2024 Election preview special led by Rachel Maddow
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There has never been one quite like this. You want to see me knock the hell out of people backstage? Turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump. With the direction of the country and the future of democracy in the ballots. I'm going to do it whether the women like it or not. Tonight, the candidates deliver their closing messages. It's called.

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For a brief moment, admit it. You were hoping that we were going to be hosting this on ice skates. We're not. But the prospect of falling down on our faces at any moment is still just as live as it ever could be. Thank you so, so much for being with us. Sunday, we know, is supposed to be a day of rest. But honestly, two days before a presidential election, two days before this presidential election.

So here we are with less than 36 hours until the first polls open on Election Day. I already have not slept for a week, which you can tell from looking at me and from the fact that I'm punchy from the first lines of the script.

We love that. We are super glad to have you with us. We are ready for this if we have ever been ready for anything. I'm joined by my beloved colleagues, Nicole Wallace, Chris Hayes, Joy Reed, Jen Psaki. Steve Kornacki is going to be with us in just a few minutes. Some of our best friends from here at MSNBC are going to be joining us over the course of this special.

In these final hours, the presidential and vice presidential candidates are racing across the country, making their final pitches to voters as we speak. Former President Donald Trump is due on stage any moment at a rally in Macon, Georgia. Vice President Kamala Harris has just wrapped up a big rally in East Lansing, Michigan. Georgia tonight will be Donald Trump's third swing state in one day. Earlier today, he had rallies in both Pennsylvania and

and in North Carolina. Kamala Harris has spent her whole day in Michigan, starting at a black church in Detroit. She stopped in to chat with voters at a Detroit chicken and waffles joint. She headed to Pontiac, Michigan for a conversation at a black-owned small business at a barbershop. Tomorrow, Vice President Harris has three rallies scheduled in Pennsylvania, while Trump's campaign says he'll make four stops tomorrow, ending with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is very much the final sprint.

And we all know sprinting is hard. At one point today at his North Carolina rally, Trump started talking about the Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, looking around for him, wondering why he wasn't there.

Wrong state, big guy. You're in North Carolina. There's no reason why the Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate would be there. Maybe have someone get you a Coke. But again, lots of events in a very short and compressed time frame right now. Lots of different states. You can forgive a guy for having no idea where the frick he is. More than 75 million Americans have already cast their ballots in this election. Both campaigns still fighting for every last vote they can turn out.

And until the actual vote count starts coming in on Tuesday, all we really have in terms of knowing what's going to happen in this race is polling. And there's good reasons why you're hearing everybody this cycle, even many pollsters, telling you not to put too much stock in the polls this year.

And there's a number of different real reasons to think that. For one thing, in the last few election cycles, mainstream credible pollsters have had some really high profile misses, some very consequential misses in terms of real world expectations in big, important races. A big question hanging over all the polls this year for 2024 is whether pollsters have adjusted their models to account for those previous misses, whether they have adjusted their models correctly.

Another reason polling is getting the side eye this year is the increasing prevalence of sort of politically motivated, sort of bad faith actors who are producing things that technically can be called polls, but methodologically speaking, they're more like garbage.

That said, they call it a poll. If you can get enough people to post it, particularly on social media, to talk about it, maybe you can change the way people are perceiving the race, perceiving the momentum, perceiving the quality of the two candidates' campaigns.

Garbage polls trying to create an impression that their favorite candidate will win, that their favorite candidate has the momentum. The proliferation of those bad polls and the undeserved attention they've received from partisans, particularly on social media, that's another reason why your kindest and smartest friends have been telling you this year, hey, don't pay any attention to the polls. It's a sound argument. That's it. We are still in a news environment in which there are good polls.

And particularly, where in some states there is a gold standard pollster who appears to be unaffected by larger dynamics that are making everybody whine about the polls. And the reason those individual pollsters get the gold standard designation is both because of their proven sound methodology, but also because of their track record over time in that particular jurisdiction. And the prototypical example of a gold standard poll

is the Iowa poll done by Ann Selzer, by J. Ann Selzer in Iowa. The polls that she produces for the Des Moines Register in Iowa, specifically the final Iowa poll she does before each major election, her polls are known for their uncanny predictive accuracy.

This is Ann Seltzer's recent track record. I mean, what you see here is in each election year what her final poll said the result would be in Iowa. Next to that is what the actual result was on Election Day. And as you can see, if you look at the Senate and presidential races since 2012, her poll

Her poll has accurately predicted the winner of the Senate and presidential races in Iowa within one or two points every time. There was a governor's race in 2018 where things went a little bit gang aglay. But in Senate and presidential races, you have seen Ann Seltzer basically as a living bullseye. And that's why lots of people had strong reactions when the Des Moines Register Ann Seltzer Iowa poll was posted last night.

This is that poll, and it is a shock result. It shows Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump by three points in Iowa. And the reason this is consequential to our psyche is that if this is accurate, and if anybody is accurate, it's likely to be Ann Seltzer in the Iowa poll. If this is accurate, this implies that Harris might be winning Iowa. Three points, granted, is within the margin of error here, but it's three points.

Iowa is a state where neither campaign has spent any time or resources since the primaries. They don't have a ground game there. They don't have ads up there. Trump won Iowa by eight points last time and nine points the time before that. Nobody thinks of it as a swing state. A Democratic presidential candidate hasn't won Iowa since Barack Obama in 2012. But here she is with a lead.

In addition to that top line lead, the poll's internal numbers show dynamics in terms of women voters and particularly older women voters that could, again, if they hold, have really major implications beyond Iowa. I mean, the Iowa poll shows that women who are political independents favor Harris by nearly 30 points. Women over the age of 65 support Harris over Trump by 35 points.

Actually, look at this. This, in some ways to me, is even more shocking. With all voters over age 65, the Iowa poll has Harris plus 19 over Trump. That's driven by her huge margin with women over 65. But even men over 65 in this poll are plus two for Harris. If the Democratic candidate is winning voters over 65, full stop. We have a very different race on our hands than we thought we did.

Right. If that dynamic really is happening in Iowa, there's no reason to think it might not be happening in other states as well. It would just mean a wildly different scenario than what we have been talking about. So that is why people have freaked out about this one poll, this poll in particular, because it is this pollster and she's got her track record. And this is out of a state where nobody saw it coming.

Joining us now is Jay Ann Selzer. She's president of the polling firm Selzer & Company. Ms. Selzer, we know your time is really valuable, particularly on a day that the poll comes out. Thank you so much for being with us. My pleasure. Let me ask you, first of all, if I got any of that the wrong way around or if you see any of that differently than the way I laid it out for our audience. Picture perfect. Okay. So you obviously have a sterling reputation for your ability to poll Iowa.

You've been doing it for a long time. What is your top line takeaway from your final poll before election day? Were you as surprised as everybody else by the broad strokes of what you found?

I don't see how anybody would look at those numbers and the history in Iowa in the past 8, 12 years and think that these numbers could have been foretold. We did see some of this movement toward Harris in our September poll coming out of the June poll, which still had Joe Biden at the top of the ticket.

Kamala Harris joined the ticket and gained and picked up 14 points, reducing that margin to just four points. So there was certainly some momentum there. We saw some enthusiasm there. But digging into the data, we determined that it wasn't people switching positions. It was new people, right?

perhaps a bigger pool of people deciding to vote. And at that time, our definition of a likely voter was somebody who tells us they will definitely vote.

And the numbers were especially notable among older people, among women, and among college graduates. These are all groups that are tilting toward Harris. So it seemed like there was a get-off-the-bench moment and get-in-the-game moment, and that may have been triggered by Kamala Harris becoming the nominee.

One of the internal dynamics reflected in your poll that I haven't heard discussed as much today is a significant movement, it appears, since September with men. Obviously, the gender gap is massive. The numbers that you're talking among women broadly, women over 65, independent women, are huge for the Harris campaign.

Trump does still have a margin, have a positive margin with men in Iowa, but that margin shrunk significantly since September. Can you give us any insight into what's happening among specific subgroups of men, either different age groups or different demographic groups otherwise, in terms of the shift toward men, where his numbers there seem to be weakening? Well,

It gets really tricky to hash things out at such a detailed level. What I will say is the number, the gender gap among women, the contest gap is 20 points among older women age 65 and over. It's more than two to one among that group. And so that appears to be pushing it up. And while men overall favor Trump among men 65 and over, it's in fact a Harris lead in

So I think there's something happening here, and it's happening within that 65 and over age group. I was on a different chat show earlier today, and one of the women from the audience talked about she's joined the 65 and over cohort and how she feels she's politically different from the people at the top end of that 65 and over cohort. And I thought, that's right. That cohort...

the cohort moves up the ladder and ages in.

to the older group. So people have a stereotype that older people vote Republican. And in past cycles, that's been true. But now we've got a new cohort joining from the past cycle. And I think they're particularly sensitive to certain issues and potentially the six-week abortion ban in Iowa that was enacted and then came into force just this summer after the June poll was taken with Joe Biden on the ticket.

It's so interesting what you're talking about, this dynamic with older voters. I want to ask you if that also whether there's also something to say there about how likely these likely voters are to actually vote. I mean, your poll finds people over 65 to be tilting toward Harris, as you say, with women overwhelmingly. So she's also doing better than Trump with the youngest voters. Trump's doing better with the middle aged people. Which of these voting groups votes the most?

Well, this is one of the things we track because we're able, we talk to over a thousand people in order to get 800 likely voters. But we know some things about that full thousand that enables us to calculate what we'll call the incidents. How many of all Iowans in those demographic groups

meet our criterion to be a likely voter. And you can do that two ways. You can say you've already voted, because if that isn't likely, I don't know what is. Or you can tell us you will definitely vote. And among the age 65 and over group, that incidence is 93%. Wow. So out of 100 people in that age group we talked to, 93 said they'd already voted or intended to vote. Among the

the under 35 age group, that incidence is just 62. So as I say, if you want a horse to ride on, you want the older people because they show up and vote. Iowa pollster and seltzer, really appreciate the time you've taken to explain this to us. Obviously, a national double take when these numbers first came out last night, getting your getting your explication of how this all came together is just invaluable to us. Thank you so much.

My pleasure. I will say at a time when pollsters don't have a great name because of how things have gone in recent years, I don't think anybody before Donald Trump today ever cast aspersions on Ann Seltzer's ability to poll Iowa. I mean, we're going to put this in context in a moment. We're going to talk to Steve Kornacki, have him put the Iowa poll in context with the other polling that we're seeing, including the big new NBC News poll that's out. But I got to say, this is it just, Nicole, feels like a...

Sort of a firecracker into the seat, like, oh, that's not supposed to be there. So when you're on a campaign, you have tracks, right? They're overnight tracks. You would have seen the tracks. Small number of campaign staff would see the tracks. And the tracks are directional, right? So you know, is this getting through? How are we moving directionally? So tracking polls, so daily tracking polls. And it's usually the most reliable data that you possess. And over time, public polls got pretty close.

After 16, the public polls became something totally different. And campaigns used to sort of check how close their tracks were to what was public. There's something that happened this year where they're almost, I can't imagine, the campaigns view them in a lot of different ways. And let me just say, the best news possible in the cycle about polls is,

is for Harris is for them to be tied. Right. Because you're your number one thing is you need every last human being who might vote to go and to take everyone in the home to go vote who's eligible to as well. So it is a great thing for a campaign to have the polls tied. I'm not sure we'll know until after Tuesday whether that was ever true, because one, there's no model post jobs, first presidential election post jobs.

Two, there's no no one changed the models after Biden left and Harris became the nominee. Nobody went back and said, oh, we've modeled for, you know, a white two white men in the same of the same, you know, vintage, if you will. No one changed the models.

And then what you were setting up is no one has a filter for the things that are not reliable models or intended to be, right? It's another norm that's been annihilated in the era of Trump. It used to be a norm that everyone aspired to have a poll that resembled the truth. That is another norm that has been annihilated. The thing I would say about, and as I've been on both ends of it, right, where I was working for someone for whom her news was bad and I was working for someone for who

whom her news was good. I've never worked for anyone for whom her news didn't bear out. Really? Yeah. Well, I mean, Chris, you joked as you sat down here, what we're talking about the Iowa poll. I haven't heard anything about this Iowa poll. I mean, kind of bar mitzvah last night, like a cell phone being like, so the thing about Seltzer is she's really like literally...

You're like, excuse me, can I take a break, Rabbi, to talk about the cross-cap? Just a second. Because men over 65 are plus two, and even in an entirely white state, you have to understand... Yeah, it's difficult. Well, here's why... I mean, not to cut you off, but I think that the...

What we've seen is that all the polling has been the same, right? And Nate Silver had this thing where we ran that the odds of all of this independently coming out the same is like one in nine trillion, which means they're hurting. What does hurting mean? It means that there are layers of methodological assumptions that go into polling. When she said, you know, the likely voter screen, like who do we think is the electorate? Sample rates have gotten so bad that there is so much modeling on top of the raw data. And those assumptions are

the outcomes. And there's a sense in which all the polls are showing us the same race, a dead even tie. And that might just be a sociological artifact of pollsters. It might be that the race is tied or it might be we're just at the measurement methodological limitations of what we can know. I mean, the thing about the polls, right, is like since we came out of the caves, we want to know the future, but we can't.

And there's all sorts of people that have rushed in to that vacuum with goat entrails and tarot cards and divinations of all kinds. And like, fundamentally, we're still in that spot. I would like to know who's going to win the election. I'm sure everyone here else would, too. Yeah. And we don't know because the future actually is uncertain. The thing about.

The thing about, I've also been on the good and the bad end, shall we call them, of the Ann Seltzer polls. That's how it goes. Is that what she does that's a little different from other pollsters, which is what makes her, I think, more accurate. She bets on what she thinks the electorate is going to be, not what the electorate was. So there's a lot of polls that are based on, this goes to Nicole's point about post-obs, people who are basing their polls on the 2020 electorate. Well, we saw in 2022 it's different. There are women who are coming out of the woodwork who are Republicans.

Republicans who were young, who have never voted before. And that is what her reputation is. We'll see if this bears out. I mean, I don't think the Harris campaign is betting on Iowa in the win column. Right. But but that's the interesting thing about her. The other thing I think that if you're in the Harris campaign you're looking at is they have struggled, as we know, struggled or they've been trying to make up gains with white voters, older white voters, as we know well, because we've discussed why it's not first in the nation anymore. Iowa is a very white rural state. So if you're looking at that for them, you feel

kind of, maybe even if just vibes, better about states like Wisconsin and states like rural Pennsylvania where maybe she is doing better or might do better than people expect with those groups. And there's, I don't know if it distills that even more, but the fact

Well, and I think...

Nicole hit on something that I think is, it's not surprising. I think I agree with you probably more than anyone else. Because the reality is, is that a lot of the people who were polling in 2016 and missed Trump then reconfigured their likely voter model to lean in the direction of adding more Trump voters because they were so afraid of having been wrong in 2016 that I think you saw the likely voter models drift right. And of

course, you do have the entrepreneurial polls that are trying to game people's brain out there and they're just selling lots of pro-Trump dreck. But I think that what I loved what Ms. Seltzer said was that she mentioned abortion. Because I think one of the things that is missing from a lot of the likely voter models, the way they were built to still lean to not miss Trump voters, is abortion. And she talked about

older voters, including older white voters. This is like a perfect sort of microcosm of what white America is thinking after three very big things that you can't factor into any poll.

January 6th, which is this is the first presidential election in which we're litigating January 6th. That has not been tested. You can't poll it. The second thing is Donald Trump being indicted. There's no way to really understand as a pollster, how do I factor in how people might react to the idea of an indicted person? Indicted and convicted.

And convicted and going to be sentenced in a couple of weeks. But I go back and I've said this a billion times and I will keep saying it. Abortion is the X factor in every election after 2022. Which was implemented in July. In July. Right around Monday, I don't know. Exactly. And so you saw in 2022 the first time that voters had a chance to react. And their reaction has been strongly negative and actually angry. And that isn't changing. And the last thing I will say here is that she mentioned older voters. I quickly looked up.

the age of boomers. Boomers were born generally 1946 to 64, meaning they were born before there was a Roe, and then they lost Roe in their lifetimes. They have children and grandchildren. It should not shock anybody that white, it doesn't matter, white, black, or indifferent, people are

reacting to the loss of Roe. It changes everything. And if pollsters aren't taking that into account, don't pay attention to them. One other thing I think to watch here, too, with Iowa is I think Democratic activists in Iowa reacted to this poll by saying, we don't think Kamala Harris is going to win Iowa. But if these numbers are a portrait of the electorate, then maybe we're going to win back some of our congressional seats in Iowa. Because right now, the congressional delegation in Iowa is two Republicans.

senators and four Republican members of the House. And they've got two really tight races. And they'll do well in the Midwest. It tells them what they're going to do in the Midwest. I think a lot of pollsters are looking at it. The Tom Boniers of the world are going, I'd feel good about the Midwest after I saw this. Well, and she also said, don't sleep on men. And I've been saying this. Yes. I've been saying that my whole life. I'm sorry, everybody. I'm sorry for the shot. I'm sorry for the shot.

That's mine of the night. No one's topping that. That's it. We're done. I mean, I'm done. But I...

I don't think we know how to cover men's views on abortion. I have met men who have shown me pictures of their grandbabies with tears in their eyes. And I said, oh, so beautiful. And he said, all I can think of is if something happened to my daughter, they wouldn't save her. And we have no way to, we don't cover it very well as journalists. I don't think pollsters have the first clue about how to ask men about that. And I think it's totally invisible until Tuesday night. It's a black box.

in the projections about how this is going to go. All right, we've got a lot to get to tonight. We're going to put this Iowa poll into the context of the other big final good quality polls that have been coming out, like the big NBC poll that's just come out. Steve Kornacki is going to be here with that. David Plouffe from the Harris campaign is on deck. We've got lots to get to. Stay with us. ♪

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While the new shock results Iowa poll from pollster Ann Seltzer has been blowing up everybody's news feeds, and for good reason, it is just one poll, and we should put it in the context of what's going on more broadly in the polling, as we're getting into the final polling before Election Day, including the big new poll from NBC News today. The top line of that one is that it's a tie, 49 for Harris, 49 for Trump. Even as the NBC poll shows a national deadlock,

There's a couple of internal numbers that the pro-Harris side in particular is latching onto. For one, black voters in the NBC poll support Harris by a margin of 87% to 9%. In context, that's a three-point larger margin with black voters than Biden won in 2020.

Even though so much recent conversation about this campaign has centered on Harris supposedly having a slipping standing with black voters in the NBC poll, she's doing better with black voters than Biden did. The NBC poll also shows a huge gender gap, which we're seeing in every poll. Thirty four points altogether. Women supporting Harris by 16, men supporting Trump by 18.

Perhaps that is not surprising on issues. Kamala Harris having a 20-point lead over Trump on the issue of abortion in the NBC poll. But there's a lot more here. And this is just part of the polling landscape as we do get our final look before actually

Actual vote starts to come in from actual voters on Tuesday. Let's bring in our friend Steve Kornacki, who was made for this and who is standing by at the big board with so much energy and stamina to spare. Steve, we just look we're looking at you at the top of the mountain right now, my friend.

Well, here we go, Rachel. And look, when it comes to the polling right now, I think the safest thing to say is there are some extremely mixed signals that are coming in. You just talked about Iowa, obviously a state Donald Trump won by nearly 10 points the last two elections. Now, at least in that Des Moines Register poll,

having Harris slightly ahead. That comes as this national poll shows Donald Trump, frankly, better positioned nationally than he finished in 2020 or 2016. And frankly, then he polled in either one of those elections to our poll. Has it tied other national polls?

have it very much in this range of a tide race, maybe Harris by one or two, maybe Trump by one or two. That's a little different and it leaves open lots of questions about what's going on in the battleground states and perhaps outside of the battleground states. We'll get to that in a minute. But looking inside our NBC poll here, there's the

question of enthusiasm, which always gets to the variable of turnout here. These are folks from our poll who rate themselves with the highest level of interest in this election. It is at 77 percent in our poll. You can see that is down a little bit from 2020. We had historic high turnout in 2020, 160 million voters. This number two, when you look inside the lowest levels of

high interest are coming from non-white voters, Latino voters and black voters. Two ways to view that. Obviously, you're talking about traditionally core Democratic constituencies that could take away from Democratic overall margins with those groups. It could also be trouble for Donald Trump, though, because polling has shown previously him expanding support with non-white voters. If he's starting to lose those potential voters to lack of interest,

That could be trouble for his campaign. Then you take a look here at the issues. It really the climate we're seeing here is what we've seen the whole election. Harris's best advantage by far on the issue of abortion, 20 points over Trump on that. Trump here with the advantage on inflation and cost of living. The other one you don't see here.

The biggest Trump advantage is the border and immigration, the gender gap. I think you talked about this one, but I mean, just to put this in context, Trump leading by 18 points with men, Harris leading by 16 with women. If that's what you get, something like that, that's a gender gap of 34 points. The previous high,

in history was 24 points. So this would absolutely shatter any historical record when it comes to the gender gap. Then there's this interesting issue of you've got an incumbent administration that Harris is a part of. Joe Biden's final approval rating in our poll is going to clock in at 41%. And obviously that low approval rating

is one of the reasons there were Democrats who were anxious to get Biden out of this race earlier this year. Harris, part of that administration. How much is that weighting her down here? And then Trump himself, the approval rating for a former president seeking to become a future president. In our final poll here, when we ask people retrospectively, thinking back, do you now approve or disapprove of the job Donald Trump did as president?

He's up to 48 percent, notably higher than Biden. And this is higher than any reading we ever got in an NBC poll when Donald Trump was president. So after leaving office, it has ticked up a little bit for him. Will that be enough to put him over the top? We talk all about the difference between early Election Day voting, the partisan disparities we're finding. Others are finding this, too. Democrats, you can expect when early vote gets reported out, especially the mail in vote on Tuesday night.

should be some Democratic advantages. The Election Day vote becomes a question of how much of a Republican advantage when the people who vote on Election Day, when their votes start to get tabulated. Now we get to away from the national poll to the battlegrounds. This is our running average. We've been keeping this the entire summer and fall of the quality polls in all of the battleground states. And a couple of things

Couple things jump out here. Well, obviously, they're all close. You don't see a margin here of greater than one point nine points. You do see a bit of a north south divide. We've seen this lately in the polling. Trump's leads here. Very small. But Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, basically Sunbelt State. Harris's best performance is in here. You know, Wisconsin, Washington.

1.4, 1.8 in Michigan. These are the northern tier states, three tenths of a point in Pennsylvania. So a bit of a north south divide. And if that holds, if that cements, that is ultimately good news for Harris because Michigan plus Pennsylvania plus

plus Wisconsin, if there are no surprises outside of the battleground, would for Harris equal 270 electoral votes. If the action really is limited to the battleground, Donald Trump has to win one of those three northern tier battleground states where our averages continue to show Harris with slight, slight leads in those states. But then that gets to the question. If there are no surprises outside

outside of the core seven battleground states that we have talked over and over about. And that is what the Des Moines Register poll really gets to. It's the question of what is happening in Iowa itself, because obviously you talk to Ann Selzer right there. One of the questions is,

Does this spill over to other states? Does this reflect something? If this is what's happening in Iowa, that might be happening in other states, maybe states we haven't been talking about, maybe some of the other battleground states. So a couple of ways to look at this. One, obviously, I think you were talking about this, but the issue of abortion, exceptionally potent in Iowa because that six week ban went into effect this summer. Millions of dollars in spending there, not in the presidential race, but

congressional races where abortion has been a driving issue. Is this more of a state specific effect that's limited more to Iowa? If this is what is happening in Iowa, one thing to keep in mind, I think we'll go over here. This is going to start lighting up on Tuesday with our results. Uh,

Iowa on Tuesday. I just want to show you the history here going back. Remember, this is an Obama Trump state. It's one of the most dramatic swings from Obama to Trump. So you have voters here who not long ago were comfortable voting Democratic blue collar white voters, huge blue collar white population here that swung very hard to Trump. There are more.

Trump counties in Iowa than any other state in the country. I raise that because what state is number two? That would be Iowa's political cousin right across the Mississippi River, Wisconsin. This has the second most Obama

of Obama-Trump counties in the country. And demographically, these are extremely similar states, large white populations, a lot of blue collar, rural white populations. Even when you get into the Mississippi area, you can go back and find German descent is very common among people, very common demographic features and politically similar movement here. We have not, for the most part, seen in Wisconsin

the kind of polling shift we just saw in that new Iowa poll today. So that's one thing to keep in mind if it's if it potentially could be a state specific thing. But if it's not, if it's spilling over, this is a place where you would expect to see it on Tuesday night because of those demographic similarities. And then, as I say, there's that question of, look,

So much of the polling attention, the budgets for polling have been directed to the seven battleground states. Is there actually something going on in Iowa? Was there something going on this whole time that was undetected? And could that be happening elsewhere? The early test you want to pay attention to on Tuesday night, seven o'clock Eastern. A lot of the polls are going to close in New Hampshire. And this was a state, again, not in the battleground. Biden won by seven. The Trump folks think this thing is a lot closer than most people are talking.

about. They sent J.D. Vance there today. And remember, in 2016, Clinton won New Hampshire over Trump. Of all the Clinton won states, none was closer than New Hampshire. The margin was just three thousand votes between those candidates. So this is an early test, I think, for me on Tuesday night. Have we potentially misunderstood the non battleground states? If we're seeing some kind of surprise in New Hampshire, I think that'll be obviously a huge development.

Obviously, interesting, too, in terms of Trump's decision to spend some last minute campaign time in Virginia, raising the question as to whether or not they think that's on the map as well. Steve Kornacki, just the beginning of what is going to be a beautiful relationship over these next many hours. Steve, thank you. We'll get back to you later on tonight. Up next here, we're going to be speaking with David Plouffe.

He was the architect of Barack Obama's two winning presidential campaigns in 2008, 2012. He's now working for Kamala Harris. We'll get an update from him after just a very quick break. Stay with us.

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And make no mistake, we will win. We will win. We will win. And we will win. We will win. We will win. And we will win. In the closing days and hours of the campaign, that phrase, we will win, has become a newly energized theme of Kamala Harris's stump speech. Does the Harris campaign have factual

based, data driven reasons to feel that optimistic in these final days of the race. We have exactly the person to ask. Joining us now is Harris Campaign Senior Advisor David Plouffe. David, it's great to have you here. We know you have stuff to do. By any chance, have you guys gotten any internal polling in Iowa? How do you feel about that? Well, I have the deepest respect for Ann Seltzer.

But I think at the end of the day, the question is, is she catching something from a composition of the electorate and maybe a support score, meaning are women in particular going to perform better for us than even our own internal data? So our data suggests a razor thin close race in seven states.

where we really have to have a great election day. But late deciders in our data are choosing Kamala Harris. I want to suggest by 90-10,

But in a close race, if they're choosing you 55-45 or 60-40, that's a great thing. Is there anything that you're seeing that suggests that the laser-like focus on those seven states has been too tight and that there ought to be other states that are in play? We are seeing J.D. Vance going to New Hampshire. We're seeing Trump going to Virginia. We're seeing this crazy poll out of Iowa. That's good news for you guys. I mean, do you think that the seven states are the seven states? Yeah.

Because what I've learned in presidential campaigns, you can't chase your 350th electoral vote. One of these is going to be the tipping point state.

And Trump, I think himself, is going to states that are not battleground states because he's not drawing good crowds in the battleground states. That bothers him. I'm surprised they're sending Vance because I think he's probably a little more sane about things. But Trump is gallivanting Iran because you see there's empty seats, people leaving. The act seems a little stale.

David, when you talk about how razor thin the margins are, everything matters, right? I wonder how you're thinking about some of these ballot referenda. Given the fact that abortion seems to be moving people, moving women, older women, maybe in Iowa and elsewhere, there are two ballot initiatives in states that really matter. I mean, they all matter. But in Arizona, where according to our NBC News polling, Trump has a 1.9% lead. That's his largest lead. There is a

There's a ballot referendum to establish a fundamental right to abortion. And in Nevada, where Harris has her tightest lead, 0.3 percent, there's a ballot measure for a state constitutional right for abortion that's going to be on the ballot. How are you guys thinking of those measures?

initiatives as maybe affecting turnout, maybe helping your candidate? I mean, how do you calculate that? Well, I think in Arizona, it's clear that that ballot initiative is going to win and strongly. So there's a huge pool of voters that currently might not be voting for Kamala Harris, who

who are going to vote for that initiative. So we're trying to talk to them. There's no doubt that abortion is going to drive a lot of vote in this race and women's health care generally. I think that's been overlooked because some polls suggested it might be fading. But in our research, it's going to drive participation, volunteerism, it already is, and turn out an ultimate vote. So you look at Arizona, that could pass by 15, 20 points.

So it gives us a lot of voters to go talk to who might currently not be voting for Kamala Harris. And by the way, Arizona is going to be very close. I know polls say one point nine, but we really have closed well in the early vote there. But Arizona is in a kind of era where they just have close races like Georgia. And I think that's what we're going to see again on Tuesday.

Good to see you, David. You have a big job. So as the saying goes, you could have been anywhere in the world tonight, but you're here with us. We appreciate that. And we just saw Steve walk through numbers where the recall memory approval of Donald Trump, the idea of his presidency is higher than the actual American public ever felt about his presidency during it. When you look at that,

And this idea that his old ceiling of 46 is being projected and polled at 48, 49. Do you see that? Do you have a path to win if he is above the so-called 46 ceiling, if he is at 48? Right. Well, we've always believed that his ceiling was going to be a little bit higher this time. So 48, 48 and a half percent. That is not 50.

And we've always believed we have a better ability to get to 50. And we're closing well. That matters in a presidential campaign. I can't overstate how important it is. It helps with turnout, but it also for those four to five percent of people who've not decided who to vote. If you're closing well, you're going to win more of them. And when a race might be 48-48 a week out,

and you're winning more of those late deciders, that's how you get to 50. The other thing I'd say, the last seven days of this presidential campaign, no one's closed this poorly.

In my view, presidential campaign history, Trump, the worst. He's reminding every voter who has concerns about him why they should have concerns. And we're picking that up in our both qualitative and quantitative research. David, we have questions for you on that exact point. Can you stick with us? Yes. We'll be right back with David Plouffe, who is senior advisor to the Harris campaign. We'll be right back.

We are back with Harris Campaign Senior Advisor David Plouffe. David Plouffe, I have two questions for you. Puerto Rico is garbage. General John Kelly, he's a fascist. Losers and suckers, Israel, in his own voice. I hear anecdotally that people have heard those two stories. What impact, if any, do you hear? They've had a big impact. This is part of how he's closed so poorly. So seven nights ago, like 16 blocks from here,

Think about it. It's his closing event. It's almost like your presidential campaign announcement speech. It should be flawless. And it was the opposite of that. It's caused a huge problem with voters because they say, this is what I'm worried about. This is all voters. And obviously, the Puerto Rican community is a huge constituency in Pennsylvania and other battleground states. And we've seen huge energy there.

You know, we could see a switch of 10, 20 percent there. And I think the Kelly comments are consistent with what's been a problem for Trump this whole time. So we've tried to make the argument this is even more dangerous than the first time. He's more unstable. He's more unhinged. He wants unchecked power. And the people who tried to stop him last time, none of them are around. It's Marjorie Taylor Greene. It's Matt Gaetz. It's Laura Loomer.

So, the Kelly comments, I think, basically added to people's concern, which is so important. So, when you were all asked about his approval rating, there are some people who give him approval of his first term who still aren't going to vote for him because they think this is just too dangerous. So, those have been two major impacts. But even today, I mean, we got all breaking news on our phone of him two days out from a presidential election saying he wished he had never left.

Wish he'd had a sit-in in the Oval Office. And for these voters that still haven't decided, that's the exact kind of character and behavior that they don't want to rerun off. Yeah. And so I have a question about the cannibalization of the vote. We know that Donald Trump previously...

he described early vote as inherently fraudulent. Early voting is bad. You must vote on election day. It's the only valid way to vote. They've obviously changed that in this race. They have decided to push their supporters to vote early, and that has happened all across the country. We've seen huge early vote numbers for Republicans. How much of that

vote does the campaign believe is cannibalizing from their election day versus what's being cannibalized by Democratic early voters? A huge percentage of it. Now, to be clear, if someone was definitely going to vote in an election day and they vote early, there's some value because at least you get the vote in a bank and maybe they're freed up to volunteer.

And it obviously diminishes the number of voters you as a campaign have to go to on election day. But it's not additive. And so what we're seeing is they're bringing forward their vote. And we've always believed that Donald Trump's ceiling was a little bit higher, but lower than ours.

And we always believed he was going to have to do a pretty tremendous job of bringing out sporadic and new voters who were going to support him. And we don't see evidence of that. Or that Elon Musk in the backs of vans with no seatbelts can do it for him. Well, listen, a ground campaign is not going to turn a race you're going to lose by six points in a race you win by one point. But it can give you a half a point or a point. And you've seen the numbers we've put out. What happened this weekend in all seven battleground states, we're hitting every door we need to hit.

And in the places where you're still doing persuasion, we are not running into Trump or Musk people. Harris Campaign Senior Advisor David Plouffe. Don't go to sleep. Go back to work. We'll see you soon. Thank you. Coming up, we will take a look inside the heavily fortified tabulation center in Phoenix, Arizona, where ballots are right now being prepped for counting. We'll also be introducing a brand new MSNBC contributor who you will very much want to meet. That's all coming up. Stay with us.

Welcome back to our special coverage on election eve eve. We are super happy to have you with us. We're hunkering down here at MSNBC headquarters in New York. We have snacks. We have coffee. We have sleeping bags under our desks. We have things that come in packages that are supposed to substitute for showers, but they don't. We're preparing to bring you continuous coverage of the presidential election as long as it takes. We will not tire. We are not afraid.

Tomorrow, you can expect wall-to-wall coverage of the final full day of the campaign, both during the day and in primetime. We're going to have our full lineup of MSNBC shows tomorrow night with all your regularly scheduled hosts, including I'll be here at 9 o'clock Eastern. On Tuesday, that's election day, our special coverage starts at 6 p.m. Eastern, which is just one hour before polls start to close and we start to get the first results. We expect a long, long

night as the counting continues across the country, particularly in the swing state of Arizona, where most ballots are cast by mail. In Maricopa County, which is the most populous county in Arizona, there are so many races on the ballot in this particular election that the ballot is two pages long, which means it'll take just that much longer to tabulate the vote while the whole country watches and waits.

Also in Maricopa County this year is a six-foot-tall barbed wire fence around the tabulation center in Phoenix. Local officials physically fortifying the election center with panic buttons and drones and rooftop snipers.

Truly preparing for the worst. Joining us now from Phoenix is NBC News correspondent Liz Kreutz, who's inside the fortress, inside the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center. Behind her, election officials are doing what is called adjudication of the ballots, which means they're checking for any potential problems before the ballots are processed for tabulation. Liz, it's great to have you with us. Tell us what you've been seeing and what's going on there.

Hey, Rachel. Yeah, we made it inside. We did. It took a lot of layers of security. And I'm sure you remember this view very well from 2020. We are looking inside the ballot process.

processing center right now. And what's happening right here is what two pairs of election workers, one Republican, one Democrat, they work together to go over any ballot irregularities. And they come to a consensus. And we are told that actually they become friends through this process. It's a nice snapshot of America. You can see over here right now they're counting these ballots.

Rachel, what's so interesting is anyone around the world right now can watch on a live stream what is happening in this room. In fact, since 2020, they have added even more cameras and live streams. So you can watch literally the step-by-step process of how it works all

of that in this effort for transparency here to try to counter any more claims of election fraud heading into Tuesday, knowing that it could take several days until we get results. And just to add to this idea of the fortress here, I mean, just getting in, we have video of it, two layers of fencing, a concrete barrier, multiple steps to call in, to get inside, to show your ID. If you come and look where we are right now,

This is where we entered. And there's these magnetic security areas that you have to go through. They have the sheriff's department here going through your bags. Election officials have spent $10 million over the past four years to make this place what they are calling, Rachel, the safest place to be in Arizona on election night.

Liz, in terms of the officials that you're talking to, the security folks, the people who are there doing the work that needs to be done, what's the morale like? What are people's attitudes like? Obviously, it's a little bit unnerving for us looking in from the outside, looking at what they feel they've had to do for security. But they also have a job to do. It's an important job. In many cases, it's a very joyful job. You're doing your civic duty and it's something the country needs. Where are people's heads at in terms of how they're feeling about this task ahead?

Yeah, well, we've been told that they definitely had some longtime election workers who just said, you know what, I can't do it this year. And they've decided not to do it because of a lot of the threats that they received. And there's also been some folks who have been able to get...

I mean, essentially, it seems like hazard pay. They've increased some of the people's pay to make people come and feel like they want to be here and work through the election because of the fact that so many of these workers received so many threats for so long. Some of the officials have told us that over the past year, the threats have subsided, but they are expecting them to ramp up yet again come Tuesday.

NBC correspondent Liz Quartz. Thank you so much, Liz. It's great to have you there. Thanks for talking with people that are really helpful. My colleague Joy Reid is standing by with Arizona's top election official. Joy. Thank you very much, Rachel. And joining us now is Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. Mr. Fontes, thank you so much for being here. Let's start on that question of security. We do know that back in 2020, after Fox called

Arizona for Joe Biden. Alex Jones and others showed up at the Maricopa County Election Center. Some of the people who showed up with him were Jacob Chansley, who we later saw as part of those who sacked the Capitol. He's been sentenced for that.

So there's been a lot of drama and a lot of lies surrounding vote counts in Arizona. Talk about how you are thinking about the security situation going into this election.

Well, First Joy, thanks for having me. And, you know, security has got to be top of mind for everyone. But that doesn't mean that we lose sight of the fundamentals. We still have an election to run. But it is a little bit of a new paradigm that we're existing in. And so taking care of our workers, taking care of our employees, taking care of all the folks who are maybe just here for a week or a couple of days or a couple of months to help us out and also making sure that our voters stay safe all have become facets of

of what we've done. And so we've got to stay focused on the fundamentals. At the end of the day, we will be delivering a quality election as Arizona always has done. Again, in spite of the lies, the conspiracies and the misappropriation of the truth, we've done a pretty darn good job here in Arizona. So we're going to keep doing that. But we also have these other things that we have to focus on just to make sure that our people are safe.

Just this Thursday, Donald Trump said of Arizona, the only thing that can stop us is the cheating. It's the only thing that can stop us. So he's already sort of setting up his, you know, his followers to believe that there's something fishy going on in your state. We recall that very comical, but also very serious pretend audit of your state's results afterwards.

As secretary of state, it is part of your mission to try to get people to trust elections, to believe them when they happen, to believe the results are real. What is the process like of trying to walk people back from this lack of trust in elections in your state?

Well, first and foremost, we've got to understand that what we're going through over the last several years here in the United States of America is a slow rolling civics lesson. We had some folks who raised a lot of doubt, doubts, told a lot of lies, capitalized on the sort of the take it for granted attitude that Americans had towards elections. We just didn't know the process that well. And through the course of answering these questions, a

addressing the lies and attacking the conspiracy theories, we have slowly but surely brought folks into understanding these processes better. And that part of it must continue. We have to continue to tell the truth, answer the legitimate questions, because some people still don't understand our process completely. And that's OK. We're happy to explain it. But when people are lying, particularly elected officials and candidates, when those folks lie about a process,

knowing better because all of them do know better. That's the biggest problem we have. And the lies around voting in this in the U.S. on the Republican side tend to revolve around this lie that non-citizens are voting.

And Arizona is a state that obviously has a large Latino population, a, you know, American born Latino population. But suspicion often flows to places that have large black or Latino populations like your state. More than two million people have already voted in Arizona, which is great. Lots of early voting participation. But you've also had a lawsuit.

in which you've lost a part of a case against Stephen Miller's outfit, America First Legal, in which they're demanding to see part of your voter rolls to force the state to prove that non-citizens are not voting. Talk a little bit about that case and where it goes from here. Well,

Well, first and foremost, we are appealing that case because this is a public safety issue as much as anything else. We do not want a bunch of extremists out there pounding on people's doors and demanding that they turn over identification just because, you know, somebody in another part of the country thinks that non-citizens are voting in Arizona, which, by the way, is very, very rare. In fact, it is vanishingly rare that those sorts of things happen. First, that a non-citizen might register, and even more rare that

a vote gets cast. So I'm going to acknowledge it's not a perfect system and we should. But what we're doing right now is looking at a state in Arizona where we have a bifurcated system that's very different than the rest of the United States of America. In every other state in the union, a signature on an affidavit under penalty of perjury is enough to get you to vote. That's the proof of citizenship that every American gives us.

In Arizona, however, in order to vote for all of the races outside of the federal ballot,

governor all the way down through judges, etc., you've got to show documented proof of citizenship. But we didn't start doing that until 2004. The systems have never fully been supported by the legislature or any of the administrators. It is a very complicated way that we do things, issuing Fed-only ballots and then full ballots. And it's just really a problem where we don't see that problem anywhere else in the United States of America. So we've got to get it together on that aspect. But as far as the rest of it goes,

We're in great shape. And again, I must repeat, the issue of non-citizen voting is in existence, but it is vanishingly rare. And no one has ever seen any more than a onesie or twosie. And none of it has ever had an impact on the outcome. So that's another one of the lies we've got to get past. One last question. And of course, one of the other aspects or one of the other factors in people's claims of not trusting elections, it's a time that it can take to actually just physically count the votes.

which we know it has to be done. It's human beings doing it. It takes time. We know I'm looking at a an estimate here that says 10 to 13, 10 to 14 days potentially for Arizona to get that result in. Can you confirm that that's the timeline we're looking at or how long should we expect to wait to know who's definitively won Arizona?

Yeah, Joe, you hit it on the head. 10 to 13 days. That's how it's always been. As a matter of fact, if you look back, Arizona has always been about 10 to 13 days. But here's the thing. When, for example, John McCain was winning by 25 points, you guys could call the race on the night of. And so everybody thought it was over. But we were still waiting for official numbers.

for 10 to 13 days. Now we've got tighter margins. We've got a much more competitive politics here in Arizona. And so that 10 to 13 days can be awfully, awfully sort of grinding on folks when they want to know the results right now. But that doesn't mean that we won't get

much, much sooner. That's up to y'all in the media. That's not our job. Our job is to get official results out that are accurate. And that's what we're going to do. And it's going to take about 10 to 13 days. I will note for our audience that President Biden, Joe Biden, won Arizona by just over $10

thousand votes in 2020. And NBC projected Arizona for Biden nine days after the election on November 12th. So that's what you should be in for, everybody. Calm yourselves and be ready for that. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, thank you so much.

I will say Arizona is lucky to have a person in that job who is as clear a communicator as he is. Yes. Given the national implications of clear election related communication coming out of Arizona. Adrian Font has somebody to watch, I think, in terms of his future career. Steve, we just had the secretary of state from Arizona confirm their official results in Arizona. They are expecting to attend to 13 days, they say, with larger margins.

Maybe the media companies will be able to project things earlier than that. That's not their concern. Does that jive with the way that you are thinking about Arizona and indeed how

How should we set our expectations in terms of what we're going to know on election night? Yeah, I think Arizona is the state if we end up, if it's suspenseful and if the Electoral College math is depending on Arizona and add to that Nevada, one of those two states, it's going to be a while. If it's close in those states and the electoral math depends on it for the reasons you just heard in that interview. And it's fairly similar in Nevada, too, just in terms of it's at

ton of mail-in ballots that they do not all get counted on election night or the day after. It becomes a days-long process. So if the count is very close, if there's a possibility of the result changing as those days of subsequent mail-in voting counting take place, those states won't be called. If they're crucial to the math, we'll be waiting on them like last time around. That's the long game scenario, I think. But in the other battleground states, the five eastern battleground states, a bit of a different story.

potentially from 2020. Let's take you through Tuesday night, seven o'clock Eastern time. The polls are going to close in Georgia. This will be the first battleground state where we start getting results and we expect we will get a lot of results in Georgia. They can pre-process the mail ballots, the absentee ballots. Those can be pre-processed. So they don't, you know, some states they have to wait till the polls close. It's a

cumbersome process of verifying signatures that can all be done ahead of time in Georgia. And there's a ton of early in-person voting, which is relatively easy to tabulate, too. There's also going to be folks who wait till Election Day to vote, expect that to come in throughout the night, too. But the bottom line is you should have the vast majority of the vote counted in Georgia sometime late that night into the very, very early hours of Wednesday morning.

I remember Georgia is one of those states in 2020. It took so long because they had a flood of mail in ballots. Mail in voting is down 75 percent in Georgia. Just mechanically going to be much easier. It probably to tabulate those results in North Carolina, in Georgia, to go to North Carolina. That's our second battleground poll close poll closing 730 Eastern. Very similar here. Expect a.

the mail voting that takes place. And again, that's down to the mail-in voting and the absentee to come fast and furious not long after those polls close at 730. The same day vote will then follow that. And you expect, as we showed you earlier, if you were watching, we expect the same day vote in North Carolina and a lot of other places to favor Trump, to favor the Republicans. So put that on your radar right now in North Carolina. Likely what we expect is the Democrats will get their best numbers with the

big early returns. And then the question becomes, can Trump erase that if the Democrats are ahead with the same day voting? So again, seven o'clock hour, you're getting those two. I'll skip Pennsylvania for one second and just quickly take you through the other two Midwest states. Michigan is the state that's had massive,

changes to its procedures, a total overhaul. This is a state that took a long time because of the clog of mail-in voting in 2020. Well, now they can, this is brand new for Michigan, this idea of pre-processing mail-in votes. Again, all that administrative work to get the ballot ready to be counted, they're already doing that in most places in Michigan. That's a big change from 2020. So is the fact that Michigan now, unlike 2020, they have already

early in-person voting. And tons of people there, we're seeing from the stats, are taking advantage of it. So that combination of pre-processing, of reduced mail-in voting, and of that rise of early in-person voting, we could have, again, a much clearer picture of Michigan on election night than we've had before.

Again, most of Michigan is going to close at 8 p.m. There's four counties on the fringes of the U.P. that stay open until 9 p.m. Eastern. But we will have results. No call, but we will have results in that 8 o'clock hour. A lot of them. Wisconsin, this could be very dramatic in the early hours of Wednesday, the wee hours of Wednesday. This is how it's played out at

couple elections now recently, just to explain it again. In Wisconsin, they've got something that resembles early in-person voting, but it's not technically called that. We don't have to get into that. But basically, folks who are voting early in person or who are voting absentee, there are some cities in Wisconsin where they take those votes and they count them at the end of the night in one location and then

all of those votes get released and where that happens most dramatically. We will be talking about this as these results come in. Tuesday is the city of Milwaukee. All of the votes cast before election day are counted after everything else is counted. This usually happens like two, three in the morning, maybe a little earlier if they're quicker. And then it all gets reported out. Huge democratic city, biggest city in Wisconsin. We have seen in recent elections, Republicans leading late and having that, uh,

early vote release from Milwaukee, putting the Democrats ahead. That's happened. That happened with Joe Biden. It was the moment in 2020 when I realized Biden had shifted to the advantageous position over Trump. It was when Trump had about a 20,000 vote lead in Wisconsin, about four in the morning, that Milwaukee batch came in.

Biden went ahead, realized that Biden was probably going to win Milwaukee. Pay attention for that. If it's close to everywhere else in Wisconsin, we are going to be waiting on that. And that's going to be a very significant moment in this election. And I'll just land here. I left Pennsylvania because Pennsylvania is the biggest wild card when it comes to the timing of this. Remember, in 2020, it was Pennsylvania that ultimately resulted in the election being called.

about 1130 in the morning Saturday. What was that? Because of Pennsylvania for the first time, COVID emergency 2020 did vote by mail and they were flooded with vote by mail in part because Pennsylvania does not have that early in-person voting. So you're either voting by mail or you're voting on election day. There's a little bit of a shift in that this year, but again, that's the broad contour of it. The key though, again,

Pennsylvania did not change its laws. Part of the problem in 2020, all those mail-in votes, they had to wait till the election day to start going through them administratively. It just took forever. Didn't change the law. But again, with mail-in voting coming way down this year, that's just going to be a lot less to process for these counties.

They've got more experience. They've had a few elections since 2020 doing it. And also there are procedures in place in some of these big counties now to continue counting round the clock, not close down shop for the night. We saw that happen a bit in 2022. So the potential exists in Pennsylvania to be significantly faster than 2020. But as I say, it's a huge wild card because, again, with

no changes in these laws, actually. You're just kind of depending on the mechanics being smoother and maybe the folks running these to have a little bit more experience, a little bit know-how. So we will see on Pennsylvania. Obviously, if we're waiting on that, that is going to be a huge piece of the electoral puzzle. One slightly impolitic follow-up for you on this, Steve, when you talk about the mechanics

and the different procedures that have been put in place, particularly ones that have changed since 2020. Are there any of these real crucial jurisdictions that have really important races that we're going to be watching really carefully where you feel like they made some real inexplicable decisions in terms of new procedures or ways they're going to handle the vote that you're just watching for as a potential bottleneck? Are there places where the technocratic way they're approaching the count is something that's keeping you up at night?

Yeah, there's a couple of things that have that were giving some concern to some election officials that are being held up by courts right now that I think could have been wild cards in this. There's a procedure in North Carolina, basically about the early in-person voting that might have that delay. I mean, I'm talking like 15, 30 minutes there. I should say there is a change that I think is good in Pennsylvania. I said no big changes, but there's one for

in terms of just public knowing what's going on in Pennsylvania at midnight on election night, even if there's all these uncounted mail-in votes, they have to now tell you, these counties do, how many total mail-in votes they have. So we will know at midnight if this is all goes to plan. We will know immediately.

what the universe is beyond that of mail-in votes to be counted. That was a bit of a mystery as that whole process played out in 2020. So from a transparency standpoint, if that is what we end up seeing, we'll have a little bit of clarity even if we don't have the votes in Pennsylvania. Fascinating. That's very helpful, Steve. Thank you very, very much. All right, still ahead, a big split in polling, a fascinating split on the issue of the economy, what that might mean for Tuesday's election. We've got three campaign veterans to help us explain it.

We got much more ahead tonight in this special coverage. Stay with us. In the final NBC News national poll,

before the election on Tuesday. It is a dead tie. It's 49 to 49. Part of what is booing Vice President Harris and her supporters from that poll, though, is some of the internal numbers. Democratic enthusiasm in that poll is high and rising on the issue of who voters trust on the issue of abortion. Harris has a 20-point lead over Trump. NBC also asked voters a couple of

questions on the economy. And the answers were interesting because the answers were split. When asked generically, who's better on the economy, Trump has a 10 point advantage over Harris. But on the question of who will better look out for the middle class, it's Harris who comes out 51 to 42, a nine point spread.

I want to bring into the conversation our colleagues, Simone Sanders Townsend, Michael Steele, Claire McCaskill, all three of them veterans of political parties and campaigns. They will be here on election night as well. We're calling them our political insiders because it makes them sound like they're giving you secret knowledge. Stephanie Rule is standing by with them right now. Steph, over to you. Thank you, Rachel. Simone, let's look at these numbers because not

as an economist, as an insider, right? Anecdotally, we know that Republicans traditionally poll better. Trump has polled better on the economy. It's the first time NBC asked the question. But on the question, who is looking out from the middle class? We see Kamala Harris come out ahead. What does that tell you? This to me, all of these numbers really tell me that the advertising and the communication strategy and the strategic direction that the campaign has employed, it has worked.

Coming out of the gate, Vice President Harris, she talked about her economic message. The policies that she dropped were about the issues that are most directly concerning Americans at this point. Housing, prices at the grocery store, right? She is speaking directly to their issues. And then when it comes to middle class, relentlessly, over and over and over, telling her story. Sometimes she is knocked for being so on message, but that's actually what she's supposed to do. Okay, Donald Trump is doing that.

Donald Trump is not the kind of candidate I would ever want to work for in my past life. It's just too erratic, too uncertain. It's like the man never read the talking points. I used to work for Bernie Sanders. You write him talking points. He would give the thing and he'd go like this and pick up his yellow pad. At least I know, though, Bernie Sanders has been saying the same thing since I've been since before I've been alive on the economy. So he's relentlessly on message because Vice President Harris was on message. If you look at the ads that the campaign is running in the battleground states.

Disproportionately, the ads were bio ads, i.e. introducing her. And then later on, there were some Trump. These are these Trump ads where she's distinguishing herself. Contrast people call those negative ads, the attack ads, if you will. But it's just, I think, talking about what Donald Trump's own words. And then the majority of the

ads have been about her policy, the economy, the messaging, what she is going to do. Do not discount the impact of people seeing those ads. OK, but let's stay with introducing her, because in the first couple of months we kept hearing, well, we don't know what she can run. We don't know what she can operate. And Donald Trump, while I could say he's a failed businessman and talk about his bankruptcies, they said we don't know what she can operate. Think about the last six weeks.

Kamala Harris has run a basically flawless campaign. What is a campaign? It's a business. And she's the CEO. And we are seeing Donald Trump day after day, week after week, not just go off message, but really come unglued. How much of an impact is that happening specifically with Nikki Haley type of voters? Well, he came on became unglued because she was together.

She had her ish together and he didn't expect that, which is why in the beginning he pined so openly for Joe Biden because he knew. I mean, Donald Trump is nothing if not sensitive to the players on the chessboard. And when there's a player on the chessboard that he doesn't want to deal with, he wants it off the board.

He wanted her off the board, which is why you look back at all those narratives. What she did to Simone's point was she hit the ground running and she had an assist. And the assist was suddenly a half a million people getting on a Zoom call and raising her seven, eight, nine million dollars. Another half a million people getting on a Zoom call. Oh, this time it was white women because first it was black women. Then it was white women. And then you're sitting there going, wait a minute, hold up, white women.

Because in 16, white women weren't buying this female president thing. How do we know that? They didn't elect one when they had one.

So she, from the very beginning, began to change the narrative and the thinking. And that was something that scared the bejesus out of Donald Trump. There's another assist. The economy. Exactly. What has been happening over the last six months? Inflation is cooling. Interest rates cut. So Donald Trump was leading with immigration and the economy is a dumpster fire. Well, the economy might not be perfect for you, but it is certainly not a dumpster. But that was not a plus for her in the beginning. That was not a plus for her.

That all that stuff was happening and it was cooling and the numbers were getting better and everybody else was screaming, look at the numbers. It's so much better. And the people in the voters are like, yeah, but I don't know who she is. I want to know more about her. And to your point, Simone, she started that narrative story, that narrative journey, right?

And as she grew that narrative journey, guess what else happened? She connected it to the economy. She started talking about an opportunity economy. She started talking about tax breaks for the middle class. She started talking about workers. She tied healthcare to the economy.

in a way that mothers looked at and said, oh, okay, now tell me more. Expanding the child tax credit. Expanding the child tax credit. She did not lean in, though, on that the economy is so good because that is, I think that's the biggest difference between the campaign that Joe Biden was running and the campaign that Kamala Harris was running. Her

Her campaign doesn't actually ever speak to the current the current greatness, if you will, of the economy, which is very good. Joe Biden did this. OK, but her campaign speaks to the concerns that people have about the work that has yet to been addressed. Joe Biden talked about very in the beginning, build back better. He built back. She's talking about the better.

And that's the difference. Claire, tell us what you're hearing and what you're thinking. You're a former lawmaker watching all of this, not just Donald Trump, but this group of mega, mega donors, bigger donors than we ever have seen. The likes of Elon Musk, who's campaigning more and harder than any business person who might end up with an official or

unofficial role in a Donald Trump administration. What do you think about all this? And what are people telling you? Well, I think it's really scary territory. You know, we have some billionaires in this country. And if you look at the top 10 donors to Donald Trump, they've given over a billion dollars to him. Just the top five. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, and that was not counting how much more Musk has spent. Musk is in Pennsylvania. He thinks because he can do rockets and electric cars that he can figure out how to get people to vote. But he's got a hard assignment because the people he's trying to get to vote are low propensity voters. They're people that don't vote all the time. In fact, this bro thing.

that they've done. You know, let's get the young men. Well, the reason they're bros is because they don't care about voting. Yeah. They're disengaged. You're not going to vote. They're really hard to get to the voting place. And you know, the one thing I think is being talking to my friends and I got a lot of friends running, right? Because this was our class.

John Tester and Sherrod Brown and Bob Casey, we all got elected at the same time. These are dear friends of mine, and I've talked to all of them. And one of the things that's really helping her at this point is the low propensity voters, the feels voters, they make up their mind at the end. You know, it matters whether they like you. And you know what?

My friends that I know, my acquaintances that are voting for Trump, they always start out by saying, I can't stand the guy, but he's going to be good for my tax rate, right? So I don't think America likes this guy. And when you're in the privacy of a voting booth and you think of the things he says and the things he does and the chaos around him, that's the other thing she's done in this campaign so beautifully.

She is now, according to the NBC poll, the candidate that represents change. And I think most Americans don't want another four years of that nut lying jerk in the White House. Claire McCaskill, Michael Steele, Simone Sanders-Hausen, thank you so much. Rachel, I'm going to send it back to you. Thank you, Steph. Lawrence O'Donnell, let me ask you, talking about this idea about the way the campaign works,

is closing, how voters are feeling, how that might affect low propensity voters, which the Trump campaign is particularly targeting, how it might affect the base and turnout. I know you were at Saturday Night Live last night for Kamala Harris's surprise. How did that make sense?

You mentioned it on Twitter. On the internet machine. What was that like and how are you feeling on that? It goes to this though, right? Because Saturday Night Live audience does include low propensity voters. It does include young, low propensity voters.

So the 8-H poll, which I have witnessed more than once, which is to say a presidential candidate in Studio 8-H for SNL. And I've you know, I've had friends of mine working there from the beginning, Al Franken, Jim Downey. So I've been hanging around there a long time. You know, we had the word was out there that, oh, you know, she's going to be there. But I know that's never true until it's true. There's all sorts of things that could happen.

that could change that right up until the very last minute. And so when we were going up in the elevator, the fact that it was packed with the uniformed Secret Service officers, the ones who looked like a SWAT team with the badges and everything, and then that we had to get wandered by them before, you know, going on the ninth floor over into the conference room where a lot of us watch it.

With all of that anticipation and expectation, and by the time you get through the Secret Service, you know it's going to happen. Right.

What happened in that studio in 8-H when the audience actually saw her was the single biggest emotional surge that I have felt in that room ever. And that includes the Rolling Stones in 1978. OK, it was really something. And what I would attribute it to is the fact that we have actually had a Trump presidency.

And this is the only person who's standing between you and another one of those. And so as as big as the stakes were before, when Hillary Clinton, you know, and others were running against this guy, this is the one where where everybody in that room knows it could not be more important. And and also, I think there was this.

reward that was in the air of thank you for running a flawless campaign to get to this point, which she really has done. I mean, just stop and think about when is the last time you had a Democrat ramping up toward Election Day and you weren't hearing anything?

all sorts of unnamed Democratic congressional sources in the New York Times and everywhere complaining about should have done this, should have done that last week. Why aren't they in Michigan? There's not a single second guess going out there about the way David Plouffe and that team is running that campaign and the way the candidate is running that campaign.

And last night here, you know, up on the 8th floor in that studio, it really did seem to be a moment where it was coming together so perfectly. Because when you look at that appearance,

That's the campaign of positivity and joy. And there was no swiping at Donald Trump in this appearance. There was none of that, you know, by her. Nothing snide, you know, just a completely positive presentation of her within that sketch.

It was really, really remarkable. And really a testament to how good Maya Rudolph's impersonation is. Seeing that there's no test of that, like having the person who you are impersonating standing right next to you. And it was just it was like a magic trick. I can report that backstage the vice president got a very special impression.

Dana Carvey version of Joe Biden face to face, which unfortunately there is no video. I wasn't there, but Dana told me about it afterwards and it was pretty special. Up next, a special announcement from us here, a happy addition to our election team here at MSNBC. We've got that and much more ahead. Stay with us.

Just 107 days after her entry into the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris will be ending her historic campaign at a place that's central to her biography. She's going to be hosting her campaign's election night watch party at her alma mater at Howard University in Washington, D.C. And this, of course, is going to be a very important event for her.

To us as a news organization, this is of practical importance to know, right? We need to know where very important news is going to be coming from the campaign and the candidate on Tuesday night, whether it's a victory speech or a concession speech or a hold on, my opponent is about to give a fake victory speech, but don't fall for it. We need to know where that's all coming from. But of course, that location also just seems important. It has political significance and sort of psychological heft.

in terms of where Kamala Harris has decided to bring this campaign home, her own history there at that incredibly important historic black institution.

Joining us now is Michelle Norris. You know her from her years of very high-profile service at National Public Radio. Most recently, you have also seen Michelle Norris' name in the news because when the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, blocked the paper's editorial board from making its presidential endorsement, Michelle Norris resigned from her position as a columnist at The Post. But tonight, we can announce that she is joining MSNBC as

As a senior contributing editor, she will be there for us at Howard University on election night. Michele Norris, it is an honor to join you as a colleague. Thank you so much. Glad to be a part of the family. Yeah, we are really, really, you make us think better of ourselves that you are here among us.

Let me just start by asking you about that decision, the Howard University decision. We know you're going to be there for us on Tuesday. And what you think that says about the Harris campaign and how they're choosing to land it? Well, it speaks to the potential historic significance of this campaign if she is victorious. But even running as a candidate, as the first candidate,

woman who has a South Asian and Jamaican heritage. So it speaks to that. But it also says something about the importance of the word we in her campaign. You know, she's always talked about bringing people along with her. And when you hear Donald Trump, so often he's talking about policy that feels like he's doing something to America instead of for America. And

And by going to Howard, she is reaching back to an important milestone and saying, I'm bringing you along with me. I'm creating an America that's about unity. I'm willing to work across the aisle. And although she will be at an historically black college, you are going to see a rainbow of people, which is something that you probably will not see wherever Donald Trump is, which is something you have not seen at all of his rallies.

So it is a culmination of her campaign and this historic moment. And she's reaching into it in ways that she hasn't in the campaign because she hasn't really leaned into her gender or hasn't leaned into her blackness or her South Asian-ness or her Caribbean-ness. But in this case, she is saying, I am all of that. And she's leaning into it in a way that she hasn't. Do you feel like we're far... And actually, I'll open this up to everybody here. Do you feel like we are far enough into the campaign at this point that we know...

the consequences of that strategic decision by this candidate in this campaign. Because the stark difference between the way the Hillary Clinton campaign talked about gender and the historic nature of her candidacy versus the lack of any kind of that discussion from Kamala Harris, the fact, as you say, that she has not been leaning into the historic nature of her own racial background in terms of what that would mean for the presidency. It's been interesting to note, I think we've all seen it unfold live,

But are we now far enough in and getting enough data in terms of how the polling looks and all those other things that we know what the consequences of those decisions are? You know, it's interesting. She's not leaning into it, but I want to make one clarification. She's not running away from it either. Sure. Right. You know, she went and spoke to Charlemagne. She's talked about it, but in ways that are nuanced.

It's you know, it's not necessarily I am woman here in Aurora. I am woman. I have stuff to do. I am a woman and I understand the issues that are important to women with the change in Roe v. Wade, with also what that means for women across the board, because it's not just abortion. It means in Iowa, for instance, you know.

They're having a hard time holding on to doctors or recruiting doctors because of that six-week abortion ban. So that affects women across the board. And she's saying, I understand those issues. I think that it's also an indication that she just didn't have time. You know, when you're running a sprint, normally a campaign is a marathon, and this was a sprint. And so she had to focus more on the issues and not be distracted by

by some of the issues around, and I'm not saying that race and gender are a distraction, but it was sometimes used to try to pull her off her message and she stayed on message. Can I ask you, Michelle, because, you know, I think we talk a lot about, and I think the media gets captivated every four years by this narrative that any minute now the black men are running over to the Republican party. It's their favorite. It's the train that's never late. But the thing is,

The thing we actually don't talk about, right? We just never actually talk about white voters that much. And it's been interesting to me that one of the stories that really hasn't been told is the fact that a black and South East Asian woman is polling at 49 and 50 percent in the United States of America, in these United States, which means that she is winning a significant share of white voters at the Obama level. And that in this 100 day campaign, she's done something Hillary Clinton couldn't do, which is get white women.

to talk to each other about why they might want to join the coalition of other women of color. And that seems to be happening. We feel it in the Iowa poll that at least that's what they're telling pollsters is that no, Roe changed their minds. Do you think that that's—what do you make of that?

I think it's part of the discipline that she showed in this campaign. She understood that abortion was going to be important. Remember, she was talking about this before July 21st when she actually stepped in. So she was ready with that message. But she's also talking about kitchen table issues.

She's talking about when she talked about that credit for people who are taking care of elderly, that's a universal issue. And especially at a moment where baby boomers are marching beyond middle age, that's something that hits a lot of people. And I think what we may see also is that she picked up a lot of white young voters, you know, even while the Trump campaign was working very hard, particularly to go after young white men.

A lot of people get close to that. And it's almost like when you're at the carnival and you're about to ride one of those kind of rickety rides and you see that sign, ride at your own risk. And you kind of get close to it and you think, oh, I'm not sure that I want to do that. She's asked people to think about the America that they want to live in, in a very effective way. And I think the polls show that. Yeah. And that makes, and underscoring the point that we've been talking about all night, that we heard from David Plouffe earlier tonight about how

the closing message for people who are deciding at the very end both who they're going to vote for and, importantly, whether to vote. That risk factor that you're describing may be everything. Michelle Norris, we are honored to have you among us. Thank you so much. Good to be here. All right. Thank you. We'll be right back. Stay with us. ♪♪♪

Four months now, we have seen a steady stream of highly produced fake videos meant to push misinformation about Vice President Harris, her campaign, or crucially the election itself, voting mechanics. Now the FBI is actually warning the public about new videos in which the FBI itself is being impersonated. Quote,

The FBI is aware of two videos falsely claiming to be from the FBI relating to election security. One stating the FBI has apprehended three link groups committing ballot fraud and a second relating to the second gentleman, Doug Amoff. These videos are not authentic, are not from the FBI, and the content they depict is false. I mean, a bold.

bold call to impersonate the FBI. Yeah, I feel like I was really ready for all the deep fake videos with people being like, this candidate did a horrible thing to me. And it's like they would say, oh, that's a Russian video. I was not ready that this was going to be the election cycle where we got fake law enforcement videos, fake FBI videos that are supposed to be the authority to whom we appeal for real information on these things. And it's also, I mean, obviously the platform,

Formerly known as Twitter is the vector for this right now, which is in the hands of a guy who has spent $100 million trying to get Trump elected. And according to The Wall Street Journal, has been communicating directly with Vladimir Putin. It's reportable since 2022. Can you imagine that other time in history where a major CEO was having communication with a foreign adversary? And we'd be like, I guess that's life. Well, we are leading a war against one of our key allies.

And the Wall Street Journal also reported that Trump has also been talking to other people in Putin's government, including the guy the Justice Department just named as running Russia's election interference effort on behalf of Trump in this election. Well, you know, you need tech guidance to do that. I guess that's right. We'll be right back. Stay with us.

So in case you haven't heard, tomorrow is the last full day of the 2024 presidential campaign. Donald Trump has four rallies scheduled tomorrow across North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan, ending the day with a rally in Grand Rapids. Kamala Harris will spend the day in Pennsylvania, rallies in Allentown, Philly, Pittsburgh. For us here at MSNBC, we're going to have a full day of coverage and a full day and night of our regular shows. I'll be here at nine o'clock Eastern tomorrow.

Then on Tuesday, the day, we're going to have nonstop coverage starting very early in the morning. This group here will gather at 6 p.m. Eastern. We will all stay here all night and into the morning. It's going to be great. Our coverage continues now with our friend Jen Psaki.

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