The Democrats take Congress. The president talks ballroom. Election Day in America continued is now. I'm Dana Bash.
And I'm Kaitlan Collins. And as my fellow White House correspondents were pointing out earlier, the president was in what is described by those who know him best as his happy place today. He came out in front of reporters and the cameras and signed a beam that is going to go in his future ballroom, in the face of that historic midterm defeat for his party. Now, the president explained it when he was finally questioned by voters about last night's results, saying the voters loved him, they just weren't crazy about the candidates, even though he hand-selected many of those candidates.
You saw the people that were packed, thousands and thousands of people at every rally. And if I was on the ballot, we would have won. But they just, you couldn't transfer that love. There was such love at those rallies. It was incredible. We weren't able to transfer the love to candidates.
Just to give you a better idea of how badly that worked, Democrats now have 240 seats in the House. That majority is only expected to grow. 56 races are still yet to be called. And in the Senate, Democrats have flipped seven seats. They've now got 54 seats. Two races are still undecided. And one of those two races, Dana, of course, could not be closer. It is the state of Mississippi.
Right now, it's got 95% of the vote in. And you can see the Democrat Mike Espy here is just 65 votes ahead of the incumbent Republican senator. That's Cindy Hyde-Smith. Now, this is a state Trump carried by more than 20 points only two years ago. And still, we're watching it very closely tonight. Also in Alaska, the Democrat Mary Peltola there is leading the Republican incumbent. That is, of course, Dan Sullivan, the Republican in this race, by just 626 votes here. Only 74% of the vote in. We are tracking both of these races very closely, as are Republicans and Democrats here in Washington. We have our correspondents across the United States for us. Kyung Lah is in Alaska. My colleague Andrew Whitman is in Mississippi. Kyung, I mean, obviously we're watching this. We're looking at the vote count. We knew Alaska was going to take a minute. What are you hearing from officials on the ground so far?
We're actually just hearing from the Sullivan campaign just a short time ago. They issued a memo, what they are calling the state of the race. And in that memo, they are modeling a theoretical path to victory. And they're already alleging in that memo that they believe voters were confused. They're saying this, though, without any real evidence of it so far. So they are looking to see if they can flip what is currently the numbers, 626 votes separating Sullivan, the incumbent Republican, from Democrat Mary Peltola, who's currently leading. But again, as you point out, some 75% of the vote. That's a good quarter of the vote that's still out there. A number of precincts and some of the hardest-to-reach areas of Alaska still have yet to report and have those votes counted. So both Peltola and Sullivan, in their statements to their supporters, have been saying that it's going to take time, and this is something that Alaska is used to, because of those far-flung precincts, some of them that you can only access by boat or helicopter or plane. Those ballots have to make it back in, they have to be counted, and that is going to take some time. 10 days to 15 days, Kaitlan, before those ballots come in, Kaitlan.
Yeah. Well, at least it looks gorgeous in Glacier View. Kyung, we'll check back in with you as we are hearing more and getting those votes in. Andrew Whitman is where it's a little bit warmer in Jackson, Mississippi. That is where that Senate race between Mike Espy and Cindy Hyde-Smith is still too close to call right now. Andrew, I know you're at the ballot location where they have just finished counting for the day. We've got just a 65-vote margin here. What is the latest you're hearing there on the ground?
Well, Kaitlan, this is a nail-biter race that's really in an unprecedented situation. This is a state that Trump carried by 23 points just two years ago. Democrats have not sent a senator from Mississippi in nearly four decades. But we are now in a margin that is too close to call, and it's likely going to come down to these absentee and provisional ballots. And the Espy campaign says that there are approximately 15,000 provisional ballots that are left to be counted. And these are ballots where voters maybe need to rectify voter ID information on voter rolls. And there are representatives and lawyers who are going to be here trying to rectify the concerns on these ballots as voters come and try and cure the ballots themselves. There's also approximately 3,600 absentee ballots throughout the state that need to be counted, according to the Secretary of State. And as long as these ballots were sent by Election Day, they can be counted up until November 10th. So, there are still days to go here. And I just spoke with a nonpartisan election observer representing Black voters, talking about what her role is in all this. Take a listen.
We are here to make sure that the voices of those eligible voters, as well as voters in the state of Mississippi, are being heard. Some of the issues that took place yesterday, we want to make sure that all of the affidavits are counted, that we count every vote, and that nothing goes uncounted.
Now, Mississippi is home to the largest percent of the Black population in the country. Mike Espy is trying to galvanize Black voters as he tried to get the attention of the National Democratic Party, as he had major surrogates like Vice President Kamala Harris come and campaign with him. Former President Barack Obama cut a campaign ad for him. Meanwhile, President Trump came down to campaign with Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith just before the election, just to show you how much Republicans were playing on defense in deep red territory. But both campaigns are saying that they are confident that they will pull out a win when all votes are counted. There is a third-party candidate who has about 2% of the vote, which could be a spoiler here with the results being as tight as they are. But all eyes are on Mississippi right now as we are waiting for all these other votes to be counted. Kaitlan.
Yeah, they're both confident only one will be right. Andrew, we'll see which one it is. Thank you so much for being there on the ground in Jackson, Mississippi. Dana, back to you on Capitol Hill.
Thanks. And Ty Pinkins, that independent candidate rather, told me last hour that he's not a spoiler and that he actually wants the Democrat Mike Espy to win. So, we'll see how that math works. I'm joined again by CNN's Manu Raju, Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, and Republican Congressman Buddy Carter of Georgia. I want to go back to something that you were saying before this beautiful day turned into a beautiful evening here on Capitol Hill about the fact that you, as a Senate Democrat, now as part of a pretty sizable majority, maybe will get even bigger, you shouldn't have to clean up the president's messes. How do you square that with the hope and the promises that Democrats made all across the campaign trail? Maybe not to clean up the president's messes, but to address some of the core issues in their lives.
Well, I want to be clear. I mean, we have a responsibility. I don't, you know, I never suggested that we don't have a job to do. What I think is important is for the public to recognize that the Democratic Party didn't break what we are seeing now. So, in other words, it takes so much less talent to break something than to fix it. And when we talk about what happened to the health care system, look at the mess that RFK Jr. has made with vaccinations and cyclospora and all the other things that we have seen. The gas prices that are a direct connection to the war caused by the Republican Party and tolerated by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. We voted 14 different times to end the war. And so I just want to level set to let the American public know, of course, we're going to do everything we can to fulfill the promises that we made. And I think it's important to note, again, that this president, in my opinion, has been very infantile. He's broken everything around him, has built very little, as you hear today. He's really interested in his ballroom. Again, I don't think he's going to be successful at that or the arch or the, you know, the reflecting pool or anything else. But he has damaged in a really significant way our country, everything from our reputation, damaged our economy. He's just done tremendous damage, and it is going to take a little time for us to repair it. We are resolute and going to do it, but I think it is important to acknowledge what we've been handed by Republicans who had the House, the Senate, and the White House.
But if I may, you know, what's your plan? I mean, you know, you talk about promises. I need to know what the plan is. And if you need a textbook example of how to fix things that are broke, remember what two years ago brought us? We had open borders. We had crime in our cities. And what did we do in this administration, in the Republican administration, when President Trump came in? We secured our border. We've got safe cities. Now, all of those things we've done as Republicans.
Well, I can tell you the plan. The first plan was to have these Republicans fired, who not only worked on the border, but they have also done a job of wrecking our economy, the gas prices, the cost of groceries. We've seen health care broken, we've seen when they were in office.
But what we know is that in Georgia, for example, 500,000 people in your state no longer have health care as a result of the actions taken in the big ugly bill.
These are facts, and so we are not better off. And so the first, when you talk about what is our plan, the first plan was to take back power.
Let me just interrupt, because Manu, I want to play for all of you, but Manu, I want you to react. Governor Ron DeSantis came out this morning and had some pretty strong language about his interpretation of the results.
This is close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country, as we have seen probably in the last 100 years.
I mean, that is a remarkable statement, and because of the depth of the breadth of the Democratic victory and how deep in the minority Republicans are going to be. I mean, it is going to take a significant wave in 2028 for them to come back and win the House majority. They would have 250-plus seats in the United States House. At the beginning of the night, Democrats who were very bullish, the most bullish they would get, was saying 230 seats at most, maybe on their wildest dreams they get 240 seats. Now we're talking about 250. There's some possibility they could get even 260 seats, Dana, which would just be such a remarkable event. In the 54 to 56 seats in the Senate, each seat is so hard to pick up, as we know, and getting to that level, picking up five seats in the next cycle, that's going to be incredibly difficult. So, that's what he's warning about there, because the losses have just been across the board. We thought Democrats would be in the minority in the Senate for a long time. How quickly the pendulum swings, it could swing back. It's very possible the Democrats could overreach in their own way. There could be a strong Republican nominee in 2028, but there's real concern that...
The pendulum's swinging pretty fast recently, a lot faster than when I started in this town. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Just ahead, breaking news from White House correspondent Kristen Holmes on who might take the fall for last night's historic defeat. Stay tuned.
Right now, only 65 votes separate the Republican incumbent senator of Mississippi, Cindy Hyde-Smith, and the Democrat who is challenging her, Mike Espy, in that race. While you'd think a razor-thin election like this would be destined for a recount, Mississippi actually doesn't have an automatic recount law, and neither campaign can request one. Here with me to talk about what happens next in Mississippi, and as we're looking at all of this tonight, is CNN contributor and UCLA law professor Rick Hasen and CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig. A tongue twister.
There hasn't been a lot of sleep that's been happening around here. I mean, what's going on in Mississippi? What is the rule, and how does this work with a recount?
The rule in Mississippi is there is no rule, and that makes Mississippi unique among the 50 states. Almost every other state has some rule that either triggers an automatic recount or one of the candidates can request it. Not in Mississippi. So if and when one of the parties loses, if it's very narrow, that party is going to have to go into court. They're going to have to ask a judge to essentially make new law and say, 'A, we'd like you to recognize us as a party that has standing to bring this lawsuit, and B, we want you, judge, to order a recount.' So, it's going to require much more of an uphill climb than a normal state where you can just automatically get a recount.
And it seems like that's where this is headed. If we've got a 70-vote margin that close, that's inevitable. You, Rick, when you look at this and what's going on in Alaska, the other race that's still close to call, and you see how big the margin is for that other Dan Sullivan that's running. I mean, if he wasn't on the ballot, you'd obviously see a difference in the Mary Peltola and the Dan Sullivan race that's underway. The DOJ still has an active lawsuit trying to block certification on that. If the Republican incumbent loses after appealing a decision by a federal judge last week, where do you see that heading?
Well, I think in both Mississippi and Alaska, for the sake of finality, I think that there's a decent chance that when all the ballots are counted, it won't be in a range where a recount or an election contest would make a difference. We know that in Mississippi there are something like 10,000 to 15,000 provisional ballots that have to be counted, and the chances that it's still going to be within 60 votes are quite small. In Alaska, when I last checked, only about three-quarters of the vote was in. Alaska and Mississippi both accept ballots that arrive after Election Day that are postmarked by Election Day. Alaska also uses ranked-choice voting. So, there's a lot of ways this could go. But if it does come down to a contest in either place, one thing that could happen is it could ultimately be resolved not by the state courts or the federal courts, but by the Senate itself, which has the ultimate power to make decisions about contested elections.
Okay. Well, I mean, that could be fascinating in terms of where this is headed, and obviously Democrats are watching it closely. Elie, just in terms of the balance-of-power shift that is underway here, Democrats are making pretty clear they're going to investigate the Trump administration in a lot of different aspects. Robert Garcia, that Democrat who is going to be the new chair of the House Oversight Committee, only had a two-word statement last night saying, 'Lawyer up.' The White House responded in an anonymous quote today saying, 'Well, don't forget we have the power of the presidency. We still control everything.' What do you think this is going to look like?
Lawyer up is good advice because this is going to be a whole new world legally and politically. Democrats now have both houses. They have the committees. They have the subpoena power. So, I expect Democrats to issue subpoenas around the president and his family and some of their money-making endeavors. I think they're going to bring the Jeffrey Epstein saga back to life. I think they're going to start subpoenaing leaders of DOJ and other agencies. Now, to interpret the White House's response, they're going to invoke executive privilege, which takes us back to really the end of the first Trump administration, where they're going to argue these are confidential communications between the president and his advisers. And then those disputes will end up in court. But here's the thing: executive privilege is not going to protect the Trump children who have no role in the administration. It's not going to protect, for example, Elon Musk or other people who would be brought in. So, this is going to be the next frontier, I think, when it comes to the legal battles and the efforts to hold the administration accountable.
What if Trump pardons Elon Musk? Like he said, he said he would protect him.
A pardon, a pardon will have zero impact on a subpoena, on executive privilege. A pardon only means one thing: he cannot be charged federally with a crime. Has no impact on a subpoena.
Elie Honig, it's going to be fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us, Rick, as well. Appreciate your time. Up next, we have breaking news from my colleague Kristen Holmes, who has new reporting on who may ultimately pay the price for that disastrous night for Republicans.
And this is Election Day in America continued. We do have some breaking news now about the defense secretary Pete Hegseth, and apparently a growing campaign behind the scenes to try to make him the fall guy for last night's Republican losses. This is all being pinned on the unpopularity of the Iran war that's been underway. And it comes, as you saw, the vice president JD Vance, who back in September to me in the briefing wouldn't call it a war, and is now publicly blaming the war for the blowout that was suffered by Republicans last night. In a very lengthy social media post that he put out today that stood out to a bunch of White House reporters, the vice president said this: 'The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay.' The vice president continued, 'Agree or disagree? That's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost, and any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.' That note did not mention the Secretary of War, as the White House calls him. But for more on this, I want to go to my colleague Kristen Holmes, who's at the White House. Kristen, obviously this was one of the first questions the president was asked in the aftermath of last night. What are you learning tonight?
Well, this backlash against Pete Hegseth is growing. We're hearing a real snowball effect here. One of the things that we had reported last night, which is why they asked that question, was that there had been speculation among Trump allies who were pointing the finger at Hegseth that he was going to be the one that took the blame. But now this blaming, this behind-the-scenes finger-pointing, this has extended out to Capitol Hill. And we're learning that the House could vote as early as this week to impeach Pete Hegseth. Now, our colleagues Sarah Ferris and Adam Cancryn, they talked to Republican Congressman Tom Massie, who said that as soon as Congress comes back, which is next week, he plans on triggering a vote to impeach Hegseth. But the real kicker here is that they have talked to several GOP sources who now are saying that they actually think it's going to pass, because Republicans on Capitol Hill are turning against Hegseth incredibly quickly. And here's what they say. They say essentially that Hegseth was the chief cheerleader in pushing President Trump to go into Iran without any kind of exit strategy. That at some point he misrepresented to Trump and to lawmakers up on Capitol Hill what the US was capable of, how quickly they could get in and out, what this would actually look like if they attacked Iran. And they're clearly getting some of this feedback from the White House, from the administration. They're getting that green light to go ahead with this, because you're hearing, I mean, dozens of Republicans here talking about Pete Hegseth and really turning on him very quickly.
