. >> joining me now is former general council to the republican national committee ben ginsburg in washingtonand jonathan capehart, both political analysts. ben, maybe you might have wanted to saw florida off of the map back in 2000 when you were the general council to the republican party. i don't remember y'all saying that. what do you make of this idea that republicans are now sort of deciding that they can't handle the fact that donald trump lost the popular vote, saying just discount california? >> well, i think what you can't do is listen to polls. if there was one lesson we learned from this election, it's that sometimes we should not be listening to what the polls tell us. so in this case, if you're a republican voter, you know that donald trump won. so somebody asks you, did he win? you're going to say yes. >> yeah. and ben, were you surprised that there weren't more defectors from donald trump among the electors today? >> no. i mean, at the end of the day, this is a vote that was taken, and a few people trying to play elitist opinion makers and get electors who have pledged to do ce

ben ginsburg and jonathan capehart, thank you both. and coming up, the russian ambassador to turkey is dead after being shot by a gunman in ankara. and then nine people were killed when a truck plowed into a christmas market in berlin. we'll have the latest on that. and later, a bipartisan group of senators are calling for a special investigation into russia's cyberattacks on the u.s. election. but is it too little, too late? this is "hardball," the place for politics. can i give it to you straight? that airline credit card you have... it could be better. it's time to shake things up. with the capital one venture card, you get double miles on everything you buy, not just airline purchases. seriously, think of all the things you buy. great...is this why you asked me to coffee? well yeah... but also to catch-up. what's in your wallet? >>> today president obama pardoned 78 people and shortened the sentence of 153 others convicted of federal crimes. the greatest number of individual clemencies in a single day by any president. president ob

i think we don't know yet where someone on the last panel said i think it was ben ginsburg who said it is hard to figure out what's going on. what we had with the trump campaign was a celebrity driven campaign run through social media that went around the traditional institutions and the traditional mediation by the press and others. and it is a question of whether future campaigns will be run this way. whether we'll have a kanye campaign in 2020, whether we'll have a series of celebrities, the oprah campaign, and this will be the new model. if that's the case, we might say money didn't matter for trump. to start off with, he did put $66 million of his own money into the campaign. and in the end, he did not only court the super pac donors. he also, when he started his transition, he literally gave a seat at the table to rebecca mercer as one of the big super pac donors. so it is very hard to know whether this was a transfo transformative campaign or whether we'll see a bifurcation. what i mean is it may be the rules for the president. there is so much free media given to trump. whether

let's bring in ben ginsburg and a former general counsel to the rnc and mitt romney. i want to speak with you. i know that youmulti -- i want to talk to you as a legal expert. what could be achieve through how this works when you do these recounts when they are being sought by someone who can't win according to the rally? >> the answer is not very much. what you will go through now is sort of rerunning the ballots through most machines. you may look at a hand count. it's far different from the forensic audit of an election that many skcholars and the presidential commission i served on have recommended. those are not performed in the heat of a recount when you actually stand to deprive the electiee voters of two states of having their electors in the ee clek toral college. the audit is a good idea. a recount is not the vehicle to achieve that. >> on that point, you still have this set of concerns around the country that are often only animated by whether people are angry that their side lost. but depending on what's happening can still matter to people generally which

. >> nbc political analyst ben ginsburg. former national counsel to the romney and bush/cheney campaigns. what's unfolding today and this sort of push by democrats, you know, trying obviously to get electors to flip? when has this happened in history? has it? >> it hasn't to quite the same extent. i think part of the coverage of all of this is due to the changed media environment. the different ways to communicate since this last happened. if you want to put some perspective on it, the 2000 election was obviously much closer. it had only been decided in mid december. and when the electors gathered in 2000, there was much more reason for contention. there was a much smaller margin of error for electors to go in a different direction. make-up of the house of representatives was different and yet, still, the electoral college mostly because the electors are chosen by party organizations really went along with what the electoral college vote was on election day. >> in the spirit of a changed election and high drama, in the last

. >> ben ginsburg, let's continue that discussion.t do you see being very constructive in terms of change in the law that would make the funding of campaigns by the parties more effective? for example, each of the national parties has an independent expenditure committee. if you count all the various ones that are in existence, it is about six in total. does having these parties spent -- spend significant sums in isolation without coordinating the central party units, a a sensible -- a sensible way to do things, would it strengthen the role of the parties as funders if they were able to coordinate more directly at least internally? your views on what could happen in terms of making the parties more significant in terms of funding campaigns. >> to answer that, you need to take a stark look at the system as it exists today. which is in limiting candidates and political parties and what they are allowed to raise, but with none of those limits stretching back from buckley versus vallejo and citizens united, you have a system of limiting w

ben ginsburg mentioned this before. there are certain things donald trump did he did spend more money on facebook than hillary clinton did. he did spend according to the campaign half their money on digital and split it evenly between digital and tv. she spent more on tv. the amount of money spent on digital in this campaign is three to four times than in the previous campaigns. we are seeing this move in that direction. but the campaigns, the immediate yas bias and what they spent their money on was radically different. one example, donald trump bought almost zero local cable tv advertising, something you would have thought four years ago would have been something everybody would have been doing this time. and because his was more of a ramshackle impromptu or improvised operation, he ended up outsourcing a lot of his campaign architecture to the platforms themselves. as opposed to putting it inhouse because hillary clinton had an operation that had been in development for so many years. so one of the reasons he ended u