-Our first guest tonight is the best-selling author
and Emmy-winning host of "All in with Chris Hayes,"
which airs weeknights at 8:00 P.M. on MSNBC.
Please welcome back to the show,
our friend, Chris Hayes, everybody.
♪♪
-Hi. -[ Laughs ]
Well, you've done a show without an audience.
-Well -- -But you don't walk out.
Yeah, you don't -- you don't do a long walk out.
-Over here. -Hi, buddy.
-How we doing?
-Well, I want to ask how you're doing.
You did the 12:00 to 2:00 shift last night.
-Yes, I'm doing the 12:00 to 2:00 shift again tonight.
And then maybe -- -Not a lot happened
between 12:00 to 2:00 last night.
-I'm insulted you would say that.
-No, it was nice --
it was nice to have you providing perspective on it,
but I think for people -- the night before, it seemed like
a lot happened between 12:00 and 2:00.
-Yeah, I mean, we're all --
Look, it's very funny to look in --
I really love the fact that these places --
I think it is a great blow for transparency --
All these places that are counting the ballots, you know,
they have live streams.
And we've had reporters in there.
At a certain level, all of us are like,
"Come on, let's hurry up." And you look at them,
and they're, like... -Yeah.
-...doing it.
It just -- you know, it is what it is.
They got a lot to process.
And then these states that aren't used to this --
Pennsylvania, Nevada being two examples
where they don't have a lot of mail-in ballots --
it's just going to take a little while.
-It does seems like they have been out in front.
Secretaries of state --
Secretaries of state, right? -Yeah.
-And attorneys general. -Attorneys general.
-Yeah.
And election officials.
Where do you think we are right now?
I mean, so I should clarify. It's right before 5:00.
You're going to be on TV a little bit later.
Do you think much will change between now and when you're on?
-Yes, because Pennsylvania --
Pennsylvania election officials said they might have
the count done today, which would be...
dispositive, basically. -Yeah.
-I mean, given the current margins
in the outstanding ballots,
the rate at which they're coming in,
were Pennsylvania to count today, I think it's --
it looks like -- we don't know definitively --
that Biden would pull ahead,
perhaps by a margin along the Michigan level margin,
100,000 votes or plus, which is sizable.
And that would then be 270.
-Right. -Of sort of states
that we can feel, you know, pretty rock solid about.
-A lot of people have made this observation on Twitter,
smarter people than me who talk about elections.
And we actually alluded to it before the election
about what happened in 2018,
which is the first sort of post-op,
which was sort of happening, I guess, in real time,
was there's no blue wave. -Yep.
-Just like everybody's saying, this is very bad.
And that if they had counted the votes in an opposite order,
the narrative would have been very different on Tuesday night?
-Oh, that's absolutely true.
I mean, a lot of people are saying that particularly
with Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Because -- and this was engineered by
Donald Trump and Republicans in those states
to prevent them from what's doing precanvassing,
which is, like, counting ahead of time these mail-in ballots.
Had they done that first,
it would have been, you know, I think by election night
we would have probably known
that those states were going to go to Biden.
And if we knew on election night
that the three Midwestern states had flipped,
giving the 270 necessary,
then it would have been a very different kind of,
and I feel more definitive probably, narrative
about what happened.
This -- you know, post-election narratives
are always dangerous things for a bunch of reasons.
One is incomplete data. Sometimes bad data.
People benchmarking against polling expectations
even though the polls were wrong.
So the thing, there isn't that, "Oh, well, what did this
candidate do wrong in that race?"
It's, no, the pollster was wrong...
-Right. -...that it was a close race.
It never was. The candidate didn't do anything wrong.
They were just not going to win that race.
-Right, you're saying that people who are watching saying,
how could they blow a ten-point polling lead?
-Yeah. -There's no --
Like, it's not like there --
-There was never a ten-point polling lead.
-Right, there was never a ten-point voting lead.
There was a polling projection, which was very different.
-Yes, I think -- I think we now have enough to know that,
you know, there is something systemically bad and wrong
with particularly state and district level polling.
And so it gives everyone this sense of like,
"Whoa, what happened?"
But if the measurement was wrong all along --
If the measurement had been saying all along, you know,
Theresa Greenfield's going the lose by eight points
in Iowa to Joni Ernst --
-Mm-hmm. -When she lost by eight points,
you say, it was kind of a plus-eight Republican state.
-Right.
-Looks about what I would think.
-Yeah, and in the year leading up to it,
I don't think people would have been shocked, like,
"Can you believe Joni Ernst is up eight points?"
-No. -It would have made total sense.
-Now the places where there's real damage
is in the House districts. -Right.
-And I think there's probably some winnable
House districts that were lost, partly because I think --
we'll figure this out, what the national environment was,
but one big thing you saw was, you know,
Republican turnout was insane. -Yeah.
-It was insane on both sides.
You know, it's been a catechism for my life in politics,
I think particularly in certain circles
on the sort of liberal and left that high turnout elections
are how Democrats can win.
But you know, there's lots of people who don't vote
who are also conservatives. -Right.
-And what ends up happening often
is that if one side motivates and turns out its people,
the other side does it as well.
-Right, because one thing that will happen is Donald Trump
will end up with far more votes than he had four years ago.
-Yes, numerically more votes. -Right.
-It's going to be so interesting the see
what that final popular vote percentage margin is.
-Mm-hmm. -I mean, one of the things
that's so weird about this and the electoral college
is we've all watched -- we watch the maps,
and then we watch the states and then we do the paths
and we press the buttons and we get the map.
In all the other races we're watching --
you know, state races, house races,
someone's winning by three or four points,
it's like, it looks like they're going to win that race."
-Yeah. -And that kind of is what it is.
It was a close but decisive victory, four points.
Joe Biden's probably going to win by that.
-Right. -Four points, maybe five.
He may win a bigger margin
than Barack Obama's re-election in 2012 over Mitt Romney.
I mean, that's pretty striking.
The difference being that Barack Obama's 2012 victory
over Mitt Romney was more geographically balanced.
And so it got called that night
and it was across a bunch of states
where he had a very clear electoral advantage.
But in terms of total votes cast and the total margin,
Biden might actually beat that spread.
-I want to come back and talk to you about perception
and optics of an election like this.
We'll be right back with more from Chris Hayes.