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Transcript: All In with Chris Hayes, October 13, 2020

Guests: Chuck Schumer, Wendy Davis, Jon Lovett, Sean McElwee

Summary

Republicans push forward on Supreme Court pick even though it could hurt them politically. Harris County, Texas sets record for the day of early voting. President Trump hits the campaign trail despite COVID fears. The latest analysis gives Democrats a good shot at Senate majority.

Transcript

MICHAEL STEELE, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: They should, but you know -- and they will, and they will. Look, one Coronavirus infected campaign at a time.

JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: Dr. Vin Gupta, thank you. Doctor -- Dr. Michael Steele -- Michael Steele, thank you both very much. "ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES" starts right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Tonight on ALL IN.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I think this will end up in the Supreme Court. And I think it's very important that we have nine justices.

SEN. CHRIS COONS (D-DE): He's trying to rush this nomination ahead so you might cast a decision, a vote, in his favor in the event of a disputed election.

HAYES: One last heist by a party on the verge of losing power. Tonight, Senator Chuck Schumer on today's Supreme Court's charade and the desperate Republican attempt to force an unpopular agenda down America's throat.

Then, another COVID outbreak tied to Trump campaign events as the pro-virus party rolls off.

RUDY GIULIANI, LAWYER OF DONALD TRUMP: People don't die of this disease anymore.

HAYES: Plus, an incredible first day of early voting in Texas with Wendy Davis and why the forecast for control of the Senate keeps improving for Democrats.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): I don't know what's going on out there, but I can tell you there's a lot of money being raised in this campaign.

HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. As you may have noticed, the news today has been dominated by the confirmation hearing for the staunchly conservative judge that Republicans are dead set on ramming through an incredibly accelerated timeline. That's Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

And they're doing it at a hearing involving not one but two Republican senators Mike Lee and Thom Tillis who have tested positive for COVID, and until very recently apparently were shedding viral load. Hopefully, that stop now because they're all in the room together.

Let's take a step back for a moment from the particulars of Judge Barrett because what's been happening today isn't really about any one person. I mean, take a look at where the country finds itself right now specifically, where the Republican Party is so dead set on pushing through this confirmation finds itself. And you've got to ask, why are they doing this?

I mean, it's not -- it's not what people want, right? 77 percent want the Senate to pass another pandemic relief package which they have so far refused to take up. 66 percent want it before a vote on Judge Barrett. And with two senators on the committee having tested positive for the virus just in the last 10 days, 54 percent say in-person hearing should be delayed.

For three weeks before an election, people are voting in record numbers are ready. There is no economic relief apparently coming there are small businesses going under day after day. There are tens of millions of people who file for unemployment whose added benefits have run out. Oh, and by the way, in case you forgot about this, because Republicans like to pretend that it doesn't exist anymore, we are entering a third wave of the virus, the once in a century pandemic that's changed all of our lives.

Right now, still, we're losing nearly 700 Americans a day. Hospitalizations just hit their highest level since August. And they are rising very quickly. And on top of that, it's not like Republicans have a cushy electoral map right now. I mean, Donald Trump is down almost 11 points nationally against Joe Biden. And the Republicans are facing an increasingly brutal Senate match.

You have democrats right now competitive in red states you would not have expected. States like Alaska and Kansas, also competitive in Montana. I mean, Senator Lindsey Graham, who should be smoothly gliding to reelection in the -- what had been very conservative state of South Carolina, finds his own fate up in the air. He was using his position today in the judiciary committee to whine about his opponent's fundraising.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GRAHAM: I don't know what's going on out there, but I can tell you there's a lot of money being raised in this campaign. I'd like to know where the hell some of it is coming from. But that's not your problem.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: So, not only that, this hearing has put front and center the fate of the Affordable Care Act. That's the legislation that guarantees insurance for people with pre-existing conditions that is now quite popular. It guarantees a lot of other things too. It's legislation Republicans have spent 10 years trying to destroy both through a Congress and the courts so far, unsuccessfully, and they are currently trying to kill it as well. They're trying to kill it in the Supreme Court, a week after the election possibly with Judge Amy Coney Barrett, listening to arguments and who knows maybe casting the deciding vote.

And Republicans are whining about being attacked for this, this attempt to destroy the ACA. But of course, the thing about that's weird about it is they could just not do it. They could, you know, pass a one line amendment to take it out of the court's hands. They should tell the Trump administration not to push for it.

They're all obviously on the wrong side of the politics on all this, so the question is why. Why, why, why? Why do this. The answer, as far as I can tell, is there are really two things that define the central product of the modern Republican Party. One is cutting taxes for rich people, which Donald Trump did. It's like the one legislative success, even though the American people probably didn't want that, even though it was the lowest approval rating he ever had in his whole time in the presidency when he was pushing that.

And the other is attempting to stack courts with conservative judges who can protect right-wing interests, whether that's corporations, evangelical Christians, from encroachments by an increasingly diverse and Democratic national majority. Senator Elizabeth Warren put it well. "This absurd hearing is happening today because Amy Coney Barrett is the last hope for desperate undemocratically overrepresentative party trying to cling to power just a little longer and oppose the agenda billionaires, giant corporations, and far-right extremists on our country.

Yet people always complain with what, almost four years into this, that Republicans won't break with Trump. They haven't broken with Trump because they like what he's doing. They approve of Donald Trump. But there are things they would break with Trump over, believe you me. If Donald Trump tried to raise taxes on rich people, they would break with him. If he tried to increase enforcement of civil rights law, they would break with them. If he appointed a judge they thought was pro-choice, my lord, they would break with him.

There's a reason that Trump promised to appoint judges who would overturn Roe and dismantle the ACA. The conservative movement has put decades of effort in organizing and strenuous activism and hundreds of millions of dollars into producing a conservative judiciary that will act, like previous judiciaries and U.S. history have acted, as a kind of bastion of right-wing reaction against a changing country, against movements for reform, against progress on civil rights and against democratically elected legislators seeking to regulate businesses and markets.

And now there's a moment to seize it, to seize that victory, and they will pay any price so long as they get what they want. They had a big success today, in fact, with the Supreme Court allowing the Trump administration to prematurely end the census count in a move likely designed by the administration to reduce the accuracy of the counts particularly marginalized populations and thus reduce their voting power.

And at the Senate Judiciary hearing today, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse methodically explained how hundreds of millions of dollars in conservative dark money have gone into installing judges who will pursue the project of corporations and social conservatives.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (R-RI): It's not three schemes but it's one scheme with the same funders selecting judges, funding campaigns for the judges, and then showing up in court in these orchestrated advocates flotillas to tell the judges what to do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: And Donald Trump literally asked these groups, Leonard Leo, who you saw there, the federal society and others, which judges to install. I mean, this is just a matter of record. This is how it works, and then he does it. And it's not a conspiracy, it's just an out in the open political project. It would be like accusing Democrats the conspiracy of like trying to have health care happen.

The only thing that makes it weird is that now on the threshold of their greatest victory, about to cross the finish line, they all get very squirrely, very tight-lipped about what exactly they're up to. Who me, overturn Roe? No. But as Sen. Amy Klobuchar pointed out, Trump never got the memo that you're supposed to trick everyone on this and use Federalist Society code where you talk about process and procedure, judicial philosophy, textualism, and originalism instead of just outright admitting what you're doing.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-MN): One of President Trump's campaign promises in 2015 was that his judicial appointment will do the right thing on ObamaCare. You can see it right here. What did the President say here? He said, September 23, 2020, I think this -- he means the election -- will end up in the Supreme Court. And I think it's very important that we have nine justices. I don't think how much clearer we can be.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Yes, the President is one of the few people who's honest about this whole situation. Right now, as I said at the top of the show, the windows seems to be shutting on this Republican majority. Maybe we'll see if the polls right, we'll see people got to vote. But you can feel the air. They are in trouble. Look at the expression on Lindsey Graham's face. And this, what we saw today, what we're seeing, this is one last heist before the cops show up.

I'm joined now by the Democratic leader in the Senate, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. It's good to -- it's good to have you, Senator. I wonder if there was a moment today in the hearing that jumped out to you. You're not on that committee, but I'm sure you've been attentive to it. Was there something that jumped out to you today?

SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): Yes, I thought Sheldon Whitehouse's presentation was so powerful. What it showed was for 30 years, there's been a group of hard-right oligarchs who knew that even if they control the elected branches of government, the presidency, the House, and Senate, they couldn't get what they wanted, because they were so far over so far to the right from the average American, even the average Republican.

So, for 30 years through funding, and all kinds of other processes, they have tried to control the courts. And as you said, this is their last shot, their last gasp before they run out of power in every way politically. And this idea that these judges are just looking at the law and deciding the law as is has been ripped away by Sheldon Whitehouse's efforts.

They are paid for by -- there's all this money that goes in to elect them. There's all this money that goes into select them. President Trump said he would only take people from the Federalist Society list. And then there's money that goes into the candidates to vote for -- you know, the senators to vote for them. And this is -- this has ruined our judicial process.

And the claims by Amy Coney Barrett and the previous ones that oh, I don't know how I'm going to vote. Well, let's take -- let's just take, Chris, the ACA. She's previously said she wants it overturned, number one. Number two, President Trump said he will only pick people who will overturn it. Do you think he didn't know? And number three, she said she's following Scalia. He's his -- he's her mentor. He of course wanted to overturn the ACA, (INAUDIBLE).

Anyone who thinks that Amy Coney Barrett won't vote to overturn the ACA is in a different world. It's really this -- it's a cockeyed optimist. Same thing, by the way, on Roe.

HAYES: Wait a second. Let me -- let me stop you there. Wait one second, I want to stop you there on the ACA. First of all, just for clarity sake, she said that she thought the dissents got the better the constitutional argument in those -- in those ACA cases, and they were --

SCHUMER: Yes, but they also wrote a lot of stuff about abortion earlier on.

HAYES: Yes, and I want to talk about Roe, but can we -- I just want to talk -- I have you here and I have to ask you this question. This is driving me insane. You have the Trump administration and Republican Attorney General are trying to kill the ACA before the court. All the Republicans act like you're some kind of psychopath if you bring up the fact they want to kill the ACA, which obviously they want to do. We've all been alive for the last 10 years.

My question is, am I crazy or could the Senate and the House pass a one sentence amendments that would just take this away from the court if everyone actually didn't want it to go before the court? Am I not -- am I losing my mind or could you all do that?

SCHUMER: Absolutely right. You hit it before. The right-wing paymasters who want to get rid of the ACA because they don't want to pay taxes, they want to shrink government, the Federalist Society, and the club progressive, they want to drown the federal government in the bathtub. They won't let them do that. And that's why they do it.

And it's clear, they're afraid of this. That's why they can't say what they're doing. That's where they have to send it to a court. And bottom line, bottom line here, they've tried diversions. They tried to divert, oh, the Democrats are making this a religious test. No one made it a religious test. Oh, the Democrats are doing this or that. None of that happened.

The bottom line is we showed yesterday the Judiciary Committee, I'm really proud of them, how important ACA is to this nomination, and how likely it is their health care will be ripped up from them if Amy Coney Barrett gets on the court.

HAYES: You mentioned Roe and I want to -- before we discuss Roe which I agree is another one of these weird ball hiding enterprises that drives me nuts, I want to play -- I want to play the exchange with Judge Barrett on this notion of super precedent which is obviously, you know, they're (INAUDIBLE). There's precedent from Supreme Court cases, there's some legal theorization around super precedent, which is cases like Brown v Board that no one really challenges. They're sort of set in stone. And a question about whether Roe falls in that category. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KLOBUCHAR: Brown v Board of Education, as we know that, holds that the 14th amendment, prohibits states from segregating schools on the basis of race.

AMY CONEY BARRETT, U.S. SUPREME COURT NOMINEE: It's super precedent. People consider it to be on that very small list of things that are so widely established and agreed upon by everyone. Calls for its overruling simply don't exist.

KLOBUCHAR: Is Roe a super precedent?

BARRETT: How would you define super precedent? I'm answering a lot of questions about a Roe which I think indicates that Roe doesn't fall in that category.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: What do you think of that answer? And what do you think about Republicans suddenly get very gun shy about whether they actually want to overturn Roe which of course they do?

SCHUMER: Well, first of all, Judge Coney Barrett isn't answering questions on Brown v Board because she hasn't talked about overturning it. She's talked about being against Roe and choice for a very long time. And the bottom line is very, very simple. You can't use the standard you use, if there's debate about it, it's not a super precedent.

We have a lot of racists in this country. Does that mean that racism can be OK in court cases, that we can curtail the 14th amendment or something like that? Of course not. Roe is super precedent. It's been established. It's been part of the law of the land for a very long time. Courts have upheld it. Senator Klobuchar talked about that in the probe in the cases after Roe. And simply because some people don't think Roe is right, doesn't avoid making it a super precedent.

You could make any argument. You could say nothing is a super precedent because of that. And what you say it five percent of America wanted to repeal Brown, we should -- that should not be a super precedent, it's an absurd line of reasoning.

HAYES: I want to pivot to a policy matter that you may have to take up soon around some kind of rescue package. I will confess that I follow this minutely and I'm deeply confused about the status of things. The President is all over the place. Here's how I understand it. The President is all over the place and doesn't have the attention span to concentrate on this for more than five minutes.

Mitch McConnell's caucus hates the idea of passing a big rescue bill, and the House wants one. But the thing I can't quite understand is it seemed like there was a tentative deal at say $1.8 trillion between the White House and Mnuchin and the speaker, and the Speaker was on CNN today basically saying like, no, it's not good enough. And that strikes a lot of people as a little nuts. Like if that were the deal, wouldn't you all take it?

SCHUMER: Well, the Speaker is right. First of all, the 1.8 is not really the 1.8 that meets America's needs, as she said. It contains all sorts of giveaways so the President can just give away money and leaves out huge numbers of things that are needed to help people. The package that the House passed, first the 3.4 trillion, and then when they came down and did the 2.2 trillion, was designed at a bare minimum to meet America's needs.

The 1.8 doesn't not just because it's 1.8, but because the language in it is far worse than what is in the 2.2 and just doesn't meet America's needs. Nancy is right to reject, and they are just playing a game. They're trying to say a higher number than they originally were without actually changing any of the language. She has asked Mnuchin to get her language on these issues on the testing issue, so vital in preventing the third Corona wave, which you talked about. They don't get in.

And then at the same time, you have this going on. It depends what day it is to know where Trump is at and where the Republicans are at. Trump today now says go big, and the Republican Senate says go very little or not at all. How do you negotiate?

HAYES: Yes, I mean, that strikes me as descriptively been the problem since May, which is that you need -- you need McConnell in the White House to come to a position to negotiate for and that hasn't happened, so here we are. But it also seems to me -- I mean, I guess I sort of feel like, does everyone over there understand that the economy is going to fall through a crater and it's going to be three months, and we're going to be like, the Democrats, if they win are going to inflate -- inherit flaming wreckage in the country again?

SCHUMER: Well, look, as soon as -- look, if we get the majority in the Senate, and we get a Democratic president, we will be able to pass a bill that really meets --

HAYES: That's three months away.

SCHUMER: -- really meets America's needs. If we win by a lot, you never know what will happen in the lame duck. But if this $1.8 billion was real and could really affect the needs of America across the board, that would be great. But it isn't. If they say one-eight, if you look at the language, it's a lot less than meets the eye.

And then, you know, Mnuchin goes in, and then the Republican senators come in, as you talked about before, how they don't want to pay any taxes. You have 20 of them would want zero dollars. Zero, zero dollars.

HAYES: Yes, they're not going to -- yeah, it would pass with the full Democrat -- if it passed to be your caucus, plus, you know, 15 or whatever. But anyone who's watching, if you're participating in the relief bills betting markets, I think that you got your answer.

SCHUMER: So, you leave -- you know, you're faced with this choice. Do you leave out the kids who aren't getting fed which may not be in their bill? Do you leave out the people who are being evicted from their homes, which may not be in the bill? Do you leave out the restaurants that is shutting down and needs some real relief, which is not in their bill?

You can go over and over and over as to what is left out. And it's not a question of politics. It's a question of the substance of meeting the needs of America which their bill doesn't come close to doing. And my guess is that they'll pull back from it as they tried to move it to the Senate making it even worse.

HAYES: Senator Chuck Schumer who is the Democratic leader in the United States Senate, he represents the state of New York, thank you for your time tonight, sir.

SCHUMER: It's nice to be with you.

HAYES: All right, tonight record-breaking early voting numbers with still three weeks to go. Next, Wendy Davis on the massive turnout in Texas and the Republican campaign to suppress the vote. Don't go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: This was a scene in Georgia yesterday on the first day of early voting, long lines and wait times of up to 10 hours to cast a ballot. And there was a similar scene in Texas today. That's also the first day of early voting in that state. Huge lines, thanks to voter enthusiasm, people looking to vote safely during a pandemic, and a sustained effort by Republican officials to make voting as hard as possible.

In Harris County, Texas which contains Houston, early voting records were absolutely obliterated today. The previous record was 68,000 votes on the first day of early voting. That was broken by 2:00 p.m. local time with five hours of voting still ago. As of about an hour ago, the total number was 115,000 with an hour left.

Now, Harris County is the most populous county in Texas. It's one of the focal points of Republican efforts to restrict the vote because county officials had wanted to set up absentee ballot drop off boxes in a dozen locations during the pandemic, but Republican Governor Greg Abbott said they can only have one absentee ballot box for the entire county. That's a county that has more than four million people living in it, and that led to lines like this one. And then a federal judge tried to overrule the governor's order, but then the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals with three Trump-appointed judges just ruled in Abbott's favor.

Now, there is a reason the Republicans are desperate to suppress the vote in Harris County. Democratic candidate Beto O'Rourke beat Republican Senator Ted Cruz there by 17 points in 2018. It's precisely the kind of suburban Metro, traditionally a Republican area, that Republicans have been losing in the state of Texas and others like it. It's not the only one.

In the 21st Congressional District of Texas, Republicans won the seat by nearly 21 points in 2016. That's not a competitive seat. That's a walk. in 2018, THE Republican candidate Chip Roy won by less than three percent of the vote. This year, he's facing a challenge from Democrat Wendy Davis.

Davis is no stranger to taking on Republicans in Texas. You might remember, in 2013, she gained national attention as a Texas State Senator for her filibuster of a sweeping anti-abortion law, and she unsuccessfully ran for governor the very next year. And Wendy Davis joins me now.

It's great to have you. I want to start with the sort of environment of Texas right now. I mean, it's a fascinating place politically, it has been for a long time, but you've got tremendous amounts of mobilization, enthusiasm, and this kind of battle developing between the governor and the Republican, sort of, power apparatus at the statewide level. And these increasingly Democratic localities like Harris County that has a Democratic county judge, how do you see this playing out?

WENDY DAVIS (D), CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE OF TEXAS: First of all, thank you so much, Chris, for having me tonight. And you're right. It's an epic battle underway here in Texas. And it's been underway for many years now with Republicans doing everything they can to pass suppressive voter laws and trying to hold back what they see as the demographic destiny of the state.

And the great thing about the "we won't quit attitude" of Texas Democrats is that we just keep plowing ahead, forging ahead and making sure that year over year, we're registering as many voters as we can, we're fielding great candidates, and we are fielding candidates up and down the ballot. Understanding that that's really the key to making sure that we're getting people turned out and we're going to get those kinds of numbers like you saw in Harris County today. And the same held true for every one of our major urban areas in the state today.

HAYES: I see that your location identifier has you in Austin, Texas right now. And this stat leap -- left out at me. Travis County, which is around Austin, has more than 850,000 eligible voters. A record 97 percent of them are registered to vote in the November 3rd general election, which is a mind-blowing statistic. This is not an -- this is not an accident. This is the product I imagined of a lot of work.

DAVIS: A great deal of work. You know, from volunteers all the way to elections administrators, people have been doing this work for years here. And we're so lucky that we had candidates like Beto O'Rourke, for example, in 2018, that generated so much excitement. And clearly this year, a lot of us hoping that the nightmare of the last four years is finally going to be over. And that's of course, created a great deal of enthusiasm in that registration number as well.

And the interesting thing, Chris, about our numbers here in Travis County, yes, 97 percent of eligible voters are registered to vote here now, about 78 to 80 percent of them typically vote Democratic.

HAYES: You are in a race against a Republican incumbent in one of these districts that to me is a kind of paradigmatic district of the Trump era. This is the kind of district that you know, if you go back and you look at it in 2012, doesn't look like a democratic district. And there are a bunch of these. They're Orange County in California, they're the Atlanta suburbs in Georgia in Lucy McBath. There's the district you're in.

What are you hearing from voters? Like, who are you talking to and what are you hearing as the kind of prime issue given the tremendous disarray the country is in right now?

DAVIS: Well, it's the same issue it was four years ago, you know, not to be repetitive or boring in any way. It's about health care. And it's particularly about health care now in the pandemic, when people like my opponent, Chip Roy, have been working furiously to end the Affordable Care Act and leave us in a state that already has the highest percentage of uninsured people in the country, with even fewer people having insurance.

But the interesting thing about our dynamic here, Chris, is that in that last four-year period, we've added 1.6 million registered voters to our rolls. The vast majority of them have been in what they called the Blue Spine, I-35 that starts in Laredo and extends through San Antonio and Austin and all the way up to Dallas Fort Worth.

And the biggest chunk of those new voters are in three of our major urban counties here in Texas, two of which are in this Congressional district. And that's really what puts areas like this in play. We are fast growing, we are registering that growth, and that's really what's going to give us an opportunity to flip these seats.

And it's not just that growth, it's the fact that Republicans have done just about everything they can do to alienate suburban women voters. And they certainly make up a huge percentage of the voting bloc in the district that I'm running in against Chip Roy. And we really believe they're going to be very determinative of our outcome here.

HAYES: Yes, I would imagine that is the case. You know, Greg Abbott, who is a political colossus in that state, polling upside down on favorability, says something to me about the status of things right there, particularly with the handling of the of the pandemic, which is part of it too. Wendy Davis, thank you for making some time for us tonight.

DAVIS: Chris, thank you. And please tell your viewers, go to WendyDavisforCongress.com and see how you can help us out in these final days. Thank you.

HAYES: All right, coming up, another outbreak in the President's wake, and how the Trump campaign went from pretending COVID doesn't exist to pretending it can't really hurt you.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I went through it. Now, they say I'm immune. I can feel -- I feel so powerful. I'll walk into that audience. I'll walk in there; I'll kiss everyone in that audience.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: When you're a star, they let you do that. Yet another completely reckless big public event by the President yesterday in Sanford, Florida, outdoors for what it's worth, but packed in with most people not wearing masks. They're doing another one tonight. He did this one in Florida, a state that still reporting an average of more than 2,000 cases a day.

The White House has turned some kind of weird corner after the President's diagnosis. I don't know if you've noticed this. They've gone from pretending the virus doesn't exist to flirting with it being affirmatively good to get COVID and spread COVID.

And these events are spreading it. New York Times, for example, reporting that Minnesota has connected two dozen Coronavirus cases with campaign events most of them Trump visits. Remember he was in Duluth right before he got diagnosed. And it is not just Trump events. This has now become part of the Republican circuit.

This was a Columbus Day event in Philadelphia with 76-year-old Rudy Giuliani yesterday, much of it in a packed room where some people were not wearing masks. An event with the Trump campaign surrogate told the adoring crowd that people don't die of this disease anymore.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GIULIANI: People don't die of this disease anymore. Old people die. Middle people die very little. And you know, the elderly people have only one percent chance to dying.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Olivia Nuzzi of the New York Magazine reporting on site that a police officer outside the Trump campaign office at the event was in violation of the city mandate. And then he, a police officer, refuse to go in, prompting Nuzzi to tweet "it truly feels like the Trump campaign is trying to kill its own voters."

NBC News White House Correspondent Geoff Bennett has seen this firsthand as well. He joins us from Florida right now where he was covering a much safer Biden event. And Geoff, I thought maybe we could just start on the, you know, the sort of granular logistics of these two campaigns in their approach to these issues. Just around the safety of staff, personnel, press, guests, and Secret Service, what have you observed?

GEOFF BENNETT, NBC NES WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, I'll tell you what, Chris. Covering Trump campaign rallies in during this era of Coronavirus has always had sort of a surreal aspect to it. Because we cover this pandemic day in and day out minute by minute. And stepping into these rallies, you step into an environment where people willfully act as if this pandemic isn't a real thing.

And so yesterday in Sanford, Florida, the Trump campaign checked all the boxes. They were taking people's temperatures. They were offering masks, they were offering hand sanitizer, but they weren't enforcing it. And so, Trump supporters who have bought into the cult of personality that is Donald Trump, none of them -- most of them were not wearing masks, and there was certainly no social distancing.

Compare that to what happened today with the Biden campaign. He had an indoor event in Pembroke Pines. It was aimed at older voters. It was indoors, so Joe Biden kept his mask on the entire time. It was sparsely attended by design. All of the seats were socially distanced.

From there, he had an outdoor event in Miramar. And that was basically a drive-in rally. People stayed in their cars. Biden was outdoors on a stage. We in the media who weren't part of the pool of reporters, that small group that changes by day that travels with the candidate, those of us who weren't part of that, Chris, we were kept about two football fields distance back.

I have to tell you, I wasn't happy about that because it made it really hard to cover Joe Biden, but the campaign says it's keeping these COVID protocols in place to keep him safe. And then wherever Biden is, they abide by the protocols of that specific region.

But look, President Trump, as we now know, of course, was hospitalized for Coronavirus. And it's as if he emerged from that having learned all of the wrong lessons. Yesterday, in Sanford, he walked out on stage, was tossing masks to his supporters, yet when he boarded Air Force One, did not wear a mask, and when he came out, did not wear a mask.

The President is suggesting that he's immune. He's trying to spin this to his political advantage. To paraphrase him, he said, I'm immune. Do you want another guy like Joe Biden who isn't immune and is still in his basement? That's the kind of pitch that he's trying to make, but it's not resonating with voters, not here in Florida, the poll show.

And Joe Biden said something today during his event in Pembroke Pines for older voters. He said, think about this. How many times in the last seven months have you been able to hug your grandchildren? And I got to tell you, for people of a certain age who know that, you know, time is valuable and time is finite, that is an argument that resonates deeply.

And so, President Trump has always treated this pandemic as if it's a political albatross that he can message his way out of. He's never treated it as if it's a public health imperative. And here we are seven, eight months into this, the man himself has contracted this disease and has recovered from it, and yet he still apparently has not learned the right lesson.

HAYES: Well, and in some ways, it's striking to see. I mean, I am obviously I'm happy the president recovered, and I'm happy that that no one appears to have gotten like seriously or deathly ill from this cluster as far as we know. But this idea that Rudy Giuliani is telling people in this cramped little arena we're, you know, no one dies of this anymore. Like we're -- like, we lost 700 Americans today. We'll lose another 700 tomorrow. We'll lose 5,000 people who will be wiped off the face of the earth before Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed if she's confirmed.

Like, it's definitely still happening out there. It is absolutely reality. And the sort of twin -- the reality suspension zone of the Trump campaign universe and its hermetically sealed nature continues to astound me.

BENNETT: Yes. And look, President Trump can continue to campaign as if he's immune, the President's maskless advisors can do that, to include Mark Meadows, the White House Chief of Staff who was on the Hill the other day, and refused to talk to reporters if he had to have a mask on, because the President still lives, works, and operates within a bubble, was treated with the kind of treatment that the average American cannot get, by the way, at taxpayer expense to which the President, according to published reports, did not contribute. So, it's a huge issue.

And I think at a certain point, we're going to look back on this era of Coronavirus and marvel at just the amount of time we've spent on sheer stupidity. We know the effectiveness of masks and yet there is still this "debate about whether or not people want to wear masks." We know that everything that Rudy Giuliani said in that cramped room is a lie, and yet we still have to talk about it because he's Rudy Giuliani. He's the President's one time lawyer who still commands a lot of attention.

And yet here in Florida, 5,000 people just die. I mean, that was the milestone they just passed. And nationally, it's what, 215,000 American lives lost seven, eight months into this pandemic.

HAYES: All right, Geoff Bennett who has been doing great reporting out in the field on all this, thank you for sharing that and stay safe out there, please.

BENNETT: Thanks.

HAYES: Coming up, three weeks from Election Day, the Senate map is not looking great for Republicans, I got to say. The growing number of states that Democrats have a chance at flipping just ahead.

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HAYES: Three weeks from today, Americans will not just decide who they want the White House but the balance of power in the Senate as well, on domestic congressional races and down ballot races. In the U.S. Senate, there are 35 seats up this year, 23 held by Republicans, 12 by Democrats. And p0lling analysis site FiveThirtyEight now projects Democrats are slightly favored to take over that chamber. It's close.

We've been falling day by day an expanding battleground map of states that now have genuinely competitive center races. One of those races where the polling seemed pretty good for Democrats early on was North Carolina. That's where incumbent Republican Senator Thom Tillis is facing a challenge from former state senator, an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran Cal Cunningham.

And back in the beginning of September, Cunningham was performing pretty well. A point ahead of Tillis in the Monmouth University poll, which left a lot of people thinking, wow, this this could happen. Could this be a Democratic Senate pickup? And then, a week and a half ago, that also it seemed to be up ended. On October 2nd, Tillis' campaign confirmed the senator tested positive for Coronavirus. And later that very same day, text messages surfaced between Cal Cunningham and a woman who is not his wife.

After about a week of pretty brutal extramarital relationship accusations that started look like, I don't know, maybe Democrats were counting their chickens a little too early in the North Carolina Senate race. But that new polling came out and guess what, the whole thing seems to have helped Cal Cunningham.

In a Monmouth University poll just released today, Cunningham's lead over Senator Thom Tillis has actually expanded. He's now up by four points whereas he was only up by one in September. It's very, very weird year politically. Right now Democrats seem to have a lot of paths to a Senate Majority. We'll talk about that next.

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HAYES: Democrats want to flip the Senate in November. Right now, the way things are looking, it's definitely doable. Republicans have 53 senators Democrats have 45. There are two independent senators who caucus with the Democrats. So, if Biden and Harris win the White House, Democrats need to gain three seats to take control the Senate since the vice president can act as a tiebreaker.

Now, if Biden and Harris don't win the White House, Democrats seem to flip four seats to take control, though their fates are probably lined up. And that's if Senator Doug Jones of Alabama keeps his seat. A recent poll has him down 12 points to Republican Tommy Tuberville. But even with that possible pickup opportunity for Republicans, Democrats are in a strong position to possibly take the Senate even if they lose the Jones seat.

The Cook Political Report has nine Republican-held Senate seats rated as either leaning Democratic or toss-ups right now. That includes North Carolina where Cal Cunningham has emerged from his scandal apparently stronger than he was before. Here to assess the chances Democrats can flip the Senate, I'm joined by Sean McElwee, co-founder and executive director of Data for Progress, and Jon Lovett, co-founder of Crooked Media, which has launched VotetoSaveAmerica.com to help people register to vote.

Jon, let me start with you. You know, I was filing all these North Carolina Republican reporters -- sorry, campaign reporters who are in the state just talking about how terrible the news environment was, how the evening news was about this accusation and that, and Cunningham is toast. And I thought to myself, like this is an interesting experiment in the Trump era. Does this stuff matter anymore? And it looks like we have something of a tentative answer to that.

JON LOVETT, CO-FOUNDER, CROOKED MEDIA: Yes, I mean, you know, look, flirty texts. A big very important pandemic revanchist anti-Democratic movement, movement for social justice, economic crisis, a COVID positive senator marching around the Judiciary Committee. I mean, you know, bigger fish to fry.

HAYES: bigger fish to fry seems to be the theme generally of these races. And I thought Sean that Data for Progress' polling was interesting. I have been sort of intrigued by like the Cal Cunningham secret. HE really does have a kind of like generic Democrat kind of bearing to him. What is driving the result in North Carolina right now, and more broadly the sort of political terrain in the Senate races?

SEAN MCELWEE, CO-FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, DATA FOR PROGRESS: Yes, absolutely. So we did a poll in North Carolina that was actually fielded during the duration of the scandal. And we found that Cunningham's support if anything mildly increased, which is consistent with (INAUDIBLE) and SurveyUSA. And the reality is voters are upset about the fact that the Senate is prioritizing a partisan Supreme Court pick over Coronavirus relief.

We've seen it consistently voters want more spending on Coronavirus even in the most conservative states. When voters were asked do you think we should prioritize the Supreme Court appointment or more Coronavirus aid, only about a third say the Supreme Court appointment. The other two-thirds are saying Coronavirus aid.

HAYES: What do you guys, Jon -- like, I know that you have been doing a lot of research and sort of discussions and interfacing with different focus groups about sort of where the issue spaces for Democrats right now, and where the kind of marginal voter can be -- can be moved. And I wonder how you see the sort of substance of this race down the stretch in the next three weeks?

LOVETT: Yes, I mean, we did a poll and we reached a lot of marginal voters, people who were first time voters in 2016 who didn't vote in 2018. And what we found was that they were more inclined to vote now, that they were incredibly motivated to vote, that they don't like Donald Trump, and they don't -- they have made up their minds there. But they actually just needed a positive case for why to vote.

And what we found was Democratic messages, just simple, basic Democratic messages about health care, about the economy, putting Donald Trump's tax cuts for the rich versus tax cuts for the middle class. Protecting pre-existing conditions versus eliminating those protections. Climate change is a hoax versus taking climate change seriously to create jobs. Like, all of those sort of simple messages were really resonant with these kinds of voters who are looking for a positive reason to just come out and participate. So, that was I think --

HAYES: You know, it's --

LOVETT: It was a positive thing.

HAYES: It's funny you said that because one of the things that's striking about this campaign to me is that for all the insanity and reality and disaster the country is in, and the horror of the just the unending pandemic, A, the race has been fairly stable in a sort of bizarre way. And B, Sean, it strikes me that so much of the Democratic messaging is just the most kind of meat and potatoes stuff.

Like, all the stuff about Donald Trump is, is kind of priced in. And it really is a lot of like, we will protect your healthcare. We will take climate change seriously. We will create jobs. Like, those are the Biden ads. It is the most kitchen table straight down the middle kind of Democratic messaging you can imagine.

MCELWEE: Right, absolutely. I mean, the fact is, is that the closing stretch of this race is exactly two terrain the Democrats want it to be on. We're talking about a Supreme Court justice who wants to repeal the ACA, and we're talking about Coronavirus, which has been an absolute disaster for Trump.

And we've had races that were -- it's just ungodly unlikely that this will be in play, Alaska, Kansas, Montana. These are all very competitive. South Carolina, our latest polling has Jamie Harrison up by one in South Carolina. We have Greenfield up in Iowa. These are races that never were on the map that are now being put on the map.

HAYES: You know, Jon, I remember so distinctly 2002, the midterms post 9/11. And I remember watching Democratic candidates ads that were all about like how much how much they wanted to go after al Qaeda and how tough they were in the war on terror and Iraq. And then like, because they were -- they were on the opponent's terrain, they were like -- they were defending themselves from the opponent stream.

And then I watched these ads of John Cornyn, who should not be in a close race, coming up being like no one loves protecting people pre-existing conditions more than I do. And it just says to me like, they are wrong footed and back footed whether they win or lose on the issue terrain right now.

LOVETT: Right? Yes. No, that's right. I mean, I do think, you know, it's strange, right? We're in the middle of an extraordinary election in which so much of the -- so much of the fighting, so much of the news is about things taking place outside of politics, outside of the ordinary course of Democratic politics, right, voter suppression, prosecuting your opponents, conspiracy theories, QAnon, all of that.

But Democrats, I think part of the reason they're resorting to those kinds of tactics is because we are on the issues in actual Democratic politics where we're supposed to be having this fight. It's not a hard fight, right? It's just their hope has to be that their propaganda machine and there's enough sort of cultural rot and enough -- and enough noise in the system that they can sort of save some of these seats and even save Donald Trump.

But if we were fighting this just on, you know, the marketplace of ideas, Democratic politics face to face, it's not -- it's not really close. I don't think anyone thinks that it would be based on the issues that we're talking about.

HAYES: Yes. And I think that nothing embodies that more than their own bizarre behavior towards their own stated position on the ACA, which is that you're an absolute monster to suggest that we have the position that we actually have, and what kind of crazy person would have that? We do. Sean McElwee and John Lovett, thank you both, gentlemen, for making time tonight. I appreciate it.

That is ALL IN on this Tuesday night. "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.

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

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