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GOP's Aggressive Legal Election Strategy Has More Than 130 Cases; Fight for the Youth Vote in Pennsylvania Intensifies; Donald Trump Holds Rally at Madison Square Garden; Donald Trump Rally Criticized for Platforming Racist, Misogynist, and Xenophobic Rhetoric; Kamala Harris Answers Question on Former NFL Player Shannon Sharpe's Podcast. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired October 28, 2024 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00]

COY WIRE, CNN SPORTS ANCHOR AND CORRESPONDENT: And congrats to your Patriots who have sent the Jets further into darkness.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: The Patriots beat the Jets. There's a team that lost to the Patriots, and it was the New York Jets. What a stunning Sunday it was. Coy Wire --

COY WIRE, CNN SPORTS ANCHOR AND CORRESPONDENT: I know you were having a great day.

BERMAN: I didn't want them to win. I want them to get the draft pick, but they, you know, the Jets still, still can't eke it out. All right, Coy Wire, thank you very much.

Brand new hour of CNN NEWS CENTRAL starts now.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Donald Trump holds a huge rally in his hometown, and now Republicans are trying hard to play cleanup quickly after the fact. The Harris campaign responding today to his supporters trashing Puerto Rico from the stage.

And hitting the trail this morning, Harris is, with some new support from a big name, Bad Bunny.

The McDonald's quarter pounder is back on the menu at more than 900 restaurants after a deadly e. coli outbreak. The one key ingredient, though, that they are still keeping out.

I'm Kate Bolduan with sara Sidner and John Berman. This is CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: We are one week and one day from Election Day. Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will head out this morning to battleground states just hours after one of Trump's largest rallies gave a huge platform to some of the most racist, misogynistic, and vulgar remarks we have heard this election cycle.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TONY HINCHCLIFFE: There's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yes. I think it's called Puerto Rico.

SID ROSENBERG, RADIO HOST: She is some sick -- that Hillary Clinton, huh? What a sick son of a -- the whole -- party, a bunch of degenerates.

DAVID REM, REPUBLICAN POLITICIAN: Can you imagine? Kamala Harris performing a random, kind, generous act?

She is the devil, whoever screamed that out. She is the anti-Christ.

GRANT CARDONE, BUSINESS OWNER: Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country. We need to slaughter these other people.

DONALD TRUMP, (R) U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: They're smart and they're vicious, and we have to defeat them. And when I say "the enemy from within", the other side goes crazy. They are indeed the enemy from within.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: Of all the sickening things that were said, Trump's campaign has talked about the jokes, saying the joke about Puerto Rico does not reflect the views of President Trump.

Let's bring in CNN political director David Chalian. David, when you heard all this rhetoric, what is the one big thing that people need to know about it today?

DAVID CHALIAN, CNN POLITICAL DIRECTOR: Well, while I was watching it, and my one big takeaway was this is probably if Kamala Harris's campaign could have designed the takeaways from the Madison Square Garden rally for Trump, this might be some version that they would have designed, because their entire mission in these last eight days is to draw a sharp contrast in the minds of American voters as possible, to put the choice of these two candidates, their visions, how they present their agendas to the country in as much stark relief as possible. And this fed into that.

I also was thinking earlier in the day, Donald Trump's campaign put out a two-minute ad, they were going to -- they ran it in football games and NFL game, Sara. And it was -- I watched this ad yesterday morning, and I sent it around to our team, and I said, I think this is the most compelling ad of the cycle from the Trump campaign. It was the most sort of positive, most focused on the economy on some issues that his advisers think worked really well for him. It was really succinct. And it was the opposite of the racism, misogyny, the nastiness that you see as sort of staples of Trump's rallies on the campaign trail.

And yet, within hours, it was back to this. So I just think that this puts clear, front and center for the American people, especially those small slice of voters who haven't decided yet, what their choices before this election. SIDNER: It certainly does.

All right, so there is new CNN polling out this morning. And some of it finds that Americans don't think Trump will concede if he loses, when you look at the numbers. That is a huge number of people, 69 percent saying they don't think he will concede, and they don't trust in the Supreme Court to make the right decision on legal challenges related to the 2020 election. What do you take away from this?

CHALIAN: Well, that seems like a pretty toxic brew to me, right? Because if you're just talking about the expectations that the American people have, if only 30 percent of Americans think that if Donald Trump loses, hell actually concede, and yet, a majority don't have faith in the Supreme Court to properly adjudicate 2024 election related matters, you could just see the kind of environment that the post-election period could have depending on the outcome and where the American people are now with their expectations of that.

[08:05:07]

A decline in the trust of an institution like the Supreme Court at precisely the same time that a vast majority of Americans don't think one of the candidates would actually concede a loss in this election, that could spell real trouble.

SIDNER: And David, of course, Harris has been sort of leaning in on her contrasting her character with Trumps in the coming days. She's spoke to Shannon Sharpe, who has a podcast, and she's targeting men. Let's listen to what they said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SHANNON SHARPE, PODCAST HOST: He said immigrants are taking black jobs. I don't know what those black job that they're taking. Can you elaborate on that, what the immigrants are taking, what black jobs are they --

KAMALA HARRIS, (D) VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES ND PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: It's just another example of him trying to divide and him trying to scare people. It's just another example of him doing that, of him trying to say it's either you or them.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARRIS: What did you make of this and this message?

CHALIAN: well, I just first made of the fact that, look at what Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are doing in terms of how they're trying to reach voters. In this fragmented media environment, you've got to go everywhere and slice and dice to where people are, because they're not just in the aggregate tuning into the evening news, as we know, Sara. So this is, to just hear her, yes, go make the play for some male voters, try to dig into Trump's advantage there.

But Shannon Sharpe's podcast, I mean, who had on their bingo card as something that a presidential candidate would be doing the closing days of the campaign?

SIDNER: David Chalian, it is always a pleasure. Thanks for breaking it all down for us.

John?

BERMAN: I will note, it was National Tight Ends Day, which might explain why she was doing Shannon Sharpe's podcast.

(LAUGHTER)

BERMAN: All right, with us now, CNN political analyst and historian Leah Wright Rigueur, and CNN political analyst Jackie Kucinich, Washington bureau chief for the paper of record, "The Boston Globe." Professor, I want to start with you. This rally that we saw Donald Trump and a lot of Trump supporters at yesterday, as "The New York Times" described it, racist, misogynist. What did you see out of it?

LEAN WRIGHT RIGUEUR, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST AND HISTORIAN: I saw all the above, but I also saw Donald Trump showing us who he is and who he will be. And I think it's notable that it happened in New York, in New York city Madison Square Garden. This is the place that was Trump's home for so long. This is, Trump Towers this is right down the street. It's also a place that has consistently rejected him in the last two presidential cycles.

So for him to at the moment where the candidates are going around, their barnstorming, they're hitting the ground running, where they're supposed to be making these messages that are bringing people into the party, showing that we're inclusive, our side is the winning side. Instead, what he does is he goes in, and he doubles down on what he is most comfortable with -- the bigotry, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, all of these things that have essentially made him who he is.

And the other thing that's really important here is as we see this playing out, two things to remember. One, Donald Trump, a lot of people have been saying, well, they were just joking. Donald Trump has been very upfront about not joking about many of these issues. So the idea that, for example, that Puerto Rico would be a garbage dump ha- ha, that's a joke. Actually, we saw that play out at the tail end of hurricane Maria when Puerto Rico was left in the dark for months. And so we see these things over and over again.

But the other point is, as we come down to the end of the day, as we come down to the end of the race, Donald Trump is looking around and saying, I haven't been penalized yet for these kinds of remarks. In fact, we're in a statistical dead tie. So if anything, what he is telling us is that I'm going to lean into the message that I think is a winning message, that I think represents both the America that I want to see, but also the America that Americans want to see. And that is one that is deeply, deeply racist, misogynistic, sexist, and xenophobic.

BERMAN: Jackie, David Chalian, put it, as the professor did, in sort of a different way, which is to say that in a way the closing arguments of the two campaigns have aligned. They're the same discussion right now. Harris is saying Trump is all these things. In this rally was Trump and his team saying we are all these things.

JACKIE KUCINICH, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Right. And the other thing is you had a lot of Harris supporters who are celebrities amplifying what Trump said to their followers who might not be as watching this on a Sunday night as we were. So that could be problematic for the Trump campaign.

And listen, they haven't been shy about their, by any stretch of the imagination, about their message toward immigrants. There was an ad that played twice during Trump's speech that was based in fearmongering about immigrants. But I think it's also the -- but the amplification from non-political people could actually be problematic.

And they have the contrast with Harris actually courting voters of color and Philadelphia yesterday in her campaign.

[08:10:02]

BERMAN: Talk to me, Jackie, a little bit more about that, the Bad Bunny effect, as it were. Bad Bunny yesterday became, after this section of the rally posted on Instagram, some Harris comments and basically Harris's video about Puerto Rico. It wasn't Bad Bunny on camera saying something out loud, but clearly lending support to Harris.

KUCINICH: Exactly. And that's -- and because his followers might not necessarily be tuning into the campaign every day, that's why it could be potentially damaging for the Trump campaign.

I mean, you can make light of celebrity endorsements, but it's there network, it's their followers where their power is. And when they're circulating these messages that are hurtful and potentially detrimental to persuadable voters, to voters that really both campaigns need, because as you and David Chalian and everyone has noted, this is coming down to the wire. This is very close in the places where it matters, and every vote is going to count. And these comments, you would imagine, could be hurtful.

BERMAN: So this rally that Donald Trump had yesterday was a set piece. It was planned for a long time. He wanted to do a specific thing with this. Harris has a set piece like this tomorrow on the ellipse in Washington, D.C., the District of Columbia, not a swing state, right, at all. She clearly wants to send a bigger message. There you go. We can all talk about that at a certain point.

(LAUGHTER)

BERMAN: But professor, what do you think Harris needs to do at this event, given that there are some of her supporters, future forward PAC out there saying, you know what, don't talk so much about the fascist stuff. Talk about what you're going to do.

RIGUEUR: She needs to make the case to the American people, and she needs to make a case about who she is as a person, but how she would govern, what is her vision for America.

One of the things that we know about winning presidential candidates is their ability to give a vision, a really concrete vision, a strong vision, a positive outlook and vision, a unifying vision to Americans, and that really has a powerful effect on what you can do. We saw it with Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. And we also saw it with Joe Biden in a moment where Americans were deeply fed up and very scared about democracy in 2020. So we need to see that.

We also need to see, I think, a little bit of what we saw from her rally in Texas and Houston the other day, which is we need to see her make very strong points on those areas that Americans are deeply concerned about, the economy, women's rights, reproductive choice, abortion, right, these things that people I have said over and over again, this is where I am suffering. Are you listening? Do you hear me?

And so we need to hear that and less about Donald Trump, because we know what Donald Trump is. Donald Trump has done the work on that already. And so I think what we will see is a doubling down on this kind of outlook, this kind of positive outlook, this vision for America that is very much rooted in saying, I am the outsider. I can do something different. I can bring something to America that no one else has been able to bring thus far.

BERMAN: We'll be watching. We'll see if she delivers that message. Professor, great to see you here in person. Jackie Kucinich, thanks so much for being with us. Sara?

SIDNER: All right, just ahead. New details on the aggressive legal plays by Republicans already in the works to cast doubt on the 2024 election results.

And this morning, Iran vowing to retaliate to Israel strikes as hostage and ceasefire talks resume after being stalled for months.

And NBA all-star Dwyane Wade honored by the Miami Heat with a statue outside the team's arena. But some fans say, who is that guy?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:18:22]

BOLDUAN: So, Republicans have filed an unprecedented number of lawsuits ahead of the November 5th election. More than 130 cases showing not only an aggressive litigation strategy from Republicans targeting voting in various respects in battleground states, but also showing this legal strategy may not be panning out as Republicans had hoped.

CNN's Marshall Cohen joins us now, with much more on this. Marshall, help people understand what aspects of voting and counting votes are being targeted the most with these lawsuits?

MARSHALL COHEN, CNN REPORTER: Kate, as you said, more than 130 lawsuits. That's how many the Republican National Committee says they're involved in this year and not without controversy.

So, they have filed cases challenging nearly every element of the election process -- mail-in voting, signature matching, ballot deadlines, certification procedures for how this is finalized after the election is over. They've also filed cases involving the voter rolls, poll watchers, and for the first time, overseas voting by servicemembers and ex-pats.

So, just in the past week, they secured a major victory in a case in Mississippi. That's not a swing state, obviously, and the ruling won't kick in right away, but this could help the GOP in other states. That case was about the deadline for when mail ballots need to arrive in order to get counted. A federal appeals court, a conservative appeals court ruled that those ballots must arrive by election day. They can't be postmarked by election day. That was a rare win for the GOP.

But by and large, most of their other cases have fallen flat, Kate, they have not succeeded in most of this litigation and while Republicans are not winning in the courts necessarily, it might not be what happens in the courtroom, that's the most important.

There's a lot of fears out there that these cases could be used after the election to drum up chaos, try to overturn the results, if course, if Donald Trump loses like we saw four years ago.

[08:20:24]

BOLDUAN: Marshall Cohen, good to see you, thank you so much -- John.

BERMAN: So, we have new numbers this morning that hints that voter turnout might be lower than expected this election. So, who might that help? Who might that hurt?

This morning, quarter pounders back on the menu at McDonald's after that deadly E. coli outbreak. We've got new reporting on what officials think was the source of the bacteria.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:25:06]

SIDNER: We're just eight days from the election. Each candidate is working overtime, of course, to lock up every crucial voting bloc that they can in a race that narrow seemingly by the hour, neck and neck at this point.

One demographic set to make a massive impact in states like Pennsylvania, younger voters potentially specifically those 18-year- olds will be casting their votes for the very first time with little over than a week to go.

Harris and Trump been able to identify the problems that actually matter to that critical youth vote.

Joining me now is the executive director of the PA Youth Vote, Angelique Hinton. Thank you so much for joining me this morning. What are you telling people? What are you hearing from young people

about their top concerns?

ANGELIQUE HINTON, PA YOUTH VOTE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: So, we're hearing a lot of concerns. Young people are very, very concerned about a lot of issues. And so, what we're trying to really do through PA Youth Vote is help them connect the dots between voting and holding leaders accountable and how that can really have an impact on some of these issues.

And so, basically, when candidates are going to speak to the issues that young people care about, you will start to see them more excited and much more engaged in this process.

SIDNER: Is it economy? Is it, you know, we've seen the protests on campuses, the war in Gaza? What are the things that are sort of illuminating or sparking their interest?

HINTON: So, it depends on where you are, in all honesty. Youth in different regions care about a lot of different things, but then you will see some transcend across. So, economy is definitely one, living affordability, right; minimum wage, those are things they care about.

They also care very much about access to education resources. School funding is a big issue here in Pennsylvania for young people, and whether or not they have equitable access to resources. Gun violence is a huge concern or community safety is an issue that young people in Philadelphia care very much about.

So, it really depends. Reproductive rights is something that you have seen transcend across different regions and then things like reproductive rights.

So, there are a lot of issues that really animate young people, even things like homelessness and housing and security. So -- but again, it really does depend on where you are, what top of mind issues are for the youth we're engaging.

SIDNER: Where you are and what you're experiencing makes total sense. I think all voters really feel that way.

Vote.org reported that all newly registered voters, of all of them on national voters' registration date, 81 percent were under the age of 35, with 11 percent being 18-years-old, a 53 percent spike from 2020. What do you make of the jump in numbers? Why do you think that is?

HINTON: I mean, I think you have seen right, with the shift. We do our work very nonpartisan, but I think you'll look at it culturally, right, it has changed dramatically.

And so, you know, the issues that are being addressed -- but then also kind of culturally what the campaign is looking like. Who they're bringing into campaign rallies matters very much. And then just the fact that, you know, you have candidates that are younger, right? Like that's something that young people also want to see. They really want to see a government that is more responsive to, but

also reflective of themselves. And so, when they start to see that, that also excites them a lot.

So, I think that coupled with the issues that have been discussed a lot in this election cycle, are really motivating for young people and I think you will really see young people turn out in this election.

SIDNER: There in Pennsylvania, there's a sizable Puerto Rican population in your state. There were several racist jokes told by a speaker at the Trump rally. One calling Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage.

And people like Bad Bunny, J.Lo, Ricky Martin are now publicly throwing their weight behind Kamala Harris. Do you think this has any influence on young voters when people -- Bad Bunny has got 45 million followers, jump in and say, hey, this is who we like?

HINTON: So, I definitely think that, you know, again, culturally, right? These are people that young people maybe follow, right, or admire. So, I think maybe in an election cycle, like we have right now, that may be something that will excite some young voters about turning out or really, you know, inspire them.

But what we like to do really at PA You Vote, is again, really provide the education that connects the dots for them between the issues they care about to ensure that they understand the importance of participating in this process in every election cycle.

So, to answer your question, yes, but if we're really looking to engage young voters long-term, we really need to make the investment and help in making sure that all of them are getting educated about how all of this works and really how it's connected to being able to address issues that they care about from a policy perspective.

SIDNER: The ones that matter to them.

Angelique Hinton, thank you so much for coming on and explaining all of that to us from Pennsylvania, a very important swing state, appreciate it -- Kate.

[08:30:32]