the former vice president, elizabeth warren, bernie sanders. warren and sanders both up speaking on the stage there. this is an activist group, obviously. this is not necessarily a broadly representative democratic party in all of its elements there, but this is a key component of activists here. who was the best received? who connected with that crowd today? >> i will tell you coming into this event, steve, to me, it seemed like the perfect forum for a elizabeth warren or a bernie sanders to make their pitch about how to fix the wealth gap in this country. it's something that they've really structured their campaigns around, and, yes, they did do well, but there was one person who surprised me, and

that was marianne williamson who really did interweave faith and her background as an author into a lot of her answers here. they really did respond. they were told not to give applause, but some of them broke the rules for the three candidates to show they liked what they were saying. the thing i was looking out for most here today, the first time you had joe biden, for example, at one of these cattle calls where candidates are just rotating on and off the stage. you really do get a chance to compare their pitches. but there are also some of those candidates who aren't really willing to be drawing contrasts between themselves and like-minded candidates in the field. i'm thinking specifically of bernie sanders and elizabeth warren when you were laying out that polling data, they are coming closer together. even elizabeth warren superseding bernie sanders in some of those polls. i asked bernie how he would draw that contrast. listen to what he told me. >> hey, senator, how do you draw a contrast between yourself and senator elizabeth warren? >> well, right now we're going to be talking about an issue

that in this country is not talked about enough, and that is the fact we have tens of millions of people living in poverty at a time of massive income and wealth inequality. so i think that instead of giving tax breaks to billionaires, we start focussing on the needs of ordinary americans, and that is wipe out poverty if he america. that's the goal that we can achieve. >> that's a message you guys share. >> and i said that's a message you guys share. senator sanders just kind of kept walking. he wasn't really willing to engage on that, but i do think it's an interesting point of contrast. they will not be on the debate stage together. though i sort of wish they would be. i would love to see how those two candidates contrast each other sharing so many things in common on policy. i will say the sanders answer we got from him comes as his campaign manager sent a memo about polling, reassuring reporters that despite seeing slippage in some horse race polls, sanders is still strong, specifically among voters who have one candidate in mind

they're supporting, which makes sense given in 2016 how loyal the bernie sanders base was. steve. >> ali, thank you. i'm joined now by cornell belch and cornell, thanks for joining us. obviously a very different race back then. it was pretty much a one-on-one race. now you've got all these other options the democrats have. i'm curious, what do you think the bernie sanders floor in this race is and what do you think the ceiling is? >> well, i think -- i think bernie sanders is going to probably struggle to hold on to as much of this coalition we saw in 2016. i mean, look, to your point, it

was -- it did come to a two-person race, and bernie i think benefitted from a great deal of sort of the anti-establishment change oriented electorate, same way we did in 2008 with obama. but i also want to point out to you, you know, kudos to reverend barber and the poor people's campaign because they have put poverty and poor people front and center in the conversation in a way that if you look at 2006, look at 2008, look at 2012, even look at this last midterm, middle class, middle class, middle class was all democrats are talking about. and they are forcing the democrats now to have to talk about poor people and poverty in a way that we certainly have not before in the past, and kudos to reverend barber and his crew. >> rick tyler, when you take a look at this democratic field right now, we were asking earlier but who do you think the trump campaign should be most worried about right now? is it joe biden, you think, because you were saying he'd be difficult to define? or is joe biden very definable

in that you have this history he was the gaffe machine in -- he does bring some baggage to this, doesn't he? >> everybody brings baggage, especially if you've been in public service as long as he has. the question is whether he can kans answer to that. here's the thing about joe biden, in many ways this is a two-person race between biden and trump. i know people are upset about that. what it is, biden occupies the establishment lane which essentially hillary clinton occupied the last time. bernie sanders occupied then the progressive lane, but now bernie has all these competitors and elizabeth warren is frankly eclipsing him, and everybody's competing in the progressive lane and nobody is competing against joe biden and nobody is disabusing him that he's the front-runner, and then you have donald trump who is actually affirming it by going after joe biden and giving him more attention. and by 75 -- sorry, 72 to 25%, democrats say they would rather have someone who is steady,

reliable leader has opposed to someone who is going to offer a bold agenda. let me give an example. medicare for all. which has been talked about among many of these democratic candidates. actually eliminates medicare. it puts everybody in a one system. it gets rid of 270 million individual private health insurance accounts, including union accounts, and so that's not really been talked about, but i think if that -- if you go into the general election with medicare for all versus donald trump, i think you're giving donald trump a real advantage for re-election. >> put this up on the screen from our new nbc news/"wall street journal" poll. the question of enthusiasm among democratic voters. the candidates who are striking a chord with them, not necessarily who they're going to be voting for, but who they're enthusiastic about. you see the biggest jump here in our poll over the last month, it's elizabeth warren. she's moved up. biden has slid back a bit on this topic. cornell, when you get outside of sanders, when you're into buttigieg, warren, harris, the other candidates sort of

clustered there, which one of them is best positioned to make a run at biden for the lead in this race? >> you don't know and that's why you run campaigns because at some point -- at some point someone's going to have to make a move and we don't know. you have biden, who, look, and i don't think -- and i think bidensbiden is vulnerable. he's the front-runner but he's vulnerable. he's at 1/3 of the vote in a lot of these polls. 72% of the democratic voters already know and already like him. so he's really underperforming from where he is. the voters are still shopping around. on that enthusiasm measure, i think that's why this is important. i'll go back to the conversation you had with chris in dayton, you know, obama carried dayton by, you know -- hillary underperformed obama in dayton by four points. you know, trump only overperformed romney by one point. so there are a lot of those obama voters who we failed to consolidate and we failed to engage and bring them enthusiastically back. that's why the enthusiasm -- the

enthusiasm -- enthusiasm matters. we need a candidate who can, in fact, grow and expand that obama coalition and is that joe biden? i don't know if that's the answer. >> all right. cornell belcher, rick tyler, thanks for taking a few minutes. >> thanks, steve. up next, taking the temperature on impeachment. you're watching "hardball." l.

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. one of the headlines of our new nbc news/"wall street journal" poll is that support is now up for congress opening an impeachment inquiry into president trump. 27% of voters say her is enough evidence to do it now. that is up ten points from just a month ago. but let's not mistake that for a sudden bipartisan groundswell because 48% of voters in our poll also say the whole matter should be closed. no inquiry, no hearings, no impeachment, just let go and let trump finish his term. that number is the exact same as it was a month ago. so this is not a case of people who were dead-set against impeachment changing their minds and suddenly embracing it. the shift is a little bit more subtle than that. about a month ago, about 1/3 of voters chose an in-between position on this question. they weren't against impeachment but they weren't for it either. at least not yet. they were for continuing to investigate and keeping open the option of impeaching down the road.

call that the nancy pelosi position. the position of most democratic leaders in congress. that is what they have been calling for, impeachment -- excuse me, hearings, yes, but impeachment, well, not now. so what has changed in the last month is that other democrats have started to speak out more. some of them are in congress. about five dozen now there saying it is time for impeachment. a lot of those democratic presidential candidates are also out there and also saying the same thing. so in other words, within the democratic party, among democratic activists and democratic voters, the temperature there is changing when it comes to impeachment. there is a stronger desire to do it, a stronger desire to do it now and not to wait than there was a month ago. in a month from now, well, who knows. maybe it will be higher still then. so it makes the balancing act for nancy pelosi that much trickier. the more united her own party is behind impeaching now, the harder it will be for her to hold firm and to say no. but outside of the universe of the democratic party, support

for impeachment remains very limited, in opposition just as high as it was a month ago so plunging into impeachment now would still raise the same political questions, the same uncertainties that it would have a month ago. if democrats keep moving from wait and see to impeach now, pelosi may end up needing the clock to save her. june of 2019 already, the first debate, we've said, less than two weeks away. the first primaries, they are in less than eight months. and impeachment, at least the kind of impeachment that proponents are envisioning, well, that would take a long time to pull off, so for democratic leaders who don't want to go down this road but see more and more signs every day it's the road their base does want to go down, well, then we don't have the support to impeachment may stop being the argument to lie on and it may be replaced by a different one. we just don't have enough time to do it. that's "hardball" for now. chris matthews is back at 10:00 p.m. tonight. a special event. a "deciders" town hall live from dayton, ohio. you're not going to want to miss

that one. tune in then. in the meantime, "all in" with chris hayes starts right now. tonight on "all in" -- >> i think that this is about us doing our jobs. >> the movement to impeach the president keeps growing. >> are we doing hour job as a member of the house? >> tonight, why more americans are getting on board with impeachment as more democrats say they don't want to wait until the election to vote on the president's fate. >> i am going to be supporting and seeking and trying to build consensus for an impeachment inquiry into the president. then senator chris murphy on new republican calls to bomb iran. >> unprovoked attacks on commercial shipping warrant a retaliatory military strike against the islamic republic of iran. what we learned from the democratic candidates at the poor people's campaign presidential forum. >> i know