appreciate you tuning in. don't go anywhere, because our election night coverage with the whole gang is coming up next. >> the democratic primary, a whole new race. six new states, two candidates standing. >> this is about the future. >> it's not about the past. it's about our children and grandchildren. >> we have a campaign of energy and excitement. >> tonight, can biden extend his winning streak? >> there's a place in this campaign for us, so join us. >> can sanders bounce back? >> we are trying to bring our people together. >> the big prize, michigan. >> michigan, i'm counting on you in a big way. >> let's win here in michigan. let us win the democratic nomination. >> leading our coverage, rachel maddow, brian williams, nicolle wallace, steve kornacki at the big board. our political team across the country. the road warriors tracking the candidates. plus, joy reid, former missouri

senator claire mccaskill, pulitzer prize winning columnist eugene robinson. our strategists, obama campaign manager david plouffe. former white house press secretary robert gibbs, msnbc special coverage starts now. >> voting is under way in six states, from the deep south all the way up to the pacific northwest. michigan, missouri, mississippi, north dakota, idaho, washington state. the first contests since the former vice president joe biden became the front-runner, the first since bloomberg and warren dropped out of this race. what the "wall street journal" dubbed super tuesday the sequel. one hour to the first polls close. brian williams here in new york with rachel maddow. >> the biggest prize tonight of course in terms of delegates is michigan. the site of serious democratic primary drama in the recent

past. 2016, michigan was the biggest upset in the whole democratic primary. bernie sanders in 2016 eking out a very slim victory over hillary clinton after michigan polls had showed him way behind. that historic upset in 2016, among other things, has cast a paul ever since over the reliability of polling in michigan. for what it's worth, heading into tonight, the polls do show joe biden ahead of bernie sanders in michigan. same thing in missouri. and biden is also strongly favored in the great state of mississippi. in the three other states voting tonight, bernie sanders, it should be noted, did phenomenally well in 2016. romping to wins of almost 40, almost 50, almost 60-point margins in north dakota, washington state, and idaho in 2016. biden tonight keeping it close or winning in those states, would, of course, be a sea change. >> another split screen day

across our country, as news of the coronavirus continues to pour in, and as the two stories, coronavirus and this election we are covering, merge. both joe biden and bernie sanders have canceled rallies scheduled for tonight, quote, out of concern for public health and safety. the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the u.s. has nearly doubled in just the past day and a half. the governor of new york has set up a one-mile-wide containment zone around the suburb of new rochelle, north of where we are here in new york city, deploying the national guard. colorado today declared a state of emergency, as did the state of new jersey, after reporting their first coronavirus death. and then there's washington state, one of the centers of this outbreak where voters are at the polls today and tonight. it's an open question whether and if and how much the coronavirus will affect these

primaries. >> in washington state, which has been so hard hit, they vote by mail, which is interesting in terms of thinking about how concerns about the virus and about people coming together in too large of crowds might affect the dynamics in terms of today's primary. despite everything else going on, we should mention that washington state has been saying, heading into tonight, they expect they might hit record turnout in this primary. ohio, which votes next week, they announced today they're moving polling places in 88 counties, basically taking them out of nursing homes and senior citizen housing facilities, out of an abundance of caution. >> our team of correspondents and analysts has spread out throughout this country. for that matter, throughout this studio. we want to start with steve kornacki at the big board with what's at stake tonight. hey, steve. >> hey, brian. yeah, some interesting storylines here. of course, coming into tonight, biden leading. this is the overall delegate count. they're still adding some of them up from super tuesday. when they're all counted, it

looks like biden will carry a lead of about 75 to 80 delegates. why that's so significant coming into tonight, because there are some opportunities here, if sanders is a bit on the ropes coming into tonight, there are some opportunities for joe biden to do some damage tonight to bernie sanders. let me give you a sense of this. first, you take a look down here. in mississippi, obviously, no results yet, but a reminder, four years ago, this is what mississippi looked like. it was basically the worst state on the map for bernie sanders, four years ago the story for bernie sanders, struggling to break through with black voters. you have an electorate in missouri that's about two thirds african-american. he was barely able to get any delegates out of mississippi four years ago. he's been struggling in the south, continuing to struggle with african-american voters. that's a danger sign right there. danger zone for sanders potentially tonight. then you have michigan and missouri. michigan and missouri, the storyline there we're following tonight, non-college white voters in particular. one of the reasons that bernie sanders was able to win michigan

four years ago and stretch out the primary process, strong support from blue-collar white voters. double-digit wins over hillary clinton. there has been some signs of slippage, though, for sanders in the super tuesday states, among that same group. he needs them tonight in michigan, in missouri. will he get them? the other issue for bernie sanders, these three states, these were great bernie sanders states in 2016. washington, idaho, and north dakota. let me give you one example. look at washington. look at the margin here in 2016. sanders won this state 73/27. but he won a caucus. washington, idaho, and north dakota were caucus states in 2016. they have all moved away from caucuses. it's a primary in washington, a primary in idaho. kind of a hybrid in north dakota tonight. that could also be trouble for bernie sanders. there are opportunities for joe biden to really show that circumstances have changed since 2016, and i think big picture, the story tonight is will

democratic voters in these states give sanders some new life when he badly needs it? or are they going to deliver a message, they're kind of ready for this thing to be over with? >> steve, can i ask you a little bit about how much polling there has been for these states tonight? it's my impression that we do have polling in michigan. we do have a little bit of polling in missouri, say, but there hasn't been a lot of polling in all of these states. and so how does that affect our ability to talk about, for example, like you were just doing, sanders' prospects in the states? do we expect that some of the disasters in polling in michigan in 2016 have been corrected for? >> well, i guess there's only one way to find out. one thing you could say in michigan though in 2016, when you think about the polling back then, it had been a long time, really, you didn't have any modern examples of a competitive democratic presidential primary in michigan. in 2008, if anybody could remember, the michigan primary 2008, the dnc was telling candidates to boycott the obama

campaign didn't even contest michigan. you didn't have one from '08, you didn't have much of a race in '04 once you got outside of new hampshire. in the '90s and '80s, michigan was closer to a caucus state than the primary state. i think the pollsters learned a lot in 2016 about the democratic primary electorate in michigan and have applied those lessons to 2020. we'll see how they hold up with that, but you're right. we don't have a ton of polling in these states. we haven't had a ton of polling this cycle. it's one of the things we're getting used to. again, when you say trouble signs for sanders, it's the polls, also just the fact that in the other states that have some demographic characteristics similar to michigan and missouri, you have seen already some underperformance for sanders. he's got to change that tonight. >> steve, if i might, the bigger news at your board seems to be the massive northwest state of washaho we have formed. >> oregon got left out. >> i missed that, and that's a powerhouse as states are

concerned. a lot of land mass out there. michigan, as we have been saying, as we will continue to say, the biggest prize of the night. 125 delegates at stake. democrats flip two house seats in the detroit suburbs during the '18 midterm. with us from livonia, michigan, tonight, chris jansing. >> if this is one of the places that democrats are hoping they will be able to flip back in the win column in november, this is exactly the kind of voting place, the polling place, you want to watch. there we see folks voting in two different precincts. there are three more over here. the numbers have been steady all day long. i just got the latest 7:00 numbers. we're up around 1900, according to the city clerk. those are very, very strong numbers. but why here? why is it important? well, in this suburban area, the county itself, brian, went very strongly for hillary clinton. but this polling place overwhelmingly for donald trump in 2016.

in fact, it was considered to be trump country then. wait two years, one of those seats you just talked about, one of those congressional seats, flipped to blue. something that democrats believe that they can do again, and they're watching here very closely. now, talking to voters here, it's been kind of fascinating because i am used to -- i have been to michigan many times. when you go to midwestern states and the states i have been to so far, you hear about health care, the economy. now you might hear coronavirus. i heard absolutely none of those things. here's what i heard over and over again about why people felt it was important to come out in the primary. chaos, complete and total chaos. turmoil, get trump out. one person here did say she was going to vote for donald trump. not surprising it was a lower turnout for trump supporters given that although there are other republicans on the ballot, it's a fait accompli, but among democrats, they are completely

and totally driven by the idea of who can best beat donald trump. one more thing about that coronavirus. this is one of 13 states that does not have any cases of coronavirus. so if you look along these tables, they had ordered a case of hand sanitizer for folks, but noibd was using them, so i don't see any of them anymore, brian. >> lucky them to be able to order a case. chris jansing, thanks. bernie sanders, as we said, won michigan 2016. a win there tonight would be vital to his hopes of keeping going. garrett haake is with us from grand rapids. kent county, michigan, where sanders won 63% of the democratic vote last time around. hey, garrett. >> hey, brian. that's right. sanders didn't just win this county. he romped here four years ago. among voters i talked to today, it seems likely he'll do well again. it was interesting listening to chris, because i heard a lot of the same thing. this might as well be a different state economically and culturally from where she is in detroit, but i heard a lot of

the same thing. democratic voters agonizing over who could best beat donald trump as the driving issue for voters. the story line i'm watching, it could be a late night here in michigan. part of the reason, michigan expanded their early vote. essentially any cause absentee, vote by mail for weeks leading up to the primary. that led 800,000 michiganders to turn in absentee ballots which by state law can't be opened until today. they won't finalize their counting probably until some time tomorrow afternoon. for folks watching the coverage all night long, that doesn't necessarily preclude news networks like ours from making a call when we have enough data to project what's going to happen in the rest of the state. for the actual vote counters here in michigan, it will be a very late night. a sign perhaps of increased turnout across the state, although you never know exactly whether the early votes cannibalize people who might have otherwise showed up here to wait in line if they didn't have that option. >> as we like to say, what could go wrong? >> it's fascinating.

we should bring in our colleagues nicolle wallace and gene robinson. on that point in michigan, michigan is one of those states where lots of people have early voted. they made it so you don't need an excuse to early vote. it's doubled in terms of the votes they got in 2016 by these met meth methods, but michigan is a state where if you change your mind or the candidate dropped out, you can go back to the state and no, no, don't open my ballot. tear that up. i have a new one i want to give you, which is kind of awesome from the voter's perspective. it gives you a second chance, but from the perspective of actually tallying these things up, opening up all the envelopes and counting them, it's going to be long time. >> it could be long time before we have any sort of final determination about what's going on in michigan. michigan, bay city, michigan, is a place where inembedded myself after trump's election with voters who had voted for president obama two times and then flipped and voted for

donald trump. they are the kinds of voters that bernie is targeting. over the last two days i talked to the sanders campaign and the biden campaign. one thing that's interesting that they both acknowledged is the power of the national narrative. and you just don't hear that a lot from campaigns. campaigns are hardwired and programmed to chalk it up to state by state elections. that's what you say. we're going to take our message to voters of the state. the sanders campaign will acknowledge that they have, i don't know if struggled is a word they use, but i think it accurately describes the challenge they felt. they struggled with the national narrative, which is from south carolina on, there has been this wave of support, of voting for, goodwill, and almost of relief that joe biden seems to gain his footing in the days between south carolina and super tuesday. they have struggled against that narrative. they have lashed out at the media in some ways that are very similar to the way donald trump lashed out at the media, saying the media was fixated on his comment about castro.

well, bernie sanders mentioned fidel castro in the four days between his huge win and the south carolina primary, and then the biden campaign today talking about a curveball that coronavirus presents. now, we'll see in the data we get tonight whether a curveball really is the right way to describe it. i think that the vice president may benefit having been vice president for eight years to a president who remains very popular among the democratic base. but both campaigns acknowledging to me in the last 48 hours that the national storylines have rendered them -- have just given them less control over their fates in all of these contests. >> seems to me anybody who is betting on the way coronavirus is going to cut politically has got to be more humble than that. >> i think they're all humble. i mean, the biden campaign is saying we have lost control. there's a bigger story. >> exactly. an externality. >> i will say this having worked in a white house that was never in control of external events from 9/11 to the wars in iraq and afghanistan, having run for

re-election for that president. the voters don't blame you for the external events, but they judge you 100% on how you respond. i think we talk a lot about '16. i think '08 may become more instructive where george w. bush, the president then, brought then-senator obama and senator john mccain into the roosevelt room for an emergency meeting, and it was senator obama who displayed more knowledge and more steady leadership. so we may be in a period of this campaign, and things can change all the time, that is much more similar to those final weeks of the '0 general. >> there's another thing i'm watching for in michigan tonight, and that is we saw how -- what african-american voters did in the south. on super tuesday. we saw south carolina, we saw alabama. is there any difference when we look at first what is the turnout in heavily african-american parts of michigan, detroit, flint,

pontiac, places like that. what is the turnout like? are people voting with enthusiasm? and do they go as heavily for biden or do we see the generation gap that bernie sanders really hoped for with younger african-american voters going for him, that he didn't really see very much of, frankly, in the previous primaries? and i think the whole democratic party will be looking at that african-american turnout, because had it been larger four years ago, michigan would have easily gone to hillary clinton. 13,000 votes. you know, that's -- that's, you know, a little corner of detroit had been more enthusiastic. >> 2016 in michigan looms for all sorts of reasons. the polls were totally wrong, for whatever reason. okay, that's worth remembering and carrying forward. also, bernie sanders breathed huge new life in his campaign to have the big upset win. also, turnout was way down in that 2016 democratic primary, which should have been

foreshadowing for the democrats that they were going to have trouble there in the general, and then them losing in the general, i mean, trump was the first republican since the '70s to win a general election in michigan. >> doesn't happen except it happened. >> all of the michigan -- it's not michigan hangover, like michigan is a chronicle of a democratic death foretold, loomed so large over what's happening there tonight. >> we're going to take a break in our coverage. after we come wack, we're going to go down south. we're going to get a report from mississippi, one of the six prizes at stake tonight as our live coverage continues with just over 41 minutes until the first polls close. your mission: stand up to moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis. and take. it. on with rinvoq. rinvoq a once-daily pill can dramatically improve symptoms... rinvoq helps tame pain, stiffness, swelling. and for some... rinvoq can even significantly reduce ra fatigue.

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welcome back. coming up on 7:22 eastern time. and during the break, we received some news. sunday's debate was always going to be unique because we're down to two. but we now know it's going to be unique for another reason. >> it's going to be even lonelier than that. this is a debate hosted by cnn on sunday in arizona. and they have just announced that there will be no audience for that debate. we have seen this happen with international sporting event, the prospect has been raised that we may start to see this with domestic sporting events as well, things happening in front of an empty stadium or arena. this will happen for this debate as states across the country try to take more measures trying to

protect people from getting this virus. >> we promised we would take a southern swing, and let's go to mississippi. just 36 pledged delegates, but it has the highest share of african-american voters in any state on the democratic primary calendar. joe biden has won overwhelmingly with black voters in the south thus far. hoping for the same tonight. you see her there, blayne alexander is our reporter in jackson tonight. hey, blayne. >> hey, brian. you already said it, the black vote is really going to be the thing to watch down here in mississippi. and likely to key the delivering a good night for joe biden. now, we're just now actually getting our very first full look at turnout today in mississippi. we understand that the numbers have been steady throughout the day, and in fact, the absentee ballots and the number of registered voters is higher than back in 2016, i'm told. but the real number to watch, of course, is going to be the black vote. now, according to our nbc news exit poll, roughly two thirds of all mississippi voters that

turned out today are african-american. it puts that into context, that's higher than south carolina. that's higher than any contest we have seen so far, and i don't need to remind you that is fantastic news for joe biden. now, by contrast, bernie sanders has not historically done well in mississippi. in fact, back in went 16, he only won about 16% of the vote. he did not win a single county when he was up against hillary clinton. now, i have been talking to voters in and out of here all day, and what they have been telling me has pretty much been on track with exactly that, overwhelmingly in support of joe biden. >> blayne alexander, thanks. as we go to steve kornacki, blaine was exactly right. if you look at turnout figures, we have every reason to believe that according to what we know about turnout, that's going to be excellent news for joe biden. >> absolutely. look, the previous high number was south carolina. we all remember what happened in the south carolina primary. it was 57% african-american, the democratic electorate there a couple weeks ago. tonight, this exit poll is

saying 64% black. actually, in 2016, number is even a little higher, cracked 70% in mississippi. this is probably going to be the highest black share of an electorate we see in the primary season. the significance of this obviously, take a look here at -- this is going to be a little slow loading. here you go. in the south so far, among african-american voters, this is what we have been seeing. 65% for biden. 16% for bernie sanders. if you add up all the results we have gotten so far, i think there is a reason that bernie sanders didn't go through with that trip to mississippi this week, instead went up to michigan. by the way, if you put this in some context, sanders does worse among african-americans in the south. his numbers in 2016 were a little better. when you got to the north, urban areas in the north, 25%, 30% in the north. look at this, he was in the seens in the south in 2016. he's in the teens in 2020. if you took biden's name off here and said this was hillary

clinton versus bernie sanders, it looked virtually the same back then. nationally in 2016, among african-american voters across every primary in the country in 2016, it was 77% clinton among black voters. and 21% sanders. that was a huge issue for bernie sanders in 2016. he was basically tied in 2016 nationally among white voters. he got his clock cleaned among african-american voters. he had four years to fix it, but these are the kinds of numbers we have been seeing so far. >> steve, that seems like that tells us what we need to know about mississippi tonight. and it tells us that biden essentially will complete a sweep of the south over the course of the primary, but how much do those numbers with african-americans affect sanders' chances tonight in missouri and in michigan? >> so yeah, you talk about missouri and michigan. i think we can show you this. let me see if that's next. here you go. this is from what we have seen so far in terms of the black share of each state. we mentioned south carolina was

56 when the final numbers were tabulated. right now, what we're seeing in michigan is an electorate that is 18% black. that's according to our exit poll right now. in missouri, we're seeing 17%. that michigan number, i'm going to put a box around that. in 2016, the number of michigan actually in the exit poll ended up at 21%. that made michigan the state in 2016 with the highest concentration of black voters that bernie sanders was able to win. he did not win a single state in 2016 with a higher share of black voters than in michigan. of course, he barely won michigan. keep that in mind as the numbers come in too. >> steve kornacki, thank you very much. let's bring into the conversation our friends robert gibbs and former u.s. senator claire mccaskill. claire, i wanted to ask you when we're looking at michigan here and your home state of missouri, we have seen some polling, but in a lot of ways, the expectations tonight are set in part because of what happened in 2016 when sanders was running

against hillary clinton. is sanders versus biden a replay of sanders versus clinton in states like michigan and your home state of missouri? >> i don't think it is. i have been home for most of the last week, and been out talking to people, focus groups in grocery stores, focus groups among my kids' friends. and i really think bernie came within one point of hillary clinton in missouri in 2016 and won michigan. i think biden is going to have a big, big win in both states. and what i have figured out, i think, is a lot of the bernie vote in 2016, fair or unfair, was anti-hillary. it wasn't so much pro-bernie. so i think you're going to see, i will be surprised if biden doesn't win missouri by at least double digits. it may be as much as 15 or 20 points. >> whoa. >> and i talked to my friends in michigan today. and they predict the same margin for biden in michigan.

>> claire, just the one off camera saying wow and whoa like i'm at home watching tv. sorry to all of our viewers. i forget sometimes. i feel like i'm watching you guys. i'm sorry. but wow and whoa, and let me ask you if you think that some of bernie's choices since his big win in nevada have something to do with that. i mean, to just leave no room for nuance around the south carolina win, to just try to blame that or brand that as the establishment coming to biden's rescue. it didn't ring true, one. it isn't true, two, and biden was pretty quick to give the credit to the people that deserve it, the african-american voters of south carolina. >> yeah, and i don't know if this is going to be true in michigan, nicolle, but in missouri, we're seeing a double-digit increase in older voters. and a decrease in younger voters. and when you find good things to say about castro, and when the word socialism is being bandied around as much as it has been, that really hurts with older

voters in a state like mine. >> wow. >> i was going to ask about the trump factor, too, claire. it seems like trump has had, you know, his conduct around the coronavirus crisis has been questioned by even some republicans, even his former homeland security adviser is out there sort of waving his arms frantically, pointing people toward real facts. do you think that is having this sort of sobering effect on democratic primary voters? >> there's no question, and i heard chris jansing say she heard voters saying chaos and total chaos. people have fatigue over the mess. and this administration is not showing strong at this moment. and that's when presidents have to lead and do so responsibly, and i actually think this corona thing is really going to hurt trump, and really tonight, it's going to help joe biden. >> robert gibbs, we all have

been talking tonight about the six contests as if michigan is the heavyweight, not just in terms of delegates but in terms of momentum and the effect on the overall democratic primary. is that the right way to be looking at it? what do you think is most important about the six states? >> i would start to think of this race not as states anymore, because while they're easy to fill in on the map and i don't want to put steve kornacki out of a jop here, but it's really all about delegates. delegates, delegates, delegates. even in a psychological win four years ago in michigan, bernie sanders only picked up a net four delegates on hillary clinton. and i think why tonight is so important for bernie sanders, this is the best political real estate that he's going to traverse in the month of march. and if you take these six states four years ago, he picked up 46 delegates. we talked about it because three of those states were caucuses. he has got to break the delegate math tonight. we're running out of time if you're the bernie sanders campaign. you talked about those southern states and that african-american

vote. in the next two weeks, we have georgia and florida. together, that's almost 100 more delegates than texas. if he's drawing 16% of the african-american vote in florida and georgia, in a real estate that's that big, he's got to start making this gap up tonight. if he misses that opportunity, it's a lot of sand through the hourglass. >> that means we should not only watch the states but the margins. >> absolutely. watch the margins. watch the delegates. watch that number coming out of this. you could conceivably, i'm not suggesting this because i think claire's predictions are much closer to what's going to happen, but you could see a bunch of these states finish close to 50/50, have a landslide in mississippi, and joe biden could win missouri, lose five states, and net 20 delegates or 25 delegates. that's the big news out of this, is again, it's not as much those states on the map anymore. it's those people that are going to show up in milwaukee to nominate and vote for that

nominee. >> he's totally right. that's the coin of the realm. that's the currency that the race is about. >> it's delegates. >> and the sanders camp knows that. i mean, their deputy campaign manager was on our hour yesterday and would not even say, play the sort of game of what do you need to win, to see? they're not even naming states anymore. they're answering it in terms of getting some delegatedelegates. >> the rest is all chitchat. another break for us. when we come back, more on how this ongoing slow-rolling coronavirus crisis is affecting the business of campaigning, and what we will have to show you tonight when we come back.

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territory. i actually just saw one of the biden campaign staffers taping a note to the door at this event center saying the biden event is canceled. that's because of the ongoing fears about coronavirus. i just heard from the dnc who said they're making changes to the debate format for next week, most notably, there won't be a studio audience watching the debate along with us. another difference, cnn now saying there won't be a spin room or a filing center for media who go there to cover it. this just presents a new phase in this campaign. a new reality for those of us who cover campaign politics because you and i both know that's the bread and butter of covering politics, is being face-to-face with voters. all of those face-to-face interactions thereat are so important. and frankly, it just harkens me back to iowa when the candidates were thrown another curveball with the senators having to be in washington for impeachment. voters then telling us they weren't faulting the candidates for this new reality that they had to deal with of being in d.c. i imagine that's what we're going to hear going forward if the campaigns continue to have to cancel events for coronavirus. but there really is no

substitute for that face-to-face campaigning, and this is what all of the candidates now still in the race are going to have to face as we head into this next phase of the calendar dealing with wanting to win states, wanting to be around voters, but also wanting to be safe about it. >> one of the great american cities tonight, with grim news, however, for retail politics. ali vitali in cleveland. senator sanders, as we mentioned, also canceled his rally. also in cleveland, josh letterman covering that campaign tonight. hey, josh. >> hey, brian. shock and disappointment here at the planned rally for bernie sanders in cleveland that is now not going to happen. we have been seeing people exiting the building, packing up boxes. they had been planning to sell stickers and bumper stickers. now that's not going to happen. bernie sanders actually just landed in the last couple of minutes in vermont. he diverted to burlington once he canceled this event.

we don't yet know whether we will actually be able to see bernie sanders this evening as these results are coming in. but we did just hear from sanders in a statement expressing concerns about long voting lines, not only in michigan, but also in other parts of the country voting today. bernie sanders calling that, quote, an outrage, and calling on polling officials to keep the polls open longer if necessary to allow more people to vote. here in cleveland, we're hearing concerns from some sanders supporters that given the way bernie sanders tends to campaign with these massive rallies, less retail politicking like joe biden, instead, having these really large events, if he's not able to do rallies because of these coronavirus concerns, that's going to have to fundamentally change the way he campaigns going forward. brian. >> josh letterman, thanks. >> fascinating. >> two notable things there. without a spin room, how are we going to know who won the debate. secondly, and more seriously, bernie sanders, who has already

carried vermont, going home to vermont tonight. >> yeah, this is interesting. it was interesting alone that we have 6 states that are voting tonight. we have michigan, missouri, north dakota, idaho, washington, all these states, and neither of the candidates was planning on being in any of those states tonight. and maybe that's because they didn't know for sure that they were going to -- they could count on which states they were going to win, so they didn't want to put their candidates there, maybe. looking ahead to next week is not crazy. next week is four very important states. ohio, arizona, illinois, florida. all big states. but for both candidates tonight to be planning to be not only not in any of tonight's states, but both of them in ohio and both of them in cleveland, and then both of them canceling, was strange enough. now, to have senator sanders going home. >> yeah, you would expect senator sanders is behind in the delegate race. you would expect -- i would expect him to still be in michigan tonight. i mean, rather than hopping on to the next state, because he's got to play for this week.

he's got to scramble for the delegates that rob gibbs was talking about. every delegate counts. he's got to make up some ground, because next doesn't look that great for him. >> if your cleveland rally gets canceled for reasons beyond your control, that's a sort of sunk cost. you can go back to one of the states that's voting tonight. >> you're very close to michigan when you're in cleveland. so to go to vermont, it seems like an odd decision. >> well, i also think that the sanders campaign is going to have to make different strategic decisions. they're going to have to make the same kind of strategic changes that the trump administration and the trump campaign is going to have to make. that is how they present themselves to voters. both sanders and trump have had success doing it their way. joe biden has never been a rally convener or a gifted rally, you know, speaker. and i don't say that as an insult. i say that as, you know, different politicians have different strengths and weaknesses. and giant rallies are not joe biden's. but i think this crisis, and we

may -- we'll learn more as the night goes on, but this is now a thing. and all campaigns, including the trump campaign, have to sort of, you know, regroup and figure out how they're going to present themselves to voters moving forward. they cannot -- i mean, the campaign that jeopardizes someone's safety is the campaign that will never escape that brand. so they all have to go and meet with law enforcement, they have to meet with health -- they have to make sure they're moving their candidate around in a way that protects the candidate and their supporters. >> and you can't just say elderly and immuno suppressed or people please don't come to the rallies, because the problem, of course, is that healthy young people could go to the rallies and then take it home to elderly immunosuppressed people who could then die. and i mean, that's the problem. that's the reason you restrict these sort of -- >> also, we shouldn't understate, he has not had a great stretch. the endorsement from elizabeth

warren didn't go to either one, but it did not go tobu bernie sande sanders. the endorsements from kamala harris and cory booker went to joe biden. he deployed them in michigan. bernie sanders has had a challenging stretch. the idea he's sort of regrouping or meeting with staff makes sense to me. >> maybe this is a larger regrouping. you're right. he lost maine, lost massachusetts. he got beat by 30 points in south carolina, and the ensuing week has not been good. i will still say i'm surprised to see him going home. maybe they are hitting the reset button. maybe we'll get a statement from the campaign about what they're doing. we should also mention as biden and sanders both canceled their planned rallies tonight in ohio, the trump re-election campaign did announce an event of some stripe in milwaukee, wisconsin, for thursday, march 19th. they're calling it a catholics for trump coalition launch, but

it's got a general admission doors opening date, and otherwise sounds like a rally. >> they expect several thousand people will attend. whatever they call it, it's the kind of large gathering that vice president pence and tony fauci warned against today at the 6:30 break. >> i'm still dwelling on your point, forgive me, what bernie stood at is massive indoor rallies. for that matter, 10,000 people in boston common in the middle of the winter. what biden is best at is finding the one person in a crowd who has suffered a personal loss and ten minutes of absolute laser focus time. both of those encounters are now the kind of thing we have been waved off of. >> what's it going to do to the debate in terms of the advantage in the debate, to have nobody in the debate hall? to have that before zero audience? sanders and biden campaigns have been fighting over whether or not they would be standing or seated and all these other dynamics they're fighting over. having it in front of an empty room will change the way the debate goes. >> no doubt.

and i think both of these men are, politicians are fueled by their supporters and by reactions, and i don't know that we have ever seen a reactionless debate. it will be televised but there won't be any reaction. >> imagine that. another break for us. when we come back, we're going to look at the first states up in about 15 minutes to close. i'm your 70lb st. bernard puppy, and my lack of impulse control, is about to become your problem. ahh no, come on. i saw you eating poop earlier. my focus is on the road, and that's saving me cash with drivewise. from anyone else. so why accept it from your allergy pills? flonase relieves your worst symptoms

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about ten minutes away from the first poll closings in three states. we want to give you a viewers guide of indicators to look for, to indicate if your candidates potentially is having a good outing or a bad outing. bad out. for that, steve kornacki at the big board. >> you know, brian, there is one particular group of voters when we look ahead to missouri and michigan two of the prizes out there tonight. one particular group of voters, sanders' fate particularly depends on. let me show you that. starting here in michigan, this is where the exit poll is showing us in terms of the composition, the biggest single group in michigan, 37% of the electorate today in michigan non-college white, white voters without a college degree. michigan is a state with a particularly high population of non-college white voters in 2016. when bernie sanders defeated hillary clinton in michigan, he got a double-digit victory with non-college white voters. big part of the story.

hillary clinton in 2016, this is the same demographic, non-college white voters, she particularly struggled with the in the general election with donald trump. all eyes on this group here in michigan. this will also be a story in missouri tonight. another state with a large population, large democratic voting population of non-college white voughteters. one thing to keep in mind, the los angeles rams bells for sanders have been going off. one of the reasons to date, coming into tonight, among this group of voters, non-college white voters, if you add of all the exit polls, sanders is not in first place. it's actually joe biden who is running a point ahead of bernie sanders. we saw this particularly on super tuesday, a week ago tonight. there are states with some similar demographics to michigan. minnesota in particular, non-college white voters in minnesota. we saw joe biden a week ago win them double digits over bernie sanders. for bernie sanders, this needs to change tonight. this needs to change in michigan. this needs to change in missouri. or he's going to be in some trouble tonight.

that's a big group of voters. we're keeping a very close eye on tonight. >> steve kornacki, thank you very much. i want to bring into the coffer nation now ryan nave, editor in chief of mississippi today. it was founded by nbc news chairman andy lack. he continues to serve on their direct. mr. nate, thanks very much for joining us. we appreciate you taking some time today. >> thanks for having me. i appreciate it. >> so, we haven't seen a lot of public polling in mississippi. we have seen some exit poll data about who is turning out. and we know how well hillary clinton did against bernie sanders in mississippi in 2016. all those sort of indicators seem to be pointing in one direction. what's your view from on the ground in jackson in terms of how this is going tonight between sanders and biden? >> yeah, i mean, i suspect vice-president biden will have a pretty good night in mississippi tonight. he probably didn't have to spend the day here on sunday, but he spent an entire day in mississippi in jackson, sort of checking all the boxes. he was at a prominent african-american black church

which is pastored by the president of the national baptist convention. he went to soul food in southwest jackson. he ended the day at a college, tupelo college which is a historic black university near jackson. as if to say, look, i'm not going to concede young voters to bernie sanders, you know. i think i have something that appeals to young voters as well. and so president trump has been to the state a lot. and if you look at the images from that rally in tugalu, they were every bit as rock us and energetic as a trump rally. he took a selfie with pretty much everybody and their mama a day. >> in terms of the sanders campaign in mississippi, obviously they got clobbered there in 2016. one of the things we've watched in this race is to see whether or not the sanders campaign has been nimble enough to make up for some of their shortcomings in 2016, to make up for some of the things that cost them so many delegates. it was, therefore, sort of a surprise even though i think biden has been favored in

mississippi, to see the sanders campaign call off their last mississippi event. it's not that he never went to mississippi over the course of this entire campaign, but his last event there he called off and went to michigan instead. i wonder if that had any sort of resonance in the state. >> yeah, you know, senator sanders has been to the state before. i mean, he was here a few years ago rallying workers at the nissan plant in canton. his supporters are saying, look, bernie has been here when it matters, not just to campaign. and even though he skipped the state, i mean, his surrogates spent a lot of time in mississippi. danny glover who is also actively involved in the organizing campaign at the auto plant here spent, you know, two full days. he had a full schedule. he was, you know, not just speaking to church groups, but he was actively canvassing for votes in north jackson. you know, a suit and tie. and so his workers are out

knocking on doors, you know, trying to drum up support and shore up support among particularly young progressives here in mississippi. >> ryan nave, editor in chief of mississippi today. it's good to have you with us tonight. >> thank you. >> exciting from mississippi, about to get the results. thank you so much, sir. >> let's hear from another friend of ours. julie reid has been watching and listening to all of this with us. she is the host of a.m. joy. miss reid, what are you looking for tonight? >> i agree mississippi is probably going to be a very good state for joe biden tonight. but, you know, i suspect that for sanders' fans, if he does not do well in michigan, i don't see where he wins tonight. and i think that the challenge for the sanders' campaign is to find a place where they can win that's got a demographic, you know, makeup that reflects the democratic party. so i think skipping, you know,

the chocolate and the mamba event, in mississippi that may have made sense from a tactical point of view. it is important they do well in michigan, like they have to do well in michigan. i think when you combine that with really not having a robust african-american outreach effort in the south before super tuesday with not being in selma, with not having -- them now rolling out these obama sort of support ads and calling black elected officials, they should have done that before south carolina. and so trying to make up for that outreach now, i'm not sure that it helps them. and i think that you're now in a state where, look, the obama/biden administration saved the auto industry. and they're not facing hillary clinton who has a sort of built-in, i don't know why i don't like her kind of factor from voters. it's going to be -- i suspect it will not be the best night ever for the sanders campaign, but then they're going to have to regroup and figure out how next week they rebound with florida sitting right out there, you know. and florida, i suspect is going

to be another really, really tough primary because that interview on "60 minutes," my friends in florida are still texting me about it. they're still angry about it. >> let me ask you, though, you say if he doesn't win michigan you don't see where else he can win. tonight we have north dakota, idaho and washington state where he won by 30, 40, 50-point margins in 2016. you're not expecting him to lose those states tomorrow, are you? >> not necessarily. that's true. that's a very good point. i'm looking at the bigger states. those smaller states he could do well theoretically. that would be go good. he has to make up a margin. he's 80 down from biden now. he has to start to clobber some of these margins. he has to do well in the bigger states. that's a good point. he can do well in the smaller states. that's not going to cut into the margin. >> washington is the second-most delegates than michigan. it was a caucus last tight time. it's a primary this time. it's vote by mail. biden has been surging recently. some of that might be excluded in terms much being reflected in

the vote. the polling in washington has been very hard to read even though -- sanders won by such a huge margin in 2016. that's going to be late in terms of those results. that's going to be -- it's not even 11:00 p.m., it does president close until 11:00 p.m. eastern. >> right. >> i think some of those states are going to be fascinating to watch. >> in washington, isn't that a state where they didn't have a primary? the primary is different from what a caucus looks like. >> they did both. >> hillary clinton did better in the primary. we'll see. the other thing, i would take a look. i don't know if this is in your text message world as the political operatives are are texting me. a lot about how coronavirus is changing people's attitudes and changing the way people think about the vote and who they want to be the next democratic nominee. that is weighing in. i think a lot of people are thinking about that when they think about who to vote for. >> it seems to me contract coronavirus clearly it's going to have a political impact. it seems the political impact in terms of the arrow vectors is like an asterisk.

it can cut in any direction. uh you don't know where it goes. >> you don't. and we have a bad response as a country right now to the coronavirus. bad and irresponsible response. what does that make people want to do in terms of their politics? it's not actually clear people have a rational response in that. >> right. i will give you one quick anecdote from a friend of mine who lives in michigan, who dealt with the flint water crisis who is strongly for bernie sanders. what about like the union health benefits that you negotiated, that your families negotiated? and what this friend said is that's not necessarily something people want to hang onto because if you're really sick -- let's say you lose your job, you lose that anyway. there is still a lot of insecurity in some of those uni union families. that could help bernie sanders in michigan. >> absolutely. >> on that point about corona, i talked to political strategists that work on senate campaigns, democratic and republican, and they think that a lot of democrats may be landing on biden because there's too much at stake. it's too risky to go with the

revolution. we need someone we trust to get us through this coronavirus. >> it has been a dynamic thing we have heard about. as we gently point out, we have an election alert as we are now ten seconds away from the top of the hour. 8:00 p.m. here in the east. daylight savings time as of last weekend. and here we go. at 8:00, the first polls have closed and we are projecting, nbc news is projecting that when all the votes are counted, joe biden will be your winner in the state of mississippi tonight. moving north to missouri, too early to call. biden leads. north dakota, too early to call. that is your top of the hour delegates awarded thus far tonight. again, if our projection matches all of the votes when they are in, 21-0, joe biden.

>> interesting to get a poll closing call at mississippi. if i had to bet on there being one of those tonight, that is the one i would -- >> you and i would have bet correctly. >> exactly. in terms of missouri and north dakota, we should be clear, it's too early to call in one of the states, in missouri. we are saying that biden is in the lead. >> too early to call, biden leads. >> no characterization in north dakota. >> no characterization in north dakota. you won't get one out of me. not going there. >> we have three more states where we still have poll closings yet to come. but the way this night is going to go, it seems to me like there isn't a set of circumstances tonight that could be determinative for joe biden. there is a set of circumstances tonight that could be determinative for bernie sanders. if senator sanders gets wiped out tonight, if, for example, i don't think this is going to happen personally. but if he loses in states that he won by nearly 40, nearly 50, nearly 60 points in 2016 and joe

biden wins those in addition to winning african americans all over the country, in addition to winning suburban voters, in addition to winning the other demographics that have been important for sanders, they are going to need to really reset the sanders campaign if he's going to stay in the race. >> yeah. >> we'll see how this goes tonight, but there is more -- especially with biden now having mississippi in his pocket. with five states still to go in terms of results, it's important tonight for senator sanders that he doesn't get wiped out. >> and a lot of wisdom in what joy reid just said on that same front. look who is standing by at the top of the hour. our friend steve at the big board. what do you have? >> we can take you through why this call was made in mississippi, why the characterization was made in missouri and what we can already tell us you as a result of the delegate race, all-important delegate race. we set this up. mississippi will have the highest share of black voters of any state to vote this cycle. here's what it looks like. joe biden 84% of the black vote in mississippi.

this is two-thirds of the electorate. bernie sanders with 13%. if you went back in time to 2016 when bernie sanders had so much trouble with black voters, his share in mississippi back then was 11%. in four years of time, he went from 11 to 13 in mississippi, basically no improvement there for him. take a look at the black vote in missouri tonight. again, this is a little bit less than one in five votes out of missouri. from black voters, you can see a 75 to 22 biden margin. missouri again, too early to call with biden ahead. this is actually worse for sanders in this exit poll in missouri than he fared with black voters there four years ago. four years ago, i'm just looking at the numbers right here. i have it written down. >> 32. >> he was at 32. he's ten points worse. we set this up a minute ago. white college, white non-college. missouri and michigan in particular, these groups loom large. these groups were important for sanders. non-college especially four years ago. take a look here. white non-college in missouri.

this is a group sanders won four years ago in missouri. tonight he is losing this group. he is trailing this group 53 to 40, a 13-point advantage for joe biden. there has been a lot of talk about sanders slipping with non-college white voters. perhaps because some who favored him in '16 were more voting against hillary clinton than for bernie sanders. perhaps biden a more acceptable candidate than hillary clinton to this group of voters. a 13-point advantage in the exit poll for biden over sanders. we say, what does what we just went through mean for the all-important delegate race? we can show you right here already the numbers if you've been paying close attention. they have changed since you tuned in. so far from mississippi as a result of that poll time close, 21 delegates have been added for joe biden. there are 36 up for grabs. 21 of those 36, at least, are decision desk says joe biden will win. you can expect that number to rise. it is very significant that as we allocate 21 of those 36, at

least 21 of those 36 to biden. so far at poll closing time, zero have been allocated by our decision desk to bernie sanders. what does that mean? it means, based on that exit poll, our decision desk is not completely confident that bernie sanders will hit 15% in mississippi. you have to hit 15% statewide to tap into that statewide delegate pool. based on that exit poll, he certainly could. he did last time. he did last time by a point. he got 16% in mississippi in 2016. he's going to have to hit 15, 16 again this time. we are not yet confident that that's going to happen. it could. we want to see the results come in. so, again, you can expect from a delegate standpoint that joe biden is going to end up with the lion's share of those 36 delegates from mississippi. what does that mean just in terms of the raw delegate race, by the way? if biden were to get 30 out of mississippi tonight, it means that even if bernie sanders won michigan tonight, where there are 125 delegates, if sanders

won michigan by a point or two, heed probably net 5, 6, 7 delegates, something like that out of michigan. a narrow win, heed net 5 to 10 delegates probably. he's going to lose probably a net of about 25 or so, maybe more out of mississippi. this landslide, this absolute landslide victory for joe biden in mississippi from a delegate standpoint is probably the single-most valuable thing anybody is going to take out of this night. >> wow. >> wow. claire mccaskill, you know missouri. >> i do. >> we don't have a call in missouri. it's too early to call and the nbc news characterization is joe biden is in the lead. with those exit poll numbers, with sanders at 22% support among african-american voters, that's down 10% from where he was in 2016. with sanders losing white-no college voters to biden by i think steve said it was 13 points, tell us how that resonates for you as a missourian. >> well, if you look at the

democratic nominee, first, they have to do well with african-american voters. joe biden has proven time and time again that he has got that really almost locked down. secondly, you have to do well in suburban women. joe biden is doing very well with suburban women. what donald trump did in 2016 is he picked our pocket of white non-college voters. i don't care what all the union presidents said in washington. their rank and file voted for donald trump, especially in the building trades. they voted for donald trump. what joe biden is showing in missouri tonight is there are going to be more white-noncollege voters in missouri that voted for him tonight and they're going to be populating these communities. and sometimes it's about whether you can speak up for the other guy. and i'm not saying that missouri is anywhere in contention in november. i'm sure that donald trump will still be favored there by not as much as last time, but that portends in other states. if biden is able to bring back

home these white non-college educated voters together with the unurban women who have had it up to here with the nonsense of trump, and african-american voters, no wonder donald trump doesn't want him to be the nominee. >> it's like pennsylvania, michigan. >> pennsylvania, michigan, ohio, indiana, you know, all the states that a lot of those white non-college educated voters voted for barack obama. and i think -- he's always said from the beginning of the campaign, i can get them back. and him going toe to toe with that union member today where the rest of the union guys were all around and he used a bad word, that will help him with those voters. it won't hurt him, it will help him. >> we have a bit of a change in our characterization. it's additional information, but we try to be transparent and pass along everything we learn. from missouri, while it is still too early to call, while biden still leads, we've made the

determination that, indeed, both candidates will cross the threshold. both candidates will be awarded delegates out of the state of missouri when it's all said and done. >> huh. >> for now let's talk to a son of the american south. that would be hal rains, former executive of "the new york times," won the pulitzer prize in 1992 for his coverage of segregation in his native birmingham, alabama. hal, it's great to have you back on the air. great to see you. i'm curious what you make of the kind of blue wave through the south that the biden campaign has just stitched another piece into tonight, what they have been able to cobble together. >> thanks, brian. it's great to be with you. and biden's success in the south last week continues a pattern where he is putting not just the south in play, but the sunbelt

in play in a way that the democrats haven't been able to do for sometime. this is a fascinating kinetic moment in this campaign. i mean, never before have we had this kind of nominating contest under the shadow of a global pandemic. so we're really living history in real-time. and i think one of the things that in my years, i've got a lot of this gray hair on nights like this. i have to say i've never known anyone who did the political demographics of these contests better than steve kornacki. what he's sketching for us i think builds on what we saw happening last week, which is a coalescing of the democratic center and center left around joe biden. without getting too far out, i'm taken back to 1976 when carter

at this point in the primaries was able to overcome the "anybody but carter" movement in his own party. i'm taken back to 1980 when reagan was able to overcome the "anybody but reagan" movement in his own party. this has the feel to me of a contest that's lurching toward an "anybody but sanders" moment. i, like eugene, was stunned that sanders went back to vermont tonight. that sends to me a defeatist signal. and, again, i'm cautioning myself about being predictive, but this is one of those nights when you feel the earth moving. >> hal, let's go back to your choice of the 1980 result. that's interesting because an incumbent lost to a republican challenger because of an

exigency, the failure of a u.s. raid to get the hostages. we have an exigency underway for our incumbent president. a lot of his errors have been forced. this is unforced. this was something he was handed and we know not as of yet how this is going to play out over the next couple of months. >> that's an excellent parallel, brian. but i have to say i think, again, back to the kinetic nature of this moment, today for the first time the white house had a pretty good day in the public relations battle, and they didn't have it because of the president. they had it because of vice-president pence is beginning to come into a more positive focus. and he and the medical experts and lawrence kudlow who were out there this afternoon gave the white house upbeat, if that's an overstatement, but the first generally positive day they've

had in this disastrous run. i think the exigency model you're talking about is dangerous for trump for this reason. people know he makes errors. people know he lies. but he's been given a wide strike zone, and this makes him look like he's not a manager. and this is a big management task. and i'm looking at that six out of ten non-college white men. they are the core of trump's base. and i think the managerial missteps that he's made really put him in a carter-like position. that's an excellent analogy on your part. >> hal reigns with us tonight from pensacola, florida, a state we'll be talking about just days from now. hal, it's great to have you on the air. on behalf of our friend and

colleague steve kornacki, a, we agree with you. b, thank you for your kindness and your generosity. all right, steve kornacki, you can now tell us what motivated the vote tonight that we know of in missouri and in mississippi. >> yeah, here's -- we have talked about this question of is there a ceiling for bernie sanders. are there critical chunks of voters in these democratic primaries that he is just not able to reach beyond a very minimal standpoint with. let me show you some evidence for the answer yes to that tonight. first of all, voters age 65 and over. that's a big group in democratic primaries. you're talking to states like 20% of the democratic electorate. look at the voters tonight. age 65-plus in mississippi. we can show you this. 86 to 11, biden over sanders. we talked a few minutes ago about how the sanders campaign in 2016 said they have to do better among african-american voters. they have not been able to do so.

this is another group. older voters in 2016 in this same state, you saw 91 for clinton and 9 for sanders. it basically hasn't moved in four years. he's gone from 9 to 11% with voters 65-plus in mississippi. and in missouri take a look at this tonight, age 65-plus. this is like a fifth of the electorate. 77% for biden, 17% for bernie sanders. four years ago bernie sanders actually hit 30% with this group in missouri. he's gone from 30 down to 17. so biden doing even better there in missouri. but this is the thing we saw with bernie sanders in those early primaries. in iowa, in new hampshire, in nevada. we saw sanders getting numbers like this with older voters, maybe a little bit lower. but it wasn't standing out, because among the rest of the field it was kind of split. biden was getting some, warren was getting some, buttigieg was getting some, klobuchar was getting some. but what you have seen since this became a one on one race, this is where you see it most dramatically. this is where you see all of those voters saying clearly

here, the non-sanders candidate, they're saying in mississippi, they're saying it in missouri, they said it in the super tuesday states. big group of democratic voters closed off to sanders in '16, and they look just as closed off in 2020. >> steve, it's interesting to look at these particular slices of the electorate and how they turned out in these states. do we have anyway to characterize at this point the overall turnout levels in mississippi or in missouri? are lots of people turning out? >> with no returns -- i'm going to check and see if anything has come in since i started this. we may have literally a few votes in missouri. literally a few votes. hundreds here. we can't tell you that. i can tell you that across all of the democratic primaries and caucuses so far, we are apples to apples compare songs with 2016 are possible, states aren't caucuses in '16 and switched to primaries in '20. where you can compare apples to apples, even with a million votes to come in in california,

turnout is up 26% in democratic primaries this year. some really dramatic ones. in south carolina in particular. there is one state so far we have seen, one state where it's down and that is oklahoma. >> fascinating. steve kornacki, thank you very much. >> we are waiting to hear from our decision desk. let's find out what the update is. we are projecting joe biden will be your victor in the show me state of missouri when all the votes are counted there. just this second since steve finished up his presentation. so mississippi and claire mccaskill's home state of missouri for joe biden. your reaction? >> i'm not surprised. and i think -- >> she predicted it like 20 minutes ago. >> i was here. >> yeah, i'm not surprised at all. i do think his delegate count will also be big because in missouri, it depends on the congressional districts and how

democratic they are. and so the most delegates will come out of cd-1, which is a primarily african-american congressional district. i think more than 50%, around 50% african-american. so he's going to do very well in that congressional district. i think there's eight delegates in that district. so i think by the time the delegate math is all done, not only will he win by a big margin in missouri tonight. he's also going to take a big haul of delegates out of there. keep in mind, you know what the core score was four years ago? 49.6 to 49.4. the closest primary in america was my state in 2016. what a difference four years have made. what a difference joe biden has made in this particular race. >> and we should be clear in terms of delegates, we do have an nbc news characterization in terms of delegates in missouri. it's not specific, but the projection is now that biden will win, and that sanders will meet the viability threshold to

get himself some delegates. just a matter of how many go which way. >> he's definitely going to make the threshold. the question is will biden be able to run up the score in the congressional demographics. >> let's bring in the former editorial board member of the kansas city star, journalism pro percent at the university of missouri kansas city. mr. kre skg e, thank you for being here. >> glad to be with you. >> let me ask you about the results. nbc news has projected a winner in missouri, biden as the winner. senator sanders is projected to meet the viability threshold. he will be looking at delegates. no shut out in missouri. this is a fairly quick call for the vice-president tonight. >> maybe not too surprising given the fact vice-president biden has been leading in missouri in the polls consistently since last year. so, you know, he really fits the

political temperament of the democratic party in missouri. this is still in some ways harry truman's democratic party as senator mccaskill knows as well as anybody. conservative democrats are sort of -- have been the way things have been run in this state for so many years. even back in the '90s when democrats were dominant in this state. it's a harry truman style of democratic party here. >> one of the things that was so interesting in 2016, which senator mccaskill just noted, was the closest primary of the entire contest in 2016. >> very close. >> is that -- senator sanders in 2016 had won a majority of union household in the state, and that was seen as being key to him doing so well and getting so close there. i wonder if there is any indication, if you've been able to see it in your reporting or anecdotally in any of the data how union households might have felt differently or felt the same way about senator sanders four years later. >> you know, joe biden has a whole lot of union support in a

state like missouri. there is absolutely no question about that. i was also really struck by the polls in some of the break downs that i saw, even in the middle part of the state. columbia, home of the university of missouri where bernie sanders did so well four years ago. in the polls i was looking at, joe biden was beating him easily there. even in a place like a hot bed of campus liberalism, if you will. so, boy, it looks to me like joe biden has really run the table tonight in missouri in a very impressive way, in a very much more decisive win for the vice-president than anything that hillary clinton managed to muster here four years ago. >> so this is a big moment for me, steve kre skg e. for 30 years you asked me hard questions. >> that's right. >> you asked me questions. it will be a very easy one.

talk about the urban rural divide in missouri and whether or not you think joe biden can crack that really chasm we've seen develop that turned our state red. you get kansas city blue, columbia and the rest ruby red. do you think joe biden can actually do better, the margins in rural missouri this time? >> i don't think there's any question, senator, that he will do better. i think the bigger question is can joe biden make up a 19-point gap. that's what trump won missouri by in 2016 over hillary clinton. that strikes me as a really big job, too big for the former vice-president. again, as you know better than i, missouri has really swung republican in a dramatic way going back 15, 20 years now in this state. and i think joe biden can, you know, show maybe within -- get within single digits of the president, but winning this

state just too big of a bite of the apple, i think, right now. >> steve from public radio cpr, kansas city, thank you for being with us. big night. nice to have you here. >> happy to be here. >> couple of subplots we're working on. we're going to get to early vote that is in and done and dusted in michigan. of course, those polls close at the top of the next hour. we want to check in on the biden campaign. they've been in the news tonight because like the sanders campaign, they have idled everybody by cancelling their event for tonight. so, mike memoli, traveling with the biden campaign, what brings you to a place like philadelphia, pennsylvania, tonight? >> well, brian, this is the second primary night of the cycle where i've ended up in a location i was not expecting to be when the day started. in this case, we are in philadelphia after leaving cleveland on very short notice a little while ago.

and the reason, of course, joe biden had plans to hold an election night rally in cleveland, ohio, to help get a head start on the ohio primary next week. but like senator sanders, the biden campaign bowing to the coronavirus fears and the fact that ohio governor mike de wine had held a press conference hours earlier saying that any sort of public indoor events were not advised to go forward. and so the biden campaign, rather than even delivering a statement in ohio, decided to come here to philadelphia. we're at the national constitution center where we can expect to hear from the vice-president tonight, not just about the results tonight on what is shaping up, again, to be a very good night for him, but also to again speak about the coronavirus, the administration's response and what it would look like potentially under a biden administration. some other news from the biden campaign on their schedule. they had already announced in the days leading unto the primary today that he would have a full schedule this week. that he would head to florida, to illinois, obviously to the debate on sunday. and then again to florida. they at this point are taking

things day by day. he's canceled a planned stop in tampa, florida, on thursday. instead joe biden will speak in his hometown of wilmington, delaware, again about the administration's response to the coronavirus. and this is a real moment, of course, for joe biden, somebody who has served in an administration that dealt with a similar pandemic response in the ebola crisis. to step back and remind voters what that administration's response looked like and what it would look like going forward for joe biden. >> you said he was cancelling the stop in tampa. what day was that supposed to be? >> on thursday. he's scheduled tomorrow at this point, and thursday he will deliver those remarks in wilmington on the coronavirus. >> interesting. we're not only seeing super last-minute changes with senator sanders and vice-president biden cancelling these colorado -- excuse me, these ohio events tonight. sorry. cleveland. i was combining -- my ko

consonants, they got mixed up. changing ahead and planning down the week -- >> on the campaign, if you are alive and you saw 8 seconds of donald trump at the cdc in a maga hat, some weird jacket talking about an uncle that went to m.i.t. and how the doctors told him how great he was at science, you, too, would see a vacuum in terms of presidential leadership. and if you were a smart person wanting to have the job of president, you would decide that, listen, the coronavirus is not donald trump's fault, but voters judge leaders on how they react to things that are out of their control. and that event on friday was whack-a-do. wearing a jacket and baseball hat -- forget what it said, make america great again. why was he wearing a hat at the cdc? >> he was on his way to the golf course. >> it gets more alarming every

time. i think we are also overthinking some of why bernie is struggling. four years ago it was about who would come after barack obama, who had done probably satisfying things for democrats. but there was probably an itch to go further, to do more on health care. now we've had four years of donald trump. now we probably want to get back to zero. i really think there are things happening that are -- to those of us who sort of stare at trees all day, i think the forest looks really scary for a lot of americans. i think if joe biden is taking some time to think about sort of calmly talk to people about this emergency, that's probably a smart thing to do. >> you know, nicolle, one of the things i think we have to say here is everybody in america knows this president lies. but he lies about things that matter and he lies about things that don't matter. but now we have a crisis, and they know he's lying. they know that he said, oh, it's going to be nothing and, you know, if i build a wall, i'll stop it. and everybody can have a test.

and then all of a sudden i think a lot of people go, wait a minute, wait a minute, we will look past your lying about whatever silly thing you're lying about. normally it is something stupid. but we're not going to really accept you lying about whether or not our health is in danger countrywide. >> and what we should do to keep ourselves safe. specifically lying to americans about what the recommendations are from the scientists. >> it is crazy that he is contradicting the science real-time. and i think, you know, i kept thinking this lie will do it, this lie will do it. these lies might actually do it. >> but you played that radio interview. this is really important. you started your show with this. i mean, the fact that people know the experts have to sort of do things on the phone so that trump might not see them on cable, i think people have this sense that it's too crazy. it's too weird. >> where they can be candid and

professional, as you pointed out tonight. >> and honest. >> the associated press broke news this weekend that the cdc had recommended, had issued a recommendation, handed it over to the white house, that older people, older americans not get on commercial airplanes. that that would be a recommendation both for people who had underlying health conditions, but also just for older americans. and it was reported by the associated press that the white house kiboshed that recommendation, did not allow the cdc to make that recommendation to the public. and so the cdc didn't. and now an anonymous federal official who was familiar with that recommendation being spiked by the white house has gone to the a.p. to blow the whistle and not incidentally, to let the american people know that was the recommendation, even though your white house -- this president will not let you hear it. and if we're going to have to result to an underground railroad of true information about a virus that is going to put our parents and grandparents at risk of dying in considerable numbers, we are in territory that doesn't even feel like

politics. we're in territory that is a crisis of governance that i think has very, very unpredictable political dynamics and political effects ahead. >> claire, to your point, your local news becomes your reality. just as in new york local news tonight is about the one-mile circle around the new york suburb of new rochelle. as someone who started out in local news living in jasper county, missouri, it becomes your reality. if you have two deaths locally, there's nothing the president can say who is going to talk you out of having two deaths locally. so that's the point i keep returning to. >> yep. >> steve kornacki, rescue us. our viewers would fairly ask at 29 minutes before the next poll closing, how is it you're reporting results from michigan that are legally available, publicly available results, steve kornacki? >> we've got a ton of them. basically the central time zone takes you into the upper peninsula, therefore there is no characterization from nbc news. but the state starts reporting

and we're getting a ton of results here. you can see joe biden has now moved into the lead statewide by 3 points. but i think when you've got partial returns, what becomes significant is what counties do we have a lot of vote from right now and how is what we are seeing right now, how does it compare to what we saw four years ago. because remember for bernie sanders, his color here on this map is purple. just seeing purple in a county is not enough for sanders. he's got to be getting the share of the vote within those counties that he got four years ago to be on pace to replicate what he did -- let me show you what i mean by this. ann arbor here. this is the university of michigan. this is eastern michigan university. this is a big college county. and you see here this is basically counting up the early vote. they have a lot more early vote in michigan this time than they did four years ago. that's why it says 1%. you have a lot of votes here. you see sanders leading, a 6-point margin for sanders. that's good for him, but keep in mind when he won this state by the skin of his teeth four years ago in this same county, he was

winning by 11 points. so this is -- right now in the early vote at least here, again, this is a college area, university of michigan, eastern michigan. sanders right now at 6 when he was at 11 in terms of the margin four years ago. let's see as the same day comes in if he's able to tick that up or he comes in under his '16 margin. take a look at kent county. this is a biggie. this is 6% of all the votes statewide. grand rapids, gerald ford's hometown. western michigan. you see again here, basically early vote, sanders up by 6 here. what did kent county look like in 2016, though? this was a landslide for bernie sanders in 2016. he won kent county by 25 points in the early going here, early vote. he's leading this by 6. again, to be on pace to get what he got out of michigan four years ago, that number has got to come up or he's got to make up for it elsewhere. take a look next door. ottowa county, this is an interesting part of michigan here. this is the dutch reform church, a big presence out here

culturally. again, half the vote out here in ottowa county, 50 to 45 biden. four years ago it was 64-34 clinton in this county. these are pretty significant changes in some -- i think this is -- we have saginaw here. we have same day in saginaw. hillary clinton -- here's another example. this was not a sanders county in saginaw. in 2016 clinton won this by 12, right. en route to narrowly losing the state. here's biden leading it by 23. as we have -- and look at this. i say it's all coming in here. here are two biggies. these are the two next door neighbor counties. oakland county, this has one of the highest median incomes in the country. here's joe biden leading it. 56-40. you talk about the surge democrats in 2016. oakland is ground zero county. 16%, biden leading it by 16. you take a look here in 2016, it was only 4 for clinton. you're seeing improvement for biden over clinton everywhere

we've looked so far. you start to add that up. about 21% in here, biden leads this thing now over sanders, 52-43. one more check here. this is mccomb county. ancestral home of the reagan democrats. this was a disaster for hillary clinton in the general election. this was a ten-point biden lead in the primary four years ago t. was narrow. clinton won it by two. we've gone through a number of significant counties where there is a fair amount of vote in right now. every single one of them we just went through has biden overperforming what hillary clinton did four years ago in narrowly losing the state. >> steve, can i ask you about college towns? one of the things we've seen in terms of anecdote at reporting in michigan is very long lines in college towns. you see that in a lot of states. particularly long lines that are being attributed to the fact that you can same-day register to vote as well as vote, casting your ballot today. are we seeing any evidence of that or is the pace in terms of vote coming in from michigan

reflect any sort of delays or problems in college towns? >> i mean, take a look. we're getting them out of ann arbor, ypsilanti. kalamazoo. this is western michigan university. let's go, broncos. here's bernie sanders leading this thing by half a point. almost all of it is reported. by the way, i say just seeing purple is not enough for bernie sanders. here in the home of western michigan university, sanders leads flare owely with almost a narrowly with almost 40 points. he racked up points in the state university town. he won by 23. at any other time with just a little bit to come in, he is barely winning kalamazoo county again. that pattern we're talking about here, everything we've checked so far has biden overperforming clinton. >> steve kornacki, thank you very much. again, the reason that we've got these results from michigan right now is because most of michigan has voted. >> yes. >> most of them have an 8:00 p.m. eastern time closing time. but there are a number of counties in the state that are still voting. and so there will not be any

call or projection before 9:00 p.m., which is when the last counties in michigan will finally conclude their voting. it should also be noted, i mentioned those long lines and long waits that have been reported. the sanders campaign has tonight called for some precincts to be held, some locations to be held open longer to allow people more time to vote because the lines have been so long and people's wait has been so long. >> robert gibbs, what do you have on michigan, what do you want to know? >> i think what steve pointed out, the two counties right above detroit, right, oakland and mccomb counties, big suburban counties. the difference, if you look at a few years ago, hillary clinton won about 52% of that combined vote. governor witmer, the current governor who won a three-way primary here just two years ago, won more than 55% of the vote in those two counties. on the way to winning 52% statewide. so that's that suburban surge that we talked about pulling house seats from the republican

side back to the democratic side. i think what steve talked about, can bernie keep up this college town vote that he got a few years ago? where's ultimately the black turnout we're going to see in detroit and wayne county, what's the independent vote? it was a big vote for bernie sanders four years ago and i'm really fascinated to know something we won't know for several hours, and that's what's overall turnout in michigan? surprisingly four years ago, republicans actually turned out about 130,000 more voters in the primary. it was one of those foreshadowing moments along with african-american support not being as excited. white non-college voters having a problem with hillary clinton. that overall turnout number was kind of this oh, is michigan going to be a problem? then obviously when we look back past election night, it was bigger than we thought. >> robert, this is nicolle. what is your sense when people say joe biden looks like he's reassembling the obama

coalition, is it too early to call? does it look that way? is that fair? >> it does certainly look that way. obviously it starts with what you've seen him do in southern contests with just rock-solid african-american support. now you're seeing it here in suburbs. you're seeing it split, again -- if bernie is not rolling out bigger margins in kent, kalamazoo, and counties where you have those big college towns, then it's going to be a real problem for him. if you look at the map from four years ago, hillary clinton won probably ten counties in all of michigan and it really was that i-75 spine from detroit up through saginaw and flint where most of her vote was. and i think tonight you're going to see a map with a lot more -- a lot fewer counties colored in for bernie sanders and a lot more for the competition. >> one of the things that's going to be interesting to watch, too, in michigan is after sanders had that super-important

win in michigan in 2016, which again was an upset over hillary clinton. it was a really big deal in the 2016 primary. by all accounts, he seems to have basically left an organizing effort in place in michigan since then. sanders has been on the ground doing organizing in michigan four years. >> four years. >> in preparation for this. to robert's point about what the overall turnout is here, obviously democrats need the turnout to be up everywhere no matter who their nominee is. but if you have four years of organizing under your belt in one of these states, what you ought to show is an uptick in turnout in general. registration is up, people turning up, casting votes, the democratic party looking stronger. that has to be one of the metrics on which i think the success of michigan is going to be evaluated no matter how the delegate math comes down between sanders and biden in the state. >> on the turnout question, joe biden almost seemed to surprise himself when he talked about -- saw that speech after south carolina. and he said, you know, turnout's up. it's not for bernie, it's for

me. he seemed as surprised as everybody else. so far the sort of volume going up on turnout has been in african-american communities, suburban communities, it's good for joe biden, not bernie sanders. >> if you look at the exit polls in michigan, he's been there four years organizing. the narrative of his campaign, i'm going to bring out the young voters. i'm going to bring out the new voters. the youth vote is down in michigan, not up. so it really does -- >> worcester i believe for democrats which is terrible for democrats. >> the youth vote never shows up like we want it to. but it's particularly hard for bernie because that was the narrative of his campaign. >> that's right. >> i've been looking over our shoulders. steve kornacki, suddenly we have 26% of the total in for michigan and polls don't close for 20 minutes. >> polls don't close for 20 minutes, so there's a lot from our exit polling. we'll tell you when they do. but i can show you, again, this

theme, remembering that this state was basically dead even four years ago. it was a very narrow win for bernie sanders. so looking inside the counties where we do have vote, how is a biden comparing to clinton four years ago? so take a look. here's a county -- these are small counties here, but again, this trend we've been talking about, 3/4 of the vote in. here's joe biden at 62% up here. now, four years ago hillary clinton was at 13. that is a double-digit improvement for joe biden over where hillary clinton was. take a look again. 11% in here, 46 clinton, 58 biden. significant improvement there. next door, two-thirds in, 46 clinton, 55 biden. i have yet to come across a county -- we've done about 15 of these so far -- where joe biden is not running better than hillary clinton did four years ago. again, these are small counties, but small counties add up. here's biden at 57. clinton was at 47. one of the reasons bernie sanders was able to win michigan last time around, he ran up big

margins in small counties, in rural counties all around michigan. he didn't actually get -- he lost, as we showed you, mccomb county. he lost oakland county. he won wayne county. he won them big, you add them up. that's biden blue you see up here. again, where you do see bernie -- a little more has come in since we showed you this. kent county, grand rapids, again, it was 62-37 last time around. he has to win in a landslide. really this is going to be the same-day vote. the folks who went out and voted today, that's what's coming in today. that's what sanders has to win in a landslide to get it up to 62%. just checking in. if you're the biden campaign and seeing numbers like this, frankly you are ecstatic. >> steve, i'm under orders to get to a commercial. one of the prettiest spots in north america, charlavoy county,

what are they doing? >> joe biden 54. clinton was at 37 in 2016. a double-digit improvement. stop me if you've heard this one before. >> why did you ask about that county? >> i was looking at the map and i'm figuring you got the oven mitt and you got the thing. >> i got a note from a biden campaign official. they were looking to see where the warren bump went. they feel like they're consolidating some of the college educated women. as a republican, all of the bats went out from the obama coalition. it appears to be happening since south carolina, it started with african-american voters, the story of super tuesday was a suburban vote. if it's true that they are seeing in the missouri exits that college-educated women are flocking to biden in large enough numbers, that has the makings of the obama coalition of 2008. >> and that is good intel. a quick review of what we've called already. voters did the hard work.

we just got the assist. this is raw vote right now in michigan, a state not closing for over 15 minutes. in the state of missouri, nbc news projecting joe biden the victor. in the state of mississippi, a call we made at poll close time, joe biden. and in north dakota, too early to call. we're back, we're 15 minutes less away from the first poll closing. !) ♪ ♪ i want to rock! (rock!) ♪ i want to rock! (rock!) ♪ i want to rock! (rock!) ♪ rock! (rock) ♪ rock! (rock) ♪ rock! (rock) ♪ i want to... (chris rock) who'd you expect? (sylvester stallone) i don't know...me? (vo) ♪ i want to rock!

♪ rock! (rock) ♪ rock! (rock) ♪ i want to rock! until i found out what itst it actually was.ed me. dust mite droppings! eeeeeww! dead skin cells! gross! so now, i grab my swiffer sweeper and heavy-duty dusters. duster extends to three feet to get all that gross stuff gotcha! and for that nasty dust on my floors, my sweeper's on it. the textured cloths grab and hold dirt and hair no matter where dust bunnies hide. no more heebie jeebies. phew. glad i stopped cleaning and started swiffering. and that was all you knew, would you really understand it, with just that point of view? we've got a different way to look at it, from right here on the ground. we don't just the united states we see united towns. we're grateful for what you bring, and all the sparks you've shown, in the thousands of towns that we get to call home.

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polls close at the top of the hour. but as we have explained, this is publicly available raw vote totals from most of michigan where the votes are being counted. look at the percentage. almost a third of the vote in. 52-43 biden. steve kornacki at the big board. >> we're keeping an eye here, brian. again, 31%, that margin sitting there at 10 points. if you add up the counties that are in so far with a significant share of the return, what you're seeing is, remember, clinton came close to beating sanders here four years ago, but couldn't get there. she lost the state by a little more than a point. if you compare biden's numbers to clinton's numbers in the counties where we're starting to get a significant amount of vote and average it together, it's

double digits. it is a double-digit improvement so far for biden over clinton four years ago in the counties where we're getting vote in. so, again, there is more to come. not all polls are closed so far. but obviously if you're the biden campaign and you're watching these numbers just like the rest of us, those are extremely encouraging numbers because it tells you that with what's in so far, you are not seeing so far a repeat of what happened in this state in 2016. quickly to update you on one more situation, no doubt here who is going to end up winning the state of mississippi, but we are keeping a close eye on the returns because you see with only a few votes in here, 2%, sanders is running at 20% statewide. he's got to keep it there. he has to keep it at 15% or above as more votes are counted. i'm just looking here. we have some from jackson coming in right now. otherwise he gets shut out of delegates statewide in mississippi. and i'm just going to see what's in in jackson here, starting to come in near heinz county, biggest in the state. for sanders in mississippi, the suspense, does this stay above 15 or does a delegate landslide for biden become a delegate

monopoly. >> bloomberg at 2%. >> what does that mean? chris hayes joins us now here. chris, with what we have seen thus far, we have a poll closing in mississippi. we have a not long after poll closing call in missouri.1%. >> yeah. >> we've got a poll closing in mississippi, a not long after poll closing call in missouri. we're watching the results come in in michigan. what's your thoughts on this? >> he's getting creamed among black voters particularly in the south. you can't win a democratic party nomination with those margins. no way, no how. doesn't work. number two, the generational divide continues to be astounding. even in the states where bernie sanders is losing the overall vote by quite a bit, he's still winning by under 20 or under 30 by big margins. the problem for sanders is those people aren't voting at the levels he needs to be competitive. and on the converse side, 65 and older are voting at enormous

levels. so, he's losing the wrong age demographic. i think the generational fissure within the democratic party coalition is going to have to be talked about and stitched back together because turnout among those voters will matter at the margins in very close states. the final thing to me is just the fact that you've got this kind of -- you've got this turnout surge and it's interesting that we didn't see that. my read on that was people found the primary itself and got it producing. there were so many people that just wanted it over. just could we get through this and get a nominee? then you're seeing this huge surge today, really big numbers, particularly out of much, much. part of that is people wanting to move past the primary. there's a big constituency. they thought they were being given a test they didn't know the answers to. at a certain point it was like i guess this is what we're doing. let's do it and move on. i think that explains the

turnout differential early in the process. >> so then what does the democratic party do in terms of the generational divide you're talking about when it comes to the general election because it's one thing if senator sanders is the overwhelming choice of young democratic voters or young potentially democratic voters and he's able to turn them out. but in this case he's the overwhelming choice of younger voters, and those younger voters do not care to participate, thank you very much. >> in fact they have declined from 2016. >> what do you do? if biden's going to be the nominee and that's by no means certain, but if he is going to be the nominee, it's not as easy as going to sanders and say give me your young voters. sanders doesn't have enough of them to benefit. >> you could have even bigger declines in the general like everything is marginal here. the one thing i would just say and this is not an answer to the question prescriptively. but i want to say there is a real kind of world view

difference in people who think this is a bad anomaly and we need to get back to normal. and people who experience, i think, a combination of the trauma of the great recession and also think about climate and think normal's not good enough. enormous content -- >> trope is one head of the three-headed dog there but it's just another thing. >> yeah. i think that is a thing that i don't know the right messaging around that but i think it's a deep world view division between these two age groups in the party. >> so, how does the democratic party peel that division and win in the general election? >> i think speaking to some of those -- there's the famous thing about biden that says i don't have any sympathy for people complaining now when he was at that event. i think that's probably not super helpful language. talking about things like climate and student debt which are very real, if you poll voters 30 under and 40 under,

would be a good first step. >> speaking of turnout in michigan, the secretary of state there in addition to polls closing at the top of the hour is going to speak about the long lines there. chris jansing standing by for us there. chris, what do we know? >> well, what we know is that it's probably going to be tomorrow sometime before they have a final count for us. part of it these long lines. if you're in line at 8:00, they allow you to stay and continue to vote. but there's another whole new thing that they've never had here before in michigan. it's called no-reason absentee voting. that means you don't have to have a reason to request an absentee ballot now. again, they have never done this before, and they got a huge response. here's the numbers we got. 993,814 people, about double what they had four years ago, requested absentee ballots. as of this morning -- and again this is an incomplete number

because people can continue to return them until 8:00 tonight -- 804,216 had been returned. that's an 81% return rate. and some of these places where they're counting, for example the place i was in suburban detroit, the absentees were up 184%. so, what do you do with all those extra ballots? in some places they staffed up. they expected it. they knew they were going to have to spend a little more time counting. others did not staff up. one of the questions we're going to ask is why not? was it money? could they not find people willing to do it? they have a system where they double up. nobody counts ballots on their own. they have at least two people and then they put it in the calculator. for obvious reasons they want to protect these absentee ballots and make sure they're as pristine as they can possibly be, that mistakes aren't made. but what we're expecting to hear from the secretary of state is that at least for this first time that they're doing this no reason absentee voting, it's

going to talk a little while, maybe until early tomorrow afternoon before they can get everything counted, brian. >> back up one second. are you saying that over 800,000 michiganers game into their polling place and said i filled this out but i want to change my vote? >> no. no. these are simply people who are absentee voting. >> okay. what's the rate of return? >> before there were rules about who could ask for it. 81%. >> okay. >> so, it's about double statewide the number of people who requested them. but again you may have individual precincts like where i was where the number was up 184%. they could not start counting those until the polls opened this morning. so, they're going through it very methodically. but the numbers are so high it's taking a long time. >> chris, let me ask you in terms of the secretary of state is going to speak in a few moments in that spot where you are. are we expecting the secretary

of state to be addressing problems and things that went wrong today and issues that caused these long lines, multiple hours long in different places in michigan, or is this the sort of run of the mill business as usual update from the secretary of state in terms of keeping everybodies' expectations in line with what her office is presented? >> i'm not going to presume to know what she's going to say, but there's a lot of media here. we can swing around and show you other questions. obviously people wanting to make sure that we're not having a situation here that we've seen in previous states where questions are going to be raised about the validity of the vote. so, we will have a chance to ask questions about exactly those things. >> chris jansing, thank you very much very much much. we're getting the poll closings. >> i am curious to hear what the statement contains. >> it's like a test for tv news.

here's the thing and here's the official who's giving the official line about the thing. you have to cover the simultaneous thing. >> absolutely. nicole wallace. >> look, we're going to not get ahead of the story. we're going to keep covering these state by state. but there's obvious coalescing around joe biden. as you said, it's ready to get on to it. i think bernie sanders is doing worse this time around in the end of the bernie sanders chapter of this who will it be. >> and bernie sanders is at home in vermont tonight. >> listen. i watched the interview he did with you and felt like he felt like it might be over. when he answers questions about, well, you know, why won't you -- you know, politics ant about compromising your principles because you didn't believe in them tht first place. it's about believing in your principle so much that you understand you have to win first to get anything done.

obama understood that. joe biden understood that. and every great present has had to sort of show a little bit of flexibility to win the office before they can get there and do great things. bernie sanders didn't display that to enough democratic primary numbers. >> i think there's one other thing in the results which is the places biden is overperforming hillary clinton, particularly michigan among rural white primary voters where sanders got a share of the vote in states other than michigan as well. we always knew that a certain share of the sanders vote in 2016 was an anti-hillary vote. we always knew that. we're seeing that play out tonight in a lot of ways. >> a controlled experiment. >> a controlled experiment where people said hillary clinton supported nafta and that hurt her in michigan. we're running the controlled experiment with joe biden and there might have been another thing impacting those voters in 2016. >> tonight is a night with a lot yet to come.

i'm going to be fascinated to see what happens in washington given the huge margins. >> we have reached that time which means just seconds from now we will get a subtle -- there it is -- election alert as we are within 15 seconds of the top of the hour. it is about to crown the hour of 9:00 p.m. which gives us a poll close is the great state of michigan. and this will include the upper peninsula. and here we go. let's wait for the clock to play out. 9:00 p.m. eastern time. nbc news is projecting that the state of michigan right now is too early to call. biden leads. both candidates will be awarded delegates at the end of the night. to review: in the state of missouri, nbc news declares that joe biden will be the victor when all the votes are counted. at polls close, we projected

biden the winner in mississippi. in north dakota, too early to call. we are not expressing a leader in that race. delegates as of tonight, here are the locked in numbers they can depend on, many more in play. delegates thus far in the presidential race, as robert gibbs keeps pointing out, there's one coin of the realm, one currency when you get to the convention. that's where the currency is right now. steve kornacki, what do we know? >> we've got a ton more coming in michigan, but first of all how what you're seeing in michigan came together. we set these demographic groups up earlier. first the black vote. sanders and biden outside the south among black voters. take a look at what you're seeing in mi seeing in michigan. this is basically what it looked like four years with 68-30 -- go

ahead. sorry. back to you, brian? >> hang on here. sorry to interrupt. here you have it. our projected on the state of michigan. joe biden. steve, you know i would only interrupt you for something like that. >> i thought that was coming and the numbers i'm about to show will show exactly why. you can see here, the black vote basically the same. it's off a few points but it's basically what it was four years ago in the state where you see significant movement in michigan tonight from four years ago, it is among white voters. this is white voters with a college degree in michigan. you can see biden is winning this group 51-46. he lost them four years ago to bernie sanders. and white voters without a college degree in michigan, biden also winning them 50-45. he lost them big four years ago -- excuse me, clinton lost to him big four years ago. overall, four years ago bernie sanders won the white vote in the michigan primary by 14

points. tonight, he is losing it by 6 points, a 20-point swing among white voters in pitch hmichigan. the black vote basically unchanged from before. that accounts for what's happening in michigan tonight. just to show you we've been taking you through county to county here. 51% of the vote is in, it is a double digit lead for joe biden. that shift pops up in places like mccown county, the blue collar county there just north of the city of detroit. they wrote that famous paper about the reagan democrat. they were talking about macomb county. you see joe biden doing significantly better here than hillary clinton did. you go next door to oakland county. demographically, this is different than macomb, this is upper income. up scale economically. but biden winning this by 18

points. four years ago, hillary clinton eked it out by 4. 4 exploding to 18 points. college county again, sanders is barely carrying this right now with about a fifth of the vote in, this was a double digit sanders win four years ago. four years ago we talk about the small rural county. this is the upper peninsula of much mitch. four years ago, basically the entire upper peninsula was won by bernie sanders. i believe there was one county he lost by 30 votes. you're seeing all biden blue up here. here's a county where 100% is in, not a ton of voters. look at the swing. hillary clinton got 35% here. joe biden getting 57%. so, four years ago right now at this time we were telling you a story of a michigan that was very close. we are telling you a michigan where hillary clinton had won the black vote but the white vote, especially the non-college white vote, was going to bernie sanders. sanders was wracking up all these wins in small rural counties in michigan.

four years lawsuiter yter you s small rural counties biden blue. even wayne county. this is detroit. and not just detroit. there's a lot outside detroit in this county. you see biden leading by 10. this is the only place on the map where biden is not yet at the clinton level. i think you've got a lot of the city of detroit that will account for the other half of the vote to come in here. i would expect that number to rise for joe biden. four years ago, michigan foreshadowed something that happened in the general election, non-college white voers in michigan who democrats had depended on to deliver them a state for a generation defected from hillary clinton and made donald trump president. one of the questions raised by this result tonight, seeing joe biden do better than hillary clinton. is joe biden more acceptable to those voters than hillary clinton was four years ago? he certainly appears to be in

the primary. will he be if he gets to the general election? >> rachel, here's the other thing that happens on a night like this. we start pivoting and asking our guests, as we will later, does biden pivot to the general? is biden really willing, or is there any desire to fight a ground war in the state of florida to spend a dollar or a day in the state of florida given tonight's results? >> it depends on how the bernie sanders campaign is going to approach the rest of the race. i mean, senator sanders has said bluntly without any equivocation that if joe biden is going to have more delegates than bernie sanders at the end of the day, then bernie sanders will drop out. he will concede that joe biden has won the nomination. he will not force it to be a majority even if it's only a plurality. he's been clear about that. if at the end of tonight or the end of this night next week it's clear that senator sanders cannot put together votes from the kind of coalition that he

needs to put together to credibly contest the nomination, then it's up to senator sanders in terms of how he wants the rest of the primary to go because joe biden knows and every democrat knows that you can't just pretend senator sanders and husband movement don't exist. they do exist. and they're considerable and they deserve respect and they're an important part of the democratic coalition. being at war with them heading into the general election is suicidal. you have to proceed in a way that is going to knit the suit, knit the various parts of the democratic party back together in more than just name but in rey'all y'allty. >> and i think one of the things i was worrying about when we went into this, divided field, the idea of the contested election. there was a certain point of time that a no majority was high. the nightmare scenario was you go into that convention with no one with a clear majority and who knows what happens. >> before super tuesday, that's

what we were thinking. >> there's coalescing happening. there is increasingly a resounding message being sent from democratic primary voters. there just is. we all know, i think, what is going to happen in florida. you look at the florida demographics -- it just is the case that the sort of dynamics of this race have a very different feel than 2016 because of that feeling of consolidation that was never the case with clinton and sanders. there was the sort of pitch back and forth, she had a lead, the michigan was a big kind of plot twist that i think gave the sanders folks an idea that they could carry states they were counted out in. that's not the trajectory of what we've seen among democratic primary voters here. >> two other things that are out there, one, donald trump got himself impeached so that tonight wouldn't happen. donald trump got impeached so he wouldn't have to compete against

joe biden. what if voters watch donald trump spending a maniacal year to get john bolton to get rudy giuliani to set up joe biden so this wouldn't happen. don't you think democratic primary voters are like let's get trump. he doesn't want to run against him. democrat and republican, maybe it wasn't so much about running against hillary clinton. maybe it was seeing the nightmare that was four years of the trump presidency. the urgency is greater. the particular is about let's do a revolution later. let's get rid of this guy first. i think voters are having to weigh different things and they're more real world than idealized. >> i have to say, i feel like the kind of coalescing we're watching happening tonight, if it were happening around senator sander, if senator sanders had pulled off an upset win in south carolina, started doing great in the south, and had a super tuesday like nobody thought he could, i honestly think the

coalescence we're seeing in the democratic party would also be happening around senator sanders. i think it is about beating donald trump. i agree that it's about beating donald trump. and if you're going to do it with sanders, great. if you're going to do it with biden, great. if you're going to do it with a hickory tree you just met, go ahead. the coalescence has its own moment. >> he's a vessel. if it had been bernie sanders -- look at the window where you saw what that might have looked like was after nevada where you had rick wilson and bill crystal saying a socialist is better than a psycho. that would be a fascinating story. but yes. the opposite happened. bernie sanders has lost steam almost every single day. he almost willfully threw florida by spending four days on his comments about castro. he could have said to the people of florida, i'm sorry.

he didn't. sanders has as much blame as anybody. >> clair, is it fair to say the state that gave bernie oxygen last time around is depriving him of oxygen this time? >> i think that is fair to say. and i actually think -- i don't know for sure what's going to happen, but i want to say right now i will not be surprised if joe biden wins every single state tonight, including those states -- >> idaho? >> including idaho. >> wow. >> i think there is something going on in the democratic party about coalescing and rising up and getting ready to face a president that, in washington state, i think it was 83% of the people who voted today said they were angry about this guy. now, bernie sanders has done an amazing thing. he has raised more money than any other candidate in terms of those that raised money.

and millions of small contributions. his followers are passionate. i think what joe biden ought to be doing right now is figuring out how he brings those people in, how he tries to knit this together because most of the people who are voting for bernie sanders are doing so because they think he can unite the country. the question is can he unite the democratic party? >> robert gibbs, take a whack at that. how do you bring those folks in? it's been said it's not a candidate, it's a movement. >> i think you've got to start reaching out to them. you've got to start talking about some policy for them, whether it's climate change, whether it's working class economics. that's part of broadening your message for a general election. but i'll say this about tonight: whether or not the states pan out to be 6-0, it is a certainty now that bernie sanders is going to lose delegates tonight to joe biden.

joe biden is going to gain delegates. joe biden goes on to better turf the next two weeks. michigan is an electoral and a psy psychological back breaker for him. this gave him new life four years ago. i'm not entirely sure for what reason. he only netted four delegates when he was down almost 200. but tonight nowhere in the state does it look like he's matching what he got four years ago. >> with the coalitions he needs to and the coalitions he said he would bring out. and i think part of that may well be and we'll look back months from now, but it may be a little bit of a realignment. democrats may be picking up suburban voters, suburban women, that might have been the trump in 2016 and quite frankly may have lost a big chunk of white working class voters in central michigan that have just gone away from the democratic party. a place like michigan that just elected a democratic governor that traded that coalition,

white working class voters for a larger suburban coalition. that was highly successful. that may well be the formula for putting together things for a general election for joe biden in 2020. >> joy, you've been smart about these interdemocratic party dynamics around here. in terms of the way that robert and clair were just talking about inside the party now, if senator sanders does have a really bad night -- and he's having one already losing mississippi, losing missouri, now losing michigan. we don't know what's going to happen in those western states where they've got poll closing and north dakota where it's too early to call. if he does have a very bad night tonight, is there something that the biden campaign should learn from how things went wrong in 2016 in terms of how to knit this back together and how to keep bernie sanders inside the tent and his supporters on board for the general? >> or '08. i think robert will remember even better than i do, you

remember the puma movement? there was a movement inside the hillary clinton camp that was refusing to coalesce with brothebarack obama. that was as nasty a campaign as mentioned. it isn't true that it necessarily harms you in the general election. you have to remember i kind of go back to what nicole said. this is like an okay cccam's ra election. people were saying do i prefer hillary clinton or donald trump? and people felt comfortable doing that. the economy was good. there wasn't anything urgent about it. now you have donald trump who is mismanaging a global pandemic, who is scaring people who even support him in a lot of ways because they're watching the stock market plummet or be volatile. he is a fact. and i think with that fact on the table, joe biden, i think for a lot of people knows who to

call, knows how to do the job. he's projecting competence. i think even for white working class voters that might normally be for him -- and he's not a woman. he's not hillary clinton just to be blunt. i think if biden goes on -- it's not over. there's still next week. i think it's going to be rough for bernie sanders in florida. if he keeps going or ends up not being the nominee, i think it would be important for biden to acknowledge the strength of this movement even though it didn't bring out the numbers. it was more of a movement than it was sort of an electoral sort of organized voting movement. but i think the concerns there are real. and i think it would be important for biden to do policy things, put forth policy things that would be attractive to the voters. the green new deal is something biden has embraced. i think that's important for jobs and climate. i think that's huge for my kids that are really climate voters. i think he can do that.

i think he can present policy ideas. and a vice presidential pick wouldn't hurt him either, to pick somebody that's acceptable and bring people in. there's no point in fighting him into the mat. if this is the closing chapter of this sanders moment, i think he deserves the dignity of saying you did build something important. the people who followed you are important. the things they're angry, enraged, and scared about matter. >> and what you bring to this democratic party and politics deserves to be reflected in the nominee's campaign. you need to have your people working on this campaign. >> yep. >> you need to have a say in important decisions by this campaign. and your values need to be reflected in policy decisions. >> can i say one other quick thing? >> yeah, sure. >> one of the things about the sanders movement, because bernie sanders is not a registered democrat and has not had an interest in party building, one of the things that crippled his

movement was it was not doing the basic functionality that a campaign inside the party would do. they're trying to do outreach to politicians. the idea they weren't doing aggressive voter registration for the democratic party -- those party building things are the things he didn't do. this looked the same way in south carolina in 2016. he had all the barbershops excited but people didn't get to the polls. so now i think what can happen is once these campaigns coalesce, what the biden camp obviously have is the mechanics and if they can turn those mechanics to those young voters, then they can have a pretty powerful outcome in november. >> hopefully what they will have is the mechanics. >> just one more point on what joy just said about the situation we find ourselves in and a caution for all of us in this business. about a month or five weeks or six weeks ago that a wall street

financial board i like said i cannot say how much wall street is sure that donald trump is headed for re-election. he had just beaten impeachment. he was purging his enemies from the government. the jobs numbers were riding high. the dow was across 30,000. we're in a totally different universe now. the economy is heading off a cliff for a possible recession. we're in the midst of what is not officially a global pandemic but what is a global pandemic. the government has totally failed. the hands have shifted quickly as the basic underlying framework for the choice of who is going to be elected for the mechanics that things are going to happen, you think people are going to be going to the polls in jogeorgia in two weeks. just keep in mind how quickly things have changesed in past five weeks and how quickly things can change. >> to make it feel more shifty, everything ahead is unclear too. will there be conventions?

will there be debates? what will voting look like? will this be turned into -- everything is up in the air and i don't think that's disconnected from what's happening. joe biden is -- in some ways, the idea that joe biden -- joe biden has no organization. he has no ads. he has no field offices. he has a very competent campaign staff but it's largely the same size and same people that have been there since the beginning. so, this is awe wave election that is totally divorced from the mechanics of campaigns in the way that obama's win was not. no modern campaign has had this result without campaigns. >> super tuesday wins coast to coast with scant visits to notify those states. >> steve kornacki, where do we stand with the delegates. >> we just not a bunch of delegates awarded. this illustrates what's happening in michigan better than anything else. this is 2016. bernie sanders is purple. he's got the same purple color

on our map tonight. this is the story we told you four years ago tonight. this is the story we're showing you tonight. look at that. all of that purple replaced by biden blue. that's the movement we're seeing in michigan. what does that add up to? our decision desk right now at this point -- and there are still some delegates, about 30 left to be al gaited out of michigan -- but right now biden leads sanders by 12 delegates. biden would be netting 12 delegates out of michigan right now, about 30 left to be allocated there. in missouri where biden is winning big, biden is netting 11 at this minute. but there are a lot to be allocated out of missouri. and in mississippi, biden is netting 21 over sanders right now. right now biden has increased his lead -- he's netted -- 44 delegates over-sanders tonight. what you see in the national delegate count, that put biden ahead by 121.

he's added to his lead, 44 so far. i think if you look at the rate, the current rate of biden who lead in these states right now, a rough estimate would be that he would probably add 10 or 15 more, probably net 10 or 15 more from these states. so, if he's up 121 right now, when you finish counting up all the delegates from these big states, his lead is probably going to sit somewhere about 135 delegates over bernie sanders. out of michigan, out of missouri, out of mississippi. that's going to leave the question of these other three states tonight, north dakota, idaho, and washington. i heard claire mccaskill say a minute ago she thinks it is possible for joe biden to go 6-0 tonight. one of the reasons is simple. these states are voting in a different way tonight than they did three years ago. these were three of bernie sanders' best states four years ago. >> on that point, north dakota is still kind of a caucus. >> yeah. the official designation i'm

seeing if we would call it -- we would call it a caucus. here's how it works. it is run by the state party. it's not run by the state of north dakota. instead of having a polling place at every precinct there are a handful of voting sites around the state. they have a voting window that took place today from 11:00 to 7:00. you can go to one of those voting centers, basically cast a ballot. this not a caucus where you show up, publicly declare your candidate, wait to see if your candidate hits 15%. i would say it's moving closer to a primary than a caucus, but the hours are narrower with a peru mary. it's harder to find a polling place. as awe caucus in 16, it was a huge sanders win. it's moved closer to a primary. let's see how it affects that. >> we did see long places tonight from some of those 14 or

so spots where people could drop off their ballots in north dakota. i want to bring into the conversation now paul egan. he's their lancing bureau chief. thanks so much for being with us. it's an exciting night in your state. >> yes, it is, rachel. hi. >> hi. let me get your top line reaction to the news that the michigan primary has been called -- nbc news projecting that vice president biden will win. how does that resonate with you? was that expected? did you expect tonight to be a different story than what we saw in 2016 between sanders and clinton? >> this was expected. michigan is known for throwing some surprises at the country on primary night, but not this year. this was -- the polls showed biden up by 20 points or more, most of them that came out in the last couple of days. >> in terms of turnout overall, one of the things that democrats and lots of observers all over

the country will be watching is to see if the democratic party is well-organized in michigan to, see if democratic voters are enthused about voting and want to go do it. what do you think we'll see at the end of day in terms of turnout and voter enthusiasm? >> i think turnout is going to be strong but not really super big numbers. it's a little hard to tell just yet. but the one thing that we did see today was very long lines to register to vote for bernie sanders. you know, the university students just got back from spring break. so, he was at a bit of a disadvantage in that sense in trying to get them motivated. he held a big rally on sunday at the university of michigan. but the -- i think what we're really seeing was from most of the voters i talked to was very tactical voting. most democrats felt that biden was the candidate that was most

likely to defeat the president which we often hear. and, you know, it's not necessarily that there's a lot of -- there's that much energy sometimes for joe biden, but i think there's a -- there seems to be enough motivation among democrats to defeat president trump that i think they're lukely likely to come out in strong numbers again in november. >> good to have you with us tonight, sir. thanks for taking the time. >> thank you. another break for us. when we come back, james carval joins the conversation. >> buckle up everybody. kle up ey ♪ we would only hold on to let go ♪ ♪ blow a kiss into the sun ♪ we need someone to lean on ♪ blow a kiss into the sun ♪ all we needed somebody to lean on ♪ ♪ ♪

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just to review, here's where we are. nbc news has projected joe biden the winner michigan. nbc news earlier tonight projected joe biden the winner in missouri. nbc news at poll closing projected joe biden the winner in mississippi. still outstanding, the state of north dakota. but we now have a party because james carville is available to talk to us. james, good evening. what are the voters saying tonight? what needs to happen right now? >> they're saying very clearly. tip of a hat to guy fox. remember, remember, this is all about november. these voters want to shut this

thing down. i mean, you can just look all across the spectrum of the democratic party and people are saying we've made our decision, this is who we're going with. and senator sanders may not break threshold in mississippi. they've got 15.3 right now. we've got to acknowledge that he created a movement, he did some truly remarkable things in american politics. and certainly vice president biden wants to talk to him and discuss this but also we can't ditch these democratic voters who are coming out saying let's get on with this thing. our mission is to defeat donald trump. there's a 99 and a 1 chance that vice president biden is going on the nominee. this thing is decided. there's no reason to keep it going not even a day longer. >> let me ask if this is a potential reason to keep it going -- >> okay. >> -- because senator sanders

and his movement and his supporters want to be respected. they want to be part of the what the democratic party is moving forward, and they want to see changes that reflect their concerns, not pushing senator sanders out of the race before he's comfortable leaving. it might allow the biden campaign a chance to court them rather than having to fight them. >> first of all, rachel, it's the democratic voters that made this decision. vice president biden is not trying to force him out. you've got to respect voters. respect the people in south carolina and virginia and michigan and all the places they're working. yes, they have to have respect for democracy and this is very clear what democrats around the country are saying. just everywhere that you go we've got to get rid of this guy. what are we doing? and these are not ordinary times, and we've got to -- of course, the vice president, he's the guy in the lead. he's got to take the lead here. we've got to bring this party together. we've got to stop this. this is not any avail to

continue this thing any longer. it really isn't. and we can have respect and we can have admiration for what's senator sanders has established but you've got to respect the democratic voters. you've got to respect people in oakland county, michigan. you've got to respect people in orange bury, south carolina. you've got to respect people in louden county, virginia. this is what this is about. the democratic voters have spoken. they've spoken unambiguously and clearly and they need to be listened to. >> what can and should the biden campaign and the sanders campaign do to try to smooth over hard feelings and to smooth over the divide that emerged during the primary so that senator sanders voters don't sit home in november? >> right now senator sanders and biden are more popular in the democratic party than donald trump was in the republican party in a comparable time in

2016. both of them have favorable opinions of democrats. no democrat wants this to go on. our voters have made a determination. vice president biden should call senator sanders and say let's have a conversation here, senator. what do we do to get this thing moving in the right direction? but it seems to me that we're -- and i agree we have to be respectful to the sanders campaign. but i wish we would talk more about respect for democratic voters who are casting their ballots and they're very clear and distinct about what they're saying. they have been to respected too. i'm speaking for them. i'm speaking for these guys in the mississippi delta. i'm speaking for these suburban women in virginia. they're the ones saying this, not me. >> james, i hear you. i also hear and see this opportunity for joe biden to actually take himself to the general electorate as someone who truly won without a campaign. he didn't have a campaign.

>> right. >> he's the first real grass roots candidate of -- i guess trump was too. he had a plane and hope hicks. but biden had nothing. i actually see the respect going the other way. bernie sanders has been insulting african-american voters in south carolina, insulting pete buttigieg, insulting everyone who voted him saying someone twisted their arm. but when you ask him who did that, there's no answer. >> it's clear they were not waiting on a phone bank, not waiting on somebody. they were looking for somebody who could get around and beat donald trump. that's exactly what happened here. the greatest motivator for democratic turnout is the fact they want to win this election. and there's nothing wrong, by the way, there's nothing at all wrong with a political party saying hey let's come together to win this election. it's the most important thing that we can do, maybe in american history for all i know. there's nothing unambiguous

here. there's no other interpretation. and vice president biden is a man that's been around politics for a long time. he's a man of considerable personal charm. i think he and senator sanders know each other well. they both have high approval rating in the democratic party. the party on the macro level that's come out of this thing much better than i would have hoped or thought but i'm glad to be surprised on the upside. we can't be, you know, bouncing around, locally gagging around the country now. we've got a real job to do and the party is ready to get on with the job. >> james, what does biden need to do? he's already sort of laid himself down and called himself a bridge to the next generation of democratic leaders. he had electric performances, speeches, by senators cory booker and kamala harris. who is he to pick as a vp to

energy u energize assuming there will be crowds and events in this general election. >> look, there's any number -- you hear speculation of any number of people. i'm sure we've got plenty of time to talk about this. but right now we've got to make this pivot from being in a primary season to being in a general election. and i think his -- my suggestion for the slogan is joe biden: because it's time for a change. i mean, that's just -- and take the word change and ascribe it to anything that you want. but that is what this country is looking for. they are looking for change. and particularly these democratic voters are ready to get on with it and they have to be respected. >> james, this is gene robinson. thanks for the acknowledgment -- fine. and thanks for the acknowledgment that we have to respect voters in orangeburg, south carolina. i appreciate that. >> i was thinking about you. >> i do appreciate it.

bless your heart. here's my question. so, i think you could conclude from the primary season thus far that in the aggregate, the democratic party is not as progressive as the sanders wing of the party, just in the aggregate. and i think that's a factor. i mean, just not everybody is as to the left as the sanders party is. i know a lot of -- i talk to a lot of folks in south carolina who certainly are not. but that is a huge and maybe a minority, but it's a huge chunk of the party. so, how do you in a policy-way, not necessarily a touchy feely way, but how do you reconcile that with the more main stream direction that vice president biden would take part in. i mean, because i do think that's an issue. >> well, i think what happened is let's just take medicare for

all. many democrats might agree with it. but it was concluded that this was an electoral illusion and that ended it. and we're in a unique time unlike anything i've ever seen in american politics where the desire to beat the incumbent, trump's ideology or anything else, this is something that is new. and to point out joe biden had no campaign, the stuff he would do and organize events and have a headquarters and phone bank people and contract out, get the voting contacts up, none of that. as soon as south carolina -- as soon as james clyburn dropped the hammer and the votes came in in south carolina, look what happened in northern virginia, look what happened in wade county, north carolina. all of a sudden all these educated white women were voting like crazy for the democrats because they're saying hey, that's the guy who could win the election. he's got the support of the base of the democratic party.

they weren't looking at his nuancesed position or what he voted in 1994 or anything like that. it was just on a macro sense this is what's happening in american politics. i've never seen this happen in all of my time in politics where it is driven by just a desire to win an election. remember, remember, it's all about november. >> james, we were in this studio in 2016. we were on the air. you were talking with us when we called florida for donald trump. and since that time, let's just say you've been in a carville trough of sorts. and including this campaign, you've been kind of morose about the state of the party. tonight you seem energized. would that bay prope a proper conclusion? >> that is. you remember in early february when i was in miami and i was panicked. and i just couldn't take it anymore. and it -- and i did not see this

thing ending -- i'll be honest with you. i'm gratified the way it ended. we got our nominee. we're ready to go on. again, it was outright favorability for our candidate within the party is very good. and they tried to do everything they could to knock the vice president biden out to race including phony investigations and everything else. so, he's the person that we're going with, and that's where we are. and you know, maybe i would have wanted michael bennet or something like that. forget all that. forget everything. we've got one mission right now, be united. and we've got to win this thing and we've got to energize people. and corporate carville reporting for duty right now. >> retired u.s. marine for baton rouge in the great state of louisiana. thank you very much for being with us. that's a lot to take in and we're going to do so over the

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he is a technician standing behind the biden podium at the constitution center in philadelphia so that everyone can focus in and make sure the mics work because we expect joe biden to stand behind that lectern. there is a teleprompter set up in this new coronavirus environment. there are no crowds there, just the traveling media who cover joe biden. our own mike mimmily among them. >> reporter: one consequence of the change of location, biden wanted to get a head start on the ohio rally next week. instead, there is a little bit of a crowd here, brian. and it's of the hard-working biden campaign team. it's not often as a candidate you can celebrate a night like this with the workers in your campaign headquarters. so, off to the side there is a healthy representation of the

biden staff here who will get a chance to celebrate with their boss. we'll hear much more from the vice president about his vision for representing dealing with the coronavirus on thursday. tonight is more of a victory for biden and his team. >> all right. mike, thanks. over to steve kornacki who's been on the phone and filling in numbers. steve. look, michigan is filling in. >> we've got a bunch of stories we can tell you in mituch mitch. we talked about bernie sanders strength with young voters, college campuses, especially state colleges, state universities. we talk about mistings there in other primaries. here's one that is 100%. this is the home of ann arbor and the university of michigan, also the home of eastern michigan university, the eagles. look at this. 100% in here. basically dead even. this is a 15-vote margin for bernie sanders in a big college

county and one that he won by double digits in 2016. biden basically fighting into a draw here. we showed you kalamazoo basically all in right now. here's bernie sanders barely hanging on, a one-point margin. again, four years ago this was a landslide. this was 61-38. go up to the northern peninsula where northern michigan is -- here you go, a 19-point lead for joe biden. this was a 26-point victory for bernie sanders four years ago. so, that was one key element we saw for sanders in michigan and in other states four years ago. if there was a state college, a state university there, he was doing awfully well. not so much tonight. and we can show you one other county. i was just checking this out when we came on the air. 100% in in livingston county. this is a commuter area,

detroit, ann arbor, lansing. biden wins it. i want to draw your attention the something else. biden over 14,000 votes, sanders over 10,000. even bloomberg getting some -- the total turnout. in 2016, there were just 17,000 votes cast here. this is an increase over 50%, 5-0 in this county. and this is the county that was told the story of the 2018 blue wave for democrats. this is one of those districts that flipped. won here in 2018 powered by turnout in places like that. now you're seeing that translate into a turnout explosion here in michigan. and obviously joe biden -- look at that. hillary clinton lost it by 21. joe biden wins it by 17. that is awe swi swing of nearly points for bernie sanders amidst a massive turnout increase. >> this is going to be one of

the really important bottom lines from tonight. what's happening in terms of democratic voter enthusiasm. can we extrapolate from what's happening in these primaries to what might happen in november? we know how crucial it was for donald trump's general election victory that he was apples to a with the michigan turnout compared to 2016, right? they've got different procedures. they've got no excuse absentee voting this time. everybody wants to mail in a ballot can do so. it's -- their procedures are different enough you'd expect turnout to be up some just because tropical stoit's easier there, right? >> the magnitude, you're looking at an increase -- it's 56%, we're doing the math back there. a 56% turnout. in washington 100%. it's about 12%, about 12% higher compared to 56%. and also when i describe sort of the demographic characteristics

of livingston county, a red to blue district, unyurbanite metr commuters, this is something we're seeing state after state, the suburban voters that powered the blue wave in 2016, higher turnout in 2020 primaries. >> steve kornacki, thank you. nbc news correspondent and native michigan der, heidi przybyla. if i told you we would be having a turnout explosion, to quote my friend steve, did you see this coming? >> i didn't see it coming, frankly neither did any of the state official i've been interviewing see it coming. i spoke earlier today with the attorney general dana nestle who said, look, none of us could have predicted any of this just a week ago. the turnout explosion and also the massive shift towards biden.

we've covered a lot about what's going on with the african-american communities with the suburban vote being way up. and in her words, she said, you know, plainly that those communities are simply, quote, scared as hell about another trump presidency. that explains a lot of the uptick as well as the new voting laws. but let's talk about what's going on in those white rural areas. in the northern part of the state, in the middle of the mitten, you have a lot of farming communities that last time went big for bernie. that is where he ran up his margins. here's what's happening. a lot of those farms have gone under. you know, these are places where i'm told there are michigan cherries rotting on the ground because of our immigration laws. all along the i-75 corridor are a lot of these white working class voters who didn't turnout for hillary. they voted for sanders in large

numbers, but they're seeing joe biden as the best antidote to what is going on in their daily lives right now. then you've also got this unique circumstance of the opportunity for gop cross-over. michigan is an open primary. and so you absolutely have some gop voters crossing over for two reasons. first of all, you've got the disaffected republicans. we saw some of those in kent county. some of the women, female suburban voters who are crossing over. but i also met, for instance, earlier today at a bar right around the corner here in detroit, by the way i was having a salad. [ laughter ] i met a trump voter who likes trump. he was going on and on about how trump has done so much for the country, but said he was voting today in a primary for biden because sanders', quote, socialism scares him. he wants to have two good options on the ballot to choose

from in november. he's not sure what he's going to do in november. all of these things are coming together as part of this huge uptick in voting participation here. >> i love the salad mini focus group. [ laughter ] let me also ask you in terms of the way this was fought over in michigan, looking ahead to tonight, we knew that michigan was going to be the big contest tonight. we knew that it was going to be the biggest delegate hall and it was going to be the most hard fought. and we knew the fraught history of what happened here in 2016. both in the democratic primary and in the general in terms of surprise results. did you see evidence -- are you able to sort of see what the shape of the democratic party is in michigan? we're all sort of trying to extrapolate to what's going to happen in november when that guy who you met over a salad is deciding whether or not he's going to pick likely joe biden or -- or donald trump. does the party seem organized? does the party seem like they've got gas in the tank? >> michigan is really unique,

rachel, because this is literally the only state in the country where women control everything, okay. in 2018 there was a pink wave that swept through here. we've got the a.g., the secretary of state, the governor, even the chief justice of the supreme court. and then you saw those two districts which were, you know, had represented by very popular conservative republican men taken over by alyssa slotkin and haley stephens. those women have organized numerous groups, including the one that i spotlighted this week that's called fems for dems and they're not just organizing women. they're amazing the way that they pull together these events and were really behind that pink wave. so to answer your question, they are very organized in this state and it's not just them. it's the state party which stepped into the breach because it was angry, angry about what happened in 2016. >> heidi przybyla, great.

>> heidi hezbollah, veteran journalist and salad enthusiast. thank you very much for joining us from -- >> i even picked on a yang supporter. >> yang is in the news. >> he's getting in at least one vote tonight. >> so andrew yang got a vote in michigan. that's some of the news we're getting in detroit. i have to tell you just in the past few minutes andrew yang has come out and endorsed joe biden. andrew yang saying tonight, quote, i believe that biden will be the democratic nominee. i have always said that i'm going to support whoever the nominee is. i hereby am endorsing joe biden not just to be the nominee for the democratic party, but the next president of the united states. i say this having supported bernie sanders in 2016. bernie was an inspiration for me, he inspired my run, but the math says joe is our prohibitive nominee. we need to bring the party together, we need to start defeating donald trump in the fall. i've had had many personal conversations with joe about the impact of the fourth industrial revolution on the middle class. i believe he's the right man for the job. not just to help us defeat

donald trump, but to govern the country in the years ahead. again, andrew yang endorsing joe biden tonight. >> you know if he says the math is there, he ran on math. a big endorsement. when we come back, one hour till the final polls close. northwest and washington state. t-mobile has the first and only nationwide 5g network. experience it on a samsung galaxy s20 5g. right now, when you buy one, you get one free. plus get 2 lines of unlimited and 5g access included, for only $90 bucks a month.

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let's add way too early to call. in delegates just tonight, there is the stack between biden and sanders, and delegates thus far this political season, there is the stack. steve kornacki, i'm looking at you and you're looking at mississippi with a third of the vote in. >> yeah, you just gave that delegate total for the three big states, mississippi, missouri, michigan, trying to track the delegate picture, believe it or not 81-15 adds the suspense. you got it there. sanders, excuse me, is sitting on the threshold. 15% is that threshold to get delegates statewide. remember, you can pick up some in congressional districts. he's probably going to which can up a couple there. the statewide pool with a third of the vote, he's sitting at 15%. remember four years ago he only got 16 out of mississippi. sanders barely hit the threshold. there are some worrisome signs in here.

counties in the delta here, heavily african-american, 100% right here. there's sanders getting 15%. you compare that to four years ago, it is actually down a point from four years ago. another delta county here, this is a biggie, 14, went down to 13 this time. this speaks to the struggle he's had with the black vote. and the population center, this is jackson, half the vote in. he's just sitting there at 15%. that's where he was four years ago. you look next door in rankin county, down two-thirds points. where sanders is improving, i'll tell you one other trouble spot, sort of the suburbs of memphis, desoto. he did get 20%, but he got 26 last time. this is a big one population wise. that's supposed to help carry sanders over that 15% threshold. so some suspense there. biden ahead. he's netted 54 delegates so far nationally tonight. that number is going to increase as more of mississippi comes into potential for biden to get the lion's share, the vast lion's share of the 36.

to get more out of missouri, to get more out of michigan. one other update for you. you mentioned north dakota where nothing is in in north dakota so far. remember, party-run, hybrid primary caucus, that has been the formula so far in this primary caucus season. or extremely excruciating slow returns. so we're seeing it again in north dakota. nothing in the report to you yet. the state party which runs this has said that they'll be finalized results tomorrow. we don't know what that means. there will be interim results tonight, but it may be awhile in north dakota. >> steve, can we go back to mississippi for just one second? i want to ask you one clarifying thing. statewide the overall issue is whether sanders is going to hit 15, hold at 15 so he has statewide viability. is there a single county in the state of mississippi that senator sanders has a shot at winning? >> i don't believe there is a county he could win. again, desoto is probably his

high water mark in 2016. here you're getting the large white population. frankly, he does a lot better with white voters than black voters in mississippi, but he doesn't do very good with white voters. he has a suburb of memphis, this is 2016. i can show you this -- why didn't i think of this before? this is mississippi in 2016. he didn't win a single counsel tichlt this is mississippi in 2020. he's not winning a single county. the hope for sanders, though, would be in those places, you get outside the delta, you get outside jackson, there are places he's running north of 12125. >> jackson he got the endorsement of the very charismatic mayor in jackson. i was thinking that might carry something for him there. looks like it's just flat. >> pulled out and didn't give the speech. >> we are 55 minutes away from our next poll close. that would be washington state. and sadly, that's the state that has been really ground zero in

the coronavirus outbreak. fortunately, however, it's a mail-in state. in 2016 bernie sanders won what was then a state caucus, 73% to 27%. with us now from king county election headquarters in renton, washington, steve patterson. steve, how is it going out there? >> reporter: incredible to think this is the epicenter of the virus across the country and that we could see record turnout. i mean, take a look in here. i want to show you the line back here. these are people that are probably just registering to vote. they can do that until polls close. people are excited here obviously. but this is happening in a state in which there are public warnings about being in public spaces. that's incredible to think about. a lot of this is because they've moved up the primary date this year. it was years previous much further away in the election. so it is more relevant. people know that, people feel

that. i spoke to an election official. he said participation is already up 40e%. that's just moving on into the night. obviously there is an hour left. so that's just king county alone, excuse me, but that's a third of the votes here in the state. and so election officials are looking at this. there is a big emphasis on the coronavirus as you can imagine. it is top of mind for voters in a state in which there are 89 delegates, the second most today to stay away from people as much as humanly possible. the messaging from the state is we've got this. they're doing that by having sanitation stations here. you can see the hand sanitizer, the wipes. you trip over wipes here as you're walking through a building like this. and i think that messaging has gotten to people so they're able to feel safe about dropping their ballots off, which people have been doing all day long. we've seen it almost as if it is an in-person election. so many people bringing their ballots to a location like this. but the messaging has really

gotten through, guys. back to you. >> steve patterson. >> steve, let me ask you about -- obviously we can't do an apples to apples comparison from 2016 to 2020 because of all the changes and the special circumstances of washington. and a caucus changing into a primary is the biggest one, but there are other changes as well. that said, the washington victory for sanders in 2016 was so gigantic. it was over a 45% margin. he won 73% of the vote. do you feel like there is still that incredible energy for sanders, that strong preference for sanders that washington democrats really showed with an exclamation point in 2016? >> reporter: well, you have to remember, too, rachel, that yes, sanders won that caucus by an overwhelming number. but there also was a primary. it just went that the democrats did not use the primary to assign delegates, where as this year it's all primary.

we know just by talking to the campaigns there was an overwhelming amount of support and enthusiasm, and the ground game is much bigger for sanders. the campaign office is much bigger for sanders. but then expanding out to a primary kind of blows up a lot of what the momentum was. it makes it a lot wider in the state. and so we've seen people in line say we're here for sanders, we're here for sanders. but what that's going to extrapolate out to, i don't think we're going to know for quite a while as we've been mentioning, too, polls don't close until 11:00. results could take a long time, maybe even into the next day or so. rachel? >> steve, thank you. >> steve, use all those products you showed us on the counter there. keep yourself safe. thank you for your live reporting tonight. thank you, steve. david plough has joined us. just to check in, that's the scene in philadelphia. joe biden's lectern and both

glass panes from a teleprompter at the national institution center. we should draw no inference from the fact david plough happens to be in philadelphia, pennsylvania, tonight. david, very basic question. as the architect of '08, if i delivered to you all the components we know about tonight of the victory, the biden campaign has sewn together thus far tonight, and if i told you he was going to have a running lane, could you stitch together a general election victory based on the pieces you know about this evening? >> well, brian, good to be with you. i think that, you know, the african-american support would suggest perhaps he can drive the turnout he'll need in that community to win. the suburban vote share turnout, we see it again tonight. very strong turnout, not just vote share. those are two important cornerstones. but even if bernie sanders wasn't in the race and this was a challenge for hillary clinton

in '16. getting both the vote but enthusiastic support of young people, it's a project for the biden campaign heading into the fall. >> has any group that has over indexed surprised you? >> well, i think the suburban vote, which -- you know, once you got down to a two-person race, i think it was likely that the person, whether it be bloomberg or biden, would win that. but he's winning in dominating fashion. and the turnout is very, very impressive and heartening. because if we do in '20 what we did in '18 as a party, you know, that really ups our margin for error. and you see biden beginning to do really well blue collar and rural voters. he's putting the pieces together. but to beat trump, i think we better assume we're not going to get lucky and we have to do it all. so i'll be very interested to see next week both florida and

arizona. very different hispanic populations. but whether biden can really increase his vote share there and enthusiasm. >> david plough, it makes people like you and me have like eyebrow aches when i say this out loud, but i'm going to do it anyway because i saw ken malman this week. there is so much science in campaigns. bernie sanders had that in his online operation and ground game. your campaign broke boundaries in 2008, ours did in 2004 with micro targeting. joe biden had none of that. what has propelled him to these seismic wave-like victories? >> nicole, he started out with a lot of support. that went away from him for a little bit, but no one candidate seized it, particularly the african-american community. again, we're back to where we were in the beginning of the race. but now he's added to that, right? part of it is down to a two-person race. i think they've done a really good job from the clyburn

endorsement to now. he's been tighter. i think they've begun to have a lot of energy out there. they obviously have done a good job on the politics, orchestrating endorsements. to beat trump, this is going to come down to tway vote a vote o precinct. maybe it will. it will be about the skill of the volunteers, but it is going to be about having good enough data and sophistication around digital marketing to compete with the closs us that trump has built. >> david, what do you think about this idea that -- i made a list of everything the country has been through in 2020. we're halfway through -- >> what about today? >> the soleimani strike. that was the first story of the new year. republicans and democrats expressed concern. republican senator mike lee was among -- joined democrats in saying it was the most troubling and disturbing military briefing he ever had. was followed by the acquittal and impeachment in the middle, john bolton's book came back.

john bolton parting ways with the white house. the white house now blocking publication of his book which is supposed to be out next week on the 17th. the coronavirus mess, no test kits available. the stock market plunge. and attacks on the supreme court. what does sort of the fatigue from just what's happened in 2020 have to do with what biden is seeing in terms of voters coalescing around him so suddenly without a ground game, without paid advertising, without campaign stops in most of the states voting for him overwhelmingly? >> yeah, it's a great question, nicolle. just as we see in the markets a flight to safety, i think we may be seeing a flight to safety for biden. so whatever you think of biden, i think there is a sense that he can handle crisis. i will tell you there's been a lot of i think appropriate concern about biden's performances. and i think the debate on sunday is really important. i think we all need to see he can handle a one-on-one debate. i think biden's stock is a little under appreciated now. he is stability at a time of

crisis. he may not have generational contrast with trump, but i think his empathy and his kindness could not be more of a contrast with trump. and i think there is -- this may not be exciting, but there are a lot of voters out there who are fatigued. and their instinct is not to give trump four more years if there is an alternative. i think biden is a safe harbor. even his performances, when he doesn't speak sentences perfectly, you know, i would embrace that and say, you know what, i've spent time in washington and i don't speak like them. i speak like scranton. i would embrace it and turn it into a strength. >> that's what i do. [ laughter ] >> you've been trying this for months. >> that's my public education. >> david plough, thank you very much. >> david, thank you. when we come back, we have robert gibbs standing by to talk to us. we have claire mccaskill standing by to talk to us. we have this other story to cover, and that is the expanding

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we are back. the line to vote in renton, washington, remember, an area that is also ground zero in the coronavirus outbreak. looking at some new journalism from "the new york times"

tonight, the headline reads, it's just everywhere already. how delays in testing setback the u.s. coronavirus response. in the 11th paragraph, you get to this. the continued delays have made it impossible for officials to get a true picture of the scale of the growing outbreak which has now spread to at least 36 states and washington, d.c. >> we had some dramatic news out of the state where i live, massachusetts, today. republican governor there charlie baker declaring a state of emergency after the number of cases in massachusetts went from 41 yesterday to 92 today. so more than doubling in one day. the governor announcing that of the 92 cases in massachusetts right now, 70 of them are attributed to one conference. >> a biogen conference. >> it happened in boston the

24th of january. we've been talking all night in terms of its political impact to the extent you can reduce it that far. let's widen the lens a little bit now and talk to dr. joseph fair. he's a virologist. he specializes in emerging diseases, an msnbc contributor. thank you for being here with us. >> absolutely. i'm here to talk about primaries, right? >> exactly. tell us why north dakota hasn't submitted any vote yet. what it feels like we are seeing, and again, this just from a layman's news consumer perspective, is it feels like we are seeing an explosion in the number of confirmed cases in the united states. should we see that as the product of america just starting to get its act together in terms of testing? or should we see this as a rapid rise in the number of infections in this country? >> it's actually both. the first rule of outbreak response and the first tool in

an outbreak response is the diagnostic. unless you know someone is positive, we can't isolate them, we can't trace their contacts, we can't do anything. so that's step zero in outbreak response, is having a valid diagnostic. and i must point out that there are commercial diagnostics available for covid-19. not just from one manufacturer, but multiple manufacturers now. so to be honest, there's really no excuse why we don't have valid diagnostics completely widespread throughout the country now. we are only going to see this grow in magnitude. we know for every confirmed case with the infection rate of this virus, two to three cases per -- you're going to infect two to three people per case of confirmed case that you have. so for every case we know about, we can assume safely that there's going to be two to three other people they have already infected that we don't yet know about and extrapolate that to those other people. so it logarithmically goes from there. >> we've seen 36 states now announce confirmed cases, plus

washington, d.c. and for a time we were all very carefully tracking individual cases and individual states and every time a new state would announce a new case that would become a different thing we filled in on the map. it was like we were trying to map it as it spread. now it feels like if it's in 36 states and it's in d.c., should we just assume that it is everywhere and should every state and every community be taking the same kinds of measures to protect people? or is it still a sort of thing where you can make regionally specific and city specific things about how people's lives should be changed? >> absolutely. it should be every state, every person should assume it is in their community. the way it works in this country is we can freely travel, thanks to our civil liberties. we can freely travel from state to state. we each have family in other states and that's exactly what's been happening. people have been carrying on as normal. just because they don't have the diagnostics out there so they don't know better than not to do that right now. unless we get that testing up

and running everywhere, we can assume it's in every state and territory and i have no doubt that that is the case. >> in tonight's voting, as we've been watching these states turn in their results, mississippi, idaho, north dakota, michigan among the states that actually don't have any confirmed coronavirus cases. it's almost palpable when we're covering the intersection of this crisis -- this global health crisis and this incredibly important election in states where they don't have confirmed reported cases. there is a different feeling in terms of the sense of urgency and whether or not it's being factored into the politics there. you're saying that's inappropriate. that every state should assume they've got it. >> absolutely. unless they have blocked all travel from other states that have it, which, you know, as you mention, 36 states have it. then they should assume it is present. they have no confirmed cases that they know about yet. they undoubtedly have cases of pneumonia. so unless they're broadly testing those pneumonia cases,

they don't know if they have it or not. like i said, unless they blocked off their state from travel from other states it's safe to assume they have it as well. >> dr. fair, let me ask you about another story. we learned before we got on the air at 7:00 p.m. eastern, both senator sanders and former vice-president biden had events scheduled in ohio. we then heard that for the debate scheduled for arizona on sunday, there will not only be no audience, there will be no filing center, there will be no spin room. simultaneously, we have had the president schedule a rally for wisconsin within the next few days. that is expected to have thousands of people. i would guess that he is trying to make a political point about that, trying to play down the risk. >> yeah. >> of people coming together. at some point will public health officials be able to saydee

fini say $definitively it is putting people's lives at risk or for political purposes? is there a clear point officials can say don't do that? >> be it a public health official or professionals, we're all saying that now. basically these mass gatherings are only going to further spread the threat of the wildfire we have going with covid-19. >> dr. joseph fair, virologist specializing in social diseases, thank you for being with us tonight. >> thank you. >> nicolle wallace, we are looking at the possibility -- we have 50 state elections and not a federal election. we are looking at the possibility of secretaries of state needing to amend and modernize their state elections to allow for the outbreak of the coronavirus. i'm guessing not all will, and i'm guessing we're going to have

some election issues because of this. if there's any kind of crystal ball looking forward to november. >> look, i mean, three weeks ago we would be talking about how state election officials have to be on alert for what even donald trump's intelligence officials have warned about, and that's an ongoing russian interference campaign. think of everything that state election officials have to contend with. they're not even -- there are local election officials, too. i think that we probably should have a conversation about surging some funding to state election boards, county election boards and the people they're going to have to administer -- this is in everybody's interests. this is not -- this doesn't have a partisan cast over it at all. i would argue that once there is a nominee in the democratic far at this, this might be one of the things they could go to congress jointly on. i think there is a need to

protect the vote from foreign interference and there is going to be a need to protect and perhaps create some contingencies so everyone can vote if the coronavirus continues to be something that -- i mean, we were hearing from medical experts decisions will be made hour by hour, but we don't know what those decisions will be in the fall. and we probably need to do some planning. >> one thing i would be thinking about is all the volunteers who usually work the polls, right. tend to be older people who sit there and check i.d.s and handout ballots and are in contact with all these people during a given day. >> my late father into his 90s. >> and my late mother into her 90s. >> and it is so much better than the app. we also had a test run of a new app in iowa. it was a total failure. so i think, you know, we rely on -- >> when in doubt bank on his mother and my father. >> exactly. >> we've already seen tonight in

ohio -- excuse me -- an inopportune time. >> that's an allergy. >> it's actually a raspberry i ate during the commercial. that's what's going on now. 88 counties changing the locations where people will vote. to take them out of senior citizen housing facilities and nursing homes because those are also places that have traditionally been places where people are going to vote. it is, you know -- the landscape here is still emerging, but we can see what is happening in other countries and see happening in this country as we get to a thousand cases and dozens of deaths, this is going to be something where parents and grandparents are the most vulnerable people. we are not a country that does great at taking care of our elderly in terms of long-term care and in terms of integrating their lives and our lives in a way that's mutually supportive. so this is going to be a cultural shock. this is going to be something that has a huge economic impact. this is going to be something where people's lives are

completely upended whether or not they themselves get sick because the older people in our lives are going to be susceptible to this. it speaks to how older people fit into our lives now. if they are in crisis we will do anything to help them. it will upend all of our lives whether we ourselves are susceptible. >> that's right. the only people to whom they are as important -- not as important, but they are also very important voters. voters are the most reliable voters. they're also very important to donald trump and whomever becomes the eventual democratic nominee. they're part of our lives. they're our families. they are also vital to what's about to happen in november, the selection of our next president. >> they are committed to their democracy. >> should i also say older americans also include the democratic -- the presidential field. >> that's true. >> 77. >> 78. >> 78, vice-president biden. 77 president trump. i'm sure he's now revising his

wikipedia page to say he's 42 and under -- >> let me say questions about the physical health of a candidate have always been part -- i worked for a cancer survivor when i worked for john mccain. sanjay gupta came down and revealed all his medical records. it will be parts of our job as people that cover this to can the campaigns, i've asked the biden campaign tonight, do they have any knowledge of the candidate coming into contact with nianyone infected with coronavirus. donald trump was in contact with someone who was infected. part of the job of our road warriors will be to check in with the campaigns every day to ask if the candidate, the candidate's spouse or any of the staff has been in contact with anyone infected. >> they are also in the age range of risk. it is important to have the conversation at a minimum. when we come back being we're going to check in on both of the democratic candidates tonight. joe biden, the timing and substance of his remarks in

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we're going to show you both

philadelphia and burlington, vermont. you'd be forgiven for saying, but no one has voted in either place today. that is part of the story tonight. there's the joe biden event. the crowd there -- >> anita dunn, his communications manager. >> in addition to media, the crowd is made up of members of the biden campaign. it's become kind of a thank you event after a bona fide good night for the candidate. so we're told we're about ten minutes out from him entering, and that brings us to burlington, vermont, and shack brewster who covers bernie sanders. shaq, tell people what you're doing in burlington, vermont. >> reporter: well, as you know, brian, we were supposed to be in cleveland, ohio. that is where senator sanders had his election night rally planned for. but he canceled it earlier this afternoon after the governor there, mike da wine said sporting teams -- there shouldn't be any indoor events

because of the coronavirus. instead he flew to burlington, vermont. he was planning ongoing back home anyway. what we are being told from a senior sanders aide, senator sanders does not expect to talk tonight. we don't expect to hear a remark from sanders on the night he had. make no doubt about it, brian, that loss in michigan is a big loss for his campaign. this was a big loss they worked to avoid. he flooded his schedule, filled many events in michigan, big rallies he had. he rolled out the endorsement of jesse jackson. he canceled an event he was supposed to have in mississippi. he raised and escalated those attacks against vice-president biden. this is a big loss for them and it's understanding the campaign has some explaining to do. this goes straight to the electability argument he's been trying to make. as of now we won't get any of those questions answered at

least from senator sanders tonight. brian? >> shaquille brewster, thank you. and steve kornacki, over to the board. first of all can i just mention that large gray state on the west coast that we have not called yet? >> yeah, california. >> i guess we can talk about that later. you're going to have some explaining to do. >> i can show you just quickly where it stands here. this is about three quarters of the vote in. the california secretary of state said 30 days from primary night he thinks he'll have full results in. you see sanders is leading here, so one of the reasons this does affect -- i can show you this outstanding result from california, it does affect this number you're seeing right here. this is the running delegate count. california, there are still a bunch of delegates that are still be allocated. but when you look at the pace, the trajectory things are on, his margin is probably going to remain about the same as they are allocated. you see biden leading this thing about 135 delegates nationally. what that reflects is the lead he had coming into tonight. and now projected delegate

allocations, nbc has given out for michigan, for missouri and for mississippi, again, three big biden wins tonight. there are still some more delegates to be allocated from these states. remember, the suspense there in mississippi if sanders is even going to hit 15% statewide. so you see it's now 139. this could probably when they're all tallied up from these three states, now biden doing even better than he was earlier in the night, this could get to 150. that could conceivably be his lead. you look at what's still to come in tonight. you're trying to look at what the sanders campaign is probably looking at tonight, this kind of math, they're seeing a deficit that could hit 150 delegates from these three states. they're looking at north dakota and idaho, states that are now primaries, not caucuses. maybe they can win them. it's not a big delegate haul if they do. washington state was big for them as a caucus. warning signs for them as a primary. this might be the deficit they're staring at, something along those lines coming out of tonight. if 150 doesn't sound like a lot, think about what comes next week

and think about what we're seeing with these demographic shifts. florida comes next week. the polling has put sanders 30, 35 points behind in florida. the demographics there are terrible for him. that could be a massive delegate loss for him. you look at -- if you're seeing what you're seeing in michigan tonight, the demographics in ohio are worse for sanders on paper than they are in michigan. this was a double-digit loss for him four years ago. illinois -- i'm circling everything here. illinois, bit the way, was razor thin four years ago, just like michigan. look at those changes we're seeing demographically in michigan. if you were to replicate that in illinois, that turns into a big biden win next week. arizona next week as well. the polling there not encouraging for sanders. i mean, you're looking at a situation where biden could be a week from tonight, if these patterns hold, you're building a 250, a 300-plus delegate lead in a one-on-one race, extremely difficult to erase that. and the only way to erase that

is to start finding big states and to start winning landslides in them. and bernie sanders isn't really showing that he can get out of the high 30s anywhere right now. >> steve kornacki, thank you. last-minute change. we're going to go out to steve patterson in the state of washington because of a closing wave of vote that has come in. steve? >> reporter: yeah, closing wave of vote. it's emanating here. you can see people still registering. as soon as they register they can vote right there. coming outside the door if i can get it open, i want to show you what it looks like out here. take a look at the line. this is just one polling place, keep in mind. you can see the line of cars coming down, last-minute registration, last-minute votes coming in. they come this way. and you can see the guy almost as if he's waving like airline traffic they can come in, where they can drop off. it's a little bit of a walk

here. they pull up to the window. they pull out a ballot. you can see why this is effective in the state of washington with this virus. it's a simple drop and in, just like that. this is obviously happening in more places across the state, across the county. we've seen high -- we've seen so much in the way of turnout. even people coming inside the center, this is a day in which, again, you can get registered. you can vote up until the polls close. and so people obviously are trying to take advantage of that before they get -- before this all ends. they want a chance to vote. but, again, speaking to election officials just here in king county, remember, this is a third of the state. they're saying already over 40%, looking at 50% participation. that's huge in this state. who that benefits, that has yet to be seen. but, again, just look at this, ending on this. this is pretty incredible. >> steve, thank you for waving your arms and getting our attention in the control room because that was indeed

instructive. and most people out east just can't imagine voting being so easy. >> when he said -- exactly. when he said look at the line, look at the line. i can't see the line, i only see the cars. i had no idea what he was talking about. being able to drive up and drop your ballot. keep in mind this is the last 20 minutes that polls are open in washington. and so these are -- they're making room for the cadillac to back up. >> that's if you think voting should be easy. okay, can we establish that? >> every voter in washington gets sent the ballot. everybody can return it by mail, they can drop it off in person. washington has been doing vote by mail for a long time now. it actually doesn't result in them having particularly slow results. not like california, which is planning to take the month apparently with a number of excuses. but this is, this is it. this is down to the wire in washington. >> i was watching our friend lawrence o'donnell who has joined us here in the studio. as you looked at the blue wall

that joe biden is building in the south and east and you were just kind of shaking your head like, here we are. >> it's a marvel on so many levels. we have never seen a comeback like this in the presidential primary process ever. a giant front runner at the beginning, loses his front runner status. and he doesn't go down to second place. he comes in fourth, he comes in third, he gets wiped out in the first three states, just wiped out, embarrassed. and the idea of coming back in the fourth and then just going like a rocket from then, we've never seen anything like that before. it's a stunning comeback. you know, i keep going back tonight to rachel's interview with bernie sanders last week. >> yeah. >> which has the right tonal accompaniment to what we're seeing tonight because one of the things that rachel was pursuing was what happened to the theory of the case, which is a big surge in voter turn out,

especially a surge in young voter turnout for bernie sanders. and rachel kept pointing out that that's not happening. and he would try to steer away from it, but he didn't ever offer some kind of energetic alternative theory to what's going on or how that's going to be jump started. and there was a kind of -- there was a certain kind of resignation when i looked back at those passages about there -- he doesn't really have a way to make it happen. didn't happen, it's not happening. and so here we are. the final point i'd make is eugene and i spent a fair amount of time talking about a poll in the washington post that came out two months ago. it was a national poll, the first and then only national poll of black voters. it told you exactly what was going to happen and where we are tonight. joe biden, prohibitive first place. bernie sanders second place, but far behind joe biden.

and in third place elizabeth warren who came in third. by the way, it was the only poll that i kind of lifted and shared with friends outside of this business. i said, take a look at this. if you're trying to understand how to watch this, take a look at this one. there's no other polyshared. whole story was there. black voters told the story. they told it to pollsters. they didn't get a chance to tell it to us, tell it to the public until south carolina let them go to the polls. >> and as steve kornacki goes to review all the previous numbers from 2016, there is no parallel really. that was hillary clinton. this guy hasn't been road tested, so we don't know what it would have been like. >> right, it was fun to watch steve earlier in the night slipping into saying, you know, biden did poorer four years ago because it's the substitute candidacy. and so, yes, you're seeing

tonight it's going to be a lot of interpretations of what we're seeing tonight. that is, how much of it was an antihillary vote and those things now are impossible to divine. you don't have any advantage of exit polls. people aren't terribly honest how much they hate a candidate when they're in the exit polling. that's something we're never going to know. for whatever reason, joe biden has come in so powerfully. one indicator we could have as we look at polls and it's in the poll of the black voter. what's the most important thing? beating donald trump. beating donald trump. so joe biden is the beating donald trump vehicle chosen by black voters overwhelmingly. and then other voters now are echoing that feeling. >> steve kornacki, what do you have for us? i'm told you have a new block of numbers. >> yeah, we do have a new block of numbers. it's turnout. we've been talking so much about turnout coming into tonight

across all the primaries and caucuses. it was up 26% at least since the last time around. remember california still determining the final number. let me show you what we're seeing so far in michigan. 85% of the vote in michigan is in now. the total adds up to 1.4 million with more votes to come in. it was 1.194 million the last time around. 1.94 million. look at missouri, two-thirds in. 69% in missouri. this adds up to 565,000. again, the number if you can see it was 626. so certainly missouri -- i'm supposed to say missoura. they get mad at me in nevada. 626, they are on pace to make it in missoura. take a look here in mississippi.

what do we have, 207,000 votes. it was 220, 220,000 in 2016. again, only two-thirds in here. so mississippi on pace to break it. by the way, i want to give you the exact number because we've been monitoring this. does sanders hit 15%? remember, if he's under it, rounding up doesn't do it for him. the number right now, show you this. if you were looking at a computer screen, it would say 15.0 right now for bernie sanders. i've been watching this closely. it's beening tooli toggling 14.o get into the delegate pool. >> it has been invoked the state claire mccaskill once represented in the united states senate, claire is a former resident of that great state. i used to answer that it was geographic. it's where you were from in missouri or missoura that

informed your pronunciation. your answer will have to wait until we hear from tonight's big victor. here's joe biden in philadelphia. >> our headquarters is just around the corner, and these are all people who have been working like the devil to try to get us elected as the -- >> thank you. [ cheers and applause ] >> i want to thank my sister valerie, and son-in-law dr. howard klein are here. folks, look, we were planning a big rally in cleveland tonight, but the governor of ohio asked the presidential campaigns to cancel their indoor public events in cleveland with large, large crowds of people, and that's what we did, due to the coronavirus. and he was concerned about that. and as i said all along that we would follow the guidance of the cdc, state and local officials and public health officials with respect to our campaign events, we'll continue to do that. this is a matter -- this whole

coronavirus issue is a matter of presidential leadership. and later this week i'll be speaking to you on what i believe the nation should be doing to address this virus. but tonight i want to speak to you from philadelphia where we announced our campaign at the front end, where we did our final announcement. to all those who have been knocked down, to all those who have been counted out, left behind, this is your campaign. just over a week ago, many of the pundits declared that this candidacy was dead. now we're very much alive. [ cheers and applause ] and although there's a way to go, it looks like we're going to have another good night. with victories in mississippi,

missouri, michigan, and we're waiting to hear from north dakota, idaho, and washington state. as i said from the beginning, this election is one that has character on the ballot, the character of the candidates, the character of the nation is on the ballot. it's more than a comeback in my view, our campaign. it's a comeback for the soul of this nation. this campaign is taking off, and i believe we're going to do well from this point on. take nothing for granted. i want to earn every single vote in every single state. but if you're willing, if you want to join us, go to joebiden.com. sign up. sign up. volunteer and contribute if you can. we need you, we want you. there's a place in our campaign for each of you. and i want to thank bernie

sanders and his supporters for their tireless energy and their passion. we share a common goal, and together we'll defeat donald trump. we'll defeat him together. [ cheers and applause ] we're going to bring this nation together. we're regenerating a democratic base, the democratic party, the african-american community, high school-educated folks like the ones i grew up with in claymont not far from here, in my old neighborhood, labor, suburban women, veterans, firefighters, union members and so many more. people of every economic station. the poor who are struggling -- and they are struggling in this environment. the middle class, who worries about whether or not they're going to be able to hang on and stay there, maintain their economic security. they're the reason jill and i got involved in this campaign in the first place, and they're the reason why i became a democrat

so long ago. and i can't tell you -- i really mean this from the bottom of my heart. i can't tell you how much i appreciate the confidence they've shown in me thus far and the way they turned out to vote for me. in my first campaign when i was a kid a long time ago, i had a billboard that said one thing on it. it had a picture of my wife and children, and it said "for all our families." that's all it was, "for all our families." that included democratic families, families of independent voters, republican families, everyone of every stripe, for all our families. look, that's what we were able to accomplish in south carolina. that's what we did on super tuesday. and it appears, although it's a little premature, it appears that's what we're able to do tonight. [ cheers and applause ]

in just the past week, someone -- so many of my capable competitors have endorsed me. mayor pete buttigieg, amy klobuchar, beto o'rourke, mike bloomberg, cory booker, and kamala harris. together, together we're bringing this party together. that's what we have to do. tonight we are a step closer to restoring decency, dignity, and honor to the white house. that's our ultimate goal. >> yes. [ cheers and applause ] >> at this moment when there's so much fear in the country, when there's so much fear across the world, we need american leadership. we need presidential leadership that's honest, trusted, truthful, and steady. reassuring leadership.

if i'm given the honor of becoming your president, i promise you i'll strive to give the nation that very leadership every day, every day i have the privilege to hold office. that's the reason i'm running for president. i believe we're in an incredible moment in american history, a phenomenal opportunity to deliver a bold, progressive vision to the american people. guaranteeing that every american has health care, affordable health care, total health care. not a privilege but a right. [ cheers and applause ] building on obamacare, providing every child access to good education regardless of their zip code. to deal with the moral depravity of our children who have to learn as they go to school -- little children -- to duck and cover, zigzag down a hallway because they fear someone with a semiautomatic weapon may be

coming in. we have to stand up to the gun manufacturers and to the nra, and i will do it. [ cheers and applause ] we have to rebuild the middle class. we have to rebuild the middle class, and this time bring everybody along, everybody along. [ cheers and applause ] and my fellow americans, we have to once again lead the world. donald trump's america first policy has made america alone. you know, in the fight against climate change, we have to rally the rest of the world to act and act now. rejoin the paris climate accord on day one, making clear to our allies that we'll honor our commitments, that our word can be trusted. [ cheers and applause ] and make clear to our adversaries that we will stand fast in restoring world order.

that's the american responsibility. tonight i'm speaking to you from the national constitution center not far from where two of the most important documents in all of history were written -- the declaration of independence. we hold these truths to be self-evident. those words became the american creed known around the world. the u.s. constitution, we, the people. these words literally changed the world. we've never fully lived up to the promise of either of those documents, but we've never, ever before walked away from them. and they're a reminder of what's at stake in this election. our very democracy is at stake in this election. as i said from the moment i announced not far from here, that i believe we're in the battle for the soul of this nation. with donald trump as president,

our core values, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made america america is truly at stake. i believe this nation can overcome four years of donald trump. but given eight, four more years, he'll forever and fundamentally change the very character of this nation. we can't let that happen. but winning means, winning means uniting america, no sowing more division and anger. it means having a president who not only knows how to fight but knows how to heal. it means replacing a president who demeans and demonizes people with a president who believes in empathy, compassion, and respect for everyone. it is my hope that the days of

divisiveness will soon be over. we're a decent, brave, resilient people. we are better than this moment we're in, and what we have to do, we just need -- we just need to remember who we are. this is the united states of america. there's not a single thing we cannot do if we do it together. we're on close to the eve of st. patrick's day. i'm fond of a quote some of you have heard me quote many times. a fellow that i admired very much who passed away not long ago, a poet named sheamus haney. here's what he said in one stanza. he said, history teaches us not to hope on this side of the grave but then once in a lifetime, that long tidal wave of justice rises up, and hope

and history rhymes. i truly believe it's within our power for the first time in a long time because of what's happened in the past three years, the power to make hope and history rhyme. that's what we're going to do. god bless you all, and may god protect us. [ cheers and applause ] >> it is 11:00 exactly on the east coast. it is 8:00 p.m. on the west coast, which means we have our final poll closings of the night. and here is what we have to tell you at this hour. in the state of washington in the pacific northwest, the race is too early to call. in the great state of idaho just to their east and south, the race is too early to call. in the state of michigan, as awarded earlier tonight, our

projection, joe biden is the projected winner. in the state of missouri, joe biden, the projected winner. in the state of mississippi, joe biden the projected winner. in the state of north dakota, a party-run election caucus hybrid, too early to call and then some. the delegates awarded tonight, the delegates awarded thus far this political season. steve kornacki, you're smiling. >> it's an election night. >> that's a perfect answer. thank you very much. what have you got? >> washington state, as you say, the polls just closing. no votes in here. remember, this is a heavy mail-in voting state so you may see some numbers here for candidate who's have dropped out who start to register. again i just want to set up what you're about to see here in washington state because if you can remember to four years ago, this is the result you saw from washington. this was a landslide for bernie

sanders over hillary clinton, 46 points. but remember these were caucuses four years ago. they have switched to a primary. we've seen all sorts of evidence that sanders does not get the kind of bang for his buck out of a primary where it's a much broader, a much bigger electorate than he does out of caucuses. the question has been how much is washington going to change from 2016 as they make this switch? there's no votes we can show you, but we can show you what the exit polls are telling us. i want you to check this out. two groups of voters we've been telling you about. white voters with a college degree. this is a big chunk of the electorate. look at this, biden in the exit poll, a double-digit advantage over bernie sanders, 42%-26%. remember, elizabeth warren has dropped out. mail-in voting there, she's running at 16%. then white voters without a college degree in washington state, again you're seeing biden with a double-digit advantage over sanders in the exit poll. warren back there at 9%. together these groups i just showed you, both of which biden is running with a double-digit

advantage over sanders, they account for more than 80% of the electorate. the washington state democratic electorate. and with these two groups in the exit poll, you have biden leading by double digits over sanders. again, a state that sanders won by 46 points in its caucuses for years ago. now you're starting to see what the electorate in a primary looks like and potentially what a huge difference that makes. remember, there was no bigger state where sanders got a larger delegate haul in 2016 than washington state. this exit poll tells you he's in a fight to even be able to win it this time, and frankly it might be an uphill fight. but we'll see as these results come? >> steve kornacki, can i ask you an impolitic question? >> my favorite. >> do we have any grounds for setting reasonable expectations for when we're going to actually find out what happened? washington? obviously it was a caucus before. it's a primary now. it's mail-in ballots.

does past performance tell us anything in terms of when we might get some votes? >> suggest we'll get some votes. suggest we'll get some significant votes out of washington. remember, it's that difference between the state-run versus the party-run, so i think we will get a lot of this mail-in vote has been coming in for weeks now. by the way, speaking of that party-run, i can show you we do have some numbers from north dakota here. if you're seeing these on your screen, just some context for these numbers, this is mail-in vote in north dakota. so with this party-run primary/caucus hybrid, they did allow a mechanism for mail-in voting. if you're seeing those results, that's what it is. >> that's still 0% reporting. >> that's a small amount, yeah. we're waiting to see on the same day. again, remember it was a caucus in '16 and sanders won it by nearly 40 points. so, again, the potential here in this different system for a very different result. >> steve, thank you. we have a lot to catch up on. >> we do. >> we won't be hearing from bernie sanders tonight. >> right. >> as we just heard from joe biden.

>> joe biden speaking in a place he didn't expect to be speaking. he's on the board of the national constitution center there in pennsylvania. he obviously had been campaigning in the states that were voting tonight, particularly in michigan, and had expected to go to ohio, where bernie sanders was also expecting to have a rally tonight in ohio. biden clarifying in his remarks tonight that part of what ended the decision to cancel those rallies was the governor of the state of ohio, mike dewine, had requested that presidential campaigns not hold events like that, and indeed that large indoor events of any kind not be held in ohio. i actually also have an additional update from something we talked about earlier on in the evening with dr. joseph baer, the virologist. we were talking about coronavirus. i had mentioned that of the six states voting tonight, there was actually sort of randomly happened to be that four of the

six states were states where no coronavirus cases have been reported. that's unusual. a large majority of american states have reported incidents of coronavirus. heading into tonight, neither mississippi, idaho, north dakota, nor michigan had reported any coronavirus cases. that was true when we had that discussion about an hour ago here on our air. since then, the governor of michigan has come out and confirmed that, in fact, in michigan there are two presumptive cases and the governor of michigan has declared a state of emergency there. so we went into the night with four of these six states having no cases. now we're down to three of these six states. >> lawrence o'donnell, we were watching joe biden together. did he touch all the bases? did he do what a speech tonight had to do? >> he did everything that that speech had to do. remember, this speech had a challenge that we've never seen in a campaign victory speech like this before. he also had to address this pandemic that is about and he

had to weave all of that together. his opening line was, this is your campaign. he was speaking to sanders voters. he was speaking to everyone on the democratic side of the electorate, and he did it in the most generous ways he could. he congratulated bernie sanders. he said he wants to thank bernie sanders and thank bernie sanders' supporters for everything they've contributed to the campaign and he's not presuming in this speech that that's the end of it, that bernie sanders is out. he had a very soft tone of voice. >> mm-hmm. >> as if you're in the living room with him for most of the speech and just kind of ramped up his energy only slightly at the end, but it was all there all the time. he really was trying to create, i think, comfort, stability, talked about presidential leadership, and he used a phrase that, you know, in any other time you wouldn't think anything

of it. he said, "if you give me the honor of becoming your president." and when i heard that, what i was hearing was, you know the guy who has it now doesn't really think it's that much of an honor. he certainly doesn't honor the job. he doesn't honor the oval office. he doesn't honor the position. and joe biden's use of that word "honor," which at any other time i think would be a throwaway line in a political speech, for me had some real resonance. i just think he did exactly what he had to do. what's so striking tonight is a campaign like the sanders campaign suffers the kind of losses that they're suffering tonight, this is when you normally have the rouse the troops speech, it's not over. now, presumably that's that was scheduled and got canceled, but they weren't able to put together any alternative version of it in vermont tonight, even for a smaller group to say tonight to sanders' voters, this

is still alive, we're still going, and so presumably we'll wait for tomorrow to hear whatever it is bernie sanders is going to say. >> let me bring in a special guest who can speak to this. with us right now, deputy campaign manager and comms director for the biden effort, kate beddingfield. she's with us from the national constitution center in philadelphia. kate, first question rather directly after congratulating your team on what looks to be a sweeping big night for you. have you been in touch -- have the candidates been in touch between the biden and sanders campaigns tonight? >> they have not spoken tonight, no. you know, vice president biden was just here now. you guys saw, just speaking. he's been focused on putting his speech together and coming out and speaking tonight. so, no, they have not spoken tonight. >> are there plans to speak? have there seconds -- you'll forgive the term -- spoken, and do you think there is any lesson

of tonight vis-á-vis the bernie sanders effort? >> well, look, i mean the lesson tonight is that joe biden is the candidate who can win all of the constituencies that we need to win as democrats to beat donald trump in the fall, you know? you saw him do tremendously well with african-american voters tonight, but you saw him build on his coalition. you saw him do incredibly well in the suburbs in michigan. you saw him win college-educated voters in missouri. clearly, you know, some of senator warren's supporters coming our way, which we're incredibly grateful for. i think you saw tonight joe biden is really the candidate that democrats across the board feel really enthusiastic about, and he demonstrated tonight that he's the candidate in this race who can build the coalition of democrats that we're going to have to turn out to beat donald trump in the fall. >> more of a logistical question than anything else, but it came up the last time we were covering a large election. have you received, and will joe biden be accepting secret service protection?

>> well, look, i'm not going to comment on security measures. obviously we will follow whatever guidance is appropriate. i'm not going to talk about security for exactly that reason, because it's security. but, you know, obviously we are -- we believe that tonight we are on the path toward winning a plurality of delegates. we're going to come out of the night tonight with a bigger delegate lead than we came into the night with. and, again, you saw across the board joe biden won the voters that we have to win, and not just won them but, you know, turned people out at almost record levels. i mean we're seeing almost -- we're seeing record turnout in michigan. we're seeing really high turnout in missouri. you know, that's a state, you know, senator sanders and secretary clinton were very, very close in 2016. i think just a percentage point, and, you know, you saw joe biden win quite handily tonight. there's a tremendous amount of energy for him. you saw him winning the voters he had to win to beat donald trump. voters are saying this is the guy who has the character, who

has the empathy. you saw that resoundingly across the board tonight. >> kate, it's rachel here in new york. thanks for making time for us tonight. i wanted to ask about something that vice president biden talked about in his speech and that obviously looms over everything that's happening tonight, and that is the pandemic of coronavirus that's now even just since we've been on the air tonight, extended to michigan, one of the states that was in contention tonight with the governor there declaring a state of emergency and announcing their first two cases. what kind of contingency planning is your campaign doing in terminates of the candidates' contact with strangers and hand-shaking and being at events in closed spaces and the viability of large indoor campaign events going forward? >> absolutely. it's an incredibly important question. you know, we are obviously following the guidance of public safety officials. you know, we obviously pulled down our event in ohio tonight because the governor had asked

that people not hold large indoor events and we followed that guidance. we have been taking steps to ensure that people who have been attending our events in the last week, you know, that they have -- we've been taking precautionary steps. people have been getting spritzed with hand sanitizer on the way into our events. the vice president has not been working rope lines to avoid that direct contact. so, you know, we're taking guidance from the scientists, from the experts, from public officials, and making sure that we're doing everything that we can do, we're doing our part to ensure that we're being responsible. so, you know, you heard the vice president tonight say he expects to address this later this week on thursday. you can expect to hear from him on this public health situation that we're in, and you'll hear him talk about his experience dealing with public crises in the white house and what he would do as president. so it's something that we're obviously taking very seriously on our campaign in terms of how we're conducting our campaign, and it's also something you're going to hear from him as he talks about, you know, what kind of leadership he would bring to

the white house. >> kate, thank you. >> thank you very much for joining us tonight. again, what appears to be a very big night for the biden effort. we appreciate your time. it's unbelievable that you have to ask individual campaigns what are you doing. >> yeah. >> for the coronavirus, but this is going to become the controlling story of at least the foreseeable future. >> lawrence, you mentioned a few minutes ago that i had that interview with senator biden a few days ago in burlington. >> senator sanders. >> senator sanders. what did i call him? >> biden. >> biden. >> i was looking at you and thinking -- i have not interviewed vice president biden. i interviewed senator sanders in burlington, and one of the things i asked him about was what he thinks about the prospect of the democratic national convention being canceled and what sort of shave guar

-- safeguards there should be to make sure the process is transparent and fair. he said it was the first time he had been asked that question, which i was surprised by. i feel like it now feels, the way things are going, there's almost no circumstances under which i can imagine a democratic national convention happening in milwaukee this summer. i mean things are changing quickly, but i can't imagine they're going to reverse themselves fast enough that something like that could be viable. >> if they cannot assemble under one roof as they're supposed to, that actually requires a rules change. if they have to do this remotely and everyone stays home, they're going to have to quickly get through a rules change that allows them to do that. i think they better get through some kind of rules change that certainly allows the option to do that. >> yeah. >> because it's all up in the air now. the idea of everybody being gathered, you know, in july in one of these -- under one of these domes is very hard to imagine as we sit here now. >> seems farfetched. i mean there is the chance, but

we may not know it then. there is the chance that the virus takes the seasonal sort of -- >> dip. >> -- dip that the flu does. but of course we don't know that. dr. fauci says we don't know that. >> right. and it should be noted that the prospect of having a hotly contested proverbial bodies on the floor, contested convention where people are fighting it out for the nomination on the floor, like having that remotely is almost impossible to imagine if we've got a nomination -- >> if we have a solid victory by, say, joe biden, where he has all the delegates he needs before the convention -- >> it's a simpler affair. >> this is easier to arrange. i think they've got to arrange the possibility of individual delegates not being able to show up. if you feel a little bit sick a couple of days before the convention, don't come. but then how does that delegate vote? and they've got to figure out a way to do that. >> we just went from zero to 60 almost literally in washington state, and by that i mean 60% of

the vote, steve kornacki? >> yeah, 60% of the vote is in. these are the three biggie counties. you see biden is leading this thing by 0.6 of a point. this is 60% of all the vote in washington state. remember, mail-in states, so much of this comes in early. they can count this up before the polls even close in a lot of cases. these three counties right here, this is king county where seattle is. let's start right there. what you're looking at, it says 0% reporting, but look at the giant number of votes counted here. this is mail-in voting. this is a ton of vote here. don't let that 0% fool you. we don't have any same-day precincts in here, and i have flagged that for you because that's significant. the vote -- we have seen the pattern here where the vote that was cast farther back, a week ago, a couple of weeks ago, that has been stronger for sanders, and we've seen in other states that it's the same-day vote where biden has done better. so if you're looking at a situation where we're waiting on

same-day, where biden is 34-33 down here in king county. it is the king county in washington state. it's the biggest one. it's where seattle is, and biden is within a point. we're going to see what happens as you get more of the recent vote counted. you go north of that, this is where ef reverett, washington i. this is the third largest county. right there biden again, mail-in vote. a lot of this older. 34-33, biden over sanders. you know it's older because bloomberg is still getting 11. warren is still getting 11. candidates who dropped out are still getting double digits. again, the trends we've seen in other states f you're joe biden and as these candidates dropped out, you've consolidated support. your support has gone up. if you're leading 34-33 with the early mail-in being counted, that bodes well. let's go south of seattle here. this is pierce county. this is number two in the state. this is tacoma basically. take a look here. again, early.

36-32 biden. again, bloomberg 12, warren 10. see what happens when the voters show up in the last couple days who didn't have bloomberg as an option, didn't have warren as an option. everything we've seen in other primaries, we'll see if this happens in washington as well, suggests that is good news for joe biden. so you add that together. i'm just looking here. 59%. that's a lead for biden. here's another population center, a smaller one. this is where the city of vancouver is, clark county. again, early biden leading that. see if spokane is -- we do have some spokane in here and eastern washington. an advantage for biden. bloomberg 15, warren 10. if you're the biden campaign -- i said this at roughly this point when we were looking at the results from michigan. if you're the biden campaign and you're seeing these numbers right now and you know that what's to come is vote that was cast more recently when the basic dynamics of this race changed, you're very excited about seeing these numbers. again, the difference between a primary and a caucus, when this was the washington state caucus

in 2016, it was a 46-point bernie sanders win. you see much higher turnout here, much different dynamic. you got biden ahead with the earliest of the mail-in voting being counted here. >> as we said, zero to 60 in no time at all. >> i know it's caucus to primary, and i know that's a big thing. but to go from the same candidate winning by 46 points in the last democratic contest there to being tied, i mean going into this tonight at 7:00 eastern time we got on the air, i said if biden can get anywhere near sanders in any of these three states, north dakota, idaho, and washington, where sanders put together, you know, 30, 40, 50, almost 60-point wins, that would be a sea change. i did not expect that we would see numbers like this. claire mccaskill called it and said we'd see numbers like this. i absolutely did not. >> another case for banning caucuses. >> and banning punditry. i'm banning myself from here on

out. >> i'm out of here too. >> the caucuses, it's true. well, they give you -- they give you a very different snapshot of the electorate than the primaries do. >> they really do. it's a whole different thing. >> yeah. it turns out iowa was much different from south carolina this year. a break for us. when we come back, among the voices we're going to hear from, one michael moore. a lot of questions to ask him tonight as our coverage continues. ♪ if you looked at america like a bird and that was all you knew, would you really understand it, with just that point of view? we've got a different way to look at it. from right here on the ground. we don't just the united states. we see united towns. from where we sit, just down the street, near the post office, by the park, when we stop and look around, what we see are sparks.

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boy, some nights can just be like christmas morning for steve kornacki. i look over. 17% of idaho is in on top of the big washington state surprise. steve? >> when you get west of the rockies, you start getting into these states with early voting, with mail-in voting, and they can start to count them up pretty quickly. in idaho, about a sixth of the vote in. biden 43, sanders 33. again, the giveaway, the tell on these things when you see bloomberg, warren, buttigieg even, he's making his first appearance tonight. when you see them registering significant support, it generally indicates you're looking at the earliest vote. what they did in idaho, you could start a couple weeks ago casting an early vote. if you wanted to, you could show up in person and do it. you could request a mail-in vote if you wanted. that's what's being tallied here and that's given biden already a ten-point advantage over sanders.

you would expect as more votes come in in these counties that are already reporting, that the candidates who have dropped out, those numbers will decline. again, we've seen that benefit biden elsewhere. but i mean take a look. biggest county in the state. this is where boise is. this is the early vote there and you already see biden out to a nine-point advantage over sanders. warren 10, bloomberg 8, buttigieg 6. if past is prologue here, room for biden to grow. again, the difference here, primary in 2020, caucus in 2016. this was the caucus result in 2016. sanders won the thing 78-21, a 57-point victory. i don't know if you can read this on your tvs. this was the total turnout in the caucus in 2016, 23,000 people turned out for the idaho democratic caucuses. they were overwhelmingly sanders supporters. he got the lion's share of delegates. already you can see here tonight, if it was 23,000, just look at this. over 10,000, you're near the

11,000, you're up near 15,000 already. 20% is in. so you could see you are just going to shatter that 2016 number. this is a much bigger electorate, it's much easier to vote. you don't have to go and sit through a three-hour meeting this time. now you can go get a mail-in ballot. you can do it in person early if you want, and you're seeing what that does. a totally different dynamic, from a 57-point win for sanders. now with a fifth of the vote in, he trails by ten in this primary. we'll just check on washington quickly to see if there's an update. indeed there is. two-thirds of the vote now counted in washington. look at that. it's a lead there for sanders of 0.2 of a point. what is happening is sanders seems to have strength when you get away from sort of the seattle area, get more into the interior here. you see this is early vote here that's being counted. these are votes that were cast -- again, bloomberg is at 20%. my god. this is votes that were cast long before election day. sanders has a lot of strength here as these counties -- if you see gray, they haven't even reported the early vote there.

so there's opportunities for sanders, i think, to keep building this number as these counties fill in. the danger for sanders, as we showed you here in king county, that 0% means the more recent vote, the same-day vote, that's yet to be counted. that's where biden likely has an advantage. so again here, if you're sanders, even if you get a little bit ahead here, which it looks like he is with a lot of that early vote, is he ahead enough to make up for what biden could get when you get those voters who were just choosing between biden and sanders? >> thank you, steve. bloomberg may want to give a speech tonight. >> exactly. >> based on -- >> where is he tonight? i should mention that as we are seeing, we've got this split-screen story tonight as we have had so many other nights. as the michigan race was called, we heard from the michigan governor that they've got their first confirmed cases of coronavirus and a state of emergency declared in michigan. >> yep. >> tonight as we are getting these first significant results from washington state, obviously we've already got a state of

emergency in washington, and some of the largest numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths around the country. but tonight as these results are coming in in washington, the governor of the state of washington, governor jay inslee has just decided, has just announced that all events in the seattle area will be banned if they have more than 250 people. that includes sports events and concert events. this is the first time that we've seen a government order that kind of a ban in such a big place. and this is -- i mean i know we're watching both of these stories unfold at once, but this is -- it's getting more dramatic sort of with the hour. >> it's going to change life in america. claire mccaskill, joy reid have joined us. your take on mr. biden's night thus far, as much as we know from steve and other sources? >> well, i think it is a really difficult night for bernie sanders -- >> yep. >> -- to go on from. if these states turn out the way i think they're going to turn

out, i think that the state of washington will end up voting for joe biden. i believe idaho and south dakota will both end -- >> north dakota. >> if that happens, the rationale for bernie sanders continuing his campaign is hard to see. if the goal here is to defeat donald trump, i particularly would hope if bernie -- listen, i get that bernie has worked hard and his followers are passionate, and i respect that. and if he wants to debate, that's great. but i would hope we would maybe stop with the negative ads at this point going forward. we need to think about how we unite and take on the big mess, which is the one that's sitting in the oval office right now. >> joy, what's your take on that. >> yeah. i mean i think it's going to be difficult to convince, i think, sanders and his movement of that. but i think this is -- we said it was potentially an exhaustion election. we talked about that a lot.

it's now a fear election. you know, we were just talking about -- you were just talking, rachel, about cancellations of events for everything that i had planned, you know, everything that those of us who do any kind of public events, they're all canceled now. that's going out a month in my own personal schedule. >> me too. >> everything has been shut down. travel, people don't want to get on a plane. i had a friend that was going to be honored at her alma mater in georgia. she's not going. the whole thing is canceled. people's lives are being disrupted every day. i still have a lot of friends in florida. i spoke with a republican friend earlier today that was convincing his parents not to go to their services, right? to synagogue. don't go, right? that people are worrying about elderly relatives. this is a fear election, and for bernie sanders, the argument he's trying to make that we need to have a democratic socialist revolution is not -- it doesn't fit in that context. and i think in that context, even without having a campaign or having a lot of infrastructure, biden makes

sense to a lot of people. it just makes sense to a guy who knows who to call. >> let me counterpoint that, though. biden is running all the things biden is running on. sanders is running as the leader of the sanders movement. but if he is running on one policy above all, it is about medicare for all. >> health care. >> which is a universal idea about health care, which is an idea about radically transforming and small "d" democratizing american provision of health care so everybody can get it no matter who you are. >> yeah. >> in the context of a global pandemic, i understand wanting to flee towards safety and something familiar. but wanting to flee toward somebody who, for all of these years, has been running on universal access to health care? i mean it seems there's an argument there. >> there is an argument there, but it is a disruptive move, right. >> it's a fight. >> it's a fight to get it. you heard when lawrence o'donnell asked joe biden if he would veto it, you see he made the caveat that anything that

came to him that wasn't immediate, he would not sign because the thing is the transition to get to that universal health care program medicare for all won't be easy. i am still old enough to remember the fight just to get obamacare. it was hell. and if people even think about that, how hard it was -- >> they don't know how hard it is. >> democrats had like a six-month window where they had 60 votes because al franken's seat was still up. democrats didn't even have a year of 60 votes. they had six months. the reality is it was hard to get it. i think people can't process the idea of wholesale shifting the entire health care system to medicare for all while we're in the crisis. and while we're in the crisis, the guy who was there for the previous crises is making sense to people. >> i have to jump in only because we have changed one of our calls. washington state has gone from too early to call to too close

to call. >> with two-thirds of the vote in. >> you can see mathematically sanders right now has the larger raw number. but it's been going back and forth. i wish the viewers at home could see the view of steve kornacki i get from this studio. but, steve, i'm looking at your board. 68% in. again, zero to 68. >> here's sort of the suspense and the mystery of getting the returns in a state like washington. you remember how fast the first 65 or so percent of the vote suddenly came in. >> kaboom. >> and suddenly it slowed dramatically. what you see here is a gap of about 1,600 votes and change, sanders over biden. we don't know the exact breakdown, but what we think is happening in most of these counties that you see colored in right now is that basically the mail-in vote that they've gotten so far has been counted roughly, probably all very close to it, and they're probably about to start revealing the same-day vote.

remember, a big difference there. let me give you an example here. the biggest county in the state, king county, this is seattle, it says 0% reported because they reported these things out sort of all in one big batch. but what you see here is sanders 34, biden 33. again, the fact that warren and bloomberg, gabbard sitting there registering tells you this is a vote that was cast a while ago. so we think this is the mail-in vote. we think -- our decision desk does -- that what you're looking at here probably accounts for an estimate here about 56% or so of the vote from king county that will ultimately be counted. and we think the rest of what's to come or a lot of the rest of what's to come is probably same-day, is prosbably much mor recent. when you start seeing that warren number go down, when you start seeing that bloomberg number go down, that will kind of be the cue in these counties that they're on to same-day stuff, that they're on to stuff that was cast more recently after warren and bloomberg got

out of the race. again, if in the vote that is older, before this race kind of reshuffled, has sanders up 34-33, the trends we've seen in other states so far suggest that is very good news for biden, that a lot of that remaining vote should give him an opportunity to move up here because that's what we've seen him do elsewhere. so, again, we think -- our decision desk does that it's a little bit over half that's in in king county. if you go north, snohomish. just about 52% of all the votes here have been tabulated. when you see double-digit bloomberg, warren, suggests that's the older vote, suggests the bulk of what's to come is going to be more same-day, more recent, an opportunity for biden. we don't know the exact breakdowns, though. they don't give us the exact breakdowns, so we've got to kind of figure them out. we've got to start seeing when the warren and bloomberg numbers start dropping. that's when we'll know. but just the patterns that we kind of know about how

washington works, you get a huge batch suddenly when the polls close. then things start to slow down as the same-day stuff gets counted. given that and given what we've seen biden do in other states with the late vote, the stuff that's come in since the field has consolidated, if you're biden and you're down one-tenth of a point here, you're probably cautiously optimistic. but again there's some guesswork involved so we're going to see. >> steve kornacki, can i ask you to go one state east for a second. we've got a too close to call projection in washington right now. in idaho it's still too early to call. i just want to ask if we've got any more vote there. >> here's the biggie again. the city of boise. we've got some of the same day in in boise. both biden and sanders have both moved up from where they were in the early vote. warren and bloomberg and buttigieg have dropped somewhat. this is the biggiest one in the state. there's a difference in idaho

between the early and the same-day. 11%. we're starting to get same day. put a pin in this number here. in ada county where boise is, 11% in. it's a five-point lead for biden. what comes in the rest of the way will be same day. let's see what the change is. >> thank you very much. >> steve kornacki, thank you. we now have the great pleasure of bringing a byline many of our viewers may know back to television. new yorker staff writer and professor of journalism here in new york at columbia university, jelani cobb. it's great to have you back on the broadcast. you've been so patient listening to our coverage. now we get to ask you what you make of this night thus far and where the democratic party is on the map tonight. >> oh, there's so much to talk about. so, i mean, let's start with this. you know, the earlier conversation about joe biden's comeback and when you look at it, when you look at that solid blue wall kind of going state

after state after state, you know, the typical narrative has been that south carolina was the trigger that pulled all of this. but i'm starting to think about what julian castro was saying before he dropped out, around the time he dropped out when he had a really big issue with the order of the primaries. he said they were not reflective of the will of the democratic party. they were not demographically characteristic and so on. so now it becomes a question of whether iowa, nevada, and new hampshire were atypical. were they just outliers? maybe biden didn't have a comeback. maybe this was something that was laying in wait for him all along, and this was the forecast we might have seen if we weren't thinking about those first three states. there's another thing about bernie sanders i think has to be said. he hasn't seen the kind of surge that he was hoping for that would allow him to move past his rivals in the democratic party in the primaries, and i think

that what's been missed here is that he has erred, perhaps e strategically -- what seemed to be a validation of the most cynical ideas about politics, there are people who would say if you're talking to political consultants, they'll tell you don't try to expand the electorate. never try to expand the electorate. just find the people who are registered, find the people who are likely to vote, and then make a case for those people. don't worry about young voters. no matter what you do, they won't come out. we know of course in 1971 when the 26th amendment was passed and, you know, the first time that people were able to vote at age 18, there was about a 55% voting rate for young people. we have never reached that number again. the closest we saw was in 2008 when barack obama hit 49%. so there's a real kind of cause for consternation or sadness even if you're not a sanders supporter to see that this idea,

which is a really fundamentally democratic idea about including everyone in the decision-making process has seemed to hit some road bumps tonight. >> is there a way, professor cobb, that the sanders campaign and the biden campaign -- i think both are recognizing the truth of what you just argued there. >> mm-hmm. >> can find some way to honor that analysis, to build toward that, and to try to use the strengths of both of these campaigns toward making the democratic party something that can sort of deliver on that promise and deliver on that idea better than each of these candidates has done individually. >> sure. and you also hope that, you know, the future of the party -- i mean we're talking about two septuagenarians, in the future of the party that you'll sigh movements and candidates that are better at uniting these two -- i guess you'd say factions of the democratic party now. and, you know, what will happen between these two candidates, i think people do not want a

replay of 2016 where there was so much animosity and people said that they would vote for jill stein and so on, and you kind of saw how that turned out in the long run. but there is, especially on the sanders side, you know, a good bit of, you know, ill will or bad feeling, i should say about the way things are going, and there are some people who feel votes have been suppressed and so on. i think it will take some time to die down before any bridge or detente between those two camps. >> can i ask you, professor, your opinion of what happened with jim clyburn and his effect on this race? >> yeah. well, i mean i think -- i've said before, jim clyburn, for people who don't know, is just this gigantic figure in south carolina politics. and not only, you know, was it his endorsement, but the way he couched that endorsement, you know. he had recently lost his wife, who was a person who was as well known in the state as he is.

and, you know, as a person who is experiencing grief, spoke about his wife a admiration and respect for joe biden. that is not the typical political endorsement. that's just not something that you can pay for. that's not something that you can anticipate, and then the exit polling was showing it really had a substantial impact on voters who were undecided in south carolina. if i could add one other thing really quickly here, there's something that joe biden did in south carolina, and it hasn't gotten enough attention, but it was during a town hall when reverend anthony thompson stood up, and anthony thompson is someone who i know somewhat, and he unfortunately lost his wife in the emanuel ame shooting in 2015. and he raised a question to -- posed a question to vice president biden about the role that faith would play in his decision-making. and it was an extraordinary moment. joe biden talked about his grief. he talked about going to the

church not simply to commemorate the people who had fallen in that shooting, but going to the church to grieve the loss of his own son beau. and this was a conversation between these two people intimately familiar with tragedy and deep grief, and it really showed as stark a contrast as you can imagine. i don't think you can paint a more stark contrast between who joe biden is and who the current occupant of the white house is. >> you're so right. you could hear a pin drop during that exchange. >> right. >> jelani cobb, thank you, professor, very much for adding your voice to our coverage tonight. another break for us. when we come back, we will hear from michael moore. wer my blood sugar and a1c. wer because i can still make my own insulin. and trulicity activates my body to release it like it's supposed to. trulicity is for people with type 2 diabetes. it's not insulin. i take it once a week. it starts acting in my body from the first dose. trulicity isn't for people with type 1 diabetes

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michael moore is standing by to talk to us, but more urgently to the board we go because we have a change in our designation. idaho now biden leads. >> ah. >> so that's a distinction. and, steve, you're up to your keister in new numbers every there, aren't new. >> i just want to update this. we said mississippi, sanders has got to hit 15% to get statewide delegates. we are rounding up from 14.8. the mississippi democratic party does not round up from 14.8. basically right now there are 64 precincts in the state of mississippi out of more than 1,700. i just looked at them. there are some that look okay for sanders. there are some that book bad.

he's got get his number up in the 64 precincts or he misses that statewide threshold. >> steve kornacki, thank you. as we said, we have an oscar award winner waiting to talk to us, a bernie sanders surrogate importantly for this political season, and host of the podcast "rumble with michael moore" conveniently hosted by michael moore. michael moore is here with us in our new york studios. you know, that was just a -- that was a small slice of tonight. bernie sanders struggling to make threshold in a state vital to the democratic electorate, and that's mississippi. where does your candidate stand tonight, ask tell me your path forward if you're bernie sanders. >> well, let me correct that. first of all, i'm not a surrogate. i don't speak for bernie or the campaign. i only speak for myself and for the millions of people who might

agree with me somewhere out there. you know, this has been an incredible movement of people across the country, and it's been very exciting to be supporting bernie, but not really bernie. he would say we've been supporting some ideas and policies in this movement to try and create a better country, not go backwards, not be nostalgic about the past, of the things that were okay before trump. but i think trump has just pummeled this country so badly, and i know -- i mean, you know, i lived in michigan, so i'm familiar with how people feel. they're frightened. they're demoralized. there is a malaise that has spread across this country and certainly throughout michigan, and people can't take one more day of this. the fact that this coronavirus has driven home just how much

danger we're in with this individual in the white house, that i think people just didn't want to -- asking people to do two things, get rid of trump and get rid of the system, political and economic system that gave us trump, that i think was too much to ask probably for people who are just like, can we just get rid of trump? please. and i understand that. it's -- you know, the hope is that when you get rid of something that's bad, you can also replace it with something that's going to move us forward, and i think that that's what bernie is trying to do. that's what he's been trying to do. in terms of your question about the path forward, it's a question really you should ask him. i know what i would advise him to do. i would look at the board of the great kornacki over there and say, wow, what is it now, 790-something delegates for

biden? that's -- you need 1,991, so that's about 1,200 short. the game isn't over. all the other states who haven't had a chance to have their say should have their say. and i think that, you know, bernie -- when he says not me, us, i think if you've met him, you know that really is where his head's at. his idea was not just himself going into the oval office but bringing, you know, millions with him. so i think that he -- i think his policies and the things that he stands for, the things that we would hope to see happen if we do get rid of trump, that they would happen. and none of us are giving up on that. plus what do you want to say here tonight? i mean obviously i watch msnbc every day, and so i've gotten

the gist over the last number of weeks and months. boy, the last thing you want to do is say one thing that is demeaning or smug about the young people. the young people didn't show up to vote. you know, bernie tonight again in michigan got the 18 to 29-year-olds. i think it was something -- it was around 82% the last time i alooka alooked. that was true in mississippi. he's received the most votes from our young americans. we cannot win in november without them. he has received the most votes from latinos. they don't get discussed much. we talk a lot about how he's doing with other demographics in terms of college-educated, in terms of women,

african-americans, et cetera. somehow latinos just are left out of the discussion. bernie has been number one in all of these races with latino voters. >> michael, here's my question. >> people who earn under $50,000 a year, number one in michigan again today with those voters. >> here's my question. if it's not your guy, do you show up for joe biden? do you support joe biden? and while i called you a surrogate, you have endorsed bernie. >> yes. >> you have lustily introduced him and happily hosted events for bernie. so do you show up? do you help the cause if, by your calculus, if the original equation was defeat trump and by the way, let's revolutionize how things are done. if you get half of that, do you support -- and assuming biden prevails, do you support joe biden? >> well, i think that's something that both bernie and i and all of us in the campaign

have said from day one. really the question has to be asked again of vice president biden, of hillary clinton, others who said two months ago that they didn't know if they could endorse or vote for bernie should he be the nominee of the party. on the two days that they each said that, the signal that they sent out, what they said was essentially was, you know, we might just have to stay with trump because we may not be voting for bernie. nobody on bernie's side has ever said anything like that at all. so the question really has to be asked to the other -- to the people on the other side of this divide within the democratic party as to where their ideas of unity are when they behave like this. of course they both walked it back. but once they put it out there,

it was -- it was a sad moment and kind of, i think, scared people even more. but that's, i think, what the intent was. so, no, those of us who are actually doing this because of our convictions, because we believe that we do need to remove trump, that that is job one. >> all right. >> that's what's going to happen. but i'm going to tell you i'm only speaking for myself. those young people who are watching this right now -- >> i get it. >> latinos, people who earn under $50,000 a year, people who haven't seen a dentist in ten years, people whose wages are garnished because they can't pay the hospital bill. >> i get it. >> because of obamacare, the deductibles are so large. all of those people, if you don't have them in november, that's who you need to bring into the studio and talk to somebody who can't afford to go to the doctor. >> michael moore, go to the

doctor will be the end of your quote. thank you very much for coming on and speaking passionately about your candidate. to our viewers, we have a barn burner in the state of washington. 60 votes separating these two candidates. our live coverage continues after this. ine a safe sleep aid. and the 12-hour pain relieving strength of aleve. so...magic mornings happen. there's a better choice. aleve pm.

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everyone is really excited for you because it was such a great high-five. and then... ...the boss comes in. and she wants one too. geico. fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance. just past midnight here on the east coast. i'm chris hayes. it's six states voting tonight. we are of course continuing to tally those votes and add them up. but at this hour, an unmistakable message from democratic primary voters tonight. we don't have the full results. it is clear it has been a big night for joe biden, a night that included what nbc news projects will be a biden win in the state of michigan. the bernie sanders campaign had banked a lot on the state where sanders had won an upset victory in his 2016 presidential run,

defying the polling even a day before that race. but the majority of democratic primary voters tonight are signaling they are coalescing around joe biden and moving toward a new phase of this campaign. there are some things in the exit polls that really jump out. african-american voters coming out overwhelmingly for biden. biden also winning a lot of white rural and suburban voters, particularly in michigan, that hillary clinton had not won in the primary last time around. we're going to talk about that. and also the enormous generational divide in the democratic party. younger voters backing sanders by huge margins, older voters backing biden by huge margins, which has been one of the starkest features of all polling in every state, everywhere throughout the whole campaign from the beginning. the story of the campaigns thus far is older voters have been coming out in droves and younger ones have not. also of course we're conducting this election night amidst an ongoing public health emergency that has already been impacting all of our dailey lives and has been impacting the campaigns themselves. both biden and sanders canceled

their planned rallies tonight, almost certainly the right thing to do based on public health expertise. biden did speak a short time ago to a room that included only campaign workers and members of the media. no big crowd of cheering supporters that would be normal on a night like this. the dnc also announced it would hold its presidential debate this weekend in phoenix with no audience. right now there is a palpable sense the country is in crisis and a move among democratic primary voters toward having a nominee. we begin tonight with msnbc political correspondent steve kornacki live at the big board. steve, first give us an overview of what we know at this point. >> so three big states where we've got a very clear picture right now. let's start in michigan. you went through the bottom line there. 15-point advantage for biden. they're still counting up votes, especially in the city of detroit. so there's more to come here, but a solid victory for biden. a couple ways we can sort of illustrate this for you. one, look, this color here, these counties, this is the biden blue. just compare what this map looked like. this sanders purple color, it

was the same color on our map in '16. this is michigan tonight. now let me show you what this map looked like four years ago tonight. it was almost entirely sanders purple when he got that victory over hillary clinton. again tonight you can barely find a bernie sanders county on here. a couple things we can tell you about where this victory comes from for joe biden. first of all, the black vote in michigan overwhelmingly for joe biden, but it was overwhelmingly for hillary clinton four years ago over sanders, so it's basically stable, the black vote in michigan. where you saw significant movement in michigan, it was among white voters. collectively in 2016, bernie sanders won the white vote in michigan by 14 points over hillary clinton. >> wow. >> oh, we got more for you, chris. >> sounds like -- >> i think you got some news. >> no. i was just saying under my breath, wow, about the plus 14 for sanders in 2016 just because of the ways in which we're now understanding that state in the

primary race last time versus this time. >> it was plus 14 last time, and tonight sanders lost it by six. swing of 20 points there among white voters. black vote basically stable. 20-point swing among white voters. that's what it adds up to. >> take us through some of the polling we have to the extent we have exit polling on african-american voters where there's just been an overwhelming, resounding, you know, win by joe biden. >> yeah. i mean take mississippi, for example. this is in the south here. 87-11, biden over sanders with african-american voters. what this means for sanders, consistent with everything we saw last week on super tuesday in south carolina, it's the same thing that happened to him in 2016. he just cannot break through with black voters. he got 9% here in mississippi in 2016 among black voters. tonight he gets 11%. as we're talking right now, he is in danger of missing that threshold to even get statewide delegates. it says 15 on here. it's actually 14.8.

if it doesn't land at 15.0, he doesn't get statewide delegates in mississippi. >> all right. steve kornacki, you're doing amazing work all night. thank you for sticking around for us. i want to turn to robert gibbs, former white house press secretary under president obama. the first thing is when we look at this sort of projects delegates, joe biden comes out of tonight probably with somewhere in the neighborhood of a 60 delegate lead. when you get a delegate lead, it's hard to give it up. >> particularly now that you have -- we don't have winner take all in the democratic primary, right? so you're going to get this proportional delegate distribution that unless you're getting 65% of the vote or 70% of the vote in the states that are upcoming, you're not going to add appreciably to your count or cut into the others. when we look at the state of washington, they're only separated by a tenth or two tenths of a point.

bernie won washington's delegate count by 47 four years ago because it was a caucus. to split it tonight is to take a lot off the board. again, i think for bernie, it was a night in which his path narrowed considerably. the real estate ahead is much tougher, and as we talked about, the margins now have to be a lot bigger in places where it's really going to be hard. >> i've heard people talk about sort of reassembling the obama coalition. we should make note that primary coalitions are different than general election coalitions. i've heard this before from certain people. oh, so and so won the primary in this state. that doesn't mean they would win it in the general. >> as evidenced by michigan. >> good point. that said, one thing i'll note is this. when you think about the obama coalition, particularly in 2008, and i was a 29-year-old at the time. i can attest to this personally in my social circle. barack obama was -- there was tremendous young voter enthusiasm around barack obama. it was almost like a cliche,

right? i mean that's the one part of that a kwaequation ear nowe're here. you've got sanders running -- it just inverts the further you go up on that. how much does that matter, you think? >> i think it's a big deal. i think there's no doubt that unless you can get young voters excited and get them pulled out on your side, look, i think by any account, the number of voters that are expected in that under 29 age cohort will be -- i saw one estimate where it was 4% in 2016 and it will be 10% in 2020. that's a big jump, and if you don't have folks excited, and i think what it probably means going forward is there's got to be some -- probably some policy adjustments, some excitement. there's a vice presidential pick and i think it will be really

important how these campaigns interact with each other in the next month or so in bringing together the coalitions that they each have because i do think the one thing that will unify these younger voters is who's in the white house now. and i don't think that should be downplayed, but it won't alone build a bridge because as you've seen it, it's a stark contrast. i mean when you're joe biden and you're winning less than 20% or you're winning 22%, 24%, you've got a long way to go. >> it's funny because i think one of the things that this generational divide has been so present from the beginning that everybody has kind of priced it in, but it's not usually like this. this is a phenomenon of the democratic party of the last four years or so, particularly when you see this polling on socialism with people under 30 saying, like, i like socialism. people over 60 being like, i absolutely do not like socialism. what are you talking about? >> i do wonder, though, if you're a younger voter and you've watched this primary play

out and you talked about this just a second ago, the labels of socialism. if the only thing you've heard about joe biden's lane of the electorate is he's a moderate. >> yes, correct. >> in reality, if you take what joe biden -- >> compared to what? >> -- has proposed in this campaign versus what was proposed four years ago or what was the sort of kind of ante up policy at the end of the obama administration, it's to the left. >> that's true. >> again, that's probably some explanation that's going to have to happen. biden's going to have to do a better job of this. bernie is going to have to bring that coalition on and explain to them, just as michael moore said, you can't change the system if you're not in control of part of the system to change. and that will be an interesting conversation to have. >> i want to bring into this discussion joshua johnson, karine john pierre, and richard kim. karine, one thing that i've had

my eye on the whole time, aside from the results, has been the absolute turnout. and in the beginning there were some warning signs. that iowa number was not what people wanted it to be for sure. the new hampshire number was pretty good but not great. but as we've gone on, we've seen very big turnouts. virginia blowing the doors off. we're seeing pretty strong turnout tonight particularly it looks like in michigan although we don't have all the votes. what's your understanding of what's going on there? >> look, i think -- and i think you were alluding to this, gibbs, which is people are saying right now, and we see this in the polling, is that we do not want trump. we want to beat trump. he needs to go. the folks, the people who are leading that conversation is black voters. and they have been saying that, ringing that bell over and over and over again. and we have to think about this. in south carolina, right, for biden, the firewall was south carolina. that was the first time a large group of voters, black voters, were able to vote. and when they did that, when

they were able to vote, they made it clear of what they wanted, and they catapulted joe biden for whatever reason, because he's connected to obama, because they feel that he's the one, you know, an older white guy who was in the white house, who now can beat this white guy who's in the white house. whatever it is, they wanted to beat donald trump, and so they made that very clear, and it happened in south carolina. and that momentum just took over. we have to remember momentum beat organization. momentum beat money. and this is not a regular primary that we're seeing right now. >> richard? >> you know, i think the other side of that turnout is, you know, bernie sanders said before the iowa caucus, if you turn on the tv and the moderator says the turnout is large, we win. if you turn on the tv and the moderator says the turnout is low, we've lost. and the exact opposite of that has happened in the high turnout states, it's joe biden and the sort of whole foods voters that have turn the out aed out and g

the victory. and the really expensive grant experiment which the sanders ran, can they turn out the people that jesse jackson called rocks just laying on the ground, that did not work. that did not work on super tuesday. it did not work today. and that is an accounting the sanders campaign and the left will have to have. i know it's a tough moment now, but going forward, that is a really important thing to look at. >> it's even crazier than that in some ways because it's not just that this very sophisticated operation that the sanders campaign put together -- and we should say the warren campaign had a very sophisticated operation. it's not even that. it's that joe biden basically didn't run a campaign anywhere. >> right. >> they didn't really run a lot of ads. >> no. >> they didn't -- >> they couldn't afford to. >> they couldn't afford to. they had very little money. >> they didn't have to. >> it was unclear.

>> he won it states that he didn't campaign in. >> right. i never thought they -- does anybody out there -- raise your hand if you don't know who joe biden is. nobody? that's what i thought. he didn't have to. to the point you were making, i think the turnout this time around was a little different for more progressive voters because it was pulled in by a number of different candidates. elizabeth warren got some of them. bernie sanders got some of them. tom steyer had an existing email list from his activism with nextgen climate activists. he had some of them who he kind of added to his email list. theyy perhaps more diffuse this time. the different candidates have tried to coalesce around bernie sanders, but bernie sanders and elizabeth warren clearly aren't quite equivalent, i think. i think this race is also, as a floridian, this makes me feel a little envious of my former state of california because they were very smart moving up their primary. >> they were. >> and texas because if

california was still a june state, they wouldn't have a damn thing to say about this. >> that's so true. >> it's not like florida, illinois, and ohio don't matter, but as of tonight, they might not. they might not be consequential in this primary, and so for younger voters, for voters that the coalition is trying to bring in, i can totally understand how they might look at this year's primary and go, oh, so this is decided in late january, early february. you don't really need me. >> i would say they'll be consequential because they aren't consequential in the fact that the makeup of that state means that the momentum that has been established by the biden campaign isn't going to change likely in either of those three states, right? what biden kind of unleashed, as it sands right now, if we get to that point, florida would be big. illinois was close. ohio is a state that looks a lot like michigan, and you'd have to think -- >> but as a native floridian, to

be told. >> i can assure you in late october when you can't watch any tv -- >> as a florida voter, especially because florida is such a fascinating state for democratic party politics in different regions of the state, you know, you have this primary process where you have a chance to choose the nominee, but you don't really because it's kind of done at this point. and then in november you come back, and, oh, you didn't need me in the primary. you need me now in november. i guess i'll show up. >> well, we should note of course thises is -- we're talking about next week states tuesday and there's a debate between now and then. it's not like there's no campaign being run there. >> but bernie sanders not speaking tonight i think is telling. that might turn out to be telling. >> can i go back to biden not having an apparatus and this sort of being a wave for him that isn't attached to infrastructure and field operations and small donors, right? i know nicolle wallace was sort of expressing astonishment at that earlier. i agree it's astonishing as like a fact.

i would not be here filled with confidence right now that that is a condition of the biden campaign on the ground, and i think something that they will need to answer very soon in the next two weeks, one month, is can they scale that up. >> i don't think anyone at this table would think try to run that in november. i think everyone thinks that's probably not the case. robert gibbs, it's great to have you here. i'm going to let you go. when we come back, what the campaigns are saying about tonight's results. we're going to check in with our reporters next. don't go anywhere. t-mobile has the first and only nationwide 5g network. experience it on a samsung galaxy s20 5g. right now, when you buy one, you get one free. plus get 2 lines of unlimited and 5g access included,

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and i want to thank bernie sanders and his supporters for their tireless energy and their passion. we share a common goal, and together we'll defeat donald trump. we'll defeat him together. >> joe biden just over an hour ago speaking before some of his campaign workers at the national constitution center in philadelphia, urging unity after a string of victories in today's democratic contests. nbc news correspondent mike memoli, who has been covering the biden campaign, joins us now live from philadelphia. what's the mood over in the biden camp this evening? >> reporter: well, chris, you've seen a pretty significant shift from the biden campaign in just tonight. we began this past week with the

biden campaign really eager to put the sanders message on its head. you've heard the former vice president at every campaign stop this week saying that he is the candidate of enthusiasm, of momentum. he wanted to continue to coalesce the sort of moderate establishment wing of the party around him and put the bernie sanders team on notice that with the kind of turnout that he's been generating with african-american voters and among suburban swing voters, that he is the candidate really who has the real lock on this nomination. tonight you've seen a real shift, though, and that was joe biden as you just played in that clip speaking to bernie sanders as he's been speaking of his other former rivals, welcoming them into the fold, saying to the bernie sanders team, you know, that they are sharing the same goal in november. and so the biden campaign knows that the map only gets more favorable for them at this point going forward. they know that they're probably a week away from being able to say that they have an insurmountable lead on the nomination, something that we were saying bernie sanders looked like he was about to do

only a few weeks ago, chris. >> all right. nbc news correspondent mike memoli, thank you. i want to turn now to nbc news political reporter shaquille brewster who has been following the sanders campaign. he joins us from vermont. the senator choosing not to speak this evening, spending the night in vermont. what should we make of that decision? >> reporter: well, it's the first time, the first election night where we're not going to hear from senator sanders. you know that he was supposed to be in cleveland, ohio. he was going to have that big election-night rally but that canceled after concerns about coronavirus. the governor there, mike dewine, cautioning against those kind of large-scale indoor events. so his campaign canceled that event and instead he flew here to burlington where for a while we didn't know if he was going to make any comment. it was in the past hour or so where we heard that senator sanders was not going to make any comment tonight. i'll tell you it is clear for this campaign that the loss in michigan was a big loss for them. just to be clear about where they were setting expectations, talking to his senior team in the past couple of days, they

were looking at washington state. they were looking at idaho. then they were looking at michigan. michigan being of course the biggest delegate prize for them but also michigan having some symbolic significance for them. this is a state that in 2016 he surprised people and was able to pull out that win despite the polling that you saw. he was not able to do that tonight despite the resources that he had. he left mississippi. he canceled trips in mississippi to instead go back to michigan. he aired four television ads, two of them going after vice president biden directly, and he had his team of surrogates in the state of michigan. and despite that, you still saw that big margin in that state. it does call into question one of the central arguments that senator sanders makes and you hear it all the time, chris, that he can bring the energy and excitement needed to take on president trump. he says he'll be able to drive turnout in those mid perswester states president trump flipped in 2016. if he's not able to drive that turnout in the democratic

primary, it does call into question whether he's able to do na in the general election. when he was in detroit today when he stopped by some polling locations, he took some questions from reporters. one question i asked him was did he see a path to the nomination that did not include winning a majority of african-americans in the south. we know that on super tuesday, african-americans in the south went for biden, six in enten. his answer to that question was he didn't think of that. he brought it back to the greater idea that he has the momentum and that he has this movement that he wants to be able to build. we saw tonight the effect of not focusing on african-americans enough and not thinking about that enough, and it's something that his campaign is going to have to answer to once we finally do get to hear from the senator, hopefully tomorrow. chris? >> all right. shaquille brewster, thank you so much. still ahead, we'll talk about what happens next after tonight's big election. stick around. i'm your 70lb st. bernard puppy,

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all right. we are just over the midnight border of this sort of super tuesday lite that we had this evening. six states voting. that's the results right now as we have them from washington state. washington, of course, a state that i think to their great glee has vote by mail as they are battling a very intense coronavirus outbreak there. it's too early to call.

the delegates won tonight as far as our estimates across the states that we are tallying and tracking, you see joe biden emerging, adding to his lead of about 67 delegates up. and that puts him in the ballpark of about 150 delegates up on joe biden. of course still quite a long ways to go in terms of the total math, but as we keep stressing, those delegate leads because of proportional allocation of delegates in the states in the democratic primary, the larger you build one up the earlier, the harder it is to claw back. we're back at the table. let me start with you, sam. the sanders campaign saying they will be going ahead to the debate on sunday, and then there's campaigning to do in illinois and ohio and arizona. what do you think about the dynamics of where this campaign is, what tonight meant, what that debate looks like. >> well i mean it was obviously not a great night for bernie sanders, but i mean we have seen -- just your reporter in

the last segment said, you know, where we were two weeks ago so dramatically different from where we are today. and you look at the polling and you see that 60%, 70% of people are not voting based upon ideology or policies. >> no. >> they're voting based upon who they think can win. >> mm-hmm. >> and really the only indication that they've gotten that joe biden can win has been a function of a slew of endorsements that bernie sanders has not gotten. there is yet to be a debate where we've seen joe biden sit down with one person, actually engage in that way, and i think that's a really important thing. and i think there's a lot of things that could happen during that debate. we had multiple ones in 2008 of just two candidates. same in 2016. i think there's a lot more time to go here. i think joe biden has a lot more to prove in that regard because there's, you know, there's no more major endorsements that can happen. they're all basically done, and now joe biden, the focus is going to be on joe biden. can he deliver in the way that

the voters have been basically told that he can deliver? >> it strikes me that it's almost like the debate on sunday night is like the final boss in the video game for joe biden right now. like he has made it very far. to your point, there were questions earlier in the campaign about his effectiveness as a communicator, about his ability as a debater specifically. those have ebbed, i think, recently. >> well, but why they've ebbed -- >> well, they've ebbed in the minds of voters. >> well, it's ebbed in the minds of voters, bauut the reason why they've ebbed is his own campaign pulled him back. they don't want him speaking at these rallies. they don't want him out there that much. that's an interesting strategy but there's going to be a time where there's only two people. >> i agree he has to pass that test. i also think this represents an interesting moment for bernie sanders to reset some of the

campaign and the expectations, and i want to hear him talk to two issues specifically. one is obviously coronavirus. i mean if you look at the moment we're in, medicare for all, paid parental leave, paid sick leave, prescription drug importation on the first day of his presidency, this should be a really good moment for sanders to speak to those issues and to make the case for those policies. the other issue i want to hear him talk about is fracking, and the massive overleveraging of energy companies here in the united states and what that means for the economy. you know, there is a way in which the best bernie sanders is the person who speaks to those issues when he's sort of counted out, and i wouldn't be surprised if there is, you know, an appeal that comes out of that debate, if not something that changes the dynamics of it. >> we should note as the dynamics shift second to second dr we just crossed 1,000 coronavirus cases. we had about 500 just a little more than 36 hours ago, so we are on a very steep exponential

curve right now. it's a curve that's familiar if you look at countries that have gone before us in the epidemic, most notably china and italy. things are changing very rapidly, but one of the questions i have is about the shape of the campaign against the backdrop of that. they're not going to be doing campaign rallies. it wasn't just well tonight. that's not going to be happening. >> right. >> the actual mechanics of voting may start to be a challenge at a certain point depending on the level some localities are at. then there's this general feeling of the nation is in crisis and who can lead. >> you can say over the past week or so, the kroicoronavirus been happening, the pandemic has kind of overshadowed the campaign a little bit. >> it absolutely has. >> now we're seeing it actually having a function within the campaign, which is i think this is why if the debate happens on sunday, it will be incredibly important because one thing that we've learned during this primary season is that moments

matter. >> yep. >> right? when we talk about momentum, south carolina mattered to joe biden, and it took off. so if that moment of just the two of them onstage, having that mano a mano, having that debate, and two days later you have florida, illinois, ohio, arizona, really key important states, if either of them do not do well or being able to grow in that moment, then who knows what could happen on tuesday? >> it's funny in a way. first of all, i should note speaking of coronavirus for people that haven't heard, we will be doing an hour about coronavirus at 1:00 p.m. eastern. we want to hear your stories and want to know what you're dealing with with coronavirus and what clear factual info we can provide. personally i think it is useful to have a debate with no audience. i have moderated debates before. >> i completely agree. >> i have moderated debates before. if there's one thing i can't stand it's a moderator who is

afraid to be the bad guy, and i think that's partly what we saw in a few of the debates. so i think just hearing them one-on-one will be good. i think it will be great to hear bernie sanders have to explain some of his policy ideas that he's never quite been able to squeeze into 90 seconds. >> he's going to have more time. >> but he was in a forum on fox news this weekend and he still couldn't quite nail down the ex- planation of how to pay for medicare for all quickly. albert einstein said if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. >> that said, you have people leaving the polls almost 17 states in a row where a majority and sometimes an overwhelming majority of the people coming out of those polls are for specifically support the premise, get rid of private insurance. >> one thing with regard to coronavirus is i think at this point in the campaign and the debates, it will be great to see the candidates reflect exactly what's going on with every american. i mean san jose's main airport just tweeted out that three of

their tsa workers tested positive for covid-19. seven mgm resorts hotels have closed their buffets starting this sunday. at the southern end of the strip, the bellagio, the mandalay bay, the grand, the aria, the luxor, the excalibur, and one other. >> you were so close. >> i was very close. right. so it's -- plus in that area is the t-mobile arena where the pac-12 men's basketball tournament begins today. so having a debate where everyone is on one page, where we're all dealing with the same crisis in the same tone and where nobody wins an applause line, this might be the most useful debate of the entire debate season. >> everyone stick around. we've got much more ahead. first we have some shocking, i mean truly shocking new reporting from "the new york times" on the federal response to coronavirus in washington state. one of the state virologists who has desperately trying to get

the feds to approve testing, who has developed his own test, is going to join me next. stick around. into a smaller life? are your asthma treatments just not enough? then see what could open up for you with fasenra. it is not a steroid or inhaler. it is not a rescue medicine or for other eosinophilic conditions. it's an add-on injection for people 12 and up with asthma driven by eosinophils. nearly 7 out of 10 adults with asthma may have elevated eosinophils. fasenra is designed to target and remove eosinophils, a key cause of asthma. it helps to prevent asthma attacks, improve breathing, and can reduce the need for oral steroids like prednisone. fasenra may cause allergic reactions. get help right away if you have swelling of your face, mouth, and tongue, or trouble breathing. don't stop your asthma treatments unless your doctor tells you to. tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection, or your asthma worsens. headache and sore throat may occur. could you be living a bigger life? ask an asthma specialist about fasenra.

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the confirmed cases of coronavirus in the u.s. continue to grow. on monday, we started the day, we had about 500 cases. nbc news now counting over 1,000 cases of the virus including 30 deaths, meaning we basically doubled the number of cases in 36 hours. now, we should note that's not unexpected. in fact, a lot of it we think has to do with the ramping up of

the testing capacity as opposed to the actual transmission of the virus. that said, we are still way, way behind where we could have been as a country, and that is due in large part to failures by the federal government, particularly on testing. in the meantime, some private labs and research centers have come up with their own working test. one of the first of them is the virology lab at the university of washington. joining me is one of the people critical to that effort, who is quoted tonight in a devastating story from "the new york times" in how delays in testing set back the u.s. coronavirus response. doctor, thank you very much. first i guess i want to get a sense from you of what the scale of testing is now in your state combined between public health centers or what the cdc test kits sent out and the test you developed. >> so here at the university of washington, yesterday we performed about 730 tests, and

today we'll probably perform over 900. so it's definitely increasing, combined with the state lab, that means there are more than 1,000 tests being performed in the state of washington currently. >> how much of an obstacle has the testing backlog been? "the times" article in which you're quoted refers to a flu study that was going on in which samples of swabs that had already been collected, the person running the study wanted to test them for coronavirus, and basically was told not to by multiple federal agencies, eventually essentially went rogue, tested them and found, i think, the first instance of community transmission. did we lose a lot of time in those four or five weeks? >> well, first i want to say that we're a clinical lab at the university of washington, so we're not affiliated with the flu study at all. i think it's really important when you get clinical testing that a positive be positive and a negative be negative. so there are strict quality and regulatory criteria that clinical labs have to adhere to when they perform testing.

to answer your question, though, i think there -- you know, this virus has caught every country unawares. it moves very fast. the cases that we're detecting today were probably transmissions from over two weeks ago, probably around two weeks ago, right? so all the criteria, the way that we test, the way that we isolate, it really is fighting the last war, and only china has been able to bring this virus under control. >> from a public health perspective, as someone who works on viruses as your career, we're receiving word that the governor of your state, jay inslee, is going to announce some sort of essential ban on gatherings of over 250 people. not clear the details of that or the legal sort of underpinnings of it, but there's been a lot of public health experts and epidemiologists talking about social distancing, canceling large gatherings, reducing the transmission speed of that virus. how important is that? >> it's very important. really without vaccines, without

therapeutic antibodies or antivirals, are only fight against this virus is with diagnostic testing and social distancing. we need to be able to diagnose people who have the virus and isola isolate, and the other thing we can do for people is supportive care. we need to make sure acute care facilities are available for people who need supportive care. that's where you want to sort of slow the transmission of the virus so all those cases don't come at once, so we have the capacity in our hospitals across america to support people who need supportive care. >> obviously this virus is very new and what we know about it keeps changing every day. i've been reading working papers that various scientists and virologists have been provisionally publishing, some who worked on the virus in wuhan in china and others. how quickly is our understanding of this evolving? how much left do you think we don't know that's important to know? >> well, i think there's a lot -- there will be a lot to learn about the virus, but right

now we have tests that we can perform to diagnose the virus, and we know what we need to do, which is prevent transmission, and that is basically evolved in social distancing. that is really our weapon of choice right now, what we have to offer. again, this virus is very, very -- it's contagious and it has just a high morbidity and mortality. it's really unlike any other virus in our lifetimes. >> what is your vision and those that you work with, experts in this field, particularly on testing, of what testing capacity is necessary? i mean how far are we from that from your perspective as someone working on this in the heart of one of the centers of the outbreak? >> yeah. so we're working to actively build towards 5,000 tests a day, and we've put in budgets for 10,000 tests a day in our area. and i think one of the things that's very important when you're answering a question like that is, you know, who gets to make that -- no real one person can make that decision overall.

you really have to respond to local matters. like i know our hospitals, our regional hospitals, our physicians, i know those answers and we can provide testing for that community. so it's hard to have sort of one single sort of controller who says this is how many tests we're going to provide or this is how the tests are going to be done. we need to have that sort of local control. it really works in the u.s. very well. >> all right. dr. alex greninger, thank you for taking a little bit of time with us tonight. >> thank you very much. >> we'll be back with much more right after this. ood. at bayer, this is why we science.

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we are back once more with joshua johnson, karine jean-pierre, richard kim, and sam seder. we were talking about how things have changed in the primary campaign with sort of head snapping quickness and how they've changed in the world in the political and economic situation. there are about to be a bunch of big political debates and fights on capitol hill in the next week about both oversight, about criticisms of the coronavirus management from the federal government, and also, richard, on the stimulus package, which is at this point there will be one. it's a question what's in it. you mentioned fracking before. we had reporting today that a major oil and gas magnate, who is also a donor to the

president, lobbying for basically a shale bailout. >> yep. >> that they're discussing various ways to help the industry. the president came out today after his meeting on capitol hill and said something to the effect of, we want to protect the airline industry. we want to protect the oil industry. he didn't say we want to protect people in nursing homes. literally his focus was protecting the industry. so there's about to be a big fight that is going to also play in this primary. >> he's also said he wants to give stimulus to hotels, which he owns. you know, i'm just really struck here at like the hypocrisy. you know, you remember the auto bailout and the way republicans said that was a politicized move, and it will be very interesting to see what their response is to this. >> i also have to say, joshua, as you were talking about sort of medicare for all and pay-fors, we've had a very, very long in depth debate about pay-fors and how you will pay for it. as i talk to you right now, i think they'll probably push between the hundred billion dollars and $1 trillion out the

door in the next two weeks with zero pay-fors. that will just be a thing that we have to do, and it always is remarkable to me as someone who has covered washington now for 12 years or so, what you have to pay for and what you don't have to pay for are just these totally different categories. >> and you're still surprised? >> i'm not still surprised, but i still note it. >> for sure. for sure. this is one of those situations where -- and in the briefing today, the head of the center for medicare and medicaid services did mention that the administration has been working with health insurance plans to make it easier for them to coordinate in terms of medicare and co-pays. >> and covering costs. >> exactly. so some of that's been thought out. in terms of the bailouts, this is kind of the argument with the auto bailout, right? is it better to let the chips fall or to support all the people who are supported by this industry? i mean supporting hotels, cruise lines, we forget how big an industry tourism is in this country. i'm not just saying that as a floridian.

the number one industry in san francisco is not tech. it's tour uism. >> right. >> so the idea we have these industries, for the contracts that are working for aramark or other such company or cleaning the cruise ship without benef benefits, without pay, or the lyft drivers who lyft has said they're going to support in terms of their health care, this sparks a larger conversation in terms of if you'll support these people in this emergency -- for example, lyft has been arguing that its employees are not employees, they're contractors, but you're helping pay for their health care. so what are they now? >> we should note nancy pelosi and chuck schumer put out a set of principles. there's different ways to do this. you bail out the industry or you get money to people, right? >> there's an analogy to what happened in the banks and what happened in the mortgage crisis. we could have bailed out the homeowners.

>> the borrowers. >> who would have then given the money to the banks. instead we went to the banks and said, hey, if you find it, you know, to your liking, please help out the homeowners. then we had millions of people lose their homes. >> correct. >> instead of talking about industries, we should be talking about workers. we should be talking about parents who are worried about their kids coming home and how they're going to pay for their kidding being at home. we should be worried about the tens of thousands if not 100,000 kids in new york city who are homeless or depending upon going to school to get food. those should be the primary conversations at the very least that the democrats are driving. give the money directly to the people who need it. don't worry about shareholders. they've got to take a little bit of a haircut. >> this will also be -- i mean on this debate on sunday night, by the time we get to sunday night, this is going to be front and center. we will start to see the outlines of a package, and that is going to be a huge topic to your point, joshua, about sort of focus, no audience, two people, a national crisis. there will be focus on that.

>> and one of those candidates has an answer for all those questions. he's had the same answer probably for his whole career, so it's going to be a challenge, i think, for joe biden, and it will be interesting to see. >> a challenge or not, i think what will be interesting is that will be a place for him to articulate some of those principles. >> indeed. >> and also to give a little bit of a vision of how he would govern under these conditions. one thing we saw with the last democratic president was the last democratic president inherited just flaming wreckage. i mean 800,000 jobs being lost. i remember that feeling of the thing is going over the cliff when barack obama was sworn in on that very cold day in 2009, and this period right now is a reminder that things can get bad very quickly and who you have in charge matters. >> that's exactly right. i have to say on the debate stage, that is perfect for bernie sanders as you guys were alluding to because this is the 1%. this is the establishment. this is the real establishment that he keeps talking about that has been the center of his message for 40 years now.

>> yes. >> his whole entire time as senator. so i think that's going to be key. but i'm with you on the workers. here's the thing. there are people who don't have jobs and who are going to be affected with this. people who are just trying to put food on their table, and so, yes, give the money to the workers, and that should be the focus. that's great for bernie sanders. >> we saw already their debate about payroll tax cut. the president sort of got out ahead of that yesterday. it was very interesting. he came out. he seemed sort of solemn. he announced he would be coming out today to give a big speech about what the package was, and then didn't do that, and it turned out that they didn't have anything prepped. >> to the point of this debate, i know we've got to go in a second. i'm looking back at the michigan exit poll, we asked which candidate would you trust most to handle a major crisis. we'll find this out sunday and tuesday thereafter, i wonder if because of what's going on, that also leans better in biden's favor. >> i think absolutely. >> because sanders is kind of ethos is i can make it better

and joe biden's ethos has been, i can do it better. maybe just the circumstances we're in might be even leaning more towards sanders having his back to the wall. >> it will be interesting to see if sanders can champion his ideas that i think are tailored for this moment in some ways or whether biden can demonstrate -- >> i think the combination of coronavirus and the desire to move to the next phase have both helped biden in this last week. this sort of rush toward the exits of let's do it and let's move on. also a reminder every day about the sort of failures and weaknesses of the person that currently is running the country. joshua johnson, karine jean-pierre, richard kim, and sam seder, thank you so much for staying up. that does it for me for tonight. i'm chris hayes. you can find me tomorrow night in my normal time slot. ali velshi picks up coverage right after this. when our daughter and her kids moved in with us...

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hello, everyone. i'm ali velshi live from msnbc news headquarters in new york with tonight's special coverage. the race nar yoed down to essentially two major candidates former vice president joe biden and senator bernie sanders with polls now closed in the six states that held democratic primaries on tuesday. the results are good for biden. nbc news projects the former vice president winning michigan, the night's biggest prize which has 125 delegates. biden is also the projected winner in mississippi, establishing a crushing lead there over sanders. biden is also the projected