Midterm Elections Just Hours Away
CHRIS CUOMO, CNN HOST: There they are fighting for our freedoms. We should exercise those freedoms and show them that their fight is worthwhile. And for the rest of us, it just matters too much right now.</s>DON LEMON, CNN HOST: Yes.</s>CUOMO: Everybody's got to do what they can, exercise the franchise. Let the chips fall where they may, but everybody's got to be involved.</s>LEMON: I think seven kids.</s>CUOMO: Seven kids. Very young. Eleven months old is the youngest. He was only 39.</s>LEMON: Yes.</s>CUOMO: He had everything going for him. He had no reason to put himself on the line the way he did except because of what he believed.</s>LEMON: Yes. And believed in something that was obviously bigger than ginning up fear as we have been talking about that ad that gins up fear and racism in this country. And I saw your interview with Corey Lewandowski. Every time you mention the ad, the implications of that ad, why it has been taken off the air by some networks, refused to be aired by this network, he kept moving it to other things. He kept deflecting.</s>CUOMO: He deflected it, but I'll tell you what. He did better than the president. The president said, well, there's a lot of offensive things. The ads are effective. I find your questions offensive.</s>LEMON: Yes.</s>CUOMO: I think that is probably the most damning thing he said in this entire election.</s>LEMON: Why so?</s>CUOMO: I'll tell you why, because everybody knows that ad is ugly and was calculated to be that. He says it's effective. So now you know it was no mistake.</s>LEMON: Right.</s>CUOMO: He wanted that message to be exactly what it is, pernicious and false and powerful.</s>LEMON: Yes.</s>CUOMO: And he wouldn't apologize. He didn't list it among his regrets, and he turned it back on the media--</s>LEMON: Yes.</s>CUOMO: -- as if we are the ones creating the problem that he certainly endorsed.</s>LEMON: Looking at my notes here because according to CNN, he hated -- they had an ad talking about the economy and all the good things the administration has done. The president hated it and said he wanted to stick with immigration. And obviously stick with this ad, which he tweeted out, which he supported and then saying, I didn't know about the controversy. It's obvious he knows about the controversy. We know that.</s>CUOMO: You know, it's interesting. If they lose the house tomorrow -- and, again, I really don't know. And I'm not--</s>LEMON: We don't know.</s>CUOMO: We don't know it very well. I'm not in the business of hedging very often. I just don't know. I think there's too much emotion out there to be captured in these polls.</s>LEMON: Yes.</s>CUOMO: But if they lose, they have trouble because they lose mandate.</s>LEMON: Yes.</s>CUOMO: They also have trouble because that party has got to figure out which direction they want to go in. Is Trumpism the new GOP or they still about what they were always about?</s>LEMON: Yes. Well, the shrinking of it tends as it seems the Republicans have been out for the last decade or so, or if you're going to expand it beyond just Trumpism. Thank you, my friend. Good to see you. We'll see you back here.</s>CUOMO: We'll be here all night, it seems.</s>LEMON: Not it seems. We will be here all night. All right. I appreciate it, Chris. See you soon. This is CNN TONIGHT. I'm Don Lemon. We are just hours away now. There you go. You see the countdown right there. Hours away from the first votes in the hardest fought midterms in years. And no matter where you live here in these United States, you've got a decision to make tomorrow. You've got the chance to make your voice heard. Here's what our new CNN poll, it has Democrats with a double-digit lead over Republicans. That's in a general, on a general congressional ballot. But in a generic, excuse me, congressional ballot. But to state the obvious here, nobody votes in a generic election, OK? And anything can happen tomorrow. Anything. Nobody has forgotten 2016, right? I'm sure you haven't forgotten that. A Trump adviser is telling CNN that White House officials are warning the president to brace for Republican losses in the House, which is probably why he is already ginning up bogus warnings about illegal voting. Remember the last time the president did that? Remember that White House commission to investigate voter fraud? Remember that, the one he abruptly shut down nearly a year ago when there was absolutely no evidence of any substantial or widespread voter fraud at all? That as the president of the United States is closing out the campaign with his final rally tonight in Missouri. He is joined by Rush Limbaugh and fitting in an interview with Sean Hannity on a Fox News set on the floor of the arena. It's the president's third rally on a day that also took him to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he said this.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I shouldn't say this because I want to unite. I do eventually want to unite. But the fact is we're driving them crazy. We're driving them crazy.</s>TRUMP: They don't know what to do. They're going loco, loco.</s>LEMON: Did you catch that? Eventually. Eventually he says he wants to unite. It seems like he could have made that a priority at some point in the past two years, you think? But I digress. There's also this from the president's rally in Cleveland.</s>TRUMP: I have actually kept more promises than I've made. When did you ever hear that from a politician? Maybe never. Never.</s>LEMON: OK. He has kept more promises than he's made? I don't think -- I don't know about you, but I don't think I've heard that from anybody ever. Have you? This is already a campaign like nothing we have seen before. This president virtually ignoring his own good news on the economy, a quarter of a million jobs added in October. But when his campaign produced a morning in America-style ad about the economic gains, President Trump hated it. So much, they said he hated it. That two GOP officials are telling CNN he demanded an anti-immigration closing argument to fire up his base. That's exactly what he got. An ad so racist and divisive that even the president's favorite network, Fox News, rejected it. That after CNN refused to sell ad time for it at all, refused to even run it. NBC pulled the spot after running it during Sunday night football and multiple times on MSNBC. Facebook also rejected the ad today. And a senior GOP congressional aide tells CNN that Trump's fearmongering on immigration, well, it may cost his party the House by putting suburban swing districts in jeopardy. But just listen to how the president responded when Josh Dawsey asked him about that ad today.</s>JOSH DAWSEY, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": Several of the networks have declined to run your immigration ad that you posted last week, saying that it was (Inaudible) racist. Do you have response to that?</s>TRUMP: I don't know about it. I mean, you're telling me something I don't know about. We have a lot of ads, and they certainly are effective based on the numbers that we're seeing.</s>DAWSEY: Mr. President, a lot of folks have said that ad was offensive. Why did you like that ad? What were you trying to--</s>TRUMP: Well, a lot of things are offensive. Your questions are offensive a lot of times, so, you know.</s>LEMON: A lot of things are offensive. Really? Not the kind of argument you want to hear from the president of the United States. And this is far from the first time that he has played the race card in this campaign because he called Stacey Abrams the African-American Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia, he called her not qualified. She's a graduate of Yale law school by the way, was a minority leader of the Georgia statehouse. That seems pretty qualified to me. He called Andrew Gillum, the African-American mayor of Tallahassee who is running for governor of Florida, not equipped for the job, even outrageously branding him a thief without any explanation as to why he said that. So, make no mistake, this election is a referendum on Trump. He said it himself today.</s>TRUMP: The key is you have to go out to vote because in a sense, I am on the ticket.</s>LEMON: And voters are listening. About seven in 10 likely voters in our new poll say that when they cast their ballots in a matter of hours in the matter of hours here in the United States, they're going to be sending a message to the president. Forty-two percent say they'll vote in opposition to the president. Only 28 percent say they'll vote to support him. There's more bad news for President Trump in our poll as well. His approval rating is a dismal 39 percent, the worst pre-midterm rating for any president in more than 60 years. Don't be fooled. This race is as close as it gets. More than 31 million Americans have voted early nationwide, and in just a few hours, it is your turn to do the same thing. So, let's bring in Harry Enten to give us -- as we say in New York, Enten--</s>HARRY ENTEN, CNN POLITICS SENIOR WRITER AND ANALYST: Whatever.</s>LEMON: -- to give us a forecast on what's going to happen tomorrow. So tomorrow really is your Super Bowl. talk to me about the latest forecast.</s>ENTEN: Yes. So, essentially what we see right now is Democrats look like they're going to gain the majority. They're going to gain 228 seats. Of course, they need 218 for a majority. Look, it's within the margin of error that they won't get the majority, but it's also possible that right now the net gain we're projecting of 33 seats, it could be that they gain even more than that. Right now, the best guess is them getting 228 seats and that House majority.</s>LEMON: It's going to be -- before it's called, again, we don't know. It could be a very late night tomorrow.</s>ENTEN: It could absolutely be a very late night. Keep in mind we might have to wait until California -- they have a lot of mail ballots. We might have to wait for Washington eight, heck, we mint have to wait for Maine too which has this instant runoff voting, which isn't so instant. And if Democrats could be fighting a seat up there so it could be a very long night.</s>LEMON: Is there anything that we -- anything that's indicative of if we see this that it's a bellwether or it is an indicator, let's say a canary in a coal mine -- if something happens here on the east coast or, you know, maybe in the Central Time zone, is it an indication of which way it could possibly go?</s>ENTEN: Yes. I'm looking at New Jersey. There are a lot of swing districts in New Jersey. New Jersey 7th, New Jersey 3rd. These are vulnerable Republican incumbents. If they both go down in defeat, it's very hard for me to envision how Republicans will hold on to the chamber.</s>LEMON: All right. Harry Enten, thank you very much. I appreciate that. Get your sleep now.</s>ENTEN: I'm going to get it.</s>LEMON: All right. Lots to talk about tonight, including the president's surprising answer when a reporter asks him whether he has any regrets about his first two years in office.