MSNBC "All in with Chris Hayes" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders
Interview
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HAYES: And then there`s President Trump who`s closing argument is grounded in racism, fear, and lies. A man who has repeatedly used flat-out racist language according to both well, the public record and television cameras, and this one right-hand man Michael Cohen. Cohen telling Vanity Fair today Trump said to be named one country run by a black person that`s not a shithole and then he added name one city. Trump also saying reportedly according to Cohen, black people are too stupid to vote for me.
Now, it is always true that nobody knows what`s going to happen in an election. It`s in the future after all. This year with just four days left it is especially true. For one thing, there is unprecedented voter enthusiasm. More than 29 million Americans have already cast their early votes into 2018. In 2014 there were only 21 million early votes cast total. In some states including Texas the early vote is smashing records 213,000 first time voters have already cast ballots and in the 30 Texas counties that report voter totals, more people have voted early in 2018 than voted at all in 2014.
The lines to vote have also been long in Georgia where more than 800,000 people have voted early and whether there`s been a surge in turnout among young Black and Hispanic voters. So far the early vote has also been 56 percent women. Every pollster has to try to figure out what the electorate will ultimately look like and many races really could go either way.
The Cook Political Report lists House 29 races as toss-ups, 28 of them in Republican-held districts along with nine toss-ups in the Senate. And a shift of just a couple percentage points could mean an enormous night for either party in either direction which is why some Republicans are working very hard to suppress the vote. Eight states debuting new voter I.D. requirements this year including North Dakota where the laws forcing an estimated 5,000 Native Americans to get a new I.D. card that lists street addresses, not the post office boxes many have been using for years in order to vote.
In Dodge City, Kansas, County Clerk Debbie Cox moved the city`s only polling place from a central location in town, the Civic Center to the Expo Center a half a mile outside the city limits. The new location is not accessible via a sidewalk and there is no regular public transportation there. When the ACLU complained, she forwarded the e-mail with a comment "LOL."
Despite all that, a judge ruled that Cox does not have to open a second polling place. Though today some good news in Georgia where Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate for governor has embarked on what many see is one of the nation`s most aggressive efforts to suppress the vote. A judge today ordered Kemp to lift voting barriers from more than 3,000 new U.S. citizens though nearly 50,000 voter registrations remain stalled.
With me now to offer his perspective on all this, someone who has been all around this country trying to get out the vote Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont. Senator, how are you feeling?
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I), VERMONT: I`m -- well, I`m feeling good. By Sunday night we`ll have been to 13 states, held 35 rallies and meetings. There is a lot of enthusiasm out there, Chris.
HAYES: How do you think about this Election Day and how do you think about what -- who needs to come out and how you -- what your best-case scenario for what happens on Tuesday?
SANDERS: I`m not much into speculation. We`ll know the results soon enough. But what I would say without being high -- without overstating it is I think this is the most important Midterm Election in the history of our country. What we are fighting for is not Democrat versus Republican. You`re fighting for the future of American democracy, you`re fighting against a president who has the base, the political process is a pathological liar, who is trying to divide the American people up based on where we come from, the color of our skin, our sexual orientation, our religion, unprecedented. And it is absolutely imperative that we have the largest voter turnout in a Midterm Election in American history.
Four years ago very low turnout. Republicans won a sweeping victory. We need a massive turnout and I`ll tell you, who must be coming out, young people and working people. People can`t make it on eight or nine bucks an hour, people who have no health care, people who are worried about the future of our planet if we don`t come back climate change. Women who demand to control their own bodies rather than having the government do it for them. The Latino community in the immigrant community who are being hit hard and lied about every single day.
We need a massive uprising in this country of people coming out and voting and ending this terrible one-party rule which now exists in Washington.
HAYES: It`s been very interesting to me to watch the way the Democrats have run and we`ve been covering a whole bunch of races, and it was summarized today as Democrats don`t -- refuse to take Trump`s homestretch bait. And what`s been striking is Democrats have run as if they`re running essentially against Paul Ryan. They have been running on basically we`re going to protect Medicare and Social Security, we`re going to protect the Affordable Care Act which they tried to repeal the tax cuts went to rich folks. They haven`t been focusing on what makes Donald Trump so odious to so many voters are so polemical and so polarizing. What do you think about that strategy?
SANDERS: Well, I think it`s not an either/or. I think you cannot ignore the ugliness of what is taking place in the White House. And I think that there are a lot of conservative Republicans who would disagree with somebody like me on every issue, who understand that it is hard to raise their kids in a nation when you have a president who lies all of the time and it was essentially a bully. So I think you know, you cannot ignore who Trump is and what he is doing. On the other hand, it certainly is not good enough just to run an anti-Trump campaign.
We have got to be talking about health care for every man, woman, and child, in my view, through a Medicare for All System. You`ve got to be talking about raising the minimum wage to a living wage 15 bucks an hour. You`ve got to be talking about climate change and the transformation of our energy system. You have to be talking about the demand that the wealthy and large corporations in a -- in a time when we have massive income and wealth inequality start paying their fair share of taxes. I think those are not only good policy issues, I think it`s good politics.
HAYES: You`ve been in politics for a long time. You`ve won races, you`ve lost races, you know that politics isn`t beanbag as the saying goes. They get -- they get nasty down the stretch. Have you ever seen anything quite like what this president is doing in this moment?
SANDERS: No. No. I have not, you have not, and nobody in this country has. You know, and it doesn`t give me any pleasure, Chris, to define him as a pathological liar. You know, I have conservative friends who are not liars. To talk about -- to talk about this president as somebody who is trying to divide our people up when you will remember after 9/11 George Bush, very conservative president he went to a mosque to say this was not an attack by Muslims, it was an attack by a handful of terrorists. Remember that?
HAYES: Yes.
SANDERS: This guy is something different who will say anything, do anything in order to gain power and while he`s dividing us up he`s also busy giving huge tax breaks to the rich and trying to throw millions of people off the health insurance that they have. So I think it is imperative that we rallied the American people not only against Trump but around a progressive agenda which demands the government works for all of us, not just wealthy campaign contributors.
HAYES: All right, Senator Bernie Sanders, thanks for making a little time tonight.
SANDERS: My pleasure.
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