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Storms Sweep Eastern U.S.; Trump's Economic Facts; Trump Focuses on Immigration; Election Night Overtime. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired November 6, 2018 - 06:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:34:11] JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Four tornadoes reported in the southeastern United States this morning. One woman was killed, two others injured in Tennessee overnight. Storms moving through the area on Election Day.

Our meteorologist, Chad Myers, has the forecast.

Chad, what are you seeing?

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: John, rain all the way from the Great Lakes right on back down even into Texas and Louisiana at this hour. Let's get you now hour by hour. We'll zoom you in. The rain into all of West Virginia, certainly through Pittsburgh, not into D.C. yet. Farther down to the south, moving through Birmingham toward Aniston, Alabama, and eventually, in about an hour, into Atlanta, Georgia.

Now, it is the coolest part of the day right now and the storms are calming down. The past two hours we've seen less tornado activity, less lightning activity. But we move you ahead now to 9:00. That's when the weather gets to Atlanta, Georgia. By 3:00, your weather is better. So if you can wait until afternoon, things get a lot better here.

[06:35:05] Farther to the north, the exact opposite is actually happening. Here's the rain, Buffalo, all the way down to Charleston and into Pittsburgh. Move you ahead a couple of hours, we take you to noon. The rain is in to New York City, into New City, all the way back down into D.C. So wait around until 3:00 around the city, we'll get a break between showers. But later on this afternoon, if you can wait until 4:00 or 5:00, things get much better. Boston, not so lucky. It's going to be raining for you most of the day, especially from noon all the way until 5:00 or 6:00, until the polls close.

Guys.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: OK, Chad, very helpful to have it hour by hour so people can plan their voting. Thank you so much.

So President Trump could be campaigning on a strong economy, but he is not. And even when the president does talk about the economy, he often gets it wrong.

CNN's senior political analyst John Avlon joins us with a "Reality Check."

What have you found, John?

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, here's the deal, Ali.

President Trump has a really good story to tell about the economy. After all, unemployment is near a 50 year low and October jobs numbers released on Friday read like a press release. But our president just can't stop twisting the truth.

Take his latest line repeated in tweets and speeches that this is the, quote, best economy in the history of the country. That's a big claim that he's been repeatedly making for months and it's just not true.

Let's take a look at the real record. The fact is that job growth has been very good under President Trump during the 21 months he's been in office, but more jobs were created in the last 21 months of President Obama's tenure. The point, of course, is that President Trump didn't inherit an economy in free-fall like Obama did. He picked up an economy in recovery and took it to new heights, based -- boasted by corporate tax cuts.

Or take a look at GDP growth. It's been a robust 4.2 percent in the second quarter and 3.5 percent in the third quarter of this year. But the GDP exceeded 4.2 percent four times under President Obama. And even that was far from the best economy ever. America's GDP growth averaged more than 4.5 percent during the 1960s.

And while the stock market suffered steep losses in October, Trump can still point to a 27 percent increase in the S&P 500 over his term in office. Well, the stock market rose 35 percent in the first two years of Obama's term.

But, of course, main street matters a lot more than Wall Street when we judge the American economy and Donald Trump can point with justified pride to rising real wages. But Trump's protectionist tariffs and trade wars, however justified in his eyes to defend American businesses, well, they maybe translating to rising consumer costs and job losses soon. There are also storm clouds brewing in the budget deficit, which has soared to a six year high, rising 17 percent in the last year alone, while projections show trillion dollar deficits as early as next year.

Bottom line, Donald Trump can and should crow about presiding over a strong economy, but it is clearly not the, quote, best economy in the history of the country.

And that's your "Reality Check."

BERMAN: That was interesting. As good as it is, though, he'd rather be talking about other things on the stump in his close with a different message. Really interesting.

All right, John, thanks very much.

AVLON: Thanks, guys. BERMAN: Republican leaders, they wanted President Trump to campaign on the economy, but instead he chose the anti-immigration message. Maggie Haberman joins us to talk about that and other fascinating insights to the Trump family and key advisers in their role in these closing hours.

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[06:42:11] CAMEROTA: Sources tell CNN that President Trump hated the positive campaign ad that touted the economy's success. Instead the president insisted on ramping up his hardline anti-immigration message. That included the ad that was considered so racist that it was rejected by CNN and later pulled by Fox, NBC and FaceBook.

Joining us now is Maggie Haberman, White House correspondent for "The New York Times" and a CNN political analyst.

Maggie, listen, we need you to help us understand where President Trump is in terms of his messaging because he seems to always want to talk about his anti-immigration fear mongering message. And then when he was asked about it, I think Josh Dawsey of "The Washington Post" sort of caught him on the tarmac for a minute to ask him about the ad, he claimed no knowledge of it. It was a very Stormy Daniels moment of, what? What ad is this? I know nothing of such ad of which you speak.

BERMAN: I'm glad you're talking about that Stormy Daniels moment, but, go ahead.

CAMEROTA: That's one.

So, is he proud of it or not proud of it? Does he want to do it or not do it?

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: One note. Dawsey, who asked the question, said on Twitter that he took the answer to be that he was saying he didn't know it had been pulled, not that the ad didn't exist. It would be hard to believe the president didn't know that the ad existed since he was dictating most of the ad copy in 2016 that they ran. I do not think that things have changed now that he's president.

Look, this is the -- this is the image that he thinks works. He has -- the issue that he thinks works. He has made that clear to a number of people. As you say, he has taken it, you know, very far, many of his critics say too far. In fact, when an ad is so racist that Fox News doesn't run it, Fox News is the most supportive cable network out there of the president, that really tells you something. And I think that, look, I think that the president is going to discover potentially how many people were turned off by how much he doubled down on this in the last couple of weeks.

Look, it's possible that there will be a surprise tonight, none of us have a clear sense of exactly what's going to happen. After 2016 everyone is concerned about getting burned. But what you did see, in the last two weeks, were two incidents of domestic terrorism, a president who responded to that by tripling down on his language, on his falsehoods about his political opponents and about the Democratic Party, about the media, and fear mongering about a caravan of immigrants coming to the U.S. One strategist put it to me that this is a case of pouring gasoline on a fire and possibly singing your eyebrows off. So, we'll see.

BERMAN: There is one person, Maggie, who you have written about who does not think the president went too far. Not at all. In fact, one person who would be, you know, backing up a gasoline truck to that fire right now if he could, it sounds like, which is Stephen Miller, the president's chief adviser. And we have seen this meteoric rise of Millerism, not just over the last two years, but really the last two weeks.

HABERMAN: Yes. I mean, look, Miller is one of the few people in the West Wing who has managed to put together both influence on policy and politics. He is a huge driver of the hardest edge immigration policies that they are talking about there.

[06:45:12] There are a bunch people in the president's orbit who believe that immigration works. Kellyanne Conway, the counselor to the president, had done a memo as a pollster, I think it was in 2014, she clearly saw that there was an economic populism approach that could be used about immigration.

What she did not advocate in that memo was some of the harder edge policies that we've seen, like reducing legal immigration, separating children at the border from their parents. I mean, you know, her memo was written when Obama was getting criticized for children being sent back after illegal border crossings.

Miller delights in this and he delights in thinking that he is provoking people and he has been very encouraging of the president, including by doing things like picking statistics, isolated statistics, and negative headlines about immigrants that he knows will rile up the president and getting them before the president hoping to provoke a reaction.

CAMEROTA: Right. I mean that's what we saw with that ad considered so racist, choosing one particularly heinous example of a psychopathic criminal --

HABERMAN: Yes. Right.

CAMEROTA: But not focusing on the psychopathic criminal who had skilled 11 Jews that same week, going back to time to find -- you know, to cherry pick one that fit their anti-immigration narrative.

HABERMAN: Fear mongering worked very well for the president in 2016. Immigration has been a huge issue for conservatives that they felt was ignored for a very long time and so it is not a surprise to see him try to return to the well. But this is not 2016. There are a lot of independents who he really risks turning off, and some Republicans who he risks turning off with this rhetoric in suburban districts. There is a reason that a lot of these candidates did not want the president campaigning with them and it is because he has been almost, you know, increasing his own toxicity as a force multiplier. It's just much less valuable now because of what we have seen.

And that ad -- this was an unprecedented moment for the media to essentially stand together as a block, not completely, but to reject airing that ad, even though he has it ran on a couple of places initially, it still came down. And that is unusual.

BERMAN: I've got to say, it's no profile in courage for NBC to run the ad on Sunday Night Football with the highest rated Sunday Night Football in 13 years and then pull it the next day.

But, Maggie, speaking of --

HABERMAN: Well, they took it down. So --

BERMAN: Speaking of moments of journalism, you know, no doubt a nominee for the Murrow Award this year will be Sean Hannity from Fox News, who was on stage last night with President Trump in Missouri.

I'll let Alisyn narrate what you're seeing here.

CAMEROTA: OK, so this, Maggie, is where Sean Hannity is shocked, shocked, he'll tell you, that he was called to the podium. He didn't know, he claims, that he was going to be part of this rally, though I think previously he had said he was going to be.

Here's the most reprehensible part of it, Maggie, and I'm really struggling with this because obviously -- and obviously Fox is struggling with how to categorize Hannity because they didn't want him at the podium and then he went to the podium and -- et cetera.

Here's what he said, when he went up to that podium, he said, look around. Look back there. He said, by the way, all those people back there are fake news. Do you know who was back there? Fox cameramen.

HABERMAN: Yes. And he --

CAMEROTA: Fox cameramen and Fox reporters. So how do you think they feel today that their best known person is calling them fake news?

HABERMAN: There has, as you know very well, always been a tension between a lot of the hosts at Fox News and the news reporters. And there are some very fine news reporters at Fox News who do a lot of good work and try very hard to be even-handed and then Hannity does something like get on stage with the president with a large grin on his face after saying the entire day that he was not going to be there and then pointing to other people and saying you're fake news, which is -- which is quite a trick.

You know, look, it's not a surprise. He's been pretty all out there and all in with the president. But this is -- this is not condoned normally by news networks. Keith Olbermann got in a lot of trouble for donating to a Democratic candidate. This is completely different.

BERMAN: Maggie Haberman, great to have you with us. Thanks so much.

HABERMAN: Thanks. CAMEROTA: All right, it could be days before some key election results are known. There's something about Harry, though, and he has a look at election night overtime, next.

BERMAN: There's always something about Harry.

CAMEROTA: There's really a lot about Harry.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:53:15] BERMAN: Oh, I'm told we have live pictures. This is voting in Virginia.

CAMEROTA: In Sterling.

BERMAN: Sterling, Virginia. The polls opened at 6:00 a.m. Our Brian Todd has been in there watching as the voters go in. They were lined up when the doors opened. This is the beginning. The election could go into overtime. It could be days before we know the answers to some of the midterms biggest questions, including which party will control Congress.

Let's talk about this.

Harry Enten joins us now. There is something about Harry.

Harry is sporting, I will note, the playoff beard this morning.

BERMAN: Harry --

HARRY ENTEN, CNN POLITICS SENIOR WRITER AND ANALYST: I'll shave for tonight. Don't worry about it.

Can I also add that Sterling, Virginia, I believe, is home to the National Weather Service that covers Washington, D.C. So even if I can't get my actual forecast, we still can talk about forecasting in general.

BERMAN: Ladies and gentlemen, Harry Enten.

Overtime tonight.

ENTEN: Yes.

BERMAN: Why?

ENTEN: OK. So let's start off with there are about half a dozen House races in California where there are going to be a lot of mail-in ballots, a lot of close races out there where we don't necessarily know who's going to win. They're on the screen right now, California 10, California 25, California 48, California 39, California 45. We have the same thing up in Washington in Washington's 8th. And you'll notice that little -- that little nice thing in the northeast part of our country, a beautiful place in rural Maine, Maine's 2nd district --

CAMEROTA: Yes. ENTEN: They don't have -- that's not really a mail-in, but what we have is instant runoff voting, a rank choice voting and with that you need a majority of the vote in order to win. I'm not going to go through the rules because it's too complicated this early hour. But the basic thing is that it could take days to count those ballots. It took six days to count the rank choice ballots in the primary in Maine's 2nd district.

BERMAN: Can I say one thing? If we are waiting on California, though, to know whether Democrats control the House or not, it isn't a great night for Democrats, correct?

ENTEN: I mean it depends on your definition of great, right?

BERMAN: Right.

ENTEN: They're not going to blow the water out as -- whatever that phrase means that I came up with. It works for us. But, you know, they could still win the majority, obviously, so and I think Democrats just want to win the majority. But, yes, it wouldn't be, you know, 40 plus (INAUDIBLE).

[06:55:07] CAMEROTA: All right, let's talk about governor -- yes, the governor's race in Georgia.

ENTEN: Right. So I think we've spoken about that before, right? Stacey Abrams is going up -- or the Democrat is going up against the Republican Brian Kemp. You need a majority of the vote to win there on election night, but there's a libertarian candidate, Ted Metz, who could, in fact, pull enough votes away from Brian Kemp, who I think is more likely than not to be the top vote getter tonight so that he doesn't reach a majority, which means we have a runoff in early December for that race.

BERMAN: And it's not just Georgia. There's also something very funky going on in Mississippi.

ENTEN: Right. In Mississippi, we have something known as the jungle primary. So Thad Cochran, the former long-time senator resigned. He was replaced by Cindy Hyde-Smith. She's going up against Republican Chris McDaniel and Democrat Mike Espy. There's also another Democrat in there who will get a minimal share of the vote. But you need 50 percent of the vote or more there to win election night. That's very unlikely to occur.

The question is, which of these Republicans is the top vote getter among Republicans? If it is, in fact, McDaniel, then we could have a Senate race in late November, a runoff between Espy and McDaniel that could determine control of the United States Senate. That would be a very interesting race. Even in Mississippi, McDaniel doesn't poll particularly well. If, however, Hyde-Smith is the Republican who advance, then chances are that Republicans will hold on to that seat.

CAMEROTA: You live for moments like this, Harry Enten.

ENTEN: Oh, I live for moments. Let me tell you how many cans of diet soda that I'm going to have

tonight. And I'm going to eat so unhealthy my mother is going to call me up and be very, very upset with me.

BERMAN: Diet cream soda.

CAMEROTA: Well, we'll look forward to that.

ENTEN: Diet cream soda and then I'll throw a little espresso in there just for safety.

CAMEROTA: Ewe.

Thank you, Harry, very much.

ENTEN: Yes, whatever.

BERMAN: All right, polls open in half the country in just minutes. Will President Trump's closing message work? NEW DAY after a quick -- is back after a quick break.

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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: You have to go out to vote because in a sense I am on the ticket.

SEN. MAZIE HIRONO (D), HAWAII: The Republicans are banking on a president who is stoking anti-immigrant fears.

[07:00:00] MIKE PENCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We're securing our borders. We've put that caravan on notice.

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: The character of this country is on the ballot.