good morning and welcome to day four of the 2020 presidential election. the electoral score at this hour, joe biden 253, donald trump 214. biden has now taken the lead in georgia while the most critical state on the map, pennsylvania, is within joe biden's reach. good morning and welcome to "morning joe" on this friday, november 6th. let's not waste any time, right? let's get right to the board? >> well, willie, man, a lot of things are happening right now. we're looking at four states. pennsylvania, of course, georgia, arizona, nevada. both campaigns have seemed to think for some time that pennsylvania and nevada were

likely going to break joe biden's way. they wouldn't say it on the record, but that's what they think and everybody else in the political world thinks. while there have been questions about arizona and georgia, but no questions about georgia anymore. donald trump did lose his significant lead and biden has slipped ahead and we'll find out how many votes are remaining, but they are predictably enough from the most democratic of democratic precincts. a lot of black voters who are breaking 90% for joe biden. >> yeah. you look at that georgia in blue, that's pretty significant. although a three-digit lead right now so nobody is calling anything. but he has this slow march as these votes came out toward joe biden eclipsing donald trump in the state of georgia. remember a democrat has not won there since 1992. but the action is in pennsylvania right now. 18,000 vote spread for donald trump in but we're expecting a

new dump of votes in counties that should trend toward joe biden. let's get over to steve kornacki over at the big board. good evening, good morning, i don't know what it is for you. take us to pennsylvania. what is it looking right now? >> 18,229 is trump's lead statewide. where are the outstanding votes in pennsylvania? they're all mail ballots that are being counted. absentee ballots. so where are they? philadelphia, the city of philadelphia, there are about 54,000 there that we're waiting on. pittsburgh, there are about 35,000 there. those are the two biggest ones in the state. but there are a couple of other significant batches around allentown, in lehigh county. there's about 10,000 there in bucks county there's about 10,000. there's a little under 10,000, but still a significant margin amount of them in delaware county right outside philadelphia. then there are just a number of

counties throughout the state with a small number, 2,000 here, 3,000 there. but i think the most important thing to know about all of these ballots, whatever county we're talking about, joe biden's winning them that's just been the clear pattern. every single county, no matter how red, no matter how red, no matter how blue, joe biden has been on average winning the mail-in vote in pennsylvania, he's getting 75% for all of the mail-in votes. if you add them up cumulatively, there are about 160,000 uncounted mail ballots in the entire state of pennsylvania right now. you can do the math. donald trump leads by 18,000 statewide right now. on average, biden's winning the mail-in vote, he's winning three-quarters of it. three-quarters of 160,000 that could net biden 80,000 votes at

that pace and that would give him a sizable lead statewide. i can't stress this enough though. there has been no variance to this pattern from county to county. every single county where we have gotten mail-in vote, biden has been leading that mail-in vote. why is this? because in pennsylvania, you had two options if you wanted to vote. you could vote by mail or you could go in and you could vote in person on election day. they didn't have the early voting centers in pennsylvania that they had in other states. we saw this in polls the month before the election, we asked a poll of pennsylvania voters are you voting early, yes i am. who are you voting for? it would come back 79-16 for biden. the folks who chose to vote by mail largely democrats. the folks who voted on election day, disproportionately republicans. in many of the counties they waited until to get to the

mail-in votes that's what's coming in now. mail in ballots, so the trend is very clear here in pennsylvania. i should note as well, philadelphia is the only place in pennsylvania where they stayed up all night counting these ballots. it has been several hours. i think about four hours, five hours, i lost track of the time overnight but a number of hours since we had an update in philadelphia. i think we're likely to get one in the next hour or two. and again, i don't know the size of it. but when you see the number of votes out there, that next update from philadelphia could be very significant. >> well, steve, i want to underline something that you said it's what i was saying about florida, when people said it was a four, five, six, seven point base for biden. it wasn't based on data.

i'm not sure what the polls were showing, but in pennsylvania. it's the same thing i was looking at. i was looking at data that had already come in and i saw the way it was tracking day to day to day in florida. when i said joe biden wasn't going to win that state by more than 100,000 votes and more likely it was dipping donald trump's way, that was based on data. not preelection polls. what you're looking at now, based on data, based on trends. you know, three days, two days ago, i didn't know if he could catch up, but like you said, when in the reddest of red counties joe biden was getting 75% of the mail-in votes or overperforming in the reddest of the red counties that changed everything. so if we're looking right now -- i just want people to know at home. no cheerleading here. not really a lot of speculation. again, this is the data that led me to say the preelection polls were garbage. it's the data, steve, that you

study every single day and that data is showing very clearly that if you are going to counties that have the most of these votes remaining, counties that donald trump lost overwhelmingly, and then you add the fact that they're mail-in ballots just the overwhelming odds are you are right that joe biden is likely going to win the state of pennsylvania if these trends hold and there's no reason to not believe the trends are going to hold for the same reason he's going to win the state, probably more than 40,000 than donald trump won it four years ago. >> i'll give you an example of what you're describing here. here's carbon county, this is a big trump county. look, trump is going to win it by 32 points, okay. big red county no surprise. do you know what the mail-in vote portion of this was? biden got 63%.

so it's no like we say biden is doing well in the mail vote in the red counties. not like you can get the overall result from the county, it's a shocking result where biden is winning red counties. the relatively small share of the democratic vote was highly concentrated among the mail p t ballots and it was deeply red, but it was missing a bunch of democratic votes and that's being filled in across the state right now. the biggest variable, i should add this though when we put the 160,000 vote number out there in terms of the uncounted mail-in ballots, one other pattern that we are seeing here across the state is when they count these up, it would appear this would be my conjecture here, but it would appear that they don't -- they're not getting down to zero in a lot of the counties because i believe this is the process. they are verifying, matching signatures, opening these for

the first time and there's a certain number in every county that are not getting counted. probably some technical issues, signatures not matching. that sort of thing. there's less than 160,000 that get added to the count, maybe 130,000, 140,000, but even at that rate, biden still easily moves past trump's lead statewide and moves into the considerable lead of his own. like you say, it would have to be totally something at odds with the pattern of reddest of red and bluest of blue in pennsylvania. >> most of the states remaining, whether you're taking about -- well, wisconsin, michigan, pennsylvania, georgia, nevada, most of those are likely breaking -- have been breaking joe biden's way and the question is why?

because you had the mail in ballots that donald trump discouraged republicans to do for three or four months now. not so long ago, we republicans dominated absentee voting and mail-in ballots. donald trump told people don't do it. go to the polls. they did go to the polls. that's why joe biden started with a 430,000 vote lead in florida. and republicans cut it down 50,000 per day over the course of two weeks. so i just -- i want to keep going back and just underlining the fact that everything that people are seeing right now has been predicted. i want to say one other thing too because it's really important. by the way, as far as the predictions go, arizona, when i saw the arizona number called. not only florida, where i said, no, biden's not going to win this. the polls are wrong. in arizona, when i found out that what they're counting were dropped off the final days, i

thought, well, wait, i think that's going to probably favor donald trump. because absentee ballots that were put in early went predominantly for biden, those put in closer to the election went for donald trump. i'm wondering if -- i wondered if the same thing was going to happen in arizona, in maricopa county, so far it is. if that trend continues, arizona will be close. but i want to bring up one thing, willie. you know, these actions of republicans have consequences. where donald trump says, don't vote by mail. all right. so democrats are beating republicans badly by mail. that makes sense. the state legislatures, we talked about this in wisconsin, in michigan, in pennsylvania, were all persuaded to please count the votes early like florida.

they all refused. if they had done so, this election would have been over at 11:00 p.m. on election night. joe biden would have won at 11:00 p.m. on legislatielection. i have never seen an election run as efficiently as florida's. you talk about waiting five hours in line. do you know how long i waited in line? five minutes. >> yeah. >> mika took her mom election day. walked straight in. only 17% of the actual vote in the state of florida occurred on election day, because they planned ahead. and yes, ron desantis encouraged everybody, count the votes early. get them all counted, we want to make sure -- of course the legislature runs it but desantis was pushing this as well. these decisions that people make

have a consequence and we're going through the three-day count because the republican state legislatures in pennsylvania, in michigan and wisconsin would not listen to their governors and said, no, no, we'll count it after election day. well, okay. >> here we are. >> but don't act shocked that all these democratic votes that you knew were coming in are doing what? coming in. >> yeah. that's why it's all a charade. all these protests and we'll get into it without playing the clips, the protests about votes being found. the votes are being counted because state legislatures laid it out this way. as you said, this is exactly as we said it was going to happen. we'll be waiting for pennsylvania, perhaps into friday. we said that on this show on monday. well, here we are on friday. looking at pennsylvania. maybe some resolution there. so all of this garbage and the conspiracies being pumped into the system are just that, garbage and conspiracies. this is the way that the process is set up by republican

legislatures and this is why it's happening this way. they're counting, the votes will be counted, there's not fraud. the lawsuits are being dismissed quickly. some of them out of hand as the voting continues this morning. the same is happening in georgia. take us to georgia. the spread is now 917. that has flipped to joe biden for the moment. how does it look going forward? >> we got another update that pushed biden's lead over a thousand, 1,096 is the new biden lead. like pennsylvania, overnight, there was one place in georgia that has continued to count, it is clayton county. and here you go. you can see it overwhelmingly democratic, clayton county. this is in the atlanta metro area and biden win the lion's share of the vote here. they have had several thousand of the mail ballots they have working through overnight. they have provided seven or eight different updates. now, there was a big one about an hour and a half ago i would say when biden took the lead statewide in georgia because of

that update. i was on the air at that point saying i thought maybe what was the end of it for clayton county, but as you can see there are more votes to come. some more from clayton county. and a few more were just reported. again, what that has done is it's put bide up to the 1,o96 lead. there are some left that have remaining uncounted ballots. they're reporting them out, for instance. gwinnett county, this is a strong biden county. they got a bunch of ballots. we're inside 10,000 left in the state but they have more coming there. a few other places. we have seen a similar trend in georgia. it's not as dramatic as the one we just described in pennsylvania where biden is just pouring it on in the mail vote everywhere. but we have seen some republican counties here, some pro trump

counties where the mail vote has been kind of a mixed bag. that seems to be the best trump is doing with it in this. so you're seeing a similar if less dramatic trend with the mail-in votes coming in in georgia. biden continues to benefit, continues to cut into trump's lead and now building his own lead. however, keep in mind georgia has a recall provision. in the final margin finishes within a half a point, the losing candidate or the candidate who is not in first can file for a recount. and this thing is virtually certain. as you can see, how ever exactly it shakes out, virtually certain to fall into the zone. we had a similar situation in wisconsin where biden finished the counting ahead by 20,000. it was within half a point. and the trump campaign under similar provision on the books in wisconsin, the trump campaign said, okay, we want the recount. if biden finishes on top, but it's inside 0.5%, you can

surmise there might be a recount here in georgia. is there gonna be a declared day in georgia? end of business today is the deadline for overseas and military ballots to be -- to come in. this is not to say there's a necessarily a huge pile of them, by the way. that's about to be counted, because many have already been counted but it's a question of whether there are more that come in today. whether there are more that show up today, but again, in a very close race something to keep in mind. but again, i think this thing has a potential here there's much more potential for biden to finish in first in georgia than there is for trump at this point. but even then in terms of getting to the declaration of a winner here in georgia there may some time involved because of the process i'm outlining. >> tell me what other counties have the most coming in? >> gwinnett is the one to keep

an eye on here, i think. i think we're looking at about 4,000 votes that are left to come in. again, as you can see, biden county. >> and what's the total that are still out in georgia? >> i don't have a hard number on this, but i think we are inside of 10,000. >> okay. very good. mika, so obviously, donald trump saw this coming. he knew -- just like we said it was inevitable. just like we have been predicting this for weeks. he knew after election night that this was -- that all these states were going to tighten up and last night, as georgia got within, you know, a couple thousand votes, i think he could see the possibility of his presidency coming to an end. >> well, we could see the challenge for journalists in the media as we covered this, we could see it playing out before our eyes. some networks close to cover the

president's hissy fit traitorous disinformation he spewed out in the evening hours for about half an hour. some chose to turn away. some chose to fact check. i thought what was interesting was the context that -- i mean, there's great reporters at fox news, john roberts put on the table immediately after the president spoke and what he said, what you saw is a president who is clearly seeing he's losing, he doesn't have the votes, he doesn't have enough to bring it over the top and as a result he's looking for a different way to retain the presidency and that's going to be interesting as these days turn into weeks. how we cover this story and watch people like steve kornacki who is at the big board who, yes, it's fun to watch kornacki and all that, but he's covering what america is saying. he's covering the data, the facts. personally i think that's where we should be right now, but it will be a great after action

report trying to figure out how this president and the disinformation that he brings to the table during this election is handled. let's bring in white house reporter for the associated press, jonathan lemire. msnbc contributor mike barnicle and host of "way too early," kasie hunt is book with us this morning. she never sleeps. >> never sleeps. so jonathan lemire, talk about what you're hearing from the white house off the record. what you're hearing from the biden campaign off the record. i think our notes pretty much match up, but what are you hearing? >> well, first, let's underscore that the county in georgia that put joe biden ahead, clayton county, that's john lewis' old county. we should mention that. the president of the united states took to the podium of the white house behind the presidential seal last night and one that's shattered every norm

of the office, he went out there and urged the vote -- the very pillar of american democracy to stop being counted. he trolled in unsubstantiated theories and conspiracy theories and made baseless accusations of fraud. undermining the very integrity of the ballot. there's seemingly to this point little teeth and no evidence to his claims. so here's where we are right now. the trump campaign of course is watching these numbers like everyone else. they see how tight things have gotten in georgia. they are worried about the outstanding ballots in pennsylvania. that has been their fear throughout, that pennsylvania would be -- they knew they were running close, they knew they had a strong ground game in the state but they were concerned they might not be able to turn out enough votes in the last days and particularly on election day to overcome the

mail-in ballots being sent in by democratic counties. that's real alarm and uncertain what the pathway is to go forward. in terms of the biden campaign, they feel really good. they feel on the precipice of victory. a stage was erected yesterday for the former vice president to give a speech. whether that's today or tomorrow, they're prepared to win. they're not prematurely talking about the win. he said all votes need to be counted but they're preparing for a victory they hope will come soon and now president trump has put the republicans in the bind again with the accusations of the voter fraud and challenging electoral misconduct. some were already tossed out. michigan and georgia, federal judges ruled against the trump campaign. will republicans at this moment continue to tie themselves to donald trump as he makes these accusations? we saw a few break with him last

night. hogan, governor of maryland denounced what trump said and mitt romney said the counting must go on. where will other republicans stand as the president continues to go forward with the baseless accusations as he sees the path to victory all but disappear. >> it's very interesting, mike barnicle, that mitch mcconnell said, hey, we're going to count all of the votes. so not sure what donald trump is talking about that. that's me adding on. that was the take from mitch. marco rubio said the same thing, we've going to count the votes and we're hearing from most republicans even mike pence last night after the president's very sad and pathetic statement on television that, by the way, for good reason most networks broke away from because he was spreading disinformation that i think was intended to foment

violence, but not only that, but "the new york post," rupert murdoch's "new york post" came out last night after that and you look at "the post" this morning and blasted donald trump. downcast donald trump makes baseless election fraud claims. >> wow. >> in white house address. that's "the new york post." this is fairly universal. mike, i talked to one of trump's closest confidants yesterday and he was laughing at the fact that donald trump is looking for his james baker. and this confidant of donald trump said he got rid of all of them four years ago. it's laughable. like when hitler invaded russia, stalin's generals couldn't fight them because all of stalin's generals had been purged five

years ago. so trump finds himself in his own political battle of stalingrad and he doesn't have any generals around. he doesn't have any james bakers around. he's pushed everybody out of his orbit that had any intelligence, any capabilities, any abilities to actually work on issues like this because all he wanted were yes men and relatives who quite frankly have never been up to the job. >> yeah. joe, you know, continuing that metaphor, it's as if hitler released general rommel toward the end of 1944 with sergeant schultz who knew nothing. >> right. >> but yesterday, yesterday was such a vivid contrast for americans to witness because within the space of two hours, we had joe biden looking like a president and behaving like a

president addressing the nation from a podium in wilmington and then less than two hours after he spoke and as jonathan pointed out from the podium of the white house press room, donald trump did one thing. he inserted great damage to the republic, to the united states of america by real questioning the legitimacy of the incoming president-elect who it appears from every obvious fact that we have seen, from steve kornacki and everybody else, joe biden will be the president-elect of the united states. and in the course of a very few minutes, donald trump attacked america, he attacked the american voting process, he attacked specific cities, detroit, philadelphia, specific states. all i could think of is when we show these vast scenes of vote counters in clark county, in nevada, in philadelphia, in pittsburgh, all throughout the country, in georgia, many of

these people are volunteers. and the level of danger that donald trump's words has posed to these people has some of them now requiring bodyguards to be walked from the counting centers to their cars because of the rage that donald trump has incited amongst some of his followers. that's what we saw yesterday in america. >> joe, invoke the name james baker, he spoke yesterday with "the new york times." he said quote, we never said don't count the votes in 200 and he continued to explain why there are huge differences between the 2000 recount and this. the whole argument was that the votes had been counted and they have been counted and they have been counted and it's time to end the process. that's not exactly the message i heard on election night. so i think it's pretty hard to be against counting the votes

said james baker. so kasie, let's talk about the group of people that you cover. it's an extraordinary place to be when it's act of bravery to say, count the votes when you're a republican to cross donald trump. we saw some defending him, lindsey graham, ted cruz, tommy tuberville, cable news hosts, that crowd. what are you seeing from other republicans on capitol hill who seem to have at least -- they're keeping their powder dry and telling the president to stop what he's doing? >> you're right, the president and his family basically tried to call in the cavalry. they said, you better be out there, we better see you defending what we're doing or you're not going to have a place in whatever the republican party will be next. but there are only a handful that answered that call. you're right, that most are urging calm. and, you know, i heard from one

of my good sources, a republican operative who essentially said there's no message. what are we going to do with this? right? we can give you outrage for only so long. but at the end of the day, you have to have a path, you have to have path to win and they don't see that right now from the president. obviously, we haven't called the race yet, but you know, i think they're basically all just trying to wait it out, urge calm, say count the votes, hope there's a decisive call here and that everyone can start to move on. because i don't think in an appetite broadly among republicans to blow up our entire system for donald trump. i mean, it has not -- you know, they have toed the line over and over and over again. and we have very carefully documented all of those times here on this show. but this seems to be the place where they're not willing to give. they don't want to blow up a system they frankly rely on.

they're also elected officials who have to say, hey, this vote count elected me. i have legitimacy because the votes are legitimate. without that none of this works. they're all privately completely sick of working with president trump. i mean, it has been an exhausting four years for everyone in washington. you know, we talked about this yesterday, you know they think they could cut some deals with joe biden. if republicans control the senate. >> exactly. >> they can work with that. >> kasie, i've talked -- >> great points, all of them. >> i talked about how democratic senators had little use for barack obama his first several years and, boy, they just loved complaining off the record about barack obama. he didn't understand washington, he didn't understand congress and he didn't understand how -- that's nothing compared to vitriol that you hear from republicans and not just senators and house members, but also behind the scenes governors.

there are some people who are donald trump's closest allies that privately are praying that he leaves office so they can get back to their work, build their political careers, and not have to answer for the insane things that he says every day. so kasie, i think -- okay, this is all fascinating. obviously we're all focusing on who's going to be the next president of the united states. and for good reason. but i have to put a side bar in here because after the dust settles, if joe biden ends up winning the presidency, then i think a lot of people are going to turn to what happened to the democratic party. >> yeah. >> there is no way to put this other than to say this election was -- joe biden winning looks like a one off. this election for the most part

was an absolute repudiation of the democratic party as a brand. their brand doesn't work across most of america. it just doesn't. they got routed in senate races they should have won. i mean, if you don't believe me, just look back at all of the predictions, are democrats going to win nine, ten, 11 senate seats? the house results are perhaps even more shocking. nobody thought that this was going to be close. the weekend before the election, republican pollsters were talking about hemorrhaging support in suburbs and couldn't believe the numbers. they said, we're going to get destroyed. well, it ended up they couldn't believe the numbers for a good reason. the numbers were wrong. and kasie, this is going to have a profound impact over the next ten years. the state legislatures that democrats thought they were going to gain, the state legislatures that democrats lost, all of this is going to

have a consequential impact on redistricting and the shape of the map over the next ten years. talk about the incredible conference call where abigail spanberger -- you know, i'm sorry. i'm former republican so i guess my opinion doesn't matter. she told it like it was. stop talking about socialism. stop talking about defunding the police. it doesn't work. and of course, leaders of the democratic party have actually come on this show and said of course they don't support the defending of the police. but she was very angry. believed that what's happened to the democratic party's brand has been shattered and they need to fight back. we need to not ever use the word socialist or socialism again. we lost good members because of that, he said heatedly. if we are classifying tuesday as a success, we will get blanking

torn apart in 2022 and i have already -- you know, when i was talking to the smartest, smartest data people alive that basically told me that the numbers were a mirage in florida and across the upper midwest, those same people say that the republicans are going to have a huge year in 2022. just looking at this data, looking at our exit polls if they don't correct course. if the democrats don't correct course, kasie. i know there's growing frustration on the hill. >> let me add one more voice to this. whip james clyburn said, quote, if we're going to run on medicare for all, defund the police, socialized medicine we are not going to win that's jim clyburn, not talking about 2022, but talking about the runoffs in the state of georgia this year. >> yeah. it's -- jim clyburn who helped joe biden get this nomination as well. joe, you're right.

and the house, you know, set the senate aside for a second. these house numbers, i mean, we went into the night. you know, i certainly was saying what my sources were telling me going into election night which is that they were going to pick up to five to seven senate seats and instead it's the opposite. as abigail spanberger pointed out, they lost some of the members, and the lesson here is that if you want the majority, if you want to govern, you have to figure out a way to make that happen in places where people are not firmly entrenched on one side of this culture war or the other. and for democrats, you know, that lesson is we have heard some of the most famous -- arguably the most famous member of the house, alexandria ocasio-cortez. she gets elected in the primary election, she is speaking to the

left of the party, but for nancy pelosi to actually be in charge, they have to win in districts in the middle of the country. they have to win in places like cobb county which we have talked about so much, that where they can appeal to people who are not as comfortable with the way that -- the culture is playing out on the far left. the way the kind of country is split. they still -- there are people who have made this split decision. they voted for joe biden for president, but they voted for david perdue in the senate. and, you know, spanberger was very emotional about it and nancy pelosi i think fully understands this. i mean, she is a power politician, but she's had to grapple with the fact that social media and the landscape gives an inordinate amount of power to the left of the party. so i think that you're absolutely right. and this going to be a central tension in how joe biden governors because i bet you me

governs he tries to governs from the center. >> he has to govern just like bill clinton and joe biden knows how to govern, he will govern from the middle and he'll make deals and the people from the far right and the far left won't like. >> it he's worked with these people before so there's a relationship already. >> if he wins, he will be governing from the center. mike, let's face it. well, first of all, let's face it. like twitter, like woke twitter has been destroyed throughout the 2020 election process. woke twitter was destroyed when joe biden got the nomination. when the same jim clyburn was like stop talking about defunding the police. he was talking about that during the campaign.

that's one of the reasons he supported biden but now you look at what's happened and americans are down the center. they just are. i know we talked about how deeply divided america is. but you look at some of the things that the far left wants. you know, it's like jeremy corbyn. we all predicted that jeremy corbyn was going to lose because he was out of touch with the british -- with the majority of british voters and sure enough it happened. so here we are, this is a country that we have. whether people like it or not. in 2016, they took a chance on donald trump, figured what do we have to lose? in 2018 they said, we have a lot to lose. this guy is out of his freaking mind and he's extreme. we're going to put democrats in charge of the house and take away some republican seats in the senate, they have a check on him. just as james madison and the founders actually planned. 2020 comes along, and it looks

like the decision they have made is, all right, listen, we just -- we're doing to fire donald trump. we just we can't take this chaos anymore. but we want to keep the republicans in control of the senate and we want to do that because we don't trust turning the whole thing over to the democratic party because to tell you the truth, some of the things we hear they sound a little crazy to us. that's what they're saying. democrats, listen. they don't have to listen to me. they never do anyway. i'm just telling you, that's where america is and if the democrats decide to move to the center and get behind joe biden if he's elected president, they're going to have the sort of success they had under bill clinton. if they have civil wars over the next four years it's going to get ugly. it's going to get ugly fast. by the way, aoc, guess what? she represents her district. i have always been a big believer everybody should

represent their district and she represents her district well ideologically. right, that's her job. all right? it's at the same time, it's nancy pelosi's job and she's really good at it, and it will be joe biden's job, and he's going to be really good at it, in charting a middle course. if that's a in fact where they think america is and nancy's already done this in before. in 2006, democrats took power back and when nancy pelosi and rahm emanuel and other democrats said, hey, why don't we do this. why don't we recruit candidates that can win in red districts and then a remarkable thing happened. democrats took control of the house. mike? >> he's frozen. oh, my gosh. >> mike is frozen again. >> i thought, willie -- i'm sorry, mika, go ahead.

>> to your point, joe, as we unfreeze mike -- >> he's like hans solo. >> they saw the incredible villain in trump and his followers and instead of trying to make the tent bigger they took advantage of that. and i mean, it was very easy because he's so shocking, but at this point, joe biden may be the only candidate on the list of all of the democrats who are running for president who can be bring the country together because he's worked with mitch mcconnell before. he's worked alongside these people. he has worked with them for decades. and it might just be exactly what washington needs to get over this far extreme on each side problem. >> yeah. willie, if you look at the map, if you look at how this election turns out, it becomes extremely clear to me as clear as it was at the florida polls were off and that the other polls were off, it becomes extremely clear

to me reading the data that joe biden was the only democrat capable of threading the needle and getting elected president this year. and even -- even that depended on donald trump botching the worst pandemic in over 100 years. >> yeah. look at how thin the line is right now even for joe biden a centrist. to your point, a lot of progressive candidates might not have gotten over this, bernie sanders, namely. mike barnicle, again, delinquent on his wi-fi bill. the trump campaign is still throwing everything it can in an effort to fight the presidential results in court. in georgia, a judge denied a trump-backed motion to disqualify 50 votes that a republican election watcher claimed after arrived after the 7:00 p.m. deadline on election day and the poll watcher offered

no evidence that the polls were late. in michigan a judge denied the request to stop counting votes because quote it made little sense. since the counting is effectively finished and the state has been awarded to joe biden. now the trump campaign is letting arizona to join the lawsuit to allow equipment errors on the ballots and in pennsylvania, the trump campaign is seeking to stop the counting of a small number of mail votes where voters were allowed to correct errors. joining us from stanford law school, professor, are there any lawsuits that might bear attention that might have some merit from the trump campaign? >> i don't think they're significant enough to make a result. they're trying to see what sticks against the wall. we think of the cases trying to adjudicate the facts on the ground and right now they're

trying to create facts and whether there's a way to cancel ballots, whether there's a way to figure out how to change the vote totals but you don't see anything comparable to what we saw in bush versus gore. also what makes it very different they're trying to do it all around the country. not like we're focusing just on one state. which is going to be outcome determinative. >> so, nate, we have seen the sort of state by state chest thumping press conferences from the various members of the trump campaign where they make the bold declarations of fraud and then when pressed, for example, by reporters like our jacob soboroff, what's the evidence, they storm away and get into vans and leave. what we're seeing is accusations, we have seen them made without evidence. how do you take the cases into court -- in fact, how do you create a lawsuit without specific evidence to support it? >> well, you're right. that's what makes this distinctive, they have a theory

about what could have happened but they don't have any evidence that there was fraud in this election. they're trying to sort of look under rocks in each of these states to find a bucket of votes and say, look, this was corrupt. but it's nothing like a dangling chad well, these groups of ballots are the once that are in dispute. you know, the margins are now getting larger and larger. it's becoming more and more difficult to bring this within as we say the margin of litigation. right? and it doesn't seem that the courts themselves are going to be able to overturn the result in order to shift the margins as we see them growing. >> jonathan lemire, this was all advertised by president trump at rallies just days before the election. he was going to send lawyers in to pennsylvania. he talked about this. we knew this was coming that the space from election day to friday, for example, when those votes were being counted because

they couldn't be counted until election day, he would fill that case with chaos and with the baseless lawsuits and most being dismissed very quickly. >> i guess we'll point out the fundamental flaw in the idea that there is a vast voter fraud conspiracy perpetuated by democrats when the democrats have lost seats in the house and didn't flip control of the senate. >> right. >> so perhaps that shows they're not so great at these. but you're right. this is what the president had said that he would do. he's made very clear he and his allies they would try to turn up the fog machine again to try to make the -- to sow doubt in the confidence of the ballots and try to send it to the courts but at least so far, they haven't had any success. can you zero in on pennsylvania. the lawsuit from republicans was challenging -- it was suggesting they don't have the ability to watch the ballots. they didn't have any ability to have monitors at the polling places, but there are, right? these are republicans there.

walk us through that suit and what the next step may be. >> so you have a ruling from the intermediate court in pennsylvania saying that republicans are allowed to watch, sort of more closely. i mean, all of us can watch what's going on in philadelphia. they are live streaming it. this is a strange feature in the age of the internet we can all watch what's going on there. but the question is how close, how much social distance there is between the watchers of the count and the people who are doing it. so, yesterday, they said, well they can get six feet away. philadelphia board is appealing it. but, you know, this is grasping at straws here. you're seeing these kinds of lawsuits in pennsylvania. there was some in michigan, obviously in georgia. but it's important to understand there's not a consistent legal argument here. the shout is count every vote in arizona. and in philadelphia, and other places where biden is up, or

seeming going to be up, they're saying stop the count so that's a difficult argument to make when you're making it inconsistently around the country. >> that's what james baker said exactly. it's inconsistent as you point out. professor of law at stanford, thank you very much. joe, the case that he pointed to, the one victory that trump can point to, the poll watchers who are there, observers, can be they can be six feet away, rather than the 20 feet away, so they did pick up 14 feet of observation. that was the one win. >> fantastic. again, comparing this to 2000 as james baker said, just doesn't work. by the way, i was on the ground for 38 days in 2000. the issues were so different and i'll tell you what else was different. the vote spread. we were talking about 537 votes. so republicans and democrats were literally going from county to county.

you'd have 11 or 12 democratic lawyers and 11 or 12 republican lawyers and a small county in florida and they'd be fighting over three or four votes but that's not the case here. by the way, the similarities, if donald trump is like oh, the votes are so close. here are -- if any republicans are going to say that, i don't think they will, but conspiracy theorists. look at how's -- what's remarkable is how close the races have been in '16 and now. in 2016, donald trump won wisconsin by 23,000 votes. just 23,000 votes. right now, joe biden is winning by just north of 20,000 votes. extremely tight. in michigan, donald trump won michigan by 11,000 votes. actually there joe biden's winning by 125,000 votes. biden actually has ten times the

lead, the spread than donald trump did. in pennsylvania, donald trump won in 2016 by 44,000 votes. willie, that seems like right now based on projections sort of the bottom end of where we expect joe biden to end up. but those three midwestern states, that blue wall, man, tell you what, it may shift from all red to all blue this year. but by the narrowest of margins, both times. >> well, as steve kornacki pointed out a minute ago, georgia is the one right now that could be the range of recount territory but as you say, none of the margins even approach recount territory. reince priebus and scott walker said a reassessment of the margins would show a handful of change. no 20,000 change in a recount typically. you're right. the margin in michigan and the margin likely in pennsylvania

will be so large that if there was one or two or a handful of cases of fraud which we have not seen yet, there's no way that that would change those margins but again, the trump white house, the trump campaign using a fog machine to try to create chaos where there is none, where the process is playing out. we are getting some new numbers in this morning. we could have some changes in this election as we're on the air. we'll be right back with steve kornacki on "morning joe." >> can you talk about the evidence you're claiming thousands of illegitimate votes in nevada? >> you should ask the question -- >> no, you guys made the claim and you said there's no election observers, where's the evidence of the fraud? you haven't prevented any evidence of fraud. they have presented no evidence of fraud ce of fraud. they have presented no evidence of fraud and wrap hair. and wrap hair. so shark replaced them with flexible power fins to directly engage floors and dig deep into carpets.

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democracy is sometimes messy. it sometimes requires a little patience as well, but that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years with a system of governance that has been the envy of the world and we continue to feel -- the senator and i, we continue to feel very good about where things stand. we have no doubt that when the count is finished senator harris and i will be declared the winners. so i ask everyone to stay calm. all the people to stay calm. the process is working. the count is being completed. and we'll know very soon. >> that was joe biden yesterday. slightly different from president trump's news conference later in the day. but really, calling for calm. calling for patience. and putting on a steady presence for the american public, joe.

>> yeah. he was. you could sense as you saw him talking yesterday, he felt -- >> confidence. >> he felt what was happening and also a growing sense that he was likely going to be the next president of the united states. willie, i want to follow-up. we had talked about the abigail spanberger and democrats' concerns and i'm sure if you spoke with a lot of democrats running for senate like steve bullock they would tell you a lifetime of good work was undone by the branding of the democratic party as being too extreme on the left and made it impossible for him to win that race. conor lamb said this of spanberger. spanberger was talking about something many of us are feeling today. we pay the price for these unprofessional and unrealistic comments about a number of issues whether it's about the police state or shale gas.

this is, teddy white, he wrote a lot of books on the presidency. one of my favorites is america in search of itself. even with a joe biden victory, if that happens, this is going to be a democratic party in search of itself. >> there's no question about it. all the rhetoric that president trump used in his singular focus on what he called riots and looting in the street and not on the fundamental message of black lives matter and the people who are out there marching against injustice, but his focus on that appears to have worked with a lot of people. saying they want to defund the police, democrats, if you vote for joe biden they want to defund the police. now that applied in congress, that applied in the senate races and house races, but joe biden took great pains to distance himself from that. he said, i do not want to defund the police. in fact, i want to add money to the police, they need our help to get better. i do not want to tear down statues of george washington, confederate leaders, but not

george washington. i'm not for fracking, i'm not for a ban on fracking, although he had said in the primary earlier that he would support that. if this margin -- these small margins hold in some of the states it may be because joe biden unlike many congressional candidates did separate himself from that rhetoric in a way that attracted centrists that might have voted for him. >> can let's bring in historian jon meacham. i can't wait to get your take generally on everything that's been happening over the past several days but first, let's just talk, look at america from 30,000 feet and talk about america in search of itself. we have seen time and again one party winning a presidential election, then being checked two years later by the opposing party and then winning

re-election and being checked by the opposing party. what we're seeing this time is quite different. you have americans in real time saying, maybe we'll take a chance on joe biden. looks like they're going to end up making that decision. but we want to make sure that the democratic party is checked from its worst tendencies. this is madison's vision of america. of course, democrats don't like it and republicans don't like it. but it's that system of checks and balances that may just get us through the four years of donald trump and will definitely dominate the way that things are run in washington over the next two years. as tom ricks says in "first principles" quoting the silicon valley guys and gals, it's not a bug, it's a feature. >> right. right.

you know, and i have been thinking of churchill all week, the line attributed to him, this is the -- democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the others. i think we're seeing that in real time. look, close elections produce consequential presidencies. i'll say that again. close elections produce consequential presidencies. 1968, 1976 and even reagan because john anderson was in the race, biden is getting about the same percentage number that ronald reagan did. 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2016. this presidential election in terms of biden's probable national percentage win and even his more than likely electoral college win, this is within the rule, not the exception. that's first thing to remember.

is that momentous -- excuse me, momentous presidencies have come out of these kind of close results. the second thing is -- that's looking at the presidency. there's a big inventory we'll all have to take on what it says that so many americans were willing to suspend their ordinary reaction to the kind of behavior we saw on the part of the president last night. it's a big, big question. and maybe there's a great divide in trump land between policy and people who are embracing the person, but people have got to reckon with that. >> yeah. the answer to that question is possible hope for democrats. back now from nbc news and msnbc news, steve kornacki at the big board to give us a sense of where the election stands right now. steve.

>> yeah, the waiting game continues in pennsylvania. where donald trump has that lead of just over 18,000 votes, again, we are expecting this morning a couple of things. number one, a new report from philadelphia. the city of philadelphia, i can just show you here. biggest city in the state. biden is winning philadelphia overwhelmingly as you might expect. there are about 54,000 or so absentee mail ballots that are still being counted in philadelphia. they worked overnight. they're not on a fixed schedule with and these so we're sort of at their mercy. sometimes they wait three, four hours between releasing numbers. sometimes it's a little shorter, sometimes longer, but it's been a while since we have had an update. they have been working all night so i would expect in the not too distant future we'll get another update from philadelphia and again, biden is just -- he's winning the city of philadelphia, 80-18 right now. the mail ballots in philadelphia which is what's being counted

here, has been going for biden at rate of 91%. so you can expect whatever comes in from philadelphia, biden will get a pretty big boost from this. so we'll see what it does to the 18,000 count lead that donald trump has. i think we'll get some clarity this morning, one potentially is around pittsburgh, allegheny county. there are 35,000 uncounted mail-in ballots in. because of a legal issue they could not touch the issues, they could not process them yesterday. so the folks -- the election officials are getting to them today. they're going to work through those, get those -- start getting those reported out. then you have a number of other places throughout the state where you've got 10,000, 5,000, 3,000, kind of scattered around the state. the bottom line is that joe biden has been winning the mail vote overwhelming everywhere in pennsylvania. it is just very clear that the mail vote in pennsylvania was just something that was overwhelmingly used by democrats and not republicans. it's a mail vote that's being

tabulated right now. so every single update, wherever it's been from in pennsylvania, has been adding to biden's total. a lot more than it's adding to trump's total. we think there's a total here in pennsylvania there's a total of 160,000 roughly -- roughly 160,000 votes left to come. so plenty of room for biden to catch trump, pass him and then potentially run away. that's what this trend is saying. one thing to see the trend on paper. let's see if that does in fact play out here and then the other big -- >> hey, steve, i'm sorry, steve. before you leave pennsylvania, can you you back there. i know we're talking about western democracy hanging in the balance here on who's going to be president, but i can't help but look at your map of pennsylvania and just being a nerd, i'm surprised by the blue. four years ago it was contained to the philly and the metro

philly area. it is creeping up into that northeast region where donald trump did pretty darn well last time. and that map is -- it seems considerably more blue. not just there, but also you look at erie, another big win for joe biden. talk about that northeast region that donald trump made his -- made a base of his last time and where joe biden has gained. >> yeah. i mean, we got this update a little while ago. this is monroe county, where stroudsburg is. clinton's margin was a couple hundred votes and biden, healthier, six-point margin in monroe county. this is an interesting one. we could show you lackawanna county, scranton, joe biden, scranton, he's made scranton a central part of his campaign. this is one of the counties, look -- put it on the screen and show you. hillary clinton did win this one. she won it by three points in 2016. that was way, way down from what

barack obama got in 2012. he had won that thing by 25 points. actually, i think i can call it up here. 27 points. obama had won it by 27. clinton won it by three. now, biden's going to win it. you average that up by about nine. so he's improved. this was a dramatic and for democrats traumatizing drop. biden is not bringing the support into the place like lackawanna county back up to the level that democrats had as recently as 2012 but he's built on it. to go from three-point win to the nine-point win and to replicate that in county after county. that does add up. that gets to be significant. but trump did hold a chunk of his gains like in lackawanna, erie county. go to the north west part of the state. look, it's very tight here, but biden -- there's a few uncounted mail ballots here. biden is going to win erie county. four years ago, it was very

narrow. but donald trump narrowly won erie county. that was a major shift. again, had it been a blowout for barack obama in 2012, trump flipped it. now it is moving a few points back in biden's direction. and biden is going to win it. so we have seen this in pennsylvania, michigan, wisconsin. there is movement on this map. i think it's -- demographics, the white working class demographics is what we're talking about in the places, it's small but significant. it's not democrats getting back to where they were a decade ago, but it's democrats making progress from 2016 and progress enough, right to take a state like pennsylvania. they lost by 46,000 votes in 2016 and now to have joe biden seemingly on the verge of passing donald trump and building a lead of his own. >> so it's modest shifts throughout the state. and willie, donald trump who let the good people of erie county

know he didn't want to be there at the last rally has got to be really angry this morning that he went to erie because he lost there. >> yeah. i don't want to be here, i may never come back if you don't vote for me. >> for those who are just waking up, steve is expecting a drop from some very important counties namely around philadelphia, in philadelphia. the spread as nbc nice has it is 253 electoral votes to 214. 20 electoral votes coming in the state of pennsylvania. if that were to be called for joe biden he would become president-elect. i want to underline one more point for our audience just joining us here. the percentage of mail-in ballots that joe biden has been winning so far in pennsylvania is at 75%. so you fully expect this trend of joe biden to pick up votes as they come in by mail to continue here. >> yeah. i mean, i keep thinking to

myself and as we have been watching this map fill in now for, you know, two days now, what i have been saying every time i see an update, give me a reason not to think that's going to be the trend everywhere. what i mean by that, show me a county, any county in the state here, where trump's actually doing well with the mail-in ballots. you don't find them. you know, we showed you carbon county earlier. deeply red carbon county. trump is going to win it 2-1. but when they tallied up the mail-in vote, biden is winning it. there's no reason to think that there's going to be much variance here. biden is going to collect votes with all of them, it would seem, but you want to see it. so you know, we have to have a pattern on paper, let's see it happen in actuality. i think the other thing here, too, when i say the votes that are left, 35,000 here, about

54,000 there. the source -- this is what the state of pennsylvania is telling us. this is what they're saying is left in the places. i don't know. is there far less in this county or that county, but there would have to be a lot far less. again, they're saying about 160,000 outstanding absentee ballots in the state and the gap right now, you know, that biden up is up against is 18,000. he's winning them at a 75% rate. at this rate he doesn't need 160,000 absentee ballots he needs far, far less than that. every single trend we can identify here is pointing to biden catching trump and moving ahead. moving significantly ahead here. but the counting is going on. we have to see them release it. we're kind of in a lull here, because philadelphia worked overnight. and i'm telling you, i think it might be five, six hours. i remember we got the most -- the last update we got from pennsylvania from philadelphia is the one that knocked this margin down to 18,000.

i swear, that was probably about six hours ago now. this about as long as they have gone in between. i think we're due for another one soon. and i think it could have a significant impact on that margin. >> well, steve talks about the counting that is happening right now. and willie, the poll workers who are working through the night and of course this is happening in other states, this counting and people who are working to make our democracy function. this is the moment america waits for every four years. this is what we're made of. and i have to mention -- i mean, it's worth mentioning that, you know, the big question was would republicans stand by the president in his sort of power grab around this process that is so important to the core of this democracy and some are. lindsey graham and ted cruz are, you know, shouting from the rooftops for more observers. there are poll observers and

workers and the process is working and these allegations are coming out of thin air as these people are working through the night to do the right thing, to count every vote. >> joe, there are -- say this again. there are republican observers in these rooms, in equal measure with democratic observers. that's the way it was laid out. these are republican legislatures that insisted upon these rules, that insisted upon these laws that have forced us to go on days after election day because they couldn't start in some of the states counting the early vote and the mail-in vote until election day. so the system is working. >> yeah. >> the democratic system is working but particularly the republican system is working that the legislators put in place. you have vote counters and county clerks talking about threats to them and their families because of the inflamed tensions. we need to just focus on the count. focus on the process that is working. the process is playing out exactly the way we said it was. and don't listen to the noise

because, by the way, there's been no evidence to support the noise. it's been just that. noise. >> right. and here's the thing. the noise has been promoted by the president of the united states who's been talking about a rigged process for the past six months because he knew it was very likely he was going to lose this election. and because of that, because of the concerns about russia four years ago, because of the president's extraordinarily reckless rhetoric, this is probably -- i think it's safe to say from the supervisors of elections that i have spoken with, the secretaries of state i have spoken with, this is probably going to be seen by the historians as the most transparent and the most accurate election in american history. only because there has been so much attention paid to it and there is one check after another check after another check. it's another reason why a lot of these challenges just aren't

going to work. i do want to say really quickly, because i think i have simplified something in a way that probably gives the wrong impression. and that is that -- it's this. i have been talking about abigail spanberger's statements and other centrist democrats who almost lost. i have to say if you talk to the biden campaign they will tell you that nobody worked harder for them this year than bernie sanders. >> oh, yeah. >> bernie sanders' supporters. elizabeth warren and warren supporters and the way that politics works, a lot of people on the hard right that provide the groundwork for the republican party and provide a lot of the money. a lot of people on the hard left that provide a lot of the groundwork and a lot of the money that's required. there is no way joe biden would

have won without that coalition coming together of yes, people who call them socialists and people like conor lamb and abigail spanberger who are more moderate democrats. so this is not a time to just -- i didn't want to give the impression that you just toss aside people on the progressive wing of the party because joe biden would not have won without them. they figured out a way to bring the party together at least in this presidential race. now they have to figure out how to appeal better to americans -- >> you were just pointing out -- >> it's not a one size fits all approach. >> no. you were pointing out though the conundrum for democrats as they try and sort of really, you know -- right now, they have the unbelievable antagonist of donald trump and it's a loud i think -- some of the much more liberal left, far left forces to come out. but if they want to appeal to more americans, there are some changes that have to be made.

we have got a lot of people standing by. msnbc national analyst, co-host of showtime's "the circus," john heilemann. tim alberta is joining us. from the lyndon b. johnson school of public affairs. and eugene robinson and jon meacham is still with us as well. thank you all for being with us. why don't we start with john heilemann and give us your take. heilemann, as to where you think things stand for joe biden. >> good morning, mika. happy friday. it looks to me -- it's looked to me -- joe and i were texting furiously about this probably the middle of the day yesterday until now, i think that being

someone who -- i speak not for the nbc decision desk. i speak not for the company. i can say the following thing without, you know -- without getting out of my skis, i think that most people in -- at the highest levels of politics, democratic and republican alike and people who have been studying this data that came through, looking at the trend lines in pennsylvania yesterday, that joe biden was eventually going to win the state of pennsylvania. i think that clarity is now, you know -- not 24 hours old, but at least 12 to 18 hours old. you can sort of see the trajectory. and i think, you know, we have been waiting in a sense appropriately. i think all of the networks have been waiting to see whether those trend lines would hold. but on the basis of where the vote is out, on the basis of where the vote had come in, you can sort of see the lines

converging and, you know, around the time that we are right now that joe biden would take a lead that was going to be at that point an irreducible lead or a lead that could not be erased that was going inexorably bring him the state of pennsylvania and it feels like in the last 12 hours it's a waiting game and a sense of inevitability about that. that does not extend to the president and to the president's allies and his enablers and his accomplices who i think are not going to go quietly. the president has given no indication that he intends to look up when this network and other networks and eventually when the state of pennsylvania, you know, exhausts all the ballots and says that joe biden has won and he has 270 electoral votes it doesn't look like he'll concede. it looks like donald trump will continue to fight and the

question is how much damage he does in the process going forward and how we handle all of that as a country. i think that's where we stand at this hour. >> tim alberta, i have been watching you over the last couple of days and particularly yesterday taking on some of the conspiratorial garbage from the united states senators, from leaders of the republican national committee, these accusations that, you know, there's fraud in the election that have no basis in reality. there are people, you know, tinkering and playing with the results that also had no basis in reality. what is happening out there right now? are you surprised by anything you're seeing in the place like michigan or wisconsin or in pennsylvania, as these results come in and as steve kornacki is waiting for a big dump out of the philadelphia area. we may get some changes in this map in the next couple of minutes or hours. are you surprised by anything that you have seen play out over

the last few days? >> no, willie. first and foremost, i'm not surprised because this is exactly what we expected. it's very important to understand that republican lawmakers in the states of michigan, wisconsin and pennsylvania had every opportunity to allow these mail ballots to be counted a week ago or more. they could have been in by now. we don't necessarily need to be sitting here waiting for these uploads of additional ballots. this idea being propagated on fox news and elsewhere that democrats are wait playing this waiting game to figure out what the deficit is and how many ballots they need to overcome it it's nonsense, it's not rooted in any factor, zero evidence. if they were so concerned about this idea that democrats would be able to sort of watch the scoreboard and then pull out just enough points they would need to win, then they could have made sure that the mail ballots were counted first. there wouldn't be this sort of

sequencing. the second thing to the first point you raised, willie, you have prominent republican officials at the republican national committee, federal lawmakers, coming out and making claims that run the spectrum from unfounded to just untrue. there was a spokesperson for the republican national committee yesterday, their top national spokesperson tweeting out all of these numbers insinuating that turnout -- because she said that turnout jumps 20% this milwaukee county this was obviously evidence of mass voter fraud. in fact, turnout jumped 3.5 point and knew turnout did jump 15% in a number of rural red counties around the state. that's not proof of voter fraud

but that's proof of a high turnout election. but you have officials who don't understand the difference between eligible vote share and a registered vote share who are comparing apples to oranges and whether they're doing it out of dishonesty or out of ignorance i can't speak to that but they still haven't taken these tweets down. they're misleading the public, look at all of the magical votes that were found in milwaukee, you know, wink wink, something must be going on in milwaukee, when there's nothing going on in milwaukee. the spike in turnout in milwaukee, in the city and in the county was far lower than the spikes in the red areas around the state. those are just a couple of examples. a final one i would give you is for three hours last night on fox news, we heard ted cruz and lindsey graham and newt gingrich and others talk about how there's being no assess being allowed no the vote counting facilities in philadelphia which is just not true. the trump campaign says it's not

true because they had to tell a judge when they were in court yesterday how many people were in the room and they said that there were at least 15 people in the room when these votes were being counted in philadelphia. we have documentary evidence that the poll workers have had access to the places. so everything you have heard from the trump campaign from the republican national committee, from the president's surrogates there's no basis for any of it. if the president is going to claim there's widespread fraud, you would think that we would have significant evidence to substantiate that and so far, we don't have a shred of it. >> absolutely none. let's just add a name, bill bennett of all people last night on fox news. he was sure that there was fraud. i wonder where he found that.

i don't understand what he or newt get out of it. i don't understand why they would try to foment violence which they're doing, trying to spread conspiracy theories. trying to undermine american -- think about that. the guy who wrote the book of virtues is spending his later years trying to undermine american democracy and to sow chaos in the democratic process. and, newt, i don't understand what newt is doing. rudy, i just feel sorry for the guy. but it goes on and on. anyway -- >> it's not just fox. i mean, fox is its own thing, joe. which we can talk about some day. >> fox though -- fox news you look at their interview with kayleigh mcenany or whatever her name is, they're very tough with her. they have been tough with other people -- >> totally agree. >> look at "the new york post." let's show "the new york post"

headlines. no, i think -- >> this is a little bit of a shift. >> what they have been -- right. i'm talking about what's happening -- >> absolutely. >> let me tell you something. what's happening right now is extraordinarily critical to the functioning of american democracy. we have learned since we were children what separates the united states of america from every other country that have been our adversaries in the past is they change leaders when tanks roll into the streets. we change leaders when americans quietly and peacefully go in to voting booths and that's what the overwhelming majority have done and vote for who they want to be president of the united states. and the overwhelming majority of americans want to keep it that way. the fact that there's some voices out in that aren't doing that right now, at this point in american history, it's extraordinarily reckless. i just say -- i'm going to get to meacham in a second on this

point, but compare how george h.w. bush handled his loss. the dignity, the grace, the patriotism. compare that to how these clowns are responding right now. they should be ashamed of themselves. they knew george h.w. bush and supported him. they should be ashamed of themselves. >> fox is in one category right now, but twitter and the tweets that the republican national committee and different far-right trumpers are putting up there that are just dead wrong about this process. it's a cesspool right now and twitter is trying to sort of fact check and put headlines on things but they sere far behind what needs to be done on the social media platforms to stop the spread of disinformation which the president using the highest office in the land from his podium is spewing. >> right. >> and potentially will for the days to come. >> of course the president in

the middle of the night went after twitter again. >> he was up all night tweeting. >> and talking about section 230. that's one thing i agree with donald trump on. section 230 should be eliminated. it should be abolished and i should be able to sue twitter for what they published earlier this year just like the president of the united states. so again, let's take a deep breath as we have been saying. let's look overall at how people have responded. mitch mcconnell has responded saying count all the votes. vice president mike pence has said, count all the votes. it's funny he said i agree completely with the president, count all the votes. that's not what the president of the united states said, and i want to say, i thank mitch mcconnell and mike pence and i thank all of the other republicans who are stepping forward and saying, let's count all the votes. james baker, i thank him for

saying it. by the way, right now, you know, what happened in the past that's not what we have to focus on right now. we have to focus on who's putting america first right now and a hell of a lot of republicans are when they say let's count all the votes first. gene robinson, let's look at -- speaking of counting, let's look at the votes, a lot of us looked at the election returns and, you know, all of my friends voted for donald trump. i don't understand why other than they couldn't bring themselves to vote for the democratic party. but i'm not the only person who's baffled. i'm sure you were baffled as well, wondering why 20% of black men voted for a guy who made common cause with david duke and richard spencer. a large number of hispanics,

hispanic men especially, voted for donald trump despite the fact that he caged the hispanics and called them breeders and insulted them time and time again. here's a number i saw from npr, shocking, donald trump improved greatly among muslim-americans, 35% of muslim-americans voted for a president who wanted to put in a muslim registry and wanted to ban muslims from being able to enter this country. it is -- i think we're going to be sorting through results like this for quite some time. do you have any explanations? >> not yet. i mean, i could -- you know, i could give you all kinds of explanations and theories on this, but we have to find that out. because none of that that you just cited really makes sense to me. you know, there were people warning in the days before the

election, obviously, trump is making a play for black men, for example. and there were indications that obviously -- to state the obvious, you know, latinos are not a political monolith, not the way that african-americans have been a political monolith. you know, and still kind of are, but the latino vote people saw that it was -- trump was going to get a lot of it. so we're going to need to figure out exactly why that happened and what was it about trump that appealed to the voters because i didn't see it. but, you know, this morning i -- like a lot of people when i woke up, the lead had changed in georgia and so -- just looking at the map i thought of three people.

i thought of stacey abrams and all of the work that she has done in what georgia over the last couple of years and what -- and an impact, again, never to get ahead of kornacki, we'll see what the numbers continue to say as we go along, but what a tremendous impact. i thought of the late john lewis and his legacy in georgia and i thought of the late john mccain and his legacy in arizona. and the way that president trump had attacked those two great americans, great american patriots, and how it appears at this hour that voters had a response. >> all right. we'll continue this conversation. everyone stay put for one second. we want to bring into the conversation democratic senator gary peters of michigan. senator peters is now the projected winner of a very close

race over john james in that state. senator, good morning, congratulations on your projected victory. the president of the united states is making claims that there was fraud in this election, unsupported by any evidence whatsoever. but we're hearing the claiming made by your opponent in the state of michigan that this was taken from him. he has not conceded yet. what is your reaction? >> my reaction is it's sad and pathetic. there's no evidence whatsoever. i think my opponent probably aligned himself with president trump, said he was 2000% with him so they're just basically putting out the statements and instead of accepting the votes in our state. the people of michigan have spoken. the election is over. we're counting -- all of the votes have been counted in michigan and it's time to move on. you know, we're at time right

now where this clearly shows the character of individuals. our individuals that that are willing to accept the votes of the people of this state and be able to move on. but clearly, that's not what we're seeing. it's unfortunate. >> by and large, the republicans have said let's get the votes counted but there are some of your senate colleagues, ted cruz and lindsey graham, who are fanning the flames without using the evidence to do it, saying that something is amiss in this election. what are you hearing from other republicans though perhaps even privately in the senate? how are they reacting to the way that the trump campaign is accusing the entire country and specific states of meddling in elections? >> i haven't talked to any of my colleagues but i would hope they would speak out against that. this is about making sure that this wonderful democratic republic that we have continues to be strong and to fan the

flames of distrust is not helpful, particularly in the absence of any, any evidence that has been put forward. our country needs to come together. we are at a pivotal moment in the history of our country. there has been so much dissension, so much rancor that to me this is about now healing the country. coming together and understanding that we are stronger as a country when we come together. let's step up. let's accept the votes of the americans across our country. and now let's get about the business of dealing with the problems that we face. so we have to get through this pandemic. that's the number one question without question that i hear all across michigan. people want to move forward. this has lasted way too long. we wanted a comprehensive approach to deal with the health and the economic crisis. people want us to get to work and that's what prevailed in michigan. you know, i have recognized as one of the most bipartisan united states senators, effective. i have passed more bills through the u.s. senate and authored more bills in the u.s. senate in

the last two years than any other democratic or republican senator and i'm a freshman in the minority party. it is about rolling up your sleeves and getting things done that's what the people of michigan and the people of the country want. the people have spoken, let's move forward as a country and let's become stronger as a result of that. let's stop people fanning the flames of dissension. it is destructive to our democracy. >> yeah. senator peters, you talk about this being a pivotal moment in our country's history. would you consider this also to be a pivotal moment for the democratic party, looking at the tightness of the races, especially given who the opponent was at this point. you know, you're the projected winner here. will there be any changes in how you approach your voters, your constituents and the way you lead given perhaps what we have learned, what the takeaways are from the results of this election across the country. >> i certainly am not doing to

change because i believe we have to come together, find common ground. i'm a proud democrat and stand for democratic values. but we have to come together to solve problems and that means working to do that. i think that's what people are hungry for this this country. certainly i know folks in michigan want to see that. so the only way we solve some of these tough problems for the long term, we have to stop this see saw back and forth and the conflict we understand some of the things don't need to be political, we need resolutions. i'm not naive. this is a tough time to do that. we're in a time of hyper-partisanship and division. but it's incumbent on those of us who are privileged to serve in the u.s. senate, for example. to say enough is enough. let's figure out how we can find some common ground here to solve the problems. i mentioned the pandemic, but with we want to make sure that

folks who are unemployed have the ability to come back and work and we want to make sure the small businesses survive. we can't get in the economy that rebounds like we like if the small businesses disappear. they need assistance. these are things that are urgent. the best way to bring the country is to show that government can work, we can solve problems. if we can do that we will be well down the road, it's incumbent on us that both parties come together. this is about the country, about the people that we are privileged to represent. let's make that the focus once again. we have not seen that in the last few years. let's make that the focus going forward. >> senator gary peters, thank you very much for joining us. senator gary peters is the projected winner of the michigan senate race. i want to turn now back to our panel. and victoria defrancesco soto, i

want to ask you the same question i asked senator peters maybe in a different way. what are we learning from the results of these races so far and the tightness of some of the races. it might end up being a win for joe biden and for some democrats, but not a resounding one. and are there some legitimate takeaways that democrats need to look at? >> mika, the standout result here is division. regardless of who wins, even though it looks like joe biden is going to win the white house, and it's a division that sadly is going to persist. i love what senator peters just said and the idea of unity, the idea of saying we're done with the election, it is time to come together. it is time to roll up our sleeves. however, we have seen leader mcconnell say that he's going to roadblock whatever a biden administration puts forward. so we have already seen that. and the idea that trump and his

team keeps claiming fraud and again, this is nothing new. we have seen claims of fraud by the republican party to justify a number of restrictive voter laws that are out in the country, texas being ground zero for that without any claim, but it helps to fuel the very conservative base. again, i don't know what is going on in the trump team's mind, but my hunch is that they're seeing this is a lost cause. that 2020 is gone, but they have their eye on 2022 and on 2024. if you remember back to the birther movement and something that president trump latched on to and you can argue carried him to the presidency, i see the same seeds right now with the discussion, the lindsey grahams, the ted cruzs, the don jr. saying this is fraud, this is fraud. that gins up the base, they're going to be riled up. they'll be ready to go to come together in 2022, 2024.

this is what's really problematic because once the dust settles how are we going to govern? it will be an administration for joe biden where he won't get a bunch of stuff done. at the very least he'll be able to keep harm from happening. that is not where we want to be, but sadly, that is the state of where we are at one of the most divisive points in our history. >> well, victoria, i love having you on. i'm -- maybe i'm being pollyannaish. i do remember back to 2000 and a lot of democrats being angry that the supreme court decided that election and decided it along party lines and, yet, george w. bush before 9/11 reached out to democrats for education reform. reached out to democrats on other issues as well, and i'm not so sure that two creatures

of the senate, joe biden and mitch mcconnell, can't figure out how to get some things done in the best interest of america. >> i hope so, joe. i really do. i think that the issue here is trump and his base. i think that if you were to take trump and his base out, mitch mcconnell might be able to settle back into kind of the traditions and the notions of the senate. so i think this is problematic. the other thing that's been worrying me and gnawing at me is in looking at the state house returns across the nation. democrats knew that in order to shift the balance, they needed to make substantial gains so that when redistricting came along they could fix some of those extremely gerrymandered maps and hopefully get a little bit more balance in congress. i'm not seeing that happen, so i'm worried that a lot of the extremism that was baked in in

the 2010 tea party redistricting is going to happen again. i think that's going to trickle up in terms of the hyper-partisanship that we see at the federal level. >> let us hope we can find a better way forward. jon meacham, i want to bring up georgia for a second and i want to bring it up because you wrote a book obviously that americans have embraced and loved about john lewis. how fascinating that it was john lewis' county in georgia that moved joe biden ahead of donald trump and in arizona it was john mccain's state that he represented for so many years that threw the biden campaign a life line on election night to give them hope that they could

still win this election. pretty incredible turn-about here, coming from the heart of john lewis' district and john mccain's old state. >> yeah. john lewis' case, it's not just poetry. john lewis did the pro savic work and stacey abrams picked it up. if joe biden billions the president-elect of the united states it's not because john lewis and jose ya williams and ella baker and diane nash walked in to the teeth of state sanctioned, white supremacist law enforcement and posse men again and again and again. create -- bringing the promise of the declaration and the

unenforced elements of the 15th amendment in to reality. and in john mccain's case, and one of the things that links john lewis and john mccain, by the way, as my friend has pointed out in a piece long ago is they both bore the scars of physical bravery in american life. one in war abroad, and in john lewis' case he bore the scars of wars here. because selma, alabama, and jackson, mississippi, are battlefields like normandy and iwo jima. it's a battlefield we had fought for liberty that had been denied. in john mccain's case, he was somebody you could disagree with him and lord knows a lot of his colleagues did and a lot of folks did. but he always called it as he saw it.

right, he called it as he saw it. he let reason play a role. >> i'm just making those sounds about john mccain because -- >> he wanted you dead, joe. >> he said some tough things before -- as i said before when they sunk a ship as an artificial reef in pensacola bay, he told barnicle, the damn shame is that scarborough wasn't chained to it. >> he didn't mean it. >> but what i loved about senator mccain was he took things personally, he got angry and just like he would hate this say this. >> don't do it. >> just like bill clinton, he knew there was another vote coming up. he knew he had to put aside any harsh feelings and i will tell you, i have said it before, when i went to the hill in february of 2017, there was nobody else on the hill i wanted to visit

and there was john mccain being still true to the cause, still being true to the cause of democracy. still concerned not only about donald trump, but his old friend lindsey graham who he knew even at that time was being swayed by the power of the presidency. >> yeah. yeah. the other thing about mccain which you know well, he was kind of the william shakespeare of profanity. he could do things -- you know? iambic pentameter with words we can't say, but he was a poetic sailor in that sense. but he called them as he saw them. i would submit one of the great acts of citizenship and we are seeing this in stark relief today, one of the greatest acts of citizenship we can do, if

your side is wrong, say so. if you think your side is right, fight like hell. but have the capacity to change your mind if the facts change. >> tim alberta, as we await for the results from pennsylvania and from nevada and from arizona and georgia, once the dust settles on all of this, i suspect there's a great tim alberta piece about what this election day and what this has meant for the country and the statement that the biden and trump voters have made in the votes. you're a michigan guy, we can take it from the michigan side. what does this country say about this place that we all live together and about this government that we have and about the culture we have with its votes? >> willie, i think at the end of the day the country told us that

we're every bit as polarized as we thought she was and then some. look, joe biden is going to win more votes for the presidency than anyone who has ever run for the office when all the votes are tallied. and donald trump is probably going to win the second most votes of anyone who's ever run for the presidency by the time all the votes are tallied. and i can tell you having spent the last 13 months on the ground every day crisscrossing between michigan, ohio, pennsylvania, the expectation in these states is that biden was going to win comfortably. but he would by three to six points probably in those three states. there was never an expectation he'd win ohio. but the expectation in pennsylvania. and the expectation among the republicans and the democrats he was comfortably ahead. not a blowout but he'd probably win. at the district level polling for a lot of congressional candidates on the ground, the republican and democrat, they're stunned right now.

they are fundamentally reeevaluating how it was that their internal surveys conducted by local firms, people with a good sense of where voting behaviors are on the ground here locally and at a county level in the states, how they got it so and i think the simplest explanation is probably the best one. is that they just, they continue to fail to have any metric to truly gauge just how polarized these communities are, just how tribal our politics have become. i mean, look, in michigan john james the senate candidate, you were talking to gary peters a minute ago, the incumbent who won that race narrowly, john james was universally expected to run one to three points ahead of donald trump. when all the votes were tallied he ran 8,000 votes behind donald trump, and that's just stunning to people here on the ground. again, what's the explanation for that? the explanation is that all politics are national.

to the contrary of what tip o'neill once said. when the president has proven to be so divisive and so polarizing, that has essentially informed all of the politics down ballot, and you now have these high intensity high tur turnout elections where it's essentially a race to get to 50.1% of the vote, and i don't know that anybody could have necessarily predicted that we would be in a situation now where four years after trump carried wisconsin by 23,000 votes, joe biden carries wisconsin by 20,500 votes, almost a mirror image, and i think that's about as good a window into where the country is right now as you possibly have. >> tim alberta, thank you so much. you know, it's interesting, several weeks before the election my friend was interviewed by cnn and asked about people supporting donald trump, and polls and how

accurate they were going to be and collier said, well, nobody's going to admit to a pollster that they're voting for donald trump. he said it's just like baywatch. you ever met anyone that actually admitted to watching "baywat "baywatch" and yet it was the most watched show for years. he said it's sort of a joke. none of my friends would ever tell a pollster, admit to a pollster that they were voting for donald trump, and there are a lot of stories and a lot of pundits and a lot of analysts who were dismissing the silent trump voter. need to look a little more closely at that because while it's easy for us to attack "the washington post" and abc news polls that show biden up 17 points in wisconsin or to attack quinnipiac for being so off or a lot of these other polls for being so off, the local pollsters got it wrong, too. the people closest to the ground, the congressional

pollsters. and again, not just the democratic pollsters, the republican pollsters had results that were ever bit as skewed. they were in a full-fledged panic a week before the election saying they were going to lose a record number of seats because they were seeing bleeding of support unlike anything they had ever seen. they were shocked by the polls, but the polls were completely wrong, and it wasn't, again, just the media polls or the democratic polls. it was the republican polls as well. polls, i'm sorry, these days for the most part, i mean, if you're planning your election strategy around it, you're flying blind because these days especially in the age of trump, they're just proving to be meaningless. so speaking of meaningless, john heilemann let me ask you, how concerned should americans be at donald trump's press

conferences, at grinell going around making a fool of himself, as if that's something new, of these other people going around alleging fraud, is that anything more than sound and fury signifying nothing? >> well, first of all, joe, i will acknowledge that i watched "baywatch" and i think you would too. we're both honest about this. >> you just went there out loud. >> just got to be honest. i'm going to try to help the polling industry and also i like that setup there. speaking of meaninglessness, john heilemann next. >> no, no. >> i know, i know. listen, here's the thing, i think one needs o'acknowledge. when donald trump gets up on election night as he did and says stop the count, yells, an illegal campaign event at the white house early wednesday morning late on tuesday night and demands that the count be

stopped at a bunch of places, declares himself the winner and says you need to stop the count, especially this all these places where a lot of black people are voting. it's heartening that, of course, the next morning the count does not stop and that the president is just howling. just yak yak yakking from the white house podium and he has no force and effect and people don't pay attention and the gears of democracy grind on. it's heartening for all of us to know the president is a pa ten kin autocrat. the reality is the president and many people around the president have been planning for a long time, joe, to try to win this election not through democratic means but through non-democratic means and not at the ballot box but after, and we're now very close to being in the after period, you know. at some point today, i think we all believe pretty confidently that joe biden is going to reach 270 electoral votes and become the ostensible president-elect,

and the president is not going to stop, though, and we know that a lot of this litigation is going on. yesterday on their press briefing, the obama -- i'm sorry, the biden dylan bob bauer on their press briefing phone call yesterday they said, you know, they dismissed the lawsuits and litigation as meritless and said this is all really more of a communications exercise, a political exercise, not a legal strategy, and i heard that, and i thought yeah, i think that's definitely right. there's no doubt about that, but that's not -- doesn't make it meaningless. the reality is the president, newt gingrich, a lot of the people you've cited today are in the process right now of convincing millions of americans that this election was a fraud and that there is a conspiracy and there is widespread vote rigging going on right now. we know given the strength of the president's performance tuesday night that he has enormous pow over tens of millions of voters. so what's going on right now is

the president is convincing -- i don't know, was it 40 million people, maybe, who are going to believe that this election was not legitimate? that's a very dangerous place to be as we head into this period between now and january when you couple it with the fact that the president and his strategists have intended to use this period to try to take away the election from joe biden once he has achieved the 270 electoral votes or more. so what's going to happen in these next three months? i think we showed a lot of faith and confidence in the system and that there will be a peaceful transfer of power. i also think we should really keep our eyes on what the president and his allies are trying to do here, what they are trying to set up, what the lies that they're telling, the beliefs that they are seeding and how they intend to capitalize and exploit them in this period. i do not think this is over yet. >> no, it's not, and i think when you focus on what you just

said we need to focus on, it does not bring us to a peaceful transfer of power at all. they're flailing and trying to do anything they can to get this election back, that is the president and his minions, and we also saw yesterday the media really understanding the evolution of how to cover this, and most major networks turned away from president -- and the major networks as well as cable turned away from the president's disinformation that he was spewing from the white house podium, and it's a change in terms of, you know, we're looking at the american process playing out, and we are looking at those that are trying to get in the way of the process playing out and covering it whether it's the president or not, joe. >> let's bring in the democratic senator of pennsylvania, bob casey. hey, senator, thanks so much for being with us. you know the map better than anybody. i remember a year and a half ago you told me about parts of the

map where if joe biden were the democratic nominee he would make improvements and you got all those numbers right. so you're looking at the map right now, what's it look like? what should we expect over the next hour or two? >> joe, thanks very much. behind me i have the mid-70s map, it's not high-tech, but i think the map tells us a lot about how he was able to cut into the margins in rural areas ever so slightly in some cases, but in northeastern pennsylvania, joe, i remember talking about that well over a year ago. lack wa na county, five points better, luzerne four points better just for an example. those margins were significant, but suburban philadelphia, the gains there were really substantial. but in terms of what's out, now these are what i've seen at the

latest, how the department of state may have reduced these numbers. still, a of i guess midnight, 163,500 votes are still uncounted. most of those in philadelphia and allegheny county, and then you have the provisional ballots that i know we've all talked about. the rough estimate for that -- i'm getting all these numbers from people smarter than i, provisional ballots about 100,000. >> your colleague, senator toomey has been on the "today" show with savannah guthrie, republican pat toomey saying the following, quote, the president allegations of large scale fraud and theft of the election are just not substantiated. i am not aware of any significant wrongdoing here. he went on to say if the president has evidence of fraud, he should bring it to a court. something they've not done yet. so from your position, you say you're talking to everybody. have you seen any evidence of fraud, any irregularities even

in the vote counting in pennsylvania? >> no, and i think that statement is accurate. look, this is a desperate -- desperate attempt to deal with what is an impending loss. joe biden is going to win pennsylvania. the only question now is by how much, how much in the unofficial count, which we'll probably get today, i think, or roughly, but then ultimately what it is when the official count -- i think that official count will probably get it up to about 100,000. >> all right, senator bob casey, thank you so much. let's head back to the real big board, national political correspondent for nbc news and msnbc, steve kornacki. steve, what are we seeing right now? >> we're seeing what we were looking at about an hour ago. we have just been in this holding pattern. who is going to come in first here with another update from pennsylvania, you know, the odds would say philadelphia because they're the ones who have been counting all night, and again, i say there's been no fixed

schedule here. it's not like every hour on the hour they're reporting out votes. you know, sometimes they wait a couple hours. sometimes they wait more than that. i think the last update we got from philadelphia now has been about eight hours, something along those lines. i will say this when we've had these long delays between reports from philadelphia, when they have then come out with new vote report, it's usually been a pretty big amount, and i say that because the statewide margin, again, 18,000 votes and change for donald trump, i think it was about 9:00 in the morning yesterday when after a night of counting with no reporting overnight, they reported out about 20,000 ballots, and you know, if they were to do something like that with their next report, given that biden is getting at least 90% of the mail ballots that we've seen so far from philadelphia, a 20,000 vote

report from philadelphia could potentially eliminate all of that statewide lead that donald trump has in one fell swoop. now, again, i don't know. i don't know how many they are preparing to report out the next time they report out. i just know that they have about 54,000 left total. i know they have been working through the night. they've got that live stream up, i think, that you've been showing, and i know that it's been eight hours since the last report, and i know that when there have been long stretches between reports from philadelphia before, we have tended to get a significant number coming out. so again, about eight hours at this point. i sound like a broken record telling you i think it's coming soon. i think it's coming soon. but i think it's coming soon. [ laughter ] >> and if you get outside of philadelphia, again, we're now getting -- look, i am actually on this screen here if you're wondering what i'm looking at, i am looking at the live stream of the delaware county processing facility, delaware county right outside of philadelphia. for the last eight hours the

lights have been off there. the lights are on. there are human beings inside. maybe they'll beat philadelphia to the punch and they'll report some votes out. maybe bucks county will, le high coun county. we can expect once they get going there's going to be votes coming in from around the state. again, i think you just mentioned this, allegheny county, pittsburgh, 35,000 votes. you know, they had that legal issue they couldn't do anything with them yesterday. they can today, so again, i think folks are arriving out there, getting working out there. it's not -- we're now at the point where it's not just philadelphia where this could be coming from, so there's a lot of possibilities here in the near future? >> lights on, human beings arriving as you put it. we'll take that as a sign for progress. let's talk about a state we haven't mentioned yet this morning, that's nevada, which has been in a holding pattern it feels like for a couple of days now. will we see any movement today

in terms of getting votes coming in there? >> yeah, we expect to, and the movement is going to be right down here, clark county where las vegas is. this is like 3/4 of the population for the entire vast state of nevada is right down there in the las vegas area. so there are something on the order of 200,000 votes outstanding statewide in nevada, but the overwhelming share of them are right there in clark county. clark county officials have told us they expect to release -- they expect to release this morning their time noon eastern time today about 51,000 more votes from there. the votes that are to come from clark county, a very significant chunk of them are mail ballots, and the mail ballots in clark county, this is a bit like pennsylvania here, they are heavily favoring joe biden. we got a small report of those mail ballots yesterday. biden was winning them two to

one. i think it's very possible disturb i ddi -- i'm telling you what the trend is if we keep seeing it. if the trend replicates itself at noon today clark county is going to report out 50,000 votes. joe biden is going to have a solid advantage among those votes and that 11,400 vote lead that joe biden has statewide, that very narrow lead is going to expand and perhaps is going to expand considerably, and the state of play in nevada, which looks very close right now may look very different at about 12:01 eastern if they do release those ballots as scheduled at noon today. and again, the lion's share of these are in clark county and in las vegas. we were watching yesterday as a lot of these rural counties came in with most, if not all of their outstanding vote, as did wa sh washoe county which is where reno is. all the action's in vegas. >> so steve, let's -- can you go to the what if map?

can you -- with ke takecan we tt the state of play right now? go ahead, let's just talk about right now the states where joe biden's ahead. give georgia to joe biden. give arizona to joe biden, and give nevada to joe biden. how many electoral votes if those hold up and i suspect that at least georgia or nevada will, but if those hold up. >> that moves him to 286, yep. >> if you talk to democrats, they are skeptical that they'll pick up north carolina. why don't we give that one to dru donald trump because it looks like he's most likely going to hold on there if the trends continue, and if the trends continue this morning, chances are very good that joe biden will take a significant lead in pennsylvania, so why don't we give that one to joe biden, and let's see where we are. >> and don't forget alaska just for accounting purposes here. >> and then alaska to of course

donald trump. >> we'll give that one to trump. >> right. >> all right. so 306 to 232. isn't that remarkably similar to donald trump's number four years ago? >> it's the reverse image. >> wow. >> wow. >> willie, what do you think about that? >> that's something. >> you look, it's the reverse image. let's keep looking at this map. you literally can reverse the colors of wisconsin, michigan, pennsylvania, georgia, and look at those numbers, willie. if those hold, the states he's ahead in right now and pennsylvania continues to go trending the way it's been going, joe biden will win using donald trump's words the greatest landslide in the history of mankind. >> i was just thinking about that, donald trump claimed 306 was a landslide. it's not of course and it won't

be if joe biden ends up that way, but it will be a significant victory, and look at that map. i mean, if that's the way it plays out, look across the upper midwest, for four years now democrats have said those narrow losses in wisconsin, michigan, and pennsylvania had to be flipped. it was a total of just over 77,000 votes across those three states that donald trump won to defeat hillary clinton, and joe biden, if he finishes off pennsylvania today will have done the job of flipping the three states that gave donald trump the election last time, kasie hunt. >> yeah, and you know, in many ways, i think if this is how the map end up looking, it's going to be a vindication of biden's strategy. you know they've endured a lot of, you know, comments from the peanut gallery that started in the primary when everybody thought he was doing that the wrong way, that he wasn't listening enough to the left of the party, and his advisers said over and over and over again, twitter's not real life. we live in a more centrist

america. we're going to appeal to those voters. it worked then, and in the final weeks of the election, there were a lot of people questioning, you know, why aren't you going to texas? why aren't you spending more time in florida, you know, why are you -- you know, why have you camped out in pennsylvania? this is why joe biden camped out in pennsylvania and why, you know, right after that you had michigan and wisconsin. they kept their eye on the ball the entire time, and if this is, in fact, what we're talking about here in a couple hours when hopefully perhaps we will be able to call this presidential race, that's, i think, you know, what we're going to be talking about. >> so gene robinson take a look at that map, if you will, we have spent a lot of time for good reason talking about how the democratic party underperformed this year and how republicans have a lot to be excited about when it comes to state legislatures, when it comes to how well they did in the senate, and when we talk about the pickups in the house

of representatives. the one thing, though, that republicans cannot ignore is those demographic changes we have been predicting for a decade now, that all of us have been predicting for a decade now starting to show an effect. let's start with north carolina, which, again, we've given it to donald trump, but we don't know if trump's going to win that or not. georgia, which everybody's been saying is moving towards being blue. well, it's obviously a very purple state right now, but if -- if joe biden continues to hold onto it, the fact that he pushed donald trump and the republican party to the wall in georgia and arizona, in north carolina, and made texas more competitive, that actually is bad news for the republican party in this sense. this year we saw the shift that we've been expecting.

four years from now with nine hispanic children being born for every caucasian child being born, those numbers are going to shift even more in the democrats' direction. >> yeah, i think they will. it takes several elections to make this sort of shift, and so you know, we talked a lot about exits in recent weeks as we were looking at numbers in texas that suggested it would be really competitive and maybe even, you know, possibly it could be and i think our inner voice of reason said, no, it's probably a couple of cycles away, but clearly moving in that direction, and i think we found out, yes, it's still a couple of cycles away in texas. any sort of shift to even real purple status to say nothing of

blue. but georgia, georgia is, you know, look at the area around georgia and then georgia. >> yeah. >> it really stands out as having moved significantly, and arizona is highly significant as well. so those are things the democratic party can take away from this election and feel -- if the numbers holdin, feel ver good about. there's also, as you said at the beginning a lot of stuff the democratic party will be somewhat disappointed about. you know, they did all right, but they really wanted to do better in state legislatures, and they simply did not do well enough to have a meaningful impact in a lot of places on the census. >> we'll talk -- >> it's a big deal for the democratic party. >> yeah, and we can talk a

little bit more about state legislatures in just a moment and what was learned during this entire process. john heilemann is still with us, also back with us we have white house reporter the "assorted press kwgts jonathan lemire and let's also bring in claire mccaskill. you were feeling really good, and then the next day you weren't feeling bad, so where does claire mccaskill's analysis stand now? how are you feeling? >> i'm back with james brown. i feel good. listen. >> i figured. >> i'd love to spend a minute talking about the only conspiracy and fraud that's going on right now and that's the lawsuits that are being filed by donald trump's team. you understand they have filed dozens of lawsuits across the country. they have won none of them. yesterday the former acting head

of dni did a press conference saying we're going to file a lawsuit in nevada. i want you to know the lawsuit they filed last night was almost identical to the lawsuit that had already been thrown out of court by the state courts in nevada. the same lawsuit that they've already lost, and i really wish the hearing in philadelphia about the only case that they've settled, it was not a loss, it was a settle, i wish they could have televised this hearing because the federal judge said to the lawyer for donald trump, you are a member of the bar. i want you to tell me right now are there representatives of donald trump's campaign observing the count? and the lawyer had to admit on the record that, yes, there were so all they fought about was how many -- all they fought about is how many there were going to be and where they were going to stand, and they reached an agreement, the two parties.

biden's campaign wasn't even a party to it. so it is so ironic to me that they are standing up with a straight face, these republican jerks that won't do what pat toomey did this morning, who stood up and said there's no evidence of fraud. the idea that they're planting this seed that there's fraud when the only conspiracy and fraud is the legal strategy of donald trump. >> let's pick up on that point, joe. we've got a couple of new statements just in to us. ben sasse, republican of nebraska saying -- i'm paraphrasing a long statement here -- that the president is making, quote, major allegations. if he has real evidence he must present it immediately. in the meantime he says count the votes under state laws. mitch mcconnell, i'll read this one verdict, here's how this must work in our country. any illegal submitted ballots must not. all sides must get to observe the process and the courts are

here to apply the laws and resolve disputes. that's how americans' votes decide the results. that's from majority leader mitch mcconnell this morning. >> there you go. >> all legal votes must be counted. >> yep. >> and that's -- and i think that's the position mitch mcconnell -- we already have bipartisanship. >> and mitt romney. >> mitch mcconnell and joe biden both agree that all legal votes should be counted. back to claire real quick before getting to the rest of the panel, and claire, i know that when you heard congresswoman abigail spanberger's comments yesterday to the democratic caucus that they needed to take a deep breath and look at what they've been doing over the past couple of years and some of the more extreme rhetoric that has been used, well, i'll just -- i'll use her words, we need to not ever use the word socialist or socialism ever again, we lost

good members because of that she said heatedly. if we are classifying tuesday as a success, we will get blanking torn apart in 2022. i know you were dealing with a lot of this in 2018 when you were running, and you were seeing democrats coming up with these preposterous claims about brett kavanaugh being in rape rooms in washington, d.c., when he was 18 years old and having -- and you had to deal with that on the campaign trail. the message needs to be more disciplined, and it needs to be the message that democrats used in 2006 when rahm emanuel and nancy pelosi figured out a way to get democrats back into the majority. >> yeah, let me just say this, we are on the precipice of removing donald trump from office because my party stayed unified, and i am so grateful to

bernie sanders and elizabeth warren and aoc, and all the others that have worked so hard and we stayed unified. now going forward we have to stay unified. it's not hard if we remember one thing. we do not have to abandon any of our progressive principles. we can fight for climate change. we can fight to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity and that we can do things that make things more fair in terms of economics of america. you know, we do need to do something about how unbalanced it is right now in terms of income inequality. on the other hand, we also have to add to that discussion some meat and potatoes economic issues. we've got to make sure that we are communicating that we also are really concerned about the cost of college, and we're really concerned about how pharma is so greedy and is robbing americans when it comes to prescription drug prices. we need to focus on those issues that unite the majority of america, including things like

gun safety. so i don't think -- i hate it when we have this discussion because some people on the left hear it that somehow we want to abandon the principles we all agree on. we don't. we just need to do an addition, not a subtraction. just an addition and communicate more forcefully about those economic issues. >> well, and if you talk to the biden campaign, they will tell you that nobody worked harder for their cause than bernie sanders and elizabeth warren. they did everything that was asked of them, everything. their people did everything, and claire, as you know, being a more moderate democrat and as i knew being a republican, it is sometimes, you know, it's the progressives that -- just like it's the very conservative people on the right, they're the ones that you get in touch with when you want people to knock on

doors, when you want to get those phone banks working. they're the ones who energize. they're the ones that write the checks. there's no way the democratic party can move forward without the progressive wing because they provide so much energy. but like you said, there needs to be more of a balance and there needs to be more of a focus or an economic message because, guess what, claire, i bet most americans don't know this, florida went for donald trump convincingly, but you know what else florida did? they passed by over 60% moving minimum wage to $15 an hour. americans understand that this system is economically, it is rigged against them and rigged for hedge fund managers and that people need to have a living wage. yes, even in donald trump's florida. >> yeah, and joe, you know, the thing that is going on here, you

know, we are proud to say that we are more centrist. we need to be very respectful of the leaders of the progressive movement, but the progressive movement also needs to understand something. it is different running in a place where donald trump just won by 15 points than it is in a district where a glass of water called democrat could win. it is not the same. you know, if you are running in a state that is bright blue or in a congressional district that is bright, bright, deep blue, you've got to be patient and understanding that there are people trying to run for office in states that aren't like that. i mean, i lost by five points, well, our statewide democrats in missouri this week lost by 17 points. it is not as easy as it looks when you're in a state that is not as progressive as some of the states where the leaders of our progressive movement come from. >> i'll tell you what -- >> i feel better.

>> yeah, yeah, i'll tell you what, i've got a istory, i know that will shock mika, about when i was in congress. >> ding ding. >> mike barnicle, i came in in 1994 as a fire breathing small government conservative. i still am a small government conservative, hopefully not breathing as much fire now as i did then. but i always looked at the moderates in our party as getting in the way of balancing the budget, getting in the way of moving faster, and i was so angry every time they would block some of our more aggressive conservative moves, and then in 1998, i got on an airplane with steve lorgent and lindsey graham and we went around from one swing district to another to another, and by the time i got to washington state and was in a democratic district that was held by a republican who had blocked all of our most conservative moves,

i sat there and looked at the environment he was running in and it was like scales fell off my eyes. and i went back talking to the other conservatives in our caucus, and i said, hey, listen, not only are these guys and women not our ideological enemies, they're our best friends. they're the reason we're in the majority. that was a challenge. republicans needed to hold the moderate side and the conservative side together, something they're just not doing now. tha that's the democrats' challenge moving forward, and it's something that can easily be done. >> yeah, you know, joe, i was struck yesterday reading a quote attributed to joe manchin, senator manchin from west virginia, and he was talking about exactly what you were just talking about with claire. and he said one of the problems that we have around here as democrats he says a lot of democrat keep coming up to me and saying hey, joe biden, all he wants to do is deal.

he's always looking for a deal, just a deal and manchin then said, what else are we supposed to do? we're supposed to make deals. i think part of the problem with the progressive wing and they work very hard, and they've worked very hard this year, by the way, as you both mentioned, to help elect joe biden, and he will soon be the president-elect of the united states, is that they don't see or don't pay enough attention to the moderate wing and the moderate voice and the moderate needs of democrats running in tough districts. >> yeah, and that's something that obviously gene robinson as we move forward we'll continue talking about. right now we're looking at the state of pennsylvania, a state that hillary clinton barely lost just like she barely lost michigan and barely lost wisconsin, and here we are four years later. it looks like joe biden, while he's going to probably win pennsylvania and he has won michigan by more than donald trump did four years ago, he

still is by the narrowest of margins, this country is going to decide its president as it did four years ago on the narrowest of margins. >> right, wisconsin, too. that's a pretty, you know, 20,000 vote margin, you know, and there's going to be a recount. it's not going to change it by more than a few hundred votes probably either way, but these are very narrow margins that we're looking at, depending on what happens in pennsylvania. we'll see what the final tallies are there. but these states aren't the same as they were back in the day when they were just reliable as clock work democratic wins. they're different. their economies are different, and our suffering in some ways their economies are hollowed out from what they used to be, and there are a lot of people who are looking for concrete

solutions and a way forward for themselves and for their families and their communities that they frankly aren't seeing right now from either party. and so we may be in for a period when that blue wall in the midwest is not as reliable as it was. it could go either way, and so you know, i think democrats are going to have to keep their focus there, not just focus on the changing states in the sun belt where there's a lot of opportunity for democrats coming up in north carolina and georgia and arizona and texas eventually, but also those states in the midwest that, you know, frankly the nation hasn't paid enough attention to and that have been hurting. >> jonathan lemire, as we await

these results from pennsylvania that we're expecting soon as steve kornacki is hitting refresh on county websites over there to see what the latest update is, take us inside the white house. obviously as we've said, they're throwing lawsuits against the wall, most of them not sticking except for one that allowed their observers to move 14 feet closer to watch the ballots being counted. what is going on right now inside the white house? what are the advisers to president trump telling him? are they propping him up and saying, yes, sir, there is a chance we might succeed with a lawsuit here? >> willie, the world around the president is shrinking inside the west wing and outside in terms of his allies. we are, as you just read finally hearing from some republicans who are breaking with him about his baseless allegations of voter fraud. yesterday, according to our reporting, his announcement, his decision to go on camera at 6:30 from the white house briefing room took most of the advisers in the white house by surprise. in fact, they had spent the last couple of days encouraging him

not to do that fearing what he would say. they did not feel that his late night election night statements coming at 2:00 in the morning or so helped his cause. in fact, it only stirred up chaos, and they felt that it was not the message he wanted to send. you don't want to be on the wrong side of the very american message of count the votes, and he seemed to -- for them he obviously came on the wrong side of that. yesterday we saw that the president largely moved between the white house residence and the oval office. he worked the phones getting updates from governors including governor ducey in arizona. the trump campaign feels like that's a state they still can find enough votes to win, but at the same time they were seeing his lead in pennsylvania slip away. they saw his lead in georgia slip away. and the sense was that he was simply running out of time. there are still -- they are not abandoning these legal

challenges. his campaign headquarters in arlington, virginia, has established a room just for those to find where they can receive reports of alleged fraud, but so far as we've been covering all morning, there isn't much there. there's no evidence of widespread fraud. most of their lawsuits they brought forth have already been tossed out. now the decision will be this, if indeed pennsylvania goes to joe biden today, if indeed joe biden becomes the president-elect today, what next? do they continue with their legal challenges? there's certainly no suggestion right now the president will suddenly concede or step away. the question is the voracity of what he might do in response and what republicans will do in reaction to that. >> jonathan lemire, as you said, the world around the president is getting smaller inside the white house. it's also getting smaller in the media landscape. he's got fewer places to go where he gets absolute acquiescence. and even i guess he was tweeting at 2:00 in the morning and

twitter blocked access to one of his tweets because of its potential being misleading, false information, and they actually covered his tweet with information about the civic process and how it's really supposed to work. and so the flailing is being contained to an extent whether it be from republicans like mitt romney, ben sasse and mitch mcconnell and others who have openly said, no, don't stop the count, and you know, that this is a process that needs to be respected. it seems like his cadre is getting a lot smaller and those who were going on media last night amounted to lindsey graham and i guess ted cruz. they're still with him on this sort of wild goose chase for a way -- a path to the presidency.

>> yeah, mika, that's right. there are certainly some loyalists. i think we should also be -- we should note yesterday what happened on twitter. the president's children are out there very much trying to rally up gop support, and donald trump jr. put out what was basically a test, a call to arms yesterday afternoon where he tweeted saying that where are these republicans? where are -- you have stood with the president to this point, why are you not there with him now when he needs you most? which is widely interpreted as a warning shot about 2024, that if you want the trump support, you need to rally behind him now. we saw a number respond to his call, nikki haley, josh hawley took to twitter and took up his cause, but not every republican did. that's going to be the testing point here, and we also know, mika, as a final point, that the president's relationship with the conservative media asknd particularly fox news, aides and republicans who want to deliver

messages to the president do so by appearing on fox news or by planting ideas with fox news hosts. if there's a movement to get the president to drop these legal challenges, there's a movement to get the president to step aside or conversely to encourage him to keep fighting, watch fox news from republican elected officials or if republican -- if hosts on fox news, if these conservative voices who have so much sway, if they start telling him, if their tune changes, that might be the tipping point. >> well, and certainly we've noticed over the past several days a change of tone with some there. hey, john heilemann, let's talk about the polling being broken and, man, you look at florida, you look across the upper midwest, and boy, they got it wrong in so many polls. but let's talk about a couple other states, and some people who got it right or places they got it right. georgia, it was deadlocked for months. for months it was tied.

it's ended up in effect tied. they were dead right about that. iowa, ann seltzer came out and was 100% correct on the presidential race as well as the senate race there. texas, i saw quite a few polls in texas that were saying minus 3, minus 4, minus 5. the biden campaign, despite the late -- the late efforts there, the biden campaign had told mika and me three weeks before texas is gone. >> mm-hmm. >> arizona, every poll i ever saw in arizona was close. that ended up being correct. you can say the same thing for north carolina. most of those north carolina polls tipped plus 2 or plus 3 for biden, but at the end, we saw them all tightening up. so in a lot of these swing states, the pollsters got it right. they just got a lot of polls way off in florida and the upper midwest. >> yeah, i think that's right,

joe, and i think it's important on a number of levels, there's a lot to say here. i'll give you another example at the very end of the campaign, you had the president, former president obama trying to decide where he was going to spend his last moments of the campaign, and he ended up going to georgia and to florida. florida i think probably was a mistake. georgia obviously not a mistake, and a place that the biden campaign really -- as i said on the show a lot in the last week, it was looking as though georgia was more likely to be able to pull that off than florida and it was clearly a genuine battleground state. the thing i want to point to is at that moment when joe biden decided to go and throw a ill will -- little bit of a hail mary and make that one stop in ohio as you recall at the urging of sherrod brown that he should come to ohio, and again, reasonable thing for sherrod brown to urge joe biden to come to his state to try to campaign, but it was one of those places where barack obama could conceivably have gone and spent time, and i know the obama

people looked at data and said, you know, it makes more sense to send barack obama to georgia than ohio, and in that case they had a very accurate sense of the public opinion die thynamics ine two states. it made sense to go to georgia and not ohio where it turned out joe biden didn't really have a chance. there's a huge lesson here for all of us, and i put myself in this category as much as anyone, you know, we went through 2016, it is definitely the case that the 2016 polls are not as -- were not as wrong as people claim. there were problems with 2016 polling, not so much the national polling but more in the battleground states. we learn a lesson there. we were told over the course of the last four years that pollsters were trying to remediate the errors that they'd made, which were, again, not as catastrophic as has been part of the cliche, part of this kind of stereotypical memory of what happened, but they were real. and then we headed into this cycle. the polling in 2018 was pretty

accurate going into the midte s midterms. a lot of us in our business who do spend a lot of time looking at polls because we think that looking at data makes more sense than just using anecdotal evidence, a lot of us got misled over the course of these last -- of this year in certain places in particular. and i really -- you know, we go back to pointing, again, to that upper midwest, the place where a lot of the errors were made in 2016 where the polls were mostly unreliable, misleading and got people -- led people astray. a lot of them were in that upper midwest quadrant. it was yet again the case that the biden campaign, the local polls, the congressional candidates, all of them from minnesota, iowa, wisconsin, michigan, pennsylvania, ohio, there was just a lot of very bad data that got produced by that region. and again, i think the key point that you made earlier just now, it's not just that the media polls were wrong, you know, one poll that said biden was up by 17 in wisconsin, it's that

congressional candidates, republicans and democrats were misled in the same way. and i think, you know, before we -- before any of us collectively put our faith back in polling, particularly in that region again, there's got to be a real systematic juundertakingo try to figure out what the problem is and what is being missed in the demographics and the nature of the electorate in those places in particular. >> yeah, and again, it's so important to underline it wasn't just liberal media polls. it wasn't just liberal democratic polls. donald trump's own pollsters were saying on election night minnesota, wisconsin, and michigan are gone. they were saying it, saying off the record don't even look at those three states. we've lost them. didn't believe they were going to be close. the rnc had polls that did the same. of course democrats, national

media polls the same as well. so yeah, this is -- and because so many republican pollsters got it wrong as well, that's why we really need to take a close look to see why they missed what they missed. not only the upper midwest, but also in suburbs. the polls showed democrats just routing republicans and biden routing donald trump in all the suburbs. it didn't turn out quite that way, so we also need to look closely there. jim robinson, though, i am struck, i know we talk about 20% of black men voting for donald trump, but it ended up -- the vote ended up being about 12%, if you look at some of the exit polls, 12% for trump, which is -- it's a slight advantage. most republicans get 7, 8, 9% of the black vote every four years.

but i can't -- heilemann talked about barack obama, and you can't underline enough the difference that stacey abrams made in that state with her on the ground organizing, made the difference, barack obama coming in to energize black voters at the very end made a huge difference, and then you just look, my gosh, okay, joe biden won wisconsin. why did he win wisconsin? because of milwaukee county, because of black voters. >> right. >> joe biden won michigan, why did he catch up in michigan? because of wayne county, detroit, because of black voters there. joe biden most likely is going to win pennsylvania. why is he going to win pennsylvania? well, because of black voters in philly. >> yeah. >> joe biden looks like he's going to win georgia as we just mentioned. why? because of black voters in atlanta, georgia. it is remarkable what black

voters have done for joe biden, and let's start in your home state of south carolina when black voters looked at woke america and said, hold my beer, we're going to vote now. >> yeah, exactly. and you know, black voters in my state made my home state made joe biden the nominee, and look, if democrats did not quite generate the blue wave that they had hoped to generate, don't blame black voters because black voters were there in numbers and in force. you know, as i mentioned earlier stacey abrams, what she did in georgia and, you know, as you saw her work the past two years on voting, on participation, on

fairness in georgia, republican governor, republican secretary of state, you know, legislature. it's you know, a republican state in terms of the leadership, but she worked and worked and worked hard and you saw it happening, but now you appreciate the impact she had. >> that's right. >> i think she gets a lot of credit and kudos, and barack obama's performances i think helped galvanize and energize the turnout, not just in atlanta but in those cities you talked about in milwaukee, in detroit, in philadelphia bringing out those voters and really making, literally making all the difference. >> huge difference. >> okay. >> and mika, president obama had his ideas on where he wanted to

go. he worked with the biden campaign, and they -- together they made some really wise choicesment you choices. you go back and look at that rally. i remember when they were going to detroit and it was president obama and stevie wonder in detroit the weekend before the election. i was like but wait, everybody said detroit's -- i mean, finished, that like michigan is in the bag for biden. why are they there? it's a damn good thing they were there if you're a joe biden supporter because that made a difference. president obama in philadelphia made difference. president obama in milwaukee made a difference. president obama in georgia made a difference along with stacey abrams and all the on the ground organizers that organized even in the age of covid. it was the difference in those states. >> so everybody stand by, we have this incredible panel. we're waiting for potential results out of pennsylvania, steve kornacki is waiting at the

big board refreshing, and we're going to go to break, but if anything happens, we're going to bust right back in. as we go to break, last night president trump lied repeatedly from the white house podium in an effort to discredit the 2020 election and american democracy at large. all three major networks along with this network cut off the president mid-sentence to shut down his disinformation campaign. >> i know that it's supposed to be to the advantage of the democrats, but in all cases they're so one sided. we were -- >> we're watching president trump speaking live from the white house, and we have to interrupt here because the president has made a number of false statements. >> 60, 70 feet away, 80 feet, 100 feet away. >> the president talking about observers at the polling sites where they're now counting the ballots across this country. they have been there, republicans and democrats. >> like wise in georgia i won by a lot, a lot.

>> and there the president of the united states addressing the american people for the first time claiming that if you count the legal votes i easily win. >> that's why they mailed out tens of millions of unsolicited ballots without any verification measures whatsoever. >> well, we're interrupting this because what the president of the united states is saying in large part is absolutely untrue. >> i've already decisively won many critical states including massive victories in florida, iowa, indiana, ohio. >> okay. here we are again in the unusual position of not only interrupting the president of the united states but correcting the president of the united states.

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>> uryou should go in and ask - >> you also said there's no election observers. there's democrat and republican observers inside. where's the evidence of the fraud? you haven't presented any evidence of fraud. >> where's the evidence? >> they've presented no evidence of fraud. >> that's the former acting director of national intelligence rick grenell after holding a news briefing lobbing claims of fraud, but clearly when jacob pressed him provided no evidence. i want to say first, steve kornacki is over literally refreshing the philadelphia city page. we're expecting a trench of new votes to come in in the next few minutes. we will go immediately to steve when those come in. could have a big exact on what's happening on the state of pennsylvania. let's go to north las vegas, nevada, where we find msnbc correspondent jacob soboroff. we just played that exchange with rick gre nell.

flesh out what is happening in nevada. a lot of claims being lobbed out there by the trump campaign without evidence. >> reporter: right, willie, so the context is there's an extraordinarily close race going on here in nevada. most of those votes that are remaining to come in will come from this facility in north las vegas, clark county. we're talking about 12,000 vote difference and grenell comes out there -- >> jacob, i'm sorry, i've got to interrupt you here. steve kornacki has the results from pennsylvania, steve, refreshing, recording right now, what do you have? >> these are coming directly from the city of philadelphia's website, they are not quite in our system yet, so i am going to tell you what we have here. the new total, let me call up philadelphia, and this is the latest report, you see these are the numbers that are in our system, the new numbers, the new current tally is joe biden 553,953 votes, okay. >> yep.

>> donald trump 125,513 votes. so that is a difference of 28,440. okay? hang on. i'm doing -- that's the first f step. let me calm down here because we've got one important step. what we need to do here is subtract -- oh, it's been updated. it's in our system. so gained about 21,000 votes. and what that did it has put joe biden into the lead. joe biden now leads in pennsylvania, statewide, by 5,587 votes. so you see in that last update that we just got in a few minutes ago there, joe biden picked up about 23,000, 24,000 votes. i get the fact number in a second. but how did he get that? these are absentee ballots, mail ballots. they've been counting them for a

couple of days in philadelphia. there's about 27,000, 28,000 votes they just reported out. biden is winning the overwhelming share of them, as he has been in philadelphia, as he has been around pennsylvania. and so this has now been enough to vault him past donald trump and into the lead statewide. i should point out, even with this update, biden now has a narrow lead in pennsylvania. there are still -- that is probably about half of the remaining vote in philadelphia that we just got. meaning there is more. there is another batch the same size of what you just saw, in philadelphia yet to come. there is vote. there are 35,000 votes yet to come from allegheny county, from pittsburgh. there are 10,000 more votes yet to come from the allentown area, lehigh county. 10,000 more to come from bucks county. all of these are expected to go to joe biden by a very heavy margin because all of the updates from all of the places

i've just mentioned so far and every other county in pennsylvania have gone heavily for joe biden so far. we started saying this yesterday. we started telling you the trend we were seeing in pennsylvania was that every update from absentee ballots was putting joe biden ahead. he was winning 75% of them. the question we wanted to see was, could he get in front? could he continue that trend? get in front of donald trump statewide in that tally or would the trend change at all. the trend has not changed at all. the trend has remained constant. with every update, joe biden has been getting more and more of an advantage in that statewide tally. and now he leads it. now there are still -- still an estimated 130,000 or so votes yet to be reported statewide. again, joe biden is leading in that tally. the ballots being counted, that 130,000, the absentee mail ballots, joe biden has been winning 75% of those. that remains the case.

this is very, very much what we have been expecting. so again, joe biden now has the lead statewide in pennsylvania. and on the current trajectory, which hasn't changed that lead is now set to expand. and potentially to expand significantly. this was once a 600,000-plus vote advantage for donald trump a couple of days ago. the reason a couple of days ago, mainly the only thing that had been counted were the ballots that were cast on election day. after election day, they began in most parts of pennsylvania counting the mail ballots. the mail ballots that had been delivered and sent in weeks ahead of time, days ahead of time. in all of these counties by state law, they could only collect those ballots until election day. and only on election day could they begin to open the ballots, verify them, begin to process them, begin to count them. in some counties, they didn't even begin that process until the day after the election day. so that is why for the last two

days now in pennsylvania, we've been getting one report after another of just mail-in ballots, which we have seen have been overwhelmingly democratic, overwhelmingly for joe biden and now we have gotten enough of those mail ballots that have been processed in pennsylvania that we can see that joe biden is ahead statewide and poised to expand that lead. >> okay. joe scarborough, let's pause and talk about what we're seeing here. joe biden has taken the lead in the state of pennsylvania. but the race is too close to call. there's no call on this state. it's just that he has now taken the lead. why is this significant? there's been so much going on right now that nbc news has joe biden at 253 electoral votes. there are 20 electoral votes available in the state of pennsylvania. if he were to take that state, it would put him over the top and make him the president-elect. as steve has pointed out to us all morning, joe biden is dominating the mail-in vote at a rate of 75%. and that's what's left out there. so as more comes in, you would

expect that lead for joe biden to grow. >> it will, and i'm sure the decision desks not only at nbc news, msnbc and at the other networks are going to wait for a few more of these votes to drop. if they continue to see trends and continue to see that lead go to 10,000, 20,000, and continue to see even in the rural parts of pennsylvania joe biden continuing the trend of picking up on average 75% of the mail-in votes across the state, then i'm sure at some point later this morning, if the votes keep coming in, keep getting reported, they will give joe biden pennsylvania and will move -- that will move biden over 270. steve kornacki, let me ask you again. i want to make sure our viewers have these numbers right. you're saying about 130,000

votes are left in pennsylvania. approximately 35,000 out of the pittsburgh area. about 10,000 out of allentown. about 25,000 votes out of bucks county. and how many out of philly did you say should we expect? >> right. so let me just figure out exactly what we just got here from philadelphia that came in. about 27,436 was biden's new total from that. was the number of new votes that biden just got. and trump just got 3,760. so they just added 31,196. actually literally probably a couple more than that because of the third party candidates so they added about 31,200 new

votes from philadelphia. now before this dump of votes from philadelphia, they were telling us there were about 54,000, approximately 54,000 ballots were remaining in philadelphia before this. we just had 31,000 and change that came in. so there are still about 23,000. that's the number here in philadelphia. there are about 23,000 uncounted ballots left in philadelphia. now, as we said, it looks like in some of these counties they're not getting to zero here. they're opening up these ballots. they're examining them. they're trying to identify identities. i'm not sure all 23,000 of these will make their way into the count here at least initially, but the lion's share of them, certainly if everything else we've seen is any indication, the lion's share of them will. say 20,000 and biden again is winning these votes. these philadelphia mail votes. biden is getting like 90% of

them. so i think if there were 20,000 more added from philadelphia and 90% rate, you know, biden is going to expand that statewide lead just on philadelphia by 16,000 votes more or so. the rest of the vote from philadelphia could very conceivably add to biden's lead and put him over 20,000 statewide. and then as you say, 35,000. today they're going to start getting to those in allegheny county. 10,000 where allentown is. 10,000 in bucks county. in delaware county, there are still several thousand outstanding and then sort of a collection, a scattering throughout the state. if you deduct the 31,000 that we, in fact, 31,000 we just got from philadelphia, if you deduct that from what the state was telling us was left before this, that would leave approximately 130,000 yet to be counted statewide. so 23 in philadelphia and about

130,000 total statewide. >> so steve, just so our viewers, republican, democrat, independent, alike understand what's coming in here, and if they haven't been watching closely over the past several days. as you talked about, or at least the last day what you've been talking about regarding pennsylvania. on average, on average, in the red counties and the blue counties, these vote by mail ballots have come in 75% for joe biden. on average. and that's not a surprise because in florida, again, because of the mail-in ballots, joe biden rolled up a massive lead over donald trump. over 400,000 possibly 430,000 early on with mail-in ballots. but what makes the climb for president trump so much more

difficult, as we move forward through the morning and why i think we're going to see decision desks call this state for joe biden after, you know, 20,000, 30,000 more vote comes in, the areas that are remaining, the pittsburgh area, it's blue. and so we probably are going to be expecting not 75% going for biden, but upwards of 80%, 85%. same with allentown. bucks county. a little closer in bucks county than in some of the other areas. that's more of a 50/50 county. so maybe that is closer to 75%, 80%. we just saw in philly these 20,000. we can expect in all these areas, should we not, the bucks county, joe biden getting close to 85%, 90% of the remaining votes. >> in fact, we've already gotten yesterday some votes from bucks county. some of the mail votes from bucks county. this is the overall