Journal this morning, your calls and comments live.
Then, with one week before election day, we talk with Clifford Young, president of polling and societal trends for Ipsos, about his organization's recent polling on election integrity and voter attitudes leading up to Election Day.
And we'll look at efforts to boost voter confidence in the election system with David Becker, founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
Washington Journal is next.
Join the conversation.
Good morning.
It's Tuesday, October 29th, 2024.
It's exactly one week until Election Day.
This morning, we'll talk about the latest from the polling world and discuss election integrity and security.
But we begin by hearing from you.
With seven days to go, how are you feeling about the race for the White House?
If you are a Donald Trump and JD Vance supporter, the number to call 202-748-8001.
If you're a Kamala Harris and Tim Walz supporter, the number 202-748-8000.
If you're undecided or supporting someone else, the number 202-748-8002.
You can also send us a text.
That number 202-748-8003.
If you do, please include your name and where you're from.
Otherwise, catch up with us on social media, on X, it's at C-SPANWJ on Facebook.
It's facebook.com/slash C-SPAN.
And a very good Tuesday morning to you.
You can go ahead and start calling in now, as is to be expected with seven days to go until Election Day.
It's a very busy day on the campaign trail, and it begins in this hour.
The Vice President Kamala Harris set to sit down with Charlemagne the God for the second time in as many weeks.
The radio host is the host of the popular The Breakfast Club program.
That's set to take place right about now, 7 a.m.
And then right after this program, 10 a.m. Eastern, Donald Trump will speak with reporters this morning from Mar-a-Lago.
You can watch that on the C-SPAN network.
Then his running mate at noon Eastern today will be in Michigan, JD Vance on the campaign trail in Saginaw.
1:45 p.m. Eastern today, Tim Walz is in Georgia speaking with supporters at a Get Out the Vote rally in Savannah.
At 2:30 p.m. Eastern, it's Donald Trump again.
He'll be in Pennsylvania this afternoon, speaking with voters at a roundtable in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania.
And then this evening, 7 p.m. Eastern, the vice president is speaking on the ellipse here in Washington, D.C. She's expected to lay out her closing arguments to voters with one week to go to Election Day.
All of those campaign events you can watch on the C-SPAN networks at c-span.org or on the free C-SPAN Now video app.
But we want to hear from you this morning in this first hour of the Washington Journal.
Turning the phones over to you to get your thoughts one week until Election Day.
It's 202-748-8001 for supporters of Donald Trump and JD Vance.
It's 202-748-8000 for supporters of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
If you're still undecided, definitely want to hear from you.
202-748-8002.
We're going to begin here in D.C.
It's Betty, Line for Democrats.
Good morning, Betty.
How are you feeling a week out?
I'm feeling good.
I voted for Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz because Donald Trump on his inauguration, his vision then made me come out and the protest right after his inauguration.
And the way he did Obama, he came in with the berger message.
And then the third point I'd like to make, I'd be great.
I believe he gave Limbaugh, a presidential medal or something at the White House.
And his supporters are nothing but the Rush Limbaugh supporters who lost their leader.
And Donald Trump knew what he was doing when he gave Rush Limbaugh that medal.
Betty, you said you protested here on D.C. on Inauguration Day in 2017?
Yes, yes.
If Donald Trump wins again, would you be out on the streets protesting here in Washington, D.C. the day after inauguration?
No, because I can't even go down to the ellipse because I've had a stroke two years ago, but I've been a protester my whole life.
And the stuff that Donald Trump says is just, I don't think our country will ever recover from Donald Trump if he gets re-elected, honestly.
Are you going to watch that ellipse speech tonight?
I will watch it.
And then what I tend to do is I'm not, I go back and I watch things on YouTube too.
That's Betty here in D.C. Dale is a Trump Vance supporter in North Carolina.
Dale, good morning.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I got a question to ask.
I don't know if it's done purposely, but every time somebody calls, last few days I've been watching C-SPAN and they're talking about stuff that makes sense, like what's going on with Homeland Security not releasing how many illegals is on voter row.
They don't get their message out.
They're cut off by C-SPAN.
Is that intentional?
Dale, we're here to hear from you a week out from Election Day and give you a chance to talk about what you're thinking about what you're watching.
Are you going to watch the events today on C-SPAN?
Do you think Donald Trump's going to talk about some of these issues you're bringing up?
Yeah, my main concern is Homeland Security is the only ones that has the illegal voter registration.
I want the people to wake up and everybody get on the same cylinder and want to find out what's going on.
They're trying to steal this thing.
Dale, we're going to talk about election security in one of our segments today on the Washington Journal.
Would just note this story in the Wall Street Journal.
Separate emergency voting appeals from Pennsylvania and Virginia have started to draw the Supreme Court into the coming election.
The Republican National Committee and election officials from Pennsylvania's heavily Republican Butler County asked the justices to block authorities from counting provisional ballots cast by voters who previously sent mail-in ballots that were invalidated because of errors such as assembling the return envelope incorrectly.
In a separate case, Virginia's Republican Attorney General asked the justices to revive a state voter purge that removed some 1,600 alleged non-citizens from the rolls after lower courts found that canceling voter registration so close to the election violates federal law.
So we could see the Supreme Court weighing in on some of these topics.
Maria, Connecticut, good morning, undecided voter.
What's it going to come down to?
Good morning.
Well, I just finished watching.
I don't speak very fast, so bear with me.
I watched the NA, the face.
It was just done before you came on.
You were watching Donald Trump?
Yes.
And I also watched Vice President Kamala Harris.
I watched both and the stark contrast between the two where they ended on the Donald Trump version with My America.
Can you hear me?
Yes, ma'am.
Okay.
They wrapped up their gathering, they're coming together with a song by an American Idol winner about my America.
It is our America.
Not once did I hear that message of unifying being shared by tons of religious leaders that were on the stage.
And Kamala Harris is attempting to bring out a unifying message for all Americans.
I didn't hear that.
That's Maria in Connecticut.
This was about a minute and a half of Kamala Harris from Monday at her event with young voters.
Here's that event.
So I say to everyone, here what you know.
Generations of Americans before us fought for freedom.
And now the baton is in our hands.
The baton is in our hands.
And I want to speak specifically to all the young leaders, all the students who are here today.
I want to speak to you for a moment.
So I love your generation.
I really do.
And one of the things about it is you are rightly impatient for change.
I love that about you.
You are impatient for change.
Because look, you have only known the climate crisis and are leading then the charge to protect our planet and our future.
You, young leaders who grew up with active shooter drills and are fighting then to keep our schools safe.
You who now know fewer rights than your mothers and grandmothers are standing up for reproductive freedom.
And for you, and for you then, I know that these issues that are at stake, they are not theoretical.
This is not political for you.
It is your lived experience.
And I see you.
And I see your power.
And I know many of you are voting for the first time.
Can I see a raise of hands?
Who's voting for the first time?
Can we hear it for our first time voters?
Kamala Harris in Ann Arbor, Michigan, yesterday.
Donald Trump, with several events yesterday, along with that National Faith Summit event, also holding a rally in Atlanta and speaking to his supporters there.
This is Donald Trump from yesterday.
I'm here today with a message of hope for all Americans with your vote in this election.
Could you imagine seven days?
We, not me, we will end inflation.
We will stop the invasion of criminals coming into our country and we will bring back the American dream.
We're going to bring it back.
We're going to bring it back.
We're going to bring it back so big and so beautiful.
Our country will be bigger.
Our country will be better and bolder and richer and safer and stronger than ever before.
This election is a choice between whether we will have four more years of incompetence and failure or whether or not we will begin the four greatest years in the history of our country.
You know, we're starting from a little bit of a little bit of a negative.
We're starting with a little bit of a negative.
They have 13,099 murderers released into our country.
They have tens of thousands of criminals released.
21 million people released into our country over the last few years.
We have no idea who the hell they are, where they come from.
It was open borders policy of Kamala.
Not a great policy.
Not a wise.
Does anybody like the idea of open borders for the world to come in?
She loves it.
That was Donald Trump yesterday in Atlanta.
We're taking your calls this morning.
Another busy day on the campaign trail for both candidates.
And we want to hear your thoughts one week out from Election Day.
Phone numbers are on the screen.
A Trump Vance supporter in Michigan.
It's Skip.
Good morning.
You're next.
Thank you, sir, for taking my calls.
What really affirmed my vote early for Trump was the constant bashing of Trump by the Harris supporters and Harris herself.
I don't understand why these voters on C-SPAN this morning that are for Harris don't tell us what they like about Harris other than what they don't like about Trump.
My dream, if I have one, is to get Trump to come up to our area in the Upper Peninsula, which is a border to Wisconsin, that would be a rural area, but I have no idea how you'd ever get him up here this short a time.
But we're a swing state.
Wisconsin's a swing state.
And in a rural area, it could play an important role in getting enough votes for Trump to win.
But why would he come to such a small rural area in our area?
So I know it won't happen.
But all I end with, sir, is why, why, why doesn't the Harris voters say something they like about Harris and what she's going to do instead of just constant bashing Trump?
I'm so sick and tired of the Trump bashing going on.
And that's why I'm really proud to vote early for Trump.
But talk about what you like about Harris because I could talk for hours about what I like about Trump.
That's Skip in Michigan.
This is Thomas in Hagerstown, Maryland.
Good morning.
A Kamala Harrison Walls supporter.
Good morning.
I'm from, I'm an old guy.
I graduated from high school in 1965.
I had a friend of mine right out of high school, toughest little guy I ever met, two or three times state camp in wrestling, went into Marine Corps, fresh out of high school, and less than a year later, he was dead.
So I don't think he was a loser or a sucker.
My brother was in charge of a mass tune in doing that.
He had an article in the New York Times that he took care of over 500 casualties in less than a couple, in just a couple days.
When he was scheduled to be promoted to full colonel, and he decided, I saw too many dead people during that time.
So when his time was up, he just refused to then re-enlist.
But those young men that died while he was in charge were losers and suckers.
And that's all what Trump seems to be.
He seems to have no respect for anything military.
And how could somebody be appointed of the military when he has no respect for military?
Thank you very much.
That's Thomas in Hagerstown, Maryland.
That line for undecided voters or voters of a third-party candidate.
Ron, good morning.
Hunt Valley, Maryland.
Go ahead.
Hi, good morning, C-SPAN.
I wanted to make sure I called in before the election.
This is my 30 day.
I think this is the 31st day.
So I just wanted to make sure.
So when I look at both candidates, you have a vice president who has actually done nothing, nothing over the past four years that she's actually been in office.
And I challenge any of your audience to just let me know at least one policy or one important trip in which she has taken over the past four years.
And then on the flip side of that, you have a candidate who, for some reason, and I don't know if this is self-sabotage or what, but for some reason, he cannot separate himself from, you know, racism.
And I just don't know what his campaign is thinking.
I mean, he could easily win this election if he was to just keep your mouth shut, you know, just put everything on pause and separate yourself from these racist people.
But at the end of the day, I mean, this is for sure going to be, I think, one of the closest elections ever in the history of our country.
And it's very important.
You know, Carla yesterday mentioned something about mental health.
It's very important that everyone realizes that, look, you're going to have people, unfortunately, who will go crazy over the outcome of this election.
And unfortunately, you'll probably have people who will have a heart attack and lose their lives because of the outcome of this election.
So everyone, just keep in mind your mental health is important.
Take a break from the news, get some rest, and this is going to be a long next couple of weeks.
That's Ron in Hunt Valley, Maryland.
You say next couple of weeks because you don't think it's going to be decided on election night?
No, there's no way.
There's no way.
I mean, if you look at your popular vote nationwide, Trump is actually only 1% behind Harris.
When you look at your previous Republicans who ran for office, they were like 4%, 9% behind.
So this is going to be razor thin, and it's going to be really your swing states who decide who the next president is of the United States.
That's Ron in Hunt Valley, Maryland.
Let me speak to some of our ex-viewers, including Tony in Florida.
When we were talking about the schedules for the various candidates today, their various interviews, Tony asked, wasn't Harris going to sit with a sympathizer for an interview?
I thought she was going to sit with Joe Rogan.
It says if Trump was doing repeat interviews with Hannity.
The Joe Rogan podcast interview had been scheduled, but now Kamala Harris not going to appear on Joe Rogan's podcast.
According to a spokesperson for her campaign last week, the team had been in touch with Rogan's program about doing a possible experience appearance on that program, but the schedule didn't line up.
That according to her spokesperson, and then Joe Rogan actually tweeted out his side of what happened.
For the record, the Harris campaign did not pass on doing the podcast.
They offered a date for today, Tuesday.
But Joe Rogan said, I would have had to travel to her, and they only wanted to do an hour.
I strongly feel the best way to do it is in studio, in his studio in Austin.
My sincere wish is to just have a nice conversation and get to know her as a human being.
I really hope we can make it happen.
Joe Rogan tweeting about that interview.
So anyway, that's when it comes to that interview, though there is plenty on the campaign trail today, and you can watch most all of it on the C-SPAN networks.
And we're hearing from you one week from Election Day this morning on the Washington Journal.
This is Bobby in Gavin, Oklahoma.
Good morning.
Yes.
I was calling.
Yes, I'll give you reasons why the guy from Michigan wants to know why you support Kamala Harris because Kamala Harris has got good sense.
Kamala Harris is not going to go to a place and tell people that they're suckers and losers at the cemetery.
People are not going to go and make fun of Puerto Ricans.
She's not going to go make fun of Puerto Ricans at the rallies and stuff.
Trump is an idiot.
That's Bobby in Oklahoma.
This is Roy, a Trump fan supporter out of Georgia in Woodstock, Georgia.
Good morning.
John, we need to understand that this election is not about Trump and Kamala Harris.
This is about life and death.
You know, there's people really trying to destroy our country.
And we have examples of this.
There was a guy, a king named Balak that wanted to destroy Israel.
So he hired a sorcerer to come and curse Israel, but he couldn't curse Israel.
So what he did.
Hey, Roy.
Roy, bring me to 2024 here.
I'm trying to bring you there.
I'm trying to bring you there.
If you listen to me, I'll take you there.
And so what he did, he told him to have MRO sex.
Okay, we'll go to another Roy in Florida.
Good morning, Harris supporter.
Go ahead.
Yeah, so we can put that vote a little bit.
Here's the deal.
Read Project 2025.
That'll tell you what Trump's going to do.
He's already told people what he's going to do.
And if people can't see it, I don't know.
I don't know what's going to happen.
But I know if the Democrats lose the House and Senate and the presidency, it's game over for this country.
I'm leaving.
I'm not going to stay here for it because I have more respect for this country, tend to live through a dictatorship, and I'm not going to do it.
Roy, what do you think is going to happen in the House and Senate races?
Where do you think?
Well, they could lose.
There's polls at.
It says the Democrats can lose the House and the Senate.
There's been different type of polling.
So he does have a base.
His base is going to stick with him no matter what he says or what he does.
But the whole situation is, basically, I'm not big on Harris, but anything is better than Donald Trump at this point.
I think he's a racist.
I think he should be in jail.
No felon is allowed to vote, but they're allowed to run for president.
Is there something wrong with that?
I mean, a rapist can run for president.
If I were Biden and Garland, I would have had this locked up years ago.
The United States of America let Donald Trump to this point that we're at now of a complete collapse of the United States of America.
And people, if Trump loses, all these 50-year-old babies are going to go out crying and screaming at the top of their lungs.
For what?
He doesn't care about them.
He cares about one person.
That's Donald Trump.
That's Roy in Florida.
You mentioned the polling, Roy.
Stick around for our next segment to 8 a.m. Eastern in a little over a half an hour from now.
Cliff Young of Ipsos Polling will join us.
Cliff Young and Ipsos run the Reuters Ipsos poll.
Maybe you've heard of that one, one of the many polls out there, but certainly one that gets a lot of attention.
He'll be with us taking your phone calls for about a half an hour this morning, 8 to 8.30.
This is Tony in Massachusetts, a Trump Vance supporter.
Good morning.
Hello, I'm calling about something related to the Ukraine war, which is never covered.
And one thing is that there's always been a lot of Russian frustration with Ukraine because Lenin was very generous with territory, especially seashores and southern territory that was mainly obtained by Russian.
So Tony, as we look ahead one week to Election Day, how much attention do you think the war in Ukraine has received on the campaign trail or is going to receive in this final stretch here when everybody makes their final pitches?
It's received not all that much compared to how serious a problem it is.
And so that's why I'm calling about this.
And so this frustration because of that and because in 1954, Crimea was transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev, who was Ukrainian.
And that's more frustration, but it's also a strategic thing because the port of the Tsars and the USSR, NEPA Navy, is Sevastopol, which is in Ukraine.
All right.
That's Tony in Massachusetts.
This is Herman in Dallas, Texas.
Good morning.
Good morning.
How you doing?
Good.
Harris Wallacewater.
That's right.
I'd like to preach a little bit, if that's okay with you.
It's your time, Herman.
All right.
I'd just like to say that anyone who abandons their principles and their values for the promise of stopping illegal immigration or for a good economy or for anything, in my view, selling their soul.
And I just, you know, I think too many people think that this country is too big to fail.
And that's just not the case at all.
We have to remain who we are.
We have to keep being who we are.
And that's, you know, and that's the freedom that's in our DNA from the beginning of this country, freedom, you know.
And that's, you know, and I'm starting to, you know, that's what I want to say.
Thank you.
That's Herman in Dallas, Texas from Ohio.
This is Philip on X tweeting along this morning saying, I am undecided on who should receive my vote.
People keep asking, what has Harris accomplished as vice president?
I challenge them to this.
What did Pence accomplish as vice president for the former president?
Again, Philip in St. Paris, Ohio.
This is Lacey out of the bluegrass state in McCarr, Kentucky, a Trump Vance supporter.
Good morning.
Lacey, you with us?
Please figure that.
I don't think we have Lacey, so we'll go to Diane St. Paul, Minnesota.
Good morning.
Good morning, and I'd like to say thank you for taking my call.
I am a Harris voter.
And not so much because I even care much about her, but what it is about, I like her policies and her ideas that she's talking about because this country has to come back together.
I was born in 1949 and raised through the late 50s and the 60s in the South.
And we all know what that was like for us.
And what had to happen is that our parents had to teach us.
If anything ever happened, we got blamed for it.
The black folks, people of color, everybody got blamed for it.
And some of our folks got lynched for it.
So what I'm saying is, nobody should want to bring that back.
And after this election, I don't care who wins it.
If it's Harris or if it's Trump, there's going to be some kind of disorder that's going to go on.
What I'm trying to teach my grandkids now, because they thought we had a free America to be in, is to be careful out there in the streets.
Be careful when you leave home.
We're coming back to where I was raised.
I was raised to be afraid to go around people.
We met white people.
We got on the other side of the street.
We had a certain amount of white people we knew personally.
But when things went bad and some black man did something, we knew we had to prepare ourselves because we don't know who they were going to come and lynch.
I was raised in that era.
I don't want to go back.
So I'm saying this: the love of money is the root of all evil.
And I put my faith and my hope in God that he brings this country together and not destroy it like they did, like he did Solomon and Gomorrah.
That's Diane in St. Paul, Minnesota, a Harris Walls supporter.
The front page of the Washington Post this morning, speaking about the Harris campaign, Harris keying in on Latino voters, the island of garbage joke made by a comedian at a Trump rally over the weekend, spurring outrage.
Democrats seize on the backlash to sway choices in the race.
That's the front page.
That's the lead story of the Washington Post.
Let me also take you to page two of the Washington Post, a story you might have heard about in the wake of the Washington Post choosing not to make an editorial board endorsement in this year's presidential race.
The story, three members of the Washington Post editorial board stepping down.
It's a 10-person board, 30% of the board stepping down in the wake of Friday's decision by the newspaper's owner and publisher to end the publication of endorsements in presidential races.
Among those who stepped down, David Hoffman, a 42-year-old, 42-year Washington Post veteran.
Board member Molly Roberts confirmed that she's stepping down from the editorial board.
The third board member is Millie Mitra, who also serves as director of audience for the Washington Post opinion section.
With that happening, if you head to the opinion pages of the Washington Post, there's an opinion piece this morning by the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos.
The hard truth, Americans don't trust the news media is the headline of his piece, but the piece is mostly about that decision about presidential endorsements.
Here's a bit of what Jeff Bezos writes this morning.
Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election.
No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, I'm going to go with newspaper A's endorsement.
None.
What a presidential endorsement actually does is create a perception of bias, a perception of non-independence.
Ending them is a principled decision, Jeff Bezos said, and it's the right one.
Eugene Meyer, the publisher of the Washington Post from 1933 to 46, thought the same, and he was right.
By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it's a meaningful step in the right direction, Jeff Bezos says.
I wish we had made the change earlier than we did in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it.
That was inadequate planning and not some intentional strategy.
Jeff Bezos in the Washington Post today, if you want to rate his piece, it is available online as well.
Back to your phone calls.
It's just after 7:30 on the East Coast, and we are seven days away from Election Day.
This is Bruce in Indiana on that undecided line.
Good morning.
Bruce, you with us?
Yes, hello.
Go ahead.
Hello.
Okay.
On the border, everyone keeps talking about the amount of people coming across, but I never hear any politician.
Hello?
Listening to you, Bruce.
Go ahead.
Anyone talk about the current law and how many people are allowed to come in?
Also, all of the news channels on TV and just in general, they all have to have experts who are commenting on anything that happens.
And I'm not understanding why that is needed or allowed.
What do you mean by allowed, Bruce?
Well, to me, any channel I watch, whether it's Republican or Democrat, they always have people on there skewing the information to one candidate or the other.
That's Democrat and Republican.
If you don't like it, Bruce, why do you keep watching?
I try not to, but even if I want to get local news, they will go to national news anymore.
So I do like your channel.
You seem to give people a voice on their own.
But I just don't understand why they have all these people on these panels who are allowing the – giving all their opinions.
voters to vote one way or the other.
And it's Bruce in the Hoosier State to the Granite State.
This is Doug in Manchester.
Trump fans supporter.
Good morning.
Yes, I think Trump's going to win overwhelmingly.
I think he's going to get like 300 electoral votes.
He even has a good chance of winning here in New Hampshire.
And also, speaking of the New Hampshire election, the second congressional district is wide open.
The congresswoman there is not running for re-election, so it's between the Republican Lily Tang Williams, who's a local here, business owner, against a lady, I forget her last name, Maggie something, but she came up from Washington, D.C. just to run for Congress.
And that just shows you the Democrat Party is focused on top-down instead of grassroots like they used to be.
Doug, what makes you so confident that Donald Trump is going to have an overwhelming victory?
Well, just people, the last four years have been a disaster.
And people, I think they're just sick of it.
They want to go back to $2 a gap for gap a gallon of gas.
They want to go back to cheap groceries.
I don't think it'll be something like 2016.
That's Doug in Manchester to Glenn out of Detroit.
Good morning.
Good morning, John.
Yes, John, I get tired of hearing people talking about what the vice president has done in the last four years.
She's not going to, she can't do anything but the president's bidding.
Whatever the president wants, her job is to go out and get it done.
You know, she's on the interview and the interviewer asks her, well, what would you do different?
Like, she's going to sit there and throw the president under the bus.
It's not going to happen because she respects the Oval Office.
You know, it's almost like going back in 1800 where Ford invented the model of T, and the CEO asked him, tells him, you know, Mr. Ford, we can sell more cars if you have them in different colors.
And Ford said, you know, you're probably right.
They can buy it in any color they want as long as it's black.
And guess what?
That's where the conversation ends.
Glenn, do you think there are places where Kamal Harris disagrees with Joe Biden or would have done something differently?
I think Kamala Harris, she made a point.
She said that I'm a different person.
Every president had their own ideas.
I think in the war in Gaza and Israel, I believe Biden Ahu wouldn't get his way.
And the way he's getting it now, because of Joe Biden, you know, I just think that she would have more things in place and she's not going to just willing-illy give him what he wants.
That's Glenn in Detroit to McCarr, Kentucky.
I think this is Lacey, who tried earlier.
Lacey, are you there?
Yes, sir.
I'm here.
All right, Trump van supporter.
Go ahead.
Yeah, let me tell you, them people are going to be running if Trump gets elected.
And I hope they do.
They're going to be what?
I hope they run.
The Democrats, they better run.
What do you mean, run?
They don't know.
They don't know who they're talking to.
Trump is one of the smartest guys in the world.
That's a fact.
He's got more moves inside his brain than he may lose his gun.
Man, let me tell you, when they drop all them weapons off over with our communists and then blow them in place, only the president cannot be dollars for that.
Okay, that's Lacey.
This is Peter, Staten Island, New York.
Undecided voter.
What's it going to come down to, Peter?
Yeah, how you doing?
Look, I'm a combat Marine from Vietnam.
I see a lot of stuff over there.
And you don't want to live in a communist country.
They knocked Trump and all this stuff about Harrison and the other.
But when he got war in there, that news guy, I see that.
So I'm not going to really vote for them.
I'm going to vote today with my wife.
I didn't vote in a long time.
But, you know, I have to vote.
And I guess I got to vote for Trump.
Look, the way they pulled out from over there, they should have never did it that way.
And 13 guys dying, they don't even shine.
They don't even go there.
They're nuts.
What's the matter?
And all these guys are call up to tell you this stuff.
They watch the channel in the morning when I get up.
So they all got everything to say.
But did it was they ever fight in the war?
Do they ever go over there?
They shouldn't even be along the line, these guys.
But then again, that's a bad thing.
So, Peter, you are decided?
Well, if I listen to these guys, I'm going to go over Trump.
All right, that's Peter George in Missouri.
Good morning, Harris Wall supporter.
Yes, I've been watching this these passwords.
The thing that I think is, you know, these Republicans have no morals about themselves.
Just look at the convention at the Trade Center the other day.
That was ridiculous.
They need to get back to the morals of life.
There's no morals about the Republicans, none at all.
Are you talking about Madison Square Garden, the event?
Yes, I am.
Yes.
That was the most ridiculous thing I ever seen in my life.
All I can say is Trump and Vance has no morals about themselves.
Bring people on there that's putting down Haitians.
They're putting down everybody else in this country.
And this is a land of the free.
He didn't say nothing, nothing about the presidential election or nothing.
It's just calling America a trash can and everything else.
Well, like I say again, Republicans have no morals about themselves at all.
That's George in Missouri.
You mentioned JD Vance on Monday.
He talked about responding to a reporter's question about some of the comments made at the Madison Square Garden rally that have received so much attention.
This is JD Vance from yesterday.
Now, I've heard about the joke.
I haven't actually seen the joke that you mentioned, but I think that it's telling that Kamala Harris's closing message is essentially that all of Donald Trump's voters are Nazis, and you should get really pissed off about a comedian telling a joke.
That is not the message of a winning campaign.
And most importantly, it's not the message of a person who's fit to be the president of the United States of America.
And my own view on this is, look, again, I haven't seen the joke.
You know, maybe.
Maybe it's a stupid racist joke, as you said.
Maybe it's not.
I haven't seen it.
I'm not going to comment on the specifics of the joke, but I think that we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America.
I'm just, I'm so over it.
That was JD Vance on Monday.
Kamala Harris also referring back to the Madison Square Garden rally and that joke by a comedian there when she was on the tarmac on the way to one of her events yesterday.
This is Kamala Harris talking with reporters yesterday.
Donald Trump has, this is not new about him, by the way.
What he did last night is not a discovery.
It is just more of the same and maybe more vivid than usual.
Donald Trump spends full time trying to have Americans point their finger at each other.
Fans the fuel of hate and division.
And that's why people are exhausted with him.
That's why people who formerly have supported Donald Trump, have voted for him, are supporting me, voting for me.
People are literally ready to turn the page.
They're tired of it.
Kamala Harris on Monday.
Back to your phone calls.
About 15 minutes left in this first hour of the Washington Journal.
And again, one week till election day, asking you your thoughts on a presidential race.
This is Sandy out of the Buckeye State.
Trump Vance supporter.
Good morning.
Hi.
Yeah, I'm voting for Trump.
And I'm really tired of them calling Republicans, people they don't even know, crazies, no morals.
If you know everybody, then go ahead and make that decision.
But don't generalize because the Democrat Party happens to be a bunch of communists.
And by the way, so is Harris, and so is Tim Waltz.
And that joke that that comedian said, Trump wasn't even at the thing there yet.
He didn't know what that guy was going to say.
He doesn't go over the guy's paperwork and what's in his mind.
I mean, come on.
You guys are forgetting.
Right now, ballot boxes are being burnt in Portland, Ohio.
That's the Antifa outpost, you know, Antifa, who went after Trump when he got first elected.
Everybody went after Trump when he first got elected.
So everybody is trying to Hitler lie, Hitler.
He's not Hitler.
He loves his country.
He loves the Constitution.
And also, that's how 12 or 6 million Jews got killed in Germany by lies, lies, and more lies, constant lies.
Goebbels, the propaganda guy, pushed lies.
They were taught lies in school.
They had to learn them.
So I don't want to hear any more Kamala, the Republicans are bad.
I'm sorry, but you're going to be living under communism because they are not going to let Trump win this election.
I hope that he wins, but we're in a communist era right now.
That's Sandy in Ohio.
You mentioned ballot boxes in Portland, Oregon, and in Washington.
This is the Associated Press story on it.
Incendiary devices set off Monday at two ballot drop boxes, one in Portland and another in nearby Vancouver, Washington, destroying hundreds of ballots in what one official called a direct attack on democracy.
The early morning fire at the drop box in Portland was extinguished quickly thanks to a suppression system inside the box, as well as a nearby security guard, and just three ballots were damaged there.
That's the story from the Associated Press.
We will keep you updated on that as the investigation begins in that incident.
This is Harold in East Alton, Illinois.
Good morning, Harris Walsh supporter.
Good morning, John.
Thank you for taking my call, and thank you for C-SPAN for letting plain Americans talk on this program.
I got a few different issues.
As far as the border goes, it's everybody's issue.
I'm not for either side on that.
One side wants to spend all kinds of money deporting them out of here, and the other side wants to spend all this money seeing if we can process them to get them in here.
I'm just a high school educator.
I don't even have any college education, but my solution is: why don't we go after the employers and make them pay a big enough fine that it's not worth hiring them?
We can't sell them a house.
We can't sell them a car.
We can't rent them an apartment.
They will not come here no more.
Immigration problem solved.
Now, as far as Trump goes, he is a threat to our national security.
And I wish somebody would get in control of the secret information, whoever is in control of keeping that secret information secure.
I don't know why all these presidents have the secret information, and he's got these boxes full.
And he's old school.
He's probably got a Xerox machine.
All right.
He's Xerox.
He's probably selling them on the market now because he's the biggest grifter in the world.
And I wish one true investigative reporter would look into how much finances he's made off of grifting off the American people through the presidency.
That's Harold in Illinois.
This is Dorothy in Baltimore, Trump Vance Supporter.
Good morning.
Oh, good morning.
Well, I just want to respond.
That's not the only thing I want to say, but I want to respond to the maid who was talking about why people relate to Trump as Hitler.
Now, we know Trump's not Hitler, and we know it ain't going to happen because we have Congress and a Senate and a judiciary.
But the reason why we say that is because Trump, other than Trump, I have not known any president in recent history who has a vendetta against a certain race of people.
And, Dorothy, you're saying that as a Trump Vance supporter?
No, I didn't.
I called on 801.
Is that the wrong number?
You did.
We hope people can call in on the lines that they actually relate to.
It just makes the conversation easier, and we don't take a turn from the other side.
This is the undecided line.
Mark is in Middlefield, Connecticut.
Good morning.
Good morning, John.
So much to say in so little time.
You know, both of them just don't talk that I think the way we the people want to hear.
I hear Kamala Harris talk about, you know, disinformation and we have to control disinformation.
Who decides what's misinformation and who isn't?
I think we, the American people, need to do that.
Trump, when he talks about immigration and the border, yeah, I'm all for not letting criminals into this country and people coming in illegally.
You know, the United States has laws, and here somebody's entering this country, and the first thing they're doing is breaking the law.
I want to hear him speak about legal ways to enter this country.
That's how my grandparents entered here.
That's how probably the majority of the people's ancestors entered here were legally.
So let me hear the proper way to enter this country.
Kudos to Jeff Bezos for what I just saw you put up his editorial.
I totally agree with him that newspapers should stay out of it.
They should just report the news and not be advocates.
And I think that's a lot of what today's quote-unquote mainstream media has become.
Do you agree with him that the timing was bad here on that decision?
No, I don't.
Well, you know what?
That's hindsight's 2020.
Should he have done it six months ago?
Probably.
But it doesn't matter.
He did it.
The New York Times didn't do it.
The L.A. Times didn't do it.
He did it.
He had the courage of his convictions to do it.
And I, you know, may not agree with him, everything else that he's done, although, God bless him for Amazon.
But I agree with him.
You know, let's have the news report the news.
Don't tell me what I think, don't tell me what I should think about what happened.
You know, the ballot box, I saw that last night when I got out of work on Instagram, and I didn't believe it until, again, watching you here, you showed me an article from the AP.
I haven't checked any news feeds this morning yet.
So that's another issue.
One, why is there early voting?
I don't understand that.
Absentee ballots, I understand.
People can't be around on election day for work, business, whatever.
But early voting, that I don't get.
Why not have a national election day?
The polls here in my state are open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. at night.
You're telling me you cannot make time to fulfill your right as an American citizen to vote.
I don't care if you have to stand in line for three hours.
You go to DMV, you have to stand in line.
You go to a local restaurant, you may have to stand in line to wait for a table.
You can't stand in line to exercise your freedom, your free right to vote.
That's Mark in Connecticut.
One thing you mentioned, Mark, you said the LA Times didn't do it when it came to not endorsing in 2024.
The LA Times actually did it before the Washington Post.
And now a story just within the past day, USA Today joining the Washington Post and the LA Times in not endorsing a presidential candidate here in 2024.
That from Yahoo News, but plenty of stories on that if you want to read that this morning.
Just a few minutes left in our first hour of the Washington Journal, one week to go into Election Day.
This is Wayne in Fort Worth, Texas, undecided voter.
What's it going to come down to, Wayne?
Well, I want to say, first of all, let me just, before we get this out of the way, I'm a black Puerto Rican.
My wife is Colombian.
And I got to tell you, you guys do a great job.
And I'm a hospital director.
I deal in substance abuse, inpatient, outpatient hospital.
See a lot of patients.
And I can tell you, the MAGA callers today, you guys don't understand Americanism.
You don't understand our country.
And it's always he, she, this, that.
Look, we are all individuals who have our own individual rights and freedoms to do whatever we want to do, whether you vote or don't.
No, my point.
I have never been to a political rally.
Me and my son and my wife, we started out with the Nikki Haley rally here in Fort Worth.
We went to the Trump rally.
We just went to the Houston rally with Kamala Harris.
And I can tell you, I voted Republican.
I voted Democrat.
I voted Green Party.
I voted, you know, Democrat.
So I can tell you that the reason I'm going with Kamala Harris this time is that it's that feeling.
It's that energy.
At her rallies, everyone came together, held hands.
We sang songs.
I've never danced with another person in public like this, but we were all dancing.
My 17-year-old son, he was so enthused and so delighted with the message of inclusiveness and how she talks about Generation Z.
It's just amazing.
It's an amazing feeling.
So Wayne, you are decided at this point.
It came down to going to a rally?
Yeah, it came down to the three rallies.
With Nikki Haley, I love Nikki Haley.
But, you know, obviously she didn't make it.
Trump, I got to tell you, my people, the Puerto Rican people, we are so insulted.
We're so insulted.
And for him to do this, I know so many Puerto Ricans who I communicate with on a daily basis in the hospital, in the hospital field.
We own 75 hospitals.
And I communicate with so many hospitals in Philadelphia.
And I can't tell you how many medical coders and billers we get on Zoom calls.
And we can't even start our phone calls about work because they have to get this out.
So many Puerto Rican people work in our hospitals.
From Philadelphia to Michigan.
We start our Zoom calls off before we go to work about JD Vance and his racism and his ways that he tries to delay the inevitability of what Kamala Harris is bringing forward with her energy.
That's Wayne.
This is Bert in Kentucky, Waynesburg, Kentucky.
Trump Vance supporter.
Good morning.
You're next.
Hi.
Thank you for taking my call.
First, Kamala was named border czar.
When she was afraid to go to the border, Biden told her to go to South America, Central America, for the root cause of the millions of people invading our country.
Now, after that, I was expecting a report.
From the report, they would hopefully solve the problem.
I'm still waiting for her report.
What a huge failure she turned out to be.
Secondly, calling Trump Hitler divided this country or could possibly divide this country as much as it was divided during the Civil War.
Trump, I, and 70 million Republicans are not Nazis.
Thank you for taking my call.
That's Bert in Kentucky on Nazis and Hitler comparisons.
Donald Trump addressed some of those attacks at his rally in Atlanta on Monday.
Here's that.
They use that word freely, both words.
They use it, he's Hitler.
And then they say, he's a Nazi.
I'm not a Nazi.
I'm the opposite of a Nazi.
I don't know my father always used to tell me don't use the word you don't you ever use the word Nazi And, you know, it's incredible now.
The way they talk is so disgusting and just horrible the way they talk.
And they don't mean it even.
They just want to do, you know, they think that they could sell.
They've called me everything from a mad genius looking to take over the world to a very, very stupid person.
I've covered from stupid to mad genius that will eventually succeed in taking over the world.
Now, these are bad people.
They've covered everything.
Let's see, last week, oh, last week, he's tired.
You know what?
I've done this stuff now for 58 days in a row, and I don't even feel tired a little bit.
And the thing that bothered me is she said it as she's taking yet another day off, you know I said, you know, she's taking a day off.
Like a couple of days ago, she took like two days off in a row.
I said, you know, you're running for something that's so important.
And in terms of importance, it's like Super Bowl times 100, right?
Super Bowl maybe times 1,000.
You don't take days off.
You go every single day.
No, I'm not tired.
And they knew I wasn't tired.
They're always tired.
I tell you, I'm very tired.
There may be a time when I'll say that.
But, you know, they said that.
That was a thing.
That didn't work out too.
Actually, people got very angry.
They said, the guy's gone 58 days in a row.
He's still going like strong.
And you would know in two seconds if I was tired, you say, you know, he's tired.
I'm not tired.
I'm actually like enthused and inspired because we're close to winning this thing.
We're close to winning.
We are very close to winning it, Bruce.
This is the kind of outrageous rhetoric that has resulted in two assassination attempts in the last three months, probably.
I was Donald Trump in Atlanta yesterday.
Back to your phone calls.
A few minutes left here in this opening segment of the Washington Journal.
This is Hillgrove out of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
Harris Wall supporter.
Good morning.
Good morning, John.
It was JD Vance who called Trump an American Hitler.
Remember when he wrote his book, The Effigy, Hillbilly Effigy?
Anyway, elegy, rather, I'm sorry.
The greatest enemy of the truth is not the lie.
It's the people who believe the lie.
And this guy is something else as far as lying goes.
I tell you what, I voted for Harris and Waltz just a while ago, a paper ballot, and I hope she wins.
This country does.
We had the best four years under the Biden Harris administration.
The lowest amount of unemployment.
Everything was going to the infrastructure bill, everything.
These are things that Trump promised, you know, us when he was in office, never came through.
And I'd like to see Puerto Rico become a state that would really kind of piss them off.
You know what I mean?
Well, anyway, that's what I want to say.
Thank you.
That's Hillgrove in the Keystone State, and our last caller in this first segment of the Washington Journal.
Stick around, though.
Plenty more to talk about this morning, including up next, focus on polling.
We'll talk with Cliff Young, the president of polling and societal trends at Ipsos.
And later, it's David Becker, the founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research on Electoral Systems and Election Security.
we'll be right back attention middle and high school students across america It's time to make your voice heard.
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this election night c-span delivers something different Not just the presidential race, but the state races that will decide the balance of power in Congress.
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Scroll through and spend a few minutes on C-SPAN's points of interest.
Washington Journal continues.
With a week to go into Election Day, we're joined once again by Cliff Young.
He's the polling and societal trends president at Ipsos.
And Cliff Young, what's the freshest polling insight you can give in these final days of the election besides that it's going to be razor-thin and it's going to be close?
Well, it is neck and neck, and we expect it to be neck and neck.
I would pay attention to the key swing states, those seven oh, so important states.
And really, in my mind, it will be about the economy, the economy, the economy.
You see both campaigns revving up on that side.
You see Harris really emphasizing threats to democracy to mobilize her base.
You see Trump emphasizing immigration to mobilize his.
But ultimately, it will come down to inflation in the economy.
More than 42 million Americans have already voted in this election.
What are Americans' views right now about early voting and mail-in voting and confidence in those systems versus the traditional voting a week from now on election day?
Yeah, by our own polling at Ipsos, we have about 25% of the population, the voting population that's voted already.
It's neck and neck there as well.
And so it will be a neck and neck race.
When it comes to vote capture, Americans across the board, independent of political stripes, are confident in your traditional methods, going to the voting booth and placing your opinion there.
Early voting in loco, people trust that.
But when it comes to other forms of voting, especially absentee and mail-in, there you have a partisan divide.
There things begin to break down.
You have a vast majority of Democrats that are confident in those sorts of forms.
Republicans much less so.
Why?
Well, it goes to ultimately relative confidence in the system.
We have to be, first we have to step back a bit and provide some context.
When you're out of power, you're less likely to be confident in the system.
So at this point, Republicans are less confident than Democrats.
This has been the case for decades.
And so if you lose, maybe you lose and you're a little bit surly because of that.
But there's a broader context where a vast majority of Americans, and by the way, global citizens, because we track this globally, a vast majority believe that the system is broken, that the system is rigged, and that the establishment no longer cares about the average person.
But did you find this back in 2020 when Donald Trump was running for re-election and Democrats are the ones that were out of power in the White House?
Was there a flip of the numbers or were you even polling on this topic?
No, the numbers absolutely flipped.
And they look like the inversion of each other, right?
They're mirror images of each other.
In other words, Democrats in 2019 were much less confident in the system, in the electoral system.
Republicans much more so.
When Donald Trump lost and Biden won, that flipped.
So we have to understand there's sort of a cicadian rhythm to elections, to, you know, being the party out of power, you're less trustful in the system.
But there's something more systemic and basic as well.
Like I said, a broad-based belief that the system is broken.
The cicadian rhythm of issues that are important to voters, there's an old saying, it's the economy's stupid.
It continues to be the top concern for voters that Ipsos has found throughout this election cycle.
How does that compare to other key issues?
Yeah, exactly.
It's the economy, the economy, the economy.
Until it's not, right?
In 2020, it was COVID.
Obviously, Biden won on COVID.
The second most important issue that we find is actually threats to democracy.
And we put this data there to kind of reinforce the point that the system's fragile right now.
You have like a lot of uncertainty and doubts about the system.
And in third place, it's immigration.
And we can show the trends over time throughout the course of this year from February of this year to the most recent Ipsos poll just in the field, October 16th through 27th.
The blue line is the economy, unemployment, and jobs as the top concern of Americans.
The orange line is the political extremism, threats to democracy.
The yellow line is immigration and then other issues and not even polling in the double digits at this point.
No, those are the three main issues.
In terms of your issues, we want to hear from you this morning with Cliff Young of Ipsos.
He's always happy to chat with you about the issues that you care about the most and polling trends in this election.
It's 202-748-8000 for voters to call in this morning for Democrats, 202-748-8001 for Republicans.
Independents, 202748-8002.
Cliff Young, walk me through as folks are calling in some of your polling and latest findings about the day after the election about Americans and accepting the results or whether they will accept the results of what's going to happen a week from now.
Yeah, that's a great question.
And what we did actually here is took about six or seven polls that we've done, one that we just did yesterday, we compile them together to get a picture of the election integrity scenario.
And what do we find?
We find that a vast, first and foremost, kind of on an optimistic side, a vast majority of Americans say they would accept the results of the election.
However, when you peel away that onion, there's a lot of uncertainty and doubt, especially among Republicans, as we've already said, that are less likely to see the system as open and fair relative to Democrats today.
They're more likely to see it as rigged.
They're more likely to see it as writ with fraud.
They're more likely to see it being overrun by illegal aliens that are voting.
And so there is this sort of underlying doubt about the integrity of the system.
But at least Americans today say they would accept the election.
So break that down a little bit more from the how are they so willing to accept the results of the election but then have those doubts about the election?
How do you poll on those things to find two what are seemingly at odds understandings of the public?
Yeah, that's a great that's a great question and we can walk around as humans with two contradictory ideas in our heads.
I think there's a the notion of kind of social convention.
If you lose, you lose with dignity.
That doesn't mean that you like to lose or you think it was fair that you lost.
I think that's what we're seeing in the data.
But as I said before, the party in power typically is less trustful of the system and Republicans today are out of power.
One that stood out for me on confidence in the system, the old saying that people don't like Congress, but they like their Congressperson.
That's why they keep getting elected.
It's almost like the person you know the most is the person you trust the most.
And one of the questions that you asked folks in your poll is whether they trust election officials in their county or town to do their jobs honestly.
And that was where the numbers were pretty uniformly across the board very high in confidence.
Democrats or Democratic-leaning registered voters saying 83% of the time that they trust those in their county.
Independents, 70%.
Republicans, 64%.
You trust your friend, you trust your neighbor, you trust your mother.
And we see this sort of result recurring over and over again.
I like my congressmen, man or woman, but I don't like the other ones.
They're all scoundrels.
But this sort of reinforces a typical, I would say, human orientation, that things that are more approximate, you trust more.
Cliff Young with us, set to take your calls this morning.
And we've gotten for about 20, 25 more minutes.
So get your calls in.
This is Ed out of Philly Independent.
Ed, good morning.
Hey, good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
Hey, I just find it very interesting today.
I'm glad we got somebody on here talking about societal trends.
I've watched, I know people were talking about Trump's rally in Madison Square Garden, and I watched a fair amount of the coverage of it.
And I found it really shocking that people are so hyper-focused on the offensive jokes.
And this sort of like victim complex among a lot of Trump's supporters is really on full display where they're talking about how they're upset that people call them Nazis.
But one of the speakers on the dais at that rally made a joke, maybe the only good joke that was told about being a speaker at a Nazi rally.
He called it a Nazi rally.
They all laughed.
I think that it's really unfortunate to see that this sort of persecution complex is the only thing that it really is the sole plank in this platform.
And I guess what I'm interested in, asking the guest, is what he thinks is going to happen when Trump has to start to exit the stage now that he's converted the GOP infrastructure into essentially a giant slush fund for his company now that the Trump organization is in tatters.
Because I think that now we have no backup or guarantee of checks and balances in any way like we did on January 6th because these people need him because the party is him.
And I'm just curious, like, what do you think is going to come next?
Cliff Young.
Yeah, I mean, when we look at, I would say that Trump or Bolsonaro in Brazil or Le Pen in France or any of these figures that are a little bit more right-leaning in orientation are a manifestation of the time, are a symptom of the times.
And we have, you know, really two Americas.
It's a tale of two Americas.
And one of the Americas is worried about the changes that are going on today that looks towards the past, take America, want to take the country back or take America back, more nativist in orientation, more restrictivists in its understanding of who should and should not be an American.
And Trump represents that, but Trump didn't create that.
That already existed, and that's part of the American story.
We can go back historically the last 250 years, and we've had waves of this more sort of nativist, America-first focus.
And this is just the most recent one.
For Donald Trump to exit the stage, he would first have to lose to Kamala Harris.
Why don't you walk us through this poll from Ipsos, the headline, the national polls give the edge to Harris but are trending Donald Trump.
Just to explain what's happening here and what Ipsos is seeing.
Yeah, so what we have actually there is the aggregation of all polls, not just Ipsos' polls.
So all the polls in the market.
We take it from 538, which aggregates polls.
We take it from Real Color Politics, which aggregates polls.
And what we wanted to show was that there's a narrowing at the national level, and there has been over the last few weeks.
You know, it's plus one, plus two, depending how you count it.
But there has been this narrowing.
Trump has gained steam relative to Harris.
And then take us back to what happened at the end of 2016, at the end of 2020, and did we see the similar trends here with the candidates at the end?
Is this just a natural narrowing of the distance between the two candidates at the end of an election?
Yeah, in general, whether it's an election in the United States or anywhere else in the world, there typically is a narrowing.
And so we should expect one here as well as the campaigns double down on their primary messages, motivate and activate those final individuals to come to their side.
But I think there's an especially interesting tilt.
That's why you put that in there, towards Trump, one that I think goes above and beyond just the traditional narrowing.
And that tilt happening, especially in some of the key swing states in the Rust Belt.
Yeah, Rust Bowl is obviously critical.
Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, those states are critical for both sides, especially the Harris side.
And we find very tight races to, and in several of the states, actually Trump leading in the public polls.
This is Michigan here, Wisconsin in the middle, Pennsylvania on the side, Donald Trump, the red line, and Kamala Harris the blue line.
You can look at those charts as we hear from Anthony in Arizona, line for Democrats.
Good morning.
Good morning, teammates, and thank you.
I'd like to bring up the fact that I believe we have a crisis in voter confidence, but it's a subset of citizen confidence.
And I proposition that with: let's consider if we were doing a blind test, a blind test, and we had these two candidates.
And then let's take it a step further since we did reference, well, it's probably leading about the economy.
And let's put you on a road, any road, major road today, and you're driving down a road, and the road is really in terrible condition.
You can feel that.
Okay.
Now, you're also going having to slow down where the speed is supposed to be 65 or 70 people.
So, Anthony, Anthony, bring me to the question just because I've got a lot of folks waiting.
Sure.
That's the question.
It is that we have personal insecurity that we don't trust change.
And why?
Because we are insecure, that our nation has always changed.
So now, given a blind test, why can't people see the difference?
Cliff Young, what do you want to take from that?
Yeah, I think there's two sort of trends going on here.
The first one is more the pendulum going back and forth.
As we already said, the party out of power, those that support it, typically are less trustful of the electoral system.
Republicans are out of power, they're less trustful at this point specifically.
That's very natural.
We can expect that.
But I also think, and the caller was alluding to this, there's a broader-based trend going on where everyone is less distrustful of the system.
Those pendulum swings are larger and larger.
The partisans are more and more apart or farther apart than they were, let's say, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
And we have to understand that, that a vast majority of Americans believe that the system is broken, and that feeds into distrust of the electoral system.
Edna, in Morristown, Tennessee, Republican, good morning.
Yes, sir.
I would like for folks to look at the facts, look at what has happened from the time Biden and Harris went in.
Look at the four years before.
I'm 70 years old, and I still work part-time.
My groceries have went up, my gases went up.
I don't trust the integrity of a whole lot.
But I'm in Hamlin County, Tennessee, and we don't have a lot of trust here as well.
Trust in the economy.
Cliff Young.
Yeah, that's a very traditional framing, electoral framing.
More of the same are throw the bums out.
And the caller here wants to throw the bums out, it sounds like it.
Why?
Because the costs are higher.
The Trump campaign has been working very hard, especially in its advertising in the key swing states, to make that point, to make that connection, to connect Biden to high inflation, to connect Hares to high inflation.
And on the flip side, the Hair's campaign has tried to stay away from it and talk about the economy in other ways, like the opportunity economy for all Americans.
That's the critical point of this electoral cycle.
In my mind, it is what will win the election for one of the sides.
And I think the caller hit it squarely on the head.
About 10 minutes left with Cliff Young of Ipsos, his recent book, Polls, Polsters, and Public Opinion: A Guide for Decision Makers.
What can they take from your guide?
Yeah, first and foremost, what is a pollster?
We're not an upholsterer.
We don't reduce sofas or couches.
We actually are, I believe, the guardians of public opinion.
We basically measure, we measure and analyze public opinion.
I think we're critical.
It's a critical profession, critical figures in any sort of healthy democracy to link those who govern with those who are being governed.
And in addition, it's a book that memorializes my 25 years of professional experience in a way that a younger pollster and analyst can more easily go and analyze public opinion.
What was polling like 25 years ago?
How did you do the job?
What was different then compared to today?
Well, it really depends on where you are.
So I was in Brazil around that time, and there we did it face-to-face.
We knocked on people's doors.
Here in the United States, we called landlines when people actually had a landline.
Like my kids, my three adult kids, do not have landlines, right?
And now in the United States, we use a whole host of methodologies, including online telephones.
Sometimes we send snail mails, sometimes we knock on the door.
But 25 years ago, in Brazil, it was face-to-face.
In the United States, it was landline telephones.
Are polls more accurate today than 25 years ago, or was it better?
Did they hit the results more on the head back then?
I would say the following.
If you look at the long-term trend, the polls are more accurate today than they were then.
However, we've had some really critical misses.
We were on the wrong side of the fence, like in 2016, which definitely doesn't help our reputation.
Chris, Oak Park, Illinois Independent, thanks for waiting.
It's quite right.
Thank you for taking my call.
You know, with the polling, and especially with regarding election integrity, there was something that was said in Madison Square Garden by Trump on Sunday regarding that he and Mike Johnson, Speaker Mike Johnson, had a secret, which, you know, what is going to be that secret and how will that affect the integrity of this election and the counting?
So, you know, that's my concern in terms of polling.
So thank you for taking my call.
Bye.
Cliff Young.
Yeah, a vast majority of Americans are not in favor of legal actions or institutional actions when it comes to election results.
That doesn't mean you'll have an actor here or there, a bad actor here or there do things, but the vast majority of Americans are not in favor of that.
I think there's another point which is interesting.
We haven't talked a bit about it, we've talked a lot about public opinion.
Obviously, that's why I'm here.
I'm a pollster.
But a lot of this goes to sort of the breakdown of elite consensus about what is said and what is not said.
And, you know, we're sort of in a world today, in this highly polarized environment, where anything goes.
And obviously, that doesn't help integrity, help trust in the system.
Elite consensus?
Yeah, elite consensus about how to behave and what you should say and shouldn't say in public, right?
You know, if you're not careful, it can be dangerous, right?
We see this sort of historically over time.
These sorts of things happen, especially under populist regimes.
And there's a lot of evidence suggests, especially academic evidence, that suggests that there's been this breakdown of the, let's say, norms of behavior or norms of conduct among elite actors.
How do you poll that?
How do you figure out that that's happening?
Yeah, you would do a survey of, let's say, high-net worth or high-educated, highly educated individuals, and you ask them about how one should behave.
And these sorts of more sociological studies have always been part of the discipline of sociology and the social sciences more generally.
And there's evidence that suggests that increasingly there's less consensus about how elite should behave.
Steve and Mentor, Ohio, Democrat.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Let me just mention two things.
One, Trump is not Hitler.
Trump wants to be Hitler.
Hitler was a soldier.
Number two.
I'm not sure where we're going with Hitler comparisons.
Why do you think Nazism and Hitler have come up so much more on the campaign trail now?
I think on both sides, democracy itself has been weaponized and weaponized in different ways.
And so on the left, it's about threats to democracy and who's a threat to democracy?
Trump.
On the right, it's about the elite stealing and rigging the system against the average person.
And we're seeing this battling out today.
And this is why we have these memes or these tropes that sort of appear because each side is ginning up their base.
They especially use this rhetoric to get people out to the polls because fear does drive people.
And we have to understand, emphasizing again, that it does happen on both sides.
On polling, what are you watching for in the final seven days here?
Does it make sense to even look at polls at this point this close to the election and might as well wait for the poll that matters on election day?
Oh, I'm looking at the polls up to Election Day, right?
Well, I am a pollster, obviously, but I'm especially looking at the swing states.
I'm especially looking at Pennsylvania.
I think Pennsylvania will be key.
I'm also looking at the matchup between Trump and Harris on the economy.
I think that will be a critical leading indicator of who takes the White House.
So those are the sorts of things I'm looking at.
Neil in Cleveland, Ohio, just a couple minutes left here with Cliff Young, Republican.
Go ahead.
Yes.
I just wanted to make a comment on the recent polling where Trump has had a bit of a surge and is doing well in the last week and a half or so.
And my theory, I'm listening and trying to hear something that explains that.
And I know it's almost impossible because you really can't get into the minds of everybody.
But my suggestion is it's possible that people have waited a little bit and then evaluated.
They've called their tax preparers and said, well, what is the difference now that the candidates have given us their tax positions and what they're going to do for us?
Because basically, like you say, it's the economy that runs the voting in a lot of respects.
But people vote with their pocketbooks.
So Trump has had the Harris is going to let the Trump tax cuts sunset at the end of next year.
And every business owner in America is going to lose a large tax deduction.
So they call their tax preparers.
And the tax preparers say, well, this is what it's going to cost you, even though you hear, well, Harris says she'll do this for the small business because we love small business owners.
Well, they're in a bind because these tax cuts are set to expire and they will want them to expire.
And the small business owners and medium business owners are going to be facing higher rates and the elimination of a large tax deduction if you're in business.
That's Neil in Ohio.
Yeah, I think he's hammering home an important point.
It's the economy.
There are different mechanisms by which you can reflect on the economy, but it's really the economy, the economy, the economy.
And Trump today is more credible talking about it because of inflation than Harris is.
And I think if the trend is true, if we take it at face value, and I think we should, that tilt towards Trump is a function of the efficiency of his campaign in the swing states when it comes to the economy.
Time for one more call.
This is Jerry in Swartz Creek, Michigan, line for Democrats.
Jerry, go ahead from that swing state.
Yeah, I'd like to come in on the New York Trump rally there.
About the Puerto Ricans, I worked, I had the pleasure of working in Florida when I went down there to work because it was so bad in Michigan with quite a few Puerto Ricans.
And they were the hardest working, nicest people you could ever meet.
And they worked hard and they sent their money home to their families and stuff and didn't do nothing.
They would cook for all the people, like 80 people at the job and sell them food instead of real fresh food and everything.
And I just wanted to say that Puerto Ricans are some of the nicest people you'll ever meet in life.
That's Jane.
And that's all I have to say.
In Michigan, final minute here, the Puerto Rican voting block.
It's a voting block, and it's especially important in certain states.
And obviously, both sides are doing what they can to drive them out, especially the Democrats.
They'll use what was said in that rally ultimately to try to drive out that half quarter percent more of that voting block and get them to the polls.
I would say more generally, when you ask Americans about immigration, legal immigration, a super majority support, super majority percent of Americans actually support it.
It breaks down when it comes to legal versus illegal.
And that's really the break between Democrats and Republicans.
The Republicans want law and order.
They want rules imposed.
They don't want illegal immigrants because what about the legal immigrants that are coming?
And so we have to understand kind of the distinction in that debate, that overall, we're a land of immigrants.
Most Americans agree that that's important.
But how you get here today is really important.
Ipsos.com is where you can go to read the work of Cliff Young and his colleagues at Ipsos.
You can also read his book, Polls, Polsters, and Public Opinion, A Guide for Decision Makers.
It's just out.
Cliff Young, always do appreciate the time.
Thank you.
Up next, we'll continue our conversation about election integrity with David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
Stick around.
We'll be right back with one of the tightest races for control of Congress in modern political history.
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Washington Journal continues.
David Becker is back at our desk.
He's the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
David Becker, remind viewers what kind of research and innovation you're doing at the center.
So we've been around for about eight years.
We work with election officials of both parties to support elections that voters should and do trust.
I work with Republican secretaries, Democratic secretaries, local election officials.
We put out research.
Research, for instance, shows that it's easier to register to vote than ever before.
More states have availability of online voter registration, automatic voter registration, same-day registration.
And it's easier to vote than ever before.
97% of all voters can vote early in the United States.
And in fact, as we sit here today, 45 states in D.C. are offering early voting, so people should get out there and vote.
And 36 states in D.C. offer no excuse mail voting, which is better than ever before.
Those are the kinds of research pieces we generally put out.
And then we also run the Election Official Legal Defense Network because unfortunately, over the last several years, election officials have been targeted for threats and harassment, sometimes even by the former president of the United States, sometimes by name.
And they often need a lawyer for advice and assistance.
And we have recruited a network of lawyers all across the country who are willing to be paired with them regardless of party and work for them for free to assist and advise them.
Staying on the center for a second more, how's it funded?
And does it have a partisan leaning one way or the other?
No partisan leaning whatsoever.
As I said, I work equally with Republicans and Democrats.
We get funded primarily by major foundations out there as well as individuals who choose to donate to us.
We're a 501c3, so all of our funding and everything else is publicly available.
On voting and early voting, so more than 42 million Americans at this point have early voted, either via absentee ballot or in-person early voting.
What do you make of that number and how it compares to previous years?
Yeah, I just checked it before I came on.
I think it's about 48 million, getting very close.
It's going to hit 50 million today.
It's, first of all, very good news.
The more people who vote early, not only does it mean voters are taking advantage of the convenience of early voting, it's actually an important security measure.
And I think this is often missed when we're discussing early voting and mail voting, how important it is to spread voting out over a series of days in a series of modes, in person or by mail.
That way, if there is any kind of event, whether it be intentional, like some kind of cyber attack or ransomware or something like that, or unintentional, like we had the CloudFair Flare situation this summer that caused some delays in Arizona during their primary day, or just traffic or weather, which we've seen, it spreads that out and makes it easier to mitigate any possible challenges that you have, especially in this era of disinformation.
If voters choose to vote early, they make themselves a moving target for any disinformation that could try to affect their vote or confuse them about how to vote.
And once they've voted, they've completely inoculated themselves against that disinformation.
So it's really good news.
I caution people not to take any partisan message from the early vote.
We just don't know what this early vote is.
It's coming from all over.
It seems to be skewing slightly more women, but also be skewing slightly older.
So that could mean a variety of different things.
Does early voting mean that vote counting is going to happen faster on election night?
When are we going to know the results?
It could.
It depends on the kind of early voting.
So first of all, we should mention that it has always taken us days, if not weeks, to count all the ballots.
There's a misconception that because the margins used to be much wider and the media could call a race on election night that states were counting ballots fast.
But that's not true.
What was happening was they were just counting enough ballots that the media could call the race.
So take, for instance, California, which will likely be called as soon as the polls close in California.
California will have counted a very, very tiny percentage of its votes, but it's pretty obvious which way California is very likely to go in the presidential race.
Whereas Georgia is going to count ballots very fast, but the margin could be very, very narrow.
So we're going to need a lot more votes before we can understand who won Georgia.
It's always taken that long.
That's why the U.S. Constitution says electors don't meet until six weeks after the election.
That's so the states can actually figure out who is going to win and get their electoral votes.
So understanding that, it all depends on the margin.
The margin is the biggest variable.
If it's very, very close, and by all accounts it will be close, I think everyone rationally should be able to process the idea that their candidate won or lost, given how close it is.
We'll likely need a couple of days in some states, particularly Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and possibly Arizona, Nevada.
And that's largely because of two things.
One, in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, they can't begin processing mail and in Pennsylvania early votes until Election Day, meaning they can't look at the envelope, confirm all the information, open the envelope, take the ballot out, and put it in a scanner.
In Arizona and Nevada, they can pre-process, but they get a lot of mail votes on Election Day.
And you can't pre-process a ballot you don't have.
So they're going to have to take some time to do that, depending on the margins.
That could mean we're going into later in the week, Thursday, or perhaps even Friday.
I think, you know, if I were to guess, I'd say we're going to probably know earlier than we did in 2020, just because we're not in COVID.
And that means we have more people working.
A lot of the technology has been improved.
Philadelphia has greatly improved its processing ability of getting those mail ballots counted.
So I think we're probably looking at Thursday or Friday, but don't hold me to that.
Let me give the phone numbers for viewers to call in.
As usual, split by political party.
Republicans 202-748-8001.
Democrats 202-748-8000.
Independents 202-748-8002.
As folks are calling in, I'll show this headline that we showed viewers in the first hour of our program.
It's from the Wall Street Journal today.
Voting battles begin to hit the Supreme Court.
I want you to just kind of walk through what's going on.
I want to start with the one in Pennsylvania.
Here's the graph that describes it from the Wall Street Journal.
The Republican National Committee and election officials from Pennsylvania's heavily Republican Butler County asked Supreme Court justices to block authorities from counting provisional ballots cast by voters who previously sent mail-in ballots that were invalidated because of errors such as assembling the return envelope incorrectly.
Can you just put that into regular speakers?
Yeah, this is a really kind of complicated issue.
It's probably not going to affect that many votes.
But when the ballots come in, either mail or early ballots under Pennsylvania law, they have to be inside an inner secrecy sleeve.
So it's a second envelope that gets sealed to preserve the secrecy.
It doesn't actually need to be there, but that's what Pennsylvania law says.
What election officials can do in some counties and do is they weigh the ballots and they can tell by the weight of the ballots whether or not certain ballots have the secrecy sleeve or not because the scales are that precise.
And if they don't have the secrecy sleeve, in some counties they reach out to those voters and say, hey, if you want to come down, you can cast a provisional ballot.
And if your ballot doesn't have the secrecy sleeve, that provisional ballot will count.
What this Pennsylvania Supreme Court has held is that's fine.
That's under state law.
That's a fine thing to do.
And now the Republicans have taken this to the United States Supreme Court.
But this is a very state law issue.
I think it's highly unlikely that the United States Supreme Court is even going to take this case.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has refused to stay their order pending that appeal.
And the appeal relies a lot on this idea that state legislatures have complete power to do whatever they want without regard to the state constitutions or the state judiciary.
This has largely been rejected in a case from about a year ago called Moore versus Harper that came out of North Carolina by the Supreme Court.
So I think the Supreme Court is going to stay out of this.
I think the Supreme Court in general doesn't want to get involved in these very, very state law election disputes.
I think we're going to see that repeatedly through this process where the state, where the United States Supreme Court allows the states to continue to run elections as they see fit consistent with the United States Constitution.
The other case, not as much of a swing state, but in the state of Virginia, Virginia's Republican Attorney General has asked the Supreme Court justices to revive a state voter purge that removed some 1,600 alleged non-citizens from the rolls after lower courts found that canceling voter registration so close to the election violates federal law.
So there's two big problems with what Virginia was trying to do this time around.
First, there is a very well-known federal law called the National Voter Registration Act passed in 1993, which says that all states that are covered under the MVRA, which includes Virginia, there's six states that are exempt, cannot conduct large-scale systematic voter list maintenance, removals of voters within 90 days of the election.
That's in there because sometimes states get it wrong.
It's very understandable, particularly people with common names, other things like that.
They're doing their best they can.
But if they do that in 2023, there's still plenty of time for that person to get re-registered or fix the problem.
If they do that 90 days before the election, they might not even know there's a problem before they go try to vote.
So that's why that law is in place.
And Virginia knows about that law.
It's been around for 30 years, and they did this program anyway.
The second big problem was they made a lot of mistakes.
I mean, there were a lot of identified citizens on this non-citizen list when they went to court and proof was shown to the court.
So they kind of showed through their actions how important this 90-day quiet period, as it's called, in the National Voter Registration Act was.
Again, I expect the United States Supreme Court not to weigh in on this.
I think this is pretty clearly the Fourth Circuit just affirmed the district court's opinion in this case.
I think it's likely the Supreme Court's going to stay out of these very state-specific, although this one does involve federal law issues.
How concerned are you about non-U.S. citizens voting a week from today?
I'm not very concerned, and that's because of the documentation and work that, frankly, Republican election officials have done to show how extremely rare the problem of non-citizen voting is.
We've known that's true.
There are reasons it's extremely rare.
One, it's illegal.
It has been for 30 years under a very specific statute that says it's a crime with jail time and a fine if a non-citizen votes.
Also, importantly, they're going to get deported if they vote as a non-citizen.
So they're risking their presence here in the United States.
Second, and I think a lot of people don't necessarily realize this, since 2002, there's a law in the United States that requires every single voter who registers to provide ID when they register, almost always a driver's license number, which is checked against the Motor Vehicles Agency data.
And remember, when you go into motor vehicles agencies now, you have to show proof of legal presence.
So if you've shown a green card, that'll be flagged.
But if you show a U.S. birth certificate or a U.S. passport, it won't be flagged.
So that's really important.
Every single voter has to provide ID when they register to vote.
We have nationwide voter ID for registration.
And then lastly, as I mentioned, these Republican states have documented how rare it is.
Just last week, Ohio had alleged that there were about 499 non-citizens registered to vote.
When the Attorney General, a Republican, looked at this, he found only six people who he could charge with non-citizen voting over the course of a decade dating back to 2014.
I looked this up.
It's actually more likely, you're more likely as an Ohioan to get hit by lightning than to find a non-citizen vote.
Georgia did an audit of their roles.
They just announced it last week as well.
I believe they found nine people dating back to 2008, so over 15 years, who were non-citizens who voted.
It does happen extremely rarely, almost always because of some sense of confusion about what they're supposed to do, because no one would rationally put their legal presence at risk in the United States, put themselves at risk of being deported to cast one ballot in an election in which 160 million ballots are going to be cast.
As usual, plenty of calls for you.
Let me start in Delaware, Georgetown, Delaware.
Kathleen, Line for Democrats.
Good morning.
You're on with David Becker.
Good morning, John.
Good morning, Mr. Becker.
I would like to know, now in 2020 and again this year, they were assuring everybody that these voter boxes where you can drop off your ballot in these boxes.
Now, if I'm not wrong, I saw on the news the other day where about three, maybe more of those boxes had been set on fire and all the envelopes in it were burned.
Now, I don't know what Donald Trump's going to make of that, but what do you think of that or am I wrong?
No, you raise a really good point.
There's been three instances over the last several weeks.
One was a postal box in Arizona, and then I believe over the last two days, there were ballot drop boxes, one in Portland and one in Vancouver, Washington.
And in each case, in the Arizona and Portland situation, only a very small number of ballots were destroyed.
The rest were salvageable.
In the Washington case, Vancouver, Washington, it looks like there might have been hundreds of ballots destroyed.
Now, really importantly here, they're reaching out to voters.
Voters know whether they dropped ballots into these boxes.
They also have good ballot tracking in those states so they can tell whether or not they've got those ballots in.
There are protections against to make sure that no one votes twice, but if their ballot has been destroyed or they're not sure what happened to it, they can go get a replacement ballot.
If their ballot comes in, only the first ballot will count.
The second ballot won't count because they know who sent it because the envelopes say that.
That's really, really important.
But I think Kathleen raises another point which is really important, which is we're seven days out from the election at this point, and there are tens of millions of mail ballots that still haven't been voted that are likely coming in.
And if you're still holding on to your mail ballot, I would at this point definitely not put it in the mail.
I would put it in a drop box.
Most drop boxes are monitored, verified, cleaned out every day.
So it's very likely that's going to be safe.
But if you have any doubts at all, you can take it right to an election office, hand it to an election worker.
It'll be logged in at that point and stored securely and safely for the entire time.
And another option is if you have a mail ballot and you're just not quite sure about it, you can bring your mail ballot into an early voting site or even on election day in most places, surrender it, and they'll give you in most places a regular ballot.
Even if you don't have it, they'll give you a provisional ballot, and that provisional ballot will only count if they don't receive your mail ballot.
And so again, protections to make sure that each voter only votes once.
On the Dropbox fires, I was talking to a longtime firefighter yesterday, and he was talking about the training that he was going through that they have this year that they just got on how to deal with Dropbox fires of not to use water on it that might destroy the ballot, but to use chemicals to put out the fire and then secure the site so election officials can come and be on site.
He's said in all his years of firefighting training, he doesn't remember getting that kind of training before an election before.
What do you make of that story?
I mean, it's credible that we live in a it's incredible that we live in a country like that right now, right?
Where there are people who are intentionally, by the way, there's film of this individual.
It might have been the same individual who firebombed both the Oregon and Washington drop boxes.
That person is going to get caught and is going to be prosecuted and spend several years in jail.
So people should know that.
But how sad a commentary on our country that there are people out there trying to destroy ballots.
Maybe they're doing it for partisan reasons.
Maybe they're doing it to sow chaos.
I guarantee you what they're doing is serving the goals, either wittingly or unwittingly, of our foreign adversaries like Russia that want to sow chaos, that are clearly trying to interfere in our election.
I mean, similarly, what does it say about our country that a nonprofit like mine needs to run the Election Official Legal Defense Network and recruit attorneys to work pro bono for our public servants, for our election officials who've been facing abuse, threats, and harassment for well over four years now and are still facing it and anticipating even more in the aftermath of the election.
I'm very proud to provide that service, but I can't wait till we've restored sanity and I can sunset that and we don't have to offer it anymore.
Melinda in Florida line for Republicans.
Good morning.
Good morning.
My question has to do with the mail-in ballots.
I guess you sign the back of it with your signature.
My question is, do they really does every single mail-in ballot get checked compared, I guess, with the signature that you signed in when you registered to vote?
So that's a great question, Melinda.
What happens in every single state is that signature is checked.
In some states, like Georgia and Minnesota, for instance, they actually check ID numbers also, which can be very helpful.
But in most states, it's a signature match.
And I can tell you in Florida, like driver's license numbers that are under the flap.
But in Florida in particular and nationwide, they check these signatures.
And they're making sure that they match.
I was just out in Clark County, Nevada, and they use software to do the initial check, but that software is set at so high a level that only about 20% of the signatures pass through because they're such exact matches to the signatures on file.
The rest go to bipartisan, observed by bipartisan observers, signature matching, where they actually hold them side by side with the signature on file to make sure they match.
And if they don't match, what they do is they contact the voter, double check.
ask them to come on in or confirm that they sent the mail ballot.
And so mail balloting is very secure.
I think there's another part of this question, which is do they use the signature on file from the voter registration form?
The answer is almost always yes, but there are some states that also look at other signatures that might have been more up to date, like a signature that was left at a DMV or motor vehicles agency or something else just to get the closest to the possible match you can, because signature matching is somewhat inexact, but election officials err on the side of caution there to make sure that they're getting these ballots right.
Also, one other thing, if someone sent someone else's mail ballot in and to commit fraud, at any kind of level that it could affect the election, there's a certainty that some of those voters would come in and try to vote and find that out.
It'd be a huge red flag about mail voting fraud.
And that's in fact how at very small levels, local level mail voting fraud in places like Bridgeport, Connecticut was found.
To Buford, Georgia, this is Bill Independent.
Good morning.
You're on with David Becker.
Good morning, John and David.
My name is Bill, calling you from the Atlanta, Georgia suburban area.
My question, and you may have touched on this, but my question is on mail-in ballots.
I'm 80 years old.
My signature, I can't even recall what my signature looked like two years ago when I got my license.
But I'm just wondering, you know, as a normal person, say my age, my signature vary from day to day, how I'm feeling, whether I'm charred or not.
And I was just wondering, how rigid are they in terms of doing the signature verification?
And is there any changes anticipated there?
And I'll take my answer offline.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Bill.
Yeah, that's a continuation of the last question, but I know quite a bit about Georgia.
Georgia in particular, and actually all the states, have very rigid signature verification regimes.
And in Georgia, for instance, the election officials get trained by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, one of the finest state investigative bureaus in the country, to do this signature match.
In every single state, when you get a ballot, election officials know they've mailed you out a ballot.
Because they flagged that in the record, they will not give you another ballot.
If someone tries to show up and impersonate you, they will know you've gotten a mail ballot.
They need to surrender that or try to cast a provisional ballot, which will not count.
Georgia, of course, as most states has voter ID.
So that would be pretty much impossible.
So there are so many protections in place to make sure that Bill's vote isn't going to be voted by someone else.
And in fact, probably the greater concern, though I think it would be handled, is Bill's ballot might be flagged as not matching because of the signature issues that, frankly, I mean, Bill, everybody has these signature issues because signatures just change so much over time.
So understandable where you're coming from.
But if that happens, his county clerk is going to get a hold of him.
They're going to say, we don't have, they're processing ballots right now in Georgia.
We don't have a signature match on you.
Can you confirm this is your ballot?
They might ask him to come in.
They might ask him to provide some ID.
And in Georgia also, remember, Georgia has this driver's license number on their mail ballots now.
So I will almost guarantee you, Bill, your signature is not going to matter much because if you put your correct driver's license number down on that ballot, it's going to be matched against the driver's file and they're going to know it's you.
Let me get your thoughts on this story that we've talked about for a week or so now.
Philadelphia's district attorney is now suing to stop a $1 million daily giveaway from Elon Munch Musk's pro-Trump political group, saying the contest is indisputably an unlawful lottery that violates Pennsylvania's consumer protection laws.
What do you think about this?
So I can't speak to the state laws in Pennsylvania specifically.
I'm not a Pennsylvania lawyer, but I can speak to the federal laws against vote buying.
There is a federal statute that's been on the books for decades.
It says it is a crime for anyone to offer payment or receive payment in exchange for registering or voting in a federal election.
This has been applied to things like Ben and Jerry's offering to give free ice cream cones in 2008 to people who showed up with an I-voted sticker.
Ben and Jerry's was informed about this law, and they immediately offered ice cream cones to everybody without the I voted sticker, which, of course, is totally fine.
It's been applied to other promotions like Starbucks, and these are obviously very innocuous.
Ben and Jerry's wasn't trying to get people to vote for either candidate, and in fact, that's not what the law requires.
It says just voting or registering in any way.
This offer by Mr. Musk was contingent upon being registered and contingent upon being registered in one of only seven swing states, which indicates it has a political motive behind it.
Voters in California and Texas were not eligible for this promotion.
And then he's offering them much more than an ice cream cone, the chance to win a million dollars, which can be life-changing for a lot of these people.
I mean, it's pretty clearly, I think, over the line on what's legal.
The DOJ sent a letter to his PAC to say this was illegal.
What would normally happen is that rational people would see this and say, okay, I'm going to stop doing this.
What instead Mr. Musk did is he started changing the rationale for this.
He said that now this is an employment contract.
The people we're giving a million dollars to are now spokespeople for our PAC.
You know, I wonder how many of his employees at his businesses are hired by random lot.
It doesn't seem like that's a very rational explanation for what's going on.
And I think, you know, we should understand that doesn't mean he's going to be taken away in handcuffs, and no one is suggesting that right now.
But there is probably an investigation that is ongoing, and he's potentially in some legal peril that down the road, many months later, after this investigation is concluded, there could be some kind of indictment.
You've repeatedly challenged Elon Musk on X for some of his claims about this election.
If you had the chance to sit down with him and talk to him for half an hour, what would you want to tell him?
Well, and a lot of what I tried to do wasn't challenging.
I was just trying to engage for a while.
I mean, I really wanted to see if there was a good faith opportunity to educate him about elections.
I mean, I don't know why anyone would take advice on how elections work from someone who builds electric vehicles.
I certainly hope no one would take advice on electric vehicles from someone like me.
I think the best piece of advice I could give him, and I doubt very seriously he would take it at this point because he's very clearly invested in spreading these lies about the election, is to take up the offer of someone like Stephen Richard, the Republican recorder in Maricopa County, Arizona, who's tried even harder to engage with him respectfully.
He's offered him to have him visit Maricopa County, take him on a tour, answer any questions he has.
And I think that would resolve a lot of these issues.
I mean, it's easy if you don't understand our election system at all to invent conspiracy theories about it.
It's hard to invest your time in learning about it.
It's hard to invest your time in serving as a poll worker, as millions of Americans do, to understand all the checks and balances and redundancies and transparencies in our process that make large-scale voter fraud effectively impossible.
And so I hope that we can return to sanity after this election is over and try to actually learn what's going on in our election system.
Because right now, our election system in the United States is actually more secure than it's ever been.
There are more paper ballots than ever before.
Elon Musk posted something recently about why Democrats oppose paper ballots.
And I responded, we have over 95% paper ballots in the United States.
Every single ballot in all of the battleground states is paper.
The only places with no paper component to their ballots at all are the states of Louisiana and some counties in Texas, hardly Democratic bastions.
And can you just explain what that means for folks who say, but I put the paper into a computer?
Right.
What do you mean?
Super ballot.
So for all of these ballots, we have the paper ballot, which the voter themselves has actually seen, in most cases actually marked, and they've verified.
They've confirmed the choices on the ballot.
That goes into a machine, and we use machines because machines are much more accurate in counting and they're much faster in counting.
But we don't just trust the machines.
In all of the states with paper ballots, they audit those machines, which means they take some of those ballots, they count them by hand, and they compare it to what the machines said to confirm that the machines got it right.
The most famous audit was Georgia's complete 100% hand count of all the presidential ballots in 2020, which again confirmed the results.
That was the same pieces of paper that the human beings, the voters had actually seen and put into that scanner.
That's why paper ballots are so important.
We have more of them than ever.
And so I'd ask people that have doubts, including Mr. Musk, did you have doubts in 2016?
Because in 2016, we had far fewer paper ballots.
The entire state of Georgia was digital.
Most of Pennsylvania had no paper ballots.
Most of North Carolina had no paper ballots.
All three of those states went for Trump in 2016.
Legitimately, there's no evidence they didn't.
But I didn't hear anyone complaining about paper ballots then, and now we have much more paper ballots.
We had 95% in 2020, 2020.
We have 97% or so in 2024.
So we're doing really well.
We can confirm the results and confirm them by comparing with the same piece of paper that the voters held.
About 15 minutes left with David Becker.
We're coming up on 9 a.m. Eastern.
This is Beverly.
Thanks for waiting in Bellwood, Illinois, line for Democrats.
Good morning.
Yes.
I'd just like to make a comment on the gentleman who made a statement regarding the Supreme Court would not like to get involved with this election.
And that's exactly what I disagree with.
I think they're waiting in the wings to hope that it's going to be a tight election that they can get involved.
Now that we know we have a right-wing Supreme Court, I think they would like nothing else but to get involved in this election.
I'm just praying that it's such a landslide that we won't not need their intervention at all.
And that's all I want to make a comment on.
Mr. Becker?
Yeah, I hear that a lot, Beverly, and I understand the concerns.
And I know there have been people across the political spectrum that disagree with decisions that the Supreme Court has made in various ways.
And completely understandable.
I'll just say this.
In 2020, the Supreme Court had some opportunities to get involved in the election, and they didn't take those opportunities up.
I think it's very likely in 2024 they're not looking for those opportunities again.
It's the same makeup of the Supreme Court as in 2020.
Essentially, it's six Republican-appointed justices, three Democratic-appointed justices.
And I think the cases are not well set up for them to take.
I know there's a lot of angst about the election, and sometimes I hear people worried that the losing candidate might try to steal power, as we saw in 2020.
I think it's highly possible that the losing candidate tries to incite anger and perhaps violence and tries to engage in a desperate attempt to steal power.
What I will tell you is that's not going to work.
It's a strategy doomed to failure.
We have guardrails in place.
The counties and the states will certify the votes in November.
The states will certify the votes, usually in late November, early December.
I have 100% confidence in that, particularly in the swing states.
The governors of the states will ascertain electors on December 11th.
Five of those governors are Democrats.
Two are Republicans who've stood up to these kinds of challenges before.
And the electors will meet on December 17th.
And on January 6th, we'll have a joint session of Congress presided over by Vice President Harris, where I am 100% confident that while there might be attempts to throw out electors, that those attempts will fail because they will ultimately rely upon 51 senators being willing to disenfranchise an entire state.
I just don't see that happening in any way.
I think the Supreme Court is not going to have an opportunity, even if they wanted it, to try to intervene in this election in a way that would change the outcome.
And I don't think they want it.
LaGrange, Georgia, this is Tommy Republican.
Good morning.
Very impressed with Mr. Becker.
And I just would like to know his opinion on the Dominion voting machines.
In Georgia, we use the Dominion voting machine to have a lot of questions come up about whether or not they're secure, whether or not they're accurate, and that kind of stuff.
I would love to have his opinion on that, please.
Thank you, Tommy.
Yeah, so we hear this quite a bit.
And of course, there's been a lot of disinformation spread about the voting machines, not just this one particular manufacturer, but others as well.
Dominion voting machines were used in states that Trump won.
Dominion voting machines were used in states that Biden won.
The Dominion voting machines in Georgia and pretty much in every state, except for Louisiana and Texas, where there's some paperless voting machines, the voting machines in every state have paper and they're audited.
So people can confirm that those ballots are actually counted correctly.
One other point I'd make to Tommy and others, look, we want to use voting machines because we have very long, complex ballots in the United States.
Arizona has, I think Maricopa County has 79 races on their ballot this year?
Yeah, this year.
And that's not unusual.
I mean, if you look in most places, there are multiple pages and dozens of races.
And you can't hand count those in one night.
You probably can't hand count those in a month.
So you want something that can count them fast and accurately.
Machines do that better than tired human beings or even awake human beings, right?
So we want to use the machines, but we don't want to trust them without verifying.
So we have this audit verification.
And then one final point about the claims made about voting machines in 2020.
Fox News was sued over false claims by this voting machine manufacturer, by Dominion.
And rather than go to trial and risk a verdict against them, they were willing to pay out nearly $800 million in a settlement before trial rather than trying to fight those defamation claims.
Kerry Lake and Rudy Giuliani were both sued for defamation for claims that included claims about the voting machines.
And both of them, rather than go to trial and use the absolute defense of I was telling the truth, they were invited to come with evidence that what they were saying was truthful.
They both conceded liability.
They both said, okay, I'm guilty.
Let's go right to the damages phase.
I lied.
Let's go right to the damages phase.
That's remarkable, and it tells you how sound these theories are.
It's really easy for people to make wild claims on social media.
When you go to court before any judge, and I don't care what, who appointed those judges, because there were multiple, at least eight by my count, Trump-appointed judges who heard cases in 2020.
And all of them held these claims to a standard of evidence.
They had to prove those claims.
And in every single case, time and time again, those claims have been debunked.
And in fact, often the people who've been making these claims about voting machines and mail ballots and non-citizens have run away from having to provide evidence.
Can you take on this text?
Because we've gotten some version of this, either via phone call or text before.
So this is what Lou says in Middlesex County, New Jersey, an independent.
Good morning, Mr. Becker.
I voted in 2020.
I voted for Trump.
I've been voting since 1976.
I have never seen an election where counting was stopped.
And it happened that these were all Democratic counties in important swing states.
And my candidate was winning at that point.
Thereafter, it changed.
Would you not be skeptical of integrity?
I would if that had happened, but that's not what happened.
I mean, in every single jurisdiction in the country, they were continuing to count ballots.
I have this analogy that I use.
It takes a long time to count ballots, particularly in larger counties.
And he's talking about Democratic counties, which might be urban and which might have a lot of people in them.
Imagine a jelly bean jar, a big jelly bean jar, like a fishbowl filled with red and blue jelly beans.
And imagine that you're trying to count and see whether there's more red and blue jelly beans in there.
And if it's 70% red, you probably don't need to get to the bottom of the jar to know that red has more jelly beans.
You probably get to a point where you say, oh, I can call this, I can call this early.
If it's 90% red, you might be able to call it right away.
If it's 50.1% blue and 49.9% red, you're probably going to have to get to the bottom of that jar.
And I challenge anyone, take a big jar of jelly beans and start doing that and seeing how long it takes you to get to the point where you can do that.
And if it's a really close election, it's going to take a while.
They didn't stop counting ballots.
In Fulton County, for instance, that video of Ruby Freeman and Shea Moss taking the ballot box out, they were just continuing the effort to count ballots.
They had a brief pause because of a water main break there, but that was a separate issue.
And they came back and they just kept counting ballots.
There's no way to instantly take 160 million ballots with dozens of races on them and snap your fingers and magically have them counted.
They count them in batches, and those batches are important because what they do then is when they audit, they know what the count was in each batch that the machine said, and they can take them and review them by hand to make sure that count matched.
That's what they do.
There was no stoppage of counting.
There won't be any stoppage of counting this time around.
They are going to be counting 24-7 in most places.
Philadelphia was literally counting 24-7 over days and days to get all those mail ballots counted.
They just have to go through that process.
So please be patient.
Recognize these are your neighbors, your community members.
You might agree with them politically.
You might not.
Know that in counting centers, there are observers from both parties watching this all the time.
In Detroit in 2020, when they were banging down the doors saying, let us in and almost rioting outside of the counting center in Detroit, there were 200 observers on the other side of that door representing both parties watching the counting process.
Please be patient and recognize that there's no one who wants us to believe that our system is a failure more than our adversaries in Russia, China, and Iran.
They're spreading disinformation about that now.
And unfortunately, they're being aided by domestic actors.
Seminole Florida, this is Ray.
You're on with David Becker.
Go ahead.
Hey, how you doing?
Doing well.
What's your question or comment?
Well, it's not really a question.
You know, when it comes to the integrity, this is what most people, like this gentleman here, he can sit there and try to, you know, bloviate on, you know, what he feels as far as the election.
What people feel is when some states take four and five days because they won't let them count mail-in ballots until 7 o'clock that evening and stuff.
It just seems like states like Florida, which I'm at, we have as many people as Arizona.
It doesn't take us that many days.
We're done 9 o'clock at night.
And it's not because it's, you know, it used to be a swing state that's close.
They just count the ballots.
They get it done.
So anytime you're sitting there waiting for days and all of a sudden you're up a million, you're down a million, obviously people look at it and say, eh, you know, something funny is going on.
Plus then certain parties want to have no identification, you know, no voter ID, you know, the Georgia 2.0, what do they call it, Jim Crow 2.0.
People were freaking out.
Georgia has more people voting today than they did before that law.
So again, I like to listen to his comments, but get away from that.
Well, we'll let David Becker get in.
Thanks, Ray.
So first of all, I agree with you about Georgia.
Georgia does an excellent job of running elections.
It has one of the highest registration rates in the country.
It applies to whites and blacks.
About 98% of people were registered to vote in 2020.
They do an outstanding job in Georgia.
Florida, I'd just say, and I'm just sharing facts here.
Florida does not count all their ballots by 9 p.m.
If you recall in 2018, they had two statewide races decided by 0.25%.
They couldn't call those races for days in Florida because the margin was so narrow.
And because under federal law, military ballots, for instance, are still coming out.
And Florida has a large military population.
Those ballots don't even come in in some cases until days and days after the election.
And they must be counted, particularly in those close elections.
We often have some amnesia about how fast and how slow it takes to count ballots.
Certainly, I mean, it took a month to resolve Florida in 2000.
So the fact is every single state takes days and weeks to count their ballots because under law they have to have military ballots come in.
There is just the only difference is the margin.
Florida now has wider margins than Georgia in the presidential race.
It may again.
So it's likely to be called earlier than Georgia.
That doesn't mean that Florida is stopped counting.
I guarantee you, at midnight, they still have ballots to count.
They might be done counting in the early morning hours the ballots that they have, but there are still ballots like military ballots and provisional ballots that still are left to be counted.
Do you know how long counting went in 2000 in Florida?
And not the recounts, obviously, but that night in Florida, do you remember?
So I remember I was working with the DOJ in 2000, and the DOJ, I should say, very importantly, and I think correctly, was informed by the Attorney General.
It was the Clinton administration at that point, that we were to completely stay out of this, that the campaigns were handling it.
I think that's entirely appropriate.
I was not in Florida at the time.
But remember, they initially called Florida for gore, and then they took it off the board.
And then they went several hours later.
I happened to be on the West Coast, and it was really late on the West Coast, so even later on the East Coast when that happened.
And then it was clear that this was just too close to call.
And so the machine counts, a lot of these punch card ballots, which we don't use anymore in the United States, were we knew that there was going to be an issue of trying to interpret voter intent from some of these ballots.
This is the hanging chads.
Yeah, the hanging chads, the dimple chads, 537 vote margin.
That's a legitimate margin for litigation, right?
That is absolutely legitimate.
Very unlikely that the loser is going to come back from behind, but that's legitimate.
But I'll also say that for people like me, election lawyers in this space, it might seem like a margin of 10,000 votes, which a few of the states had in 2020, is a really narrow margin.
And it is in terms of taking longer to call that race by the media.
It is in terms of what the percentages are.
But from a recount perspective, it's a landslide.
There's never been an election, to my knowledge, with a greater than a 1,000 vote margin statewide that's ever been overturned by recount or litigation.
It's almost impossible.
The loser would have to present evidence demonstrating they have enough votes to make up the margin.
Almost impossible to do.
So while it might take longer to count for the media to call the race, understand that counts are happening everywhere for days and weeks after the election.
It's just likely you don't care about them because the media has already called the race because the margins aren't that large.
We'll try one more call.
This is Gail in Texas Independent.
Thanks for waiting, Gail.
Helps if I hit the button, Gail, go ahead.
Yes.
I am calling.
I was registering people before, many years ago, and I felt very, very uncomfortable because when I was registering people, I was not high.
And Gail, I'm listening to you through your phone.
It's easier if you just turn down your TV.
So you're talking about registering people and you felt uncomfortable.
Why?
Because I had to take their word that they were citizens.
I could not request to see their license.
I could not demand to see their ID.
So I just had to take their word for it.
And that always bothered me.
It always bothered me that I couldn't ask for their ID.
And what year was this, Gail, when you were doing this?
This was in 2000.
Gotcha.
David Becker.
Well, since 2000, in 2002, the Help America Vote Act passed.
And the Help America Vote Act requires, as I mentioned earlier in the show, every single voter who registers needs to provide ID on their voter registration form.
So I can guarantee Gail and everyone else in Texas that for over 20 years now, every voter registration form has an ID number on it.
And Texas, when it gets that voter registration form, is checking that ID number against the motor vehicles file or the Social Security Administration file to see what's on hand.
And that's why we know that the number of non-citizens is so small, because even if someone accidentally got registered, like I said, it's irrational for someone who's here, whether they're legally here or they're illegally here, to register and vote because they will be painting a target on themselves for deportation.
And they will get caught.
But even if it happened accidentally, those ID checks are essential for catching it.
The numbers of non-citizens who actually vote in the United States is incredibly small.
And we know that you don't have to trust me on this.
Trust the Republican Secretary of State, the Republican Attorneys General who've looked for this.
David Becker is the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
It's electioninnovation.org.
If you want to check them out, we always appreciate your time on the Washington Journal.
Thanks so much.
Coming up, more of your phone calls.
It's open forum in our final 45 minutes of the program.
Phone numbers are on your screen.
Go ahead and start calling in.
And while you're dialing in, I want to remind you about our election night coverage.
Join us on C-SPAN on election night, Tuesday, November 5th, for results, candidate speeches, and your phone calls.
As in previous these years, C-SPAN will be relying on results from the Associated Press.
And we recently spoke with the AP about their approach to calling races.
I want to show you a bit of that interview.
David Scott is the Associated Press Vice President who oversees election operations.
David Scott, let's begin with how the Associated Press determines when you will call a race.
Well, the thing that we're looking to do is just answer one question.
Can the trailing candidates catch the leader?
And at the point at which we've determined based on our look at the vote count and our analysis of the vote count, our analysis of our election survey, AP VoteCast, when we're interviewing more than 100,000 voters as they cast their ballots, our analysis of the advanced vote, registration statistics, basically all of the data that's available to us with the vote count being at the heart of it, when we've determined that data makes it very clear that the trailing candidates can't catch the leader, that's when we're able to declare a winner.
How do you sort through all that data?
That is a lot of data to sort through in a timely manner to make a call.
Yeah, so at the Associated Press will be declaring winners in about 4,800 elections this November.
And that assumes none of those go to a runoff, which of course some of them will in Georgia and Louisiana and the other states where there are runoffs.
And so it is a tremendous amount of data.
And we do it with a tremendous team.
It's a big team.
So our decision team at AP, 60 people, several of whom are full-time focused on elections.
So they're always working on this all of the time.
But under that is the team that's generating that data.
And so we'll have totality across the Associated Press, about 5,000 people on the night of the general election who are working to collect the vote, count the vote, quality check it, analyze it, publish it, and then ultimately declare winners.
You mentioned vote cast.
What is that?
So votecast is our survey of the electorate.
You know, we are looking to talk to voters as they are in the process of casting their ballot, either in advance or on election day.
We execute that survey across all 50 states, and it's really the largest survey of its kind.
We're aiming to talk to more than 120,000 voters in the week leading up to election day, right up until the moment polls close.
We're asking them who they voted for, but also the things that motivated them as they cast their ballots, the issues that they cared most about, what they thought about the direction of the country.
And that additional data, we use to declare winners, but not only to declare winners.
We also use it to tell stories and to understand the electorate and to really inform all of our coverage on election night.
Is that an exit poll by a different name?
It's not an exit poll.
It's similar to it, but we're not interviewing voters as they exit polls.
How America votes has changed.
In the last presidential election, more than two-thirds of Americans voted in advance.
So more than two-thirds of Americans weren't available to be interviewed as they exited a polling place.
So vote cast is a different methodology, but one that we think is best for this moment, reaching voters where they are to ask them how they've cast their ballots.
Why and how is it that the Associated Press can call a race right after polls close in that state?
Well, it's very rare that we would do that.
It's only in a small number of states where that's possible.
And it's because we can look at the data from past elections.
We can understand the electoral history of a state.
We can look at registration statistics.
We can look at the advanced vote statistics.
And then we can look at results from our survey.
And if all of those things line up to show that once again, a candidate will have a commanding win in a state, we're able to declare a winner as soon as polls close.
But it's only in a small number of places where that's possible.
When do you think you will hold off on calling a race?
Or what would be the circumstances?
When we're not certain.
And that's our standard.
We aim for our standard is 100% accuracy.
So if we are not certain that there is without a shadow of a doubt that the trailing candidates can't catch the leader, then we hold off.
And if we think it's possible that the race could flip, that those trailing candidates have a path to victory, as small as it might be, as long as that path to victory exists, we can't say who's won yet.
How many people make the final decision?
Well, for the race for the president, it's a big team.
So we start with a race caller who's looking at the race in a state very closely, very focused on a single state.
They then work with an analyst who's looking at several states.
If they both agree, then the decision goes up to a decision editor who reviews all of their work, and then all three of them need to agree that the race is ready to be called.
And then when we get into a battleground state or a state that we think is going to be particularly close or a state that might ultimately lead a candidate to reach 270 electoral votes, then myself, our Washington Bureau Chief, and our executive editor, we all come into that conversation as well.
But in reality, it's not nearly as linear as that.
We're a big team.
We're all together on election night.
We're all looking at the data and all of us have to agree that a race is ready to be called before we can declare a winner.
How long can those decisions take?
They go all night.
I mean, we're engaged right now in looking at the data, looking at registration statistics, looking at advanced vote statistics.
We'll be engaged right at the moment polls close.
And we see that vote count data come in.
We look at our survey results and we start making decisions.
We start declaring winners.
But we only do that when we, again, when we're certain that the trailing candidates can't catch up.
And that can take some time.
We're not in any hurry, right?
We're trying to be correct.
That is our goal, 100% accuracy in declaring winners.
So we take as long as it's necessary.
And ultimately, it's not our decision.
The voters have decided.
And we're just interpreting and analyzing the votes that they've cast.
David Scott, thank you.
Happy to be here.
Washington Journal continues.
About 40 minutes left in our program today, and we are ending an open forum.
Any public policy, any political issue that you want to talk about, now is your time.
We're a week out from Election Day.
Especially want to hear your thoughts on campaign 2024 and the final days here.
Phone numbers for you to call in.
Republicans, 202-748-8001.
Democrats, 202-748-8000.
And Independents, 202-748-8002.
Stick around here on C-SPAN after our program ends at 10 a.m. Eastern.
That's because we're going to be taking you live to Palm Beach, Florida, to Mar-a-Lago.
Donald Trump is speaking to reporters there at 10 a.m. Eastern.
You can watch here on C-SPAN, C-SPAN.org, and the free C-SPAN Now app.
And we hope you stay with us all day.
Several events we're going to be covering.
At noon Eastern, Donald Trump's running mate, JD Vance, is on the campaign trail in Saginaw, Michigan.
At 1.45 p.m. Eastern, Tim Walz speaks to supporters at a Get Out the Vote rally.
That's in Savannah, Georgia.
2.30 p.m. Eastern, it's Donald Trump again.
He's in Pennsylvania this afternoon.
He'll speak with voters at a roundtable in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania.
And then this evening, 7 p.m. Eastern, Vice President Kamala Harris is speaking on the ellipse here in Washington, D.C., where she's expected to lay out her closing arguments to voters.
Again, with one week to go until Election Day.
All of that on C-SPAN today, C-SPAN.org as well.
And of course, the free C-SPAN Now video app.
With that, we'll turn the program over to you.
It's open forum.
This is Margo out of Berryville, Arkansas, Republican.
Good morning.
Good morning, and thank you for having me on and allowing me to say what I'd like to say.
Last week, my mom and sister went to vote early.
And when they both voted and they went to turn in their paper and on the computer and they voted for Trump, it did not go to Trump.
It had nothing on there.
It didn't even show where they voted.
And my sister had called over one of the poll workers and told her, she said, this didn't work.
We voted for Trump and it did not show voting for Trump.
And the poll worker kind of sort of stood there and argued with her.
And she said, oh, it will be fixed.
And so I'm just a little leery of, you know, when we go in and vote, are our votes actually being put to who we're voting for?
And especially when you have elderly people and they don't pay attention and look and see if their vote, who they voted for, actually went through.
Margot, did you watch our previous guest here, David Becker?
I just got the tail end of it, honestly.
He talked a lot about the voting systems in this country and the reasons why he's confident in it.
That interview will be available in its entirety.
I think it should be available now already on our website at c-span.org if you want to watch.
I encourage you, especially with your concerns, to maybe check that out.
This is Noreen in Durham, North Carolina.
Democrat, good morning.
Hi, good morning.
Thank you so much for C-SPAN.
I really enjoyed the last two segments.
And I happily voted in North Carolina, early voted, the first day of early voting last Thursday for Kamala Harris.
I practically danced down to the polls, and it was quite exciting.
But what I really wanted to talk about was I've been watching all morning, and we had a previous caller who was really concerned about, I think, Democrats bringing communism.
And I love C-SPAN in that it's a place where we can all get together and have civil discussion, even people across the country.
But what I would want to say is for the last several presidents, our stock market has been going gangbusters.
It's currently at a record high.
You don't have like record high stock markets in communism.
We have bosses or owners who are making thousands times more salary than their workers.
You don't have that in communism.
Democrats want to bring some common sense regulation to the market so that people don't get ripped off.
You don't have that in communism.
So I really want people to think about the fears that they have a little bit more clearly and see if it actually matches up to the realities that are happening into our country.
Democrats are as entrepreneurial and want all of us to succeed.
I think we can have win-win instead of a winner-loser.
And that's all I have for today.
Thank you so much.
And get out there and vote, everybody.
That's Noreen in North Carolina to Laurel Marilyn Bruce Independent.
Good morning.
I wanted to talk about the charges against Trump.
Now, he was saying that, you know, Haley was more popular than he was when it happened.
So why would they not charge her?
The other thing is he became more popular every time he was charged.
So obviously it was helping them.
So what reason would they have to make up the charges?
And in fact, the fact that he's postponing all these, his lawyers are postponing all these things shows he doesn't really care about the country because these are going to have to be dealt with when he becomes president.
And even the Secret Service, when he was in the Secret Service, when he was shot, they were calling it heroic.
He stopped.
He violated the protocol, putting him at risk and putting Secret Service at risk.
And there's nothing heroic about him putting himself at risk because they have Secret Service because of the harm it would do to shoot a president.
Last thing is, he didn't, I've never heard Haley's people call Trump Hitler.
It was JD Vance.
Thank you very much.
It's Bruce and Maryland.
Joe Marie in Arizona, Republican.
Good morning.
Good morning.
First off, I just want the independent bandits as cold.
I keep track.
I watch you every morning of all the independents that call in.
99% of them have nothing but Democrat talking points, Democrat opinions.
So all of y'all that call in that want to say you're independent, I don't know if you just want attention or, hey, look at me.
I'm better than everybody else because I'm not biased.
We ain't buying that you, Mr. Independence, and this independence.
Second thing, Becker, who was just on, he made so many ridiculous statements.
Number one, oh, well, you know, they're not going to risk deportation to vote when they're illegal.
Really?
Murderers, rapists, burglars, you can go on and on.
Carjackers, they are all risking jail maybe for life or even execution.
They still break the law.
So that's totally ridiculous.
Also, the woman that just called in, the Democrat, oh, I happily voted for Harris.
Really, the last four years, people, let's look at what's happening to our country.
It's going over a cliff.
Okay?
So don't be happily voting for Harris unless you want the continued destruction of America.
That's Joe Marie.
This is Rick, Leesburg, Virginia, Democrat.
Good morning.
Yeah.
Can you hear me?
Yes, sir.
Yeah, so I voted early tomorrow, yesterday, and for some reason, they weren't able to verify immediately my eligibility to vote.
So I had to go to an additional desk and get that cleared up.
And it kind of got my backup.
And I want to apologize to the Loudoun County volunteers.
And I want to say thank you to them.
What are you apologizing?
What happened, Rick?
Why are you apologizing?
Well, I got on a high horse.
I said, you know, I'm a combat disabled combat veteran, and I have the right to vote, you know.
And the guy said, yes, of course you do, you know.
But I just got a little bit self-righteous there.
So I guess what my point is that, you know, people can have their conspiracy theories, whatever they want, but don't interfere with my right to vote.
You know, you can think whatever you want, but I got the right to vote, and don't make it hard for me to vote.
And then the other point I want to make is my son is bipolar, and he made an interesting observation.
He said a lot of these conspiracy theories are very similar to his psychotic episodes that he's had.
And he said that, you know, people should be aware that when they put out these conspiracy theories, they can kind of trigger mentally ill people.
Now, that's, you know, that's my son.
He's bipolar, so he kind of knows what he's talking about.
So, you know, you can, my point is, you know, you live in your universe that you want to live in, but let me exercise my right as an American citizen to vote.
I don't need to go through a background investigation.
I've been through a lot of them.
I just want to walk in and cast my vote.
That's all I got to say.
Thanks, Rick in Leesburg, up to Wisconsin.
Pat is in the Badger State Independent.
Good morning.
Yeah, thank you very much for taking my call.
This Democratic republic that we have here has been in effect for 250 years.
We voted every four years during that period of time.
We've always had a peaceful transfer of power.
And as far as being an independent, I am an independent, regardless of what that woman that was on prior says about independence.
I voted for Barry Goldwater.
First person I voted for was Dwight Eisenhower.
I voted for H.W. Bush.
I'm a veteran.
And I get to have my own opinion in spite of what she says.
But during all those years that we voted for the past 250 years, we always had a peaceful transfer of power.
That was one of the guiding shining lights that we've had in this great country of ours.
And so hopefully this time we'll have a peaceful transfer of power again.
Anyway, that's all I have to say.
The Sunflower State.
Richard, Republican, good morning.
Yes, sir.
You can get on your computer there.
I'd like to give you some information so people can make up their own minds because in my opinion, Mr. Becker is less than honest.
If all the things that we have in place in the system, if the people that are running the elections are doing them things, yeah, the election would be pretty secure.
But what most of the lawsuits were over were people weren't doing their jobs.
Now, what people should do is you should go to YouTube, look up Hacking Democracy, the Hack.
It's an eight-minute outtake from the HBO documentary award-nominated.
Excuse me, I'm a little nervous.
And they will show you exactly how the machines are hacked.
And in that, the people, they do this, I think it was in Florida, and this was from 2006.
And these were Dominion, these were Diebold machines, I think, which Dominion took over Diebold.
So, anyways, if you go and you look at that, they'll show you how it's done.
And the people that are running the election, a couple of them start crying because they say, I've been doing this for 30 years, and I thought that this could never happen.
Now, another thing, get on your computers, go to the J. Weller Law Group.
They did an article a couple years ago on natural-born citizen.
Look at that article, and then go to the Library of Congress, the first Congress, the first session.
You can pull up everything that was said in that meeting.
And everything that Mr. Weller says goes exactly with what they were talking about in the first Congress.
So it's called the Vattell standard.
That's what the standard is for natural born citizens.
And we're allowing people to run for president that are not natural born citizens.
Rubio, Cruz, Haley, Harris, Obama, Bobby, Jim Dale.
All right.
That's Richard in Kansas.
This is Barbara in Massachusetts.
Democrat, good morning.
Hello.
Thank you for taking my call.
I wanted to know if you could answer a question that I have.
Years ago, I heard on television that Mr. Trump and the Evangelicals and southern people are all inbred.
Do you know what channel that was, what station?
I'm not sure I know what you're referring to.
This is Annette in Connecticut, Independent.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Unfortunately, Richard from Kansas stole my thunder.
I just want to highly recommend that everyone listening watch the documentary Hacking Democracy or look into black box voting.
I think you'll find it very interesting.
Thank you.
Mary Esther, Florida, this is Gary Republican.
Good morning.
Yeah, you know, there's two things that we need to have, have to have in a democracy, and that's a secure vote in an unbiased media.
I believe 85 to 90 percent of the media out there supports the Democrats.
Look, these millions of migrants that have come in here, 10 to 20 million, whatever the number is, we're spending billions to support them.
And it was done for one reason.
It's about future votes and power.
And there's at least 14 to 17 Democratic states where there's no ID required.
Look what's happened in Virginia where a Democrat judge put 1,600, made them, they had to be put back on the ballot after they had removed them.
But, you know, Democrats all voted against the Save the Vote Act.
There's drug cartels that control our border.
There's gangs and terrorists, murders, and rapists.
The first job of a president is to protect his citizen.
To me, this is an act of treason, what they've done.
Gary, can I ask you on your trust in media?
What's your view on the Washington Post?
I don't really know enough about it.
I always believe they're pretty left-wing.
I know they have not supported any candidate, and I think there's a reason for that regarding Kama.
But, you know, there's been over 200,000 drug deaths.
A lot of people don't know there's been over 300,000 migrant children, migrant brown children that have been lost into sex slavery.
That's Gary in Florida.
On trust in media, let me come back to the Washington Post.
Jeff Bezos laying out the reasons why the Washington Post is not making an endorsement in the presidential race this year.
It is a decision that has gotten some blowback even within the Washington Post.
Three members, they had a 10-member editorial board stepping off the editorial board yesterday in the wake of that decision.
Jeff Bezos, writing this article, appears in the opinion section today saying, presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election.
No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, I'm going with newspaper A's endorsement.
None.
What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias, a perception of non-independence.
Ending them is a principled decision, Jeff Bezos-Rice writes, and it's the right one.
He goes on to say, I wish we had made the change earlier than we did in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it.
That was inadequate planning and not some intentional strategy.
Jeff Bezos in today's Washington Post, if you want to read his full piece, you can go to their website.
About 20 minutes left this morning in the Washington Journal.
This is Lawrenceville, Georgia Ray, Independent.
Good morning.
Good morning.
For the lady who said independents are independent, they are.
I voted for Trump in 2016.
He botched the COVID response.
He downplayed it.
Millions of people died.
And I would like to go back to being an independent.
And now I lean towards Democrats.
But they're wearing hats and they're so angry.
And if they lose, it was fixed.
I don't know what happened to the Republican Party.
I hope one day we can get back to it.
Ray, why did you vote for Donald Trump in the first place in 2016?
I think we lost.
Ray, this is Michael in San Diego.
Democrat, good morning.
Good morning, John.
It's been over a year and a half since I called in, but I feel I must.
I want to talk about the border thing.
And let's go back to when Trump was first in office, when the Republicans had control of everything.
He said to the Congress, you guys work out a deal you agree upon.
Bring it to my desk.
I'll sign it.
What happens in the meantime?
Stephen Miller gets in his ear.
When it comes to the desk, he does not sign it.
We don't know what would have been in that bill, but odds are we would not be having the problem at the border we're having now if he just would have signed a bill.
Like I said, we don't know.
And as far as his garbage can statement the other day, it just shows how ignorant he is because he doesn't even know the words on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty.
I do believe the term wretched refuge is in there, is it not, John?
I can pull up the full wording there, but give me your masses.
I'll find it for you, Michael.
Sorry, tough to get pop quizzed here on the spot.
Sorry, John, that's okay.
But I do believe wretched refuge is in there, and that is another term for garbage.
I do believe in stuff.
So that just shows how ignorant he is.
And I thank you for the time.
And America, please vote for Harris.
This man is terrible.
That's Michael in San Diego to Denise in New York.
Republican, good morning.
Good morning.
Every time I watch this show, I get so disappointed how confused Americans are.
All I can say is right now on the New York ballot, there's a thing called the proposition number one, and it's to allow illegal immigrants to vote.
How can they put that on there when that's so illegal?
It's so unconstitutional.
And your independent line is not working at all for me.
I'm an independent.
Why isn't it working for you, Denise?
It just says the number is disconnected.
So I'm calling in on the other number, the 2000 number, the 2002 numbers.
I don't know what number I'm being called in on.
So, Denise, it works better if you try to call in on your line.
It's not disconnected.
It's just very busy.
All the lines are actually full at the moment.
But we hope that people do call in on the lines that best apply to them.
It just makes the program move better and we can rotate between the lines.
Michael in Florida, Democrat.
Good morning.
Well, we have a problem.
Voting for Trump, you're voting somebody who is called you with a dictator who is a KGV agent.
Mr. Trump has experience in business, a family-owned business.
He doesn't have business too much with the corporate circumstances.
He has a very narrow scope.
And he's dealing with somebody who has an international scope and who is a KGB agent.
Maybe audience is going to know what that is.
That is a spy.
All right.
That's Michael.
This is Betty in Illinois, Independent.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Yeah, it is.
My fingers are tired from redial and push and all that.
So I understand what Denise was talking about.
But I got through, and I just want to encourage everyone.
I wanted to be on with David Becker.
Encourage everyone to just go work the elections.
Go be a poll person.
Go do that.
You will see it's friendly most of the places.
And I would just encourage everyone to do that at least once.
Even the primaries, when it's a little slower, they teach you everything, they show you everything, and you get to know your neighbors.
I have met some really wonderful people and some really crazy people.
Thank you very much.
And Betty, I would just note, last week on this program, we started one of our programs just speaking to poll workers only.
I tried to call in that night.
Oh, great, great.
It was a great conversation with people who talk about why they do it and experiences they've had.
If viewers are interested in that, you can go to our website and see that.
Betty, thanks for calling in and reminding us of that.
That's Betty in Illinois.
About 15 minutes left this morning.
Did want to note if you go to the National Park Service, they have the full New Colossus poem, the New Colossus poem on a plaque that is installed at the base of the Statue of Liberty with the collar was talking about earlier.
The full New Colossus poem, it's by Emma Lazarus.
The date on the plaque that's there at the Statue of Liberty, November 2nd, 1883.
The poem reads this way.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame with conquering limbs astride from land to land, here at our sea-washed sunset gate shall stand a mighty woman with a torch whose flame is the imprisoned lighting and her name Mother of Exiles.
From her beacon hand glows worldwide welcome.
Her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp, cries she, with silent lips.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
That the new Colossus poem from Emma Lazarus.
Back to your phone calls.
This is Mark in Nebraska, Republican.
Good morning.
Hello, John.
Thanks for taking my call.
Hey, John, I am one for one in my lifetime in voting.
I was never much involved in the process.
I thought there was a lot of lack of common sense in when I did watch different programs, political programs on TV.
And the reason I voted for Trump in 2016 was because he was a businessman.
And I didn't want to hear anything more from these politicians that to me lack a lot of common sense.
And I know Trump can be hard to handle at times, but I do like his blend of business, a little bit of humor, sometimes over the edge.
But he is interesting to listen to.
Why didn't you vote?
Why didn't you vote in 2020?
Mark, you said you're one for one, and 2016 was the one.
You know, 2020, John, had some health problem, excuse me, has had some health problems.
Didn't get the poll to vote.
I will vote here in 2024.
And I don't know where they get these poll numbers, but I think Trump, just as I did in 2016, when I did my own, you know, getting information by talking to people, that he will win handily.
He will win handily over Camelo.
That's Mark in Nebraska.
This is Jimmy in the volunteer state line for Democrats.
Good morning.
Good morning.
How are you?
I'm doing well, Jimmy.
What's on your mind?
Well, I'm just coming in.
After what Trump did at Madison Garden the other night up there in New York, I think the Republicans have finally drove the final nail in their coffins.
We Americans are tired of the hatred speech that's been going on since 2015.
I'm like Kamala Harris when it's time to turn the page.
The reason why Trump's going to lose is because if he continues on with his hatred speech and about Latinos and Puerto Ricans and all this, it's going to turn a lot of independents and voters.
So he's got to have the win.
So that's all I got to say.
Jimmy in Tennessee, this is Mike in Oak Grove, Missouri, Independent.
Good morning.
Thank you, John.
I voted last Thursday.
Let's see if you and the listeners can guess who I voted for.
I didn't vote for the candidate who called for the Constitution to be suspended.
I didn't vote for the candidate who told followers to be in Washington January 6th.
It's going to be wild.
You have to fight to keep this country.
I didn't vote for the candidate that chose Putin over our intelligence agencies.
I didn't vote for the candidate that thinks he can grab women by the crotch.
I didn't vote for the candidate that said John McCain was not a hero.
And I didn't vote for the candidate that said vets who died for his freedom were suckers and fools.
And I didn't vote for the guy that has been accused by 26 women of sexual assault and rape.
I didn't vote for the guy that kept Minecraft by his bedside, according to his ex-wife.
And I didn't vote for the guy that cheated on his three wives.
All right.
That's Mike.
This is Josh, Silver Spring, Maryland, Republican.
Good morning.
Hi there.
Good morning.
Wanted to make two points, bring forward two points about the media.
First of all, you asked John earlier about someone's opinion about the Washington Post, and I assume you were referring to their decision not to endorse a presidential candidate.
And I just want to say I find it refreshing because I don't really think that newspapers, although it is a century-old or more practice to endorse presidential candidates, I think it's a practice that is not serving the American people well,
specifically because many of these media outlets are beholden to ad revenue and to shareholders who hold certain views and they cater to those views, C-SPAN notwithstanding, of course.
And actually, I don't believe C-SPAN endorses presidential candidates.
Is that correct?
No, Josh, not something that you'll hear from us.
So along with the Washington Post, the LA Times has decided not to do it this year.
That happened before the Washington Post one.
And now USA Today is the latest one that's being reported that will not make a endorsement in the presidential race.
Listen, I think that's a practice that I hope will carry forward in future presidential election cycles, if only because the media should be reporting out the facts and the information.
The American people should be educating themselves and reading up and making their own decision and not waiting for these endorsements, which I truly believe as a student of political communications.
It's what I studied at college in my undergraduate degree.
You know, really often the media is beholden, like I said, to ad revenue and shareholders who tend to hold certain views and they're reporting.
Josh, do you think newspaper endorsements matter?
You live in the Washington Post area.
Yes.
Yes, I do.
I do.
I do think it sways people.
I do think it sways people.
On the presidential, on the presidential level, or there's local races and D.C. races that the Washington Post has endorsed in the past?
Yeah, throughout.
I mean, my hope would be that the media stops doing these endorsements, and especially the newspapers.
Listen, I understand CNN, Fox News.
I mean, they make it very clear what their role is in the landscape of information sharing.
Newspapers, though, I believe, are still trying to be a relatively objective source of information for the American people.
One other point I wanted to make just on the polling.
We go back to 2016 and we saw how wrong the polling was.
And I just want to put out there that I think we may be in a similar type of situation where, you know, pollsters are calling up people and people maybe are not willing to go on record to say they're voting for Trump because of the ostracism and the harassment and the partisan partisanship, the targeting that they experience if they say publicly that they support Trump.
So I agree.
A caller previously said that they think Trump's going to win handily.
I think that might be right.
I think the polls are probably going to be wrong.
But I guess we'll see in a week what actually happened.
We'll all find out together.
On the trust in the media, just two more graphs from Jeff Bezos' piece today.
It's the beginning of the first and last paragraphs of his opinion piece.
He says, in the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress.
But in this year's Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress.
Our profession is now the least trusted of all.
Something we are doing is clearly not working.
He goes on to talk about that endorsement decision.
And then at the end, he says, While I do not and I will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance, overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs, not without a fight.
It's too important, he writes.
The stakes are too high.
Now more than ever, the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice.
And where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world?
Jeff Bezos in today's Washington Post.
That's the owner of the Washington Post.
Norman is in Norristown, Pennsylvania.
Democrat, good morning.
You with us, Norman?
We'll go to Sue.
Forest Hills, New York, Independent.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Thank you.
This is my first time calling in.
So two comments.
One is Jeff Bozo's not his Washington Post not endorsing.
I agree with that statement because I feel like the news media, where you guys are at this point, not having an opinion will probably serve the public better.
I think it'll gradually give you guys some credibility back.
That's my first point.
On the second point, about the comments about the video on hacking democracy, that was 2006.
This is 2024.
So in between, we have had two other election cycles.
So, the only issue I see from that point of view is Donald Trump not following through on the peaceful censusion of power.
He did get voted in using those same machines, and that was perfectly fine because he was in.
Now that he lost, what happened in January 1st, that was his doing, not the machines.
I thank you very much for letting me talk.
And I absolutely enjoy C-SPAN.
It's the one place I find gives me a sense of calm.
It allows me to kind of, you know, listen to all the other feedback from my fellow Americans, and I will make my own decision, which I already have.
And I'm very proud of the decision I make.
Thank you.
So, you said it's your first time calling in.
You can call back in 30 days.
Every 30 days is when we like to hear from our callers.
This is Bill in Mobile, Alabama, Republican.
Good morning.
Good morning.
The job of a magician is to distract the person so that they don't see what's actually happening, whether they wave a red flag or pop a balloon while they're picking your pocket.
What the press is doing right now massively on CNN and MSNBC and all the usual suspects is they're really focused on this poor joke by this bad comedian who spoke hours before Trump even arrived at Madison Square Garden to say that Trump doesn't care about Puerto Rica.
What they don't want you to see is that for the last four years, Puerto Rica has been in a major crisis with all kinds of problems, water systems not working, gangs terrifying people, financial struggle, people starving.
And where was Kamala?
Not there, not paying any attention, but she loves Puerto Ricans now.
That's what a magician does: focusing a lot on what little thing is and ignoring the big thing.
Thank you.
I'm just staying on the Washington Post for a second.
More, this is the lead story in today's Washington Post.
Harris Keyes on Latino voters, Island of Garbage Jokes, Spurs Outrage.
Democrats seize on the backlash to sway choice.
That is the front page.
This is Mary in Nevada Democrat.
Good morning.
Good morning, John.
I hope I can get several points out.
And I have a request if you can find the 23 economists.
Hello?
Can you hear me?
23 economists.
I probably can't.
Yeah, if you can find what they have to say about Trump's across the board tax.
Sure, Mary, but better than me being your Google, why don't you tell me what you think?
All right.
Well, here we go.
So basically, Trump is going to be the Grinch that stole Christmas.
His tariffs are a tax.
They're going to be born by the American citizens.
Inflation will go through the roof.
And it's going to cost each individual citizen if he implements those tariffs about another $4,000 a year.
Also, when he says no tax on Social Security, taxes are how Social Security gets funded.
If taxes aren't paid into Social Security, it will vanish overtime.
He doesn't believe in overtime, so he's not going to give anybody any gift.
This guy got immunity, and he is a criminal, and he is going to do everything he is saying.
Madison Square Garden was like listening to Germany in 1939.
That's Mary in Nevada.
It's coming up on 10 a.m. Eastern.
Donald Trump set to speak from Mar-a-Lago this morning.
The reporters are gathering and the crowd is gathering there at Mar-a-Lago.
We will be bringing that to you live from Palm Beach, Florida, when Donald Trump comes out.
In the meantime, your phone calls.
This is Toon Day in Westville, South Carolina, Independent.
Good morning.
Good morning to you.
And I want to thank C-SPAN and all public radio, public television.
I love you guys, and I do contribute.
The issue of endorsement, it's no brainer, you know.
I don't see it as very important, but it's important.
It's interesting now that Jeff Bezos is going to say no, we are not going to endorse.
Now, let me say this.
I'm an immigrant.
I came here even with a permanent resident document, not as a student.
And I work really hard.
I work child protection, adult protection, drug cup probation, salon probation.
Donald Trump is a scam.
He's a fraud, period.
But what I want to say is this to all Americans listening this morning.
You do not need political violence in this country.
I lived through that as a young man, in which my uncle's house was burned down in Nigeria.
You don't want to go through political violence in this country.
America is far better than that.
Far, far better than that.
That is my fear.
And I'm going to try to let all the minority committee know.
You better be prepared to protect yourself if this guy wins the election.
I'm afraid of political violence breaking out.
I'm breezing.
I'm ready.
But America, you don't want to go through that because this is what Trump and Republicans are pushing.
So please use your head.
This is a great country and your example to the rest of the world.
And I hope you will keep that promise to be good.
Thank you so much, C-SPAN and public television.
Thank you.
That's all I want to say.
This guy doesn't, he should not be near that office for any minute.
Thank you.
That's Toon Day in South Carolina.
Just a reminder of how C-SPAN is funded, funded through your cable bill.
We represent just a few pennies on your cable bill each month.
Though you can also donate to C-SPAN, it's donate.c-SPAN.org and contribute there if you'd like to do that.
C-SPAN, a 501c3 organization.
This is Kyle in Reno, Nevada, Republican.
Good morning.
Good morning, sir.
Thank you for having my call.
I've called your show once about 10 years ago.
I wanted to mention that I'm a low-proficiency voter.
I voted by mail.
It was a challenge to get my ballot.
I never received my sample ballot.
However, I was smart enough to read the descriptions of each category vote.
I don't understand why school board and local elections don't have to declare left or right.
So that's point one.
But I did vote and I delivered my vote to the mailbox itself, the post office itself.
Second point is watching your show.
Americans are passionate and it gets my blood pressure up.
Thank you.
Y'all have a great day.
That's Kyle.
This is Alvin.
As we continue to wait for Donald Trump at this Mar-a-Lago event this morning, this is Massachusetts Line for Democrats.
Go ahead, Alvin.
I don't understand why.
And Alvin, it's best if you turn your TV down and speak through your phone.
Hello.
Go ahead, sir.
Yes, I'm calling out in regards to the newspapers.
They never should ever have endorsed anybody in the first place.
They're a newspaper organization.
They report the news.
They don't make it.
And my people depend on the newest people to tell them who to make to vote for.
They're trying to make the news.
And as far as President Trump is concerned, President Trump does not deserve to even be in America.
There's a reason.
I say that because anyone, I'm a veteran, I'm a 50-year veteran, anyone that comes into America and tried to take over my capital, I consider it mine, doesn't deserve to be an American.
You do not have Americans trying to burn down the House of Representatives.
It's been tried before.
The British tried.
Thanks, Alvin in Massachusetts.
Guy in Oklahoma, Independent.
Good morning.
Hey, good morning, John.
Thank you for taking my call.
Man, there is just so much to digest here from what I've heard from callers this morning.
Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda from Germany, you know, talking about the news, where to get good information from.
I love C-SPAN.
I've only been a listener for about a year now.
It's very non-biased.
I appreciate that.
And also, just for you listeners out there, another good channel is TBN, Mike Huckabee, Alan Jackson.
It's straight from ministers, and they try to digest both sides and then give an honest opinion.
So TBN in the afternoon is a great place for free news, in my opinion.