AMY GOODMAN: From Pacifica, this is Democracy Now!, “War, Peace and the Presidency.”

HILLARY CLINTON: Tonight we’ve reached a milestone in our nation’s march toward a more perfect union: the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for president.

AMY GOODMAN: Hillary Clinton, three months ago. Will she make history again tonight, or will Donald Trump pull off an upset in the race for the White House, after one of the most divisive campaigns in modern U.S. history?

DONALD TRUMP: When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

AMY GOODMAN: And voters are not just deciding the presidential race. The U.S. Senate is up for grabs, and, well, possibly the House. We’ll be live for the next five hours in this Democracy Now! special, bringing you election results from around the country and voices you won’t hear anywhere else.

All that and more, coming up.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m Juan González. Welcome to all of our listeners and viewers around the country and around the world.

Polls have just closed in Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia. We’re likely just hours away from knowing who will be the next president of the United States. Will Hillary Clinton become the nation’s first female president, or will Donald Trump pull off a shocking upset? Control of the U.S. Senate is also up for grabs, as Democrats are attempting to pick up four seats to reclaim the upper chamber. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are also being decided today. Republicans are expected to remain in the majority, as the Democrats would need to gain 30 seats.

AMY GOODMAN: More than 160 ballot initiatives are also on the ballot in 35 states—more than in any election in the last decade. Marijuana legalization is in nine states an issue. Other initiatives include reforms around guns, public education, the minimum wage, the death penalty, taxes, same-sex marriage. The election caps one of the most divisive in U.S. history. This morning, Donald Trump was booed as he arrived at his Manhattan polling place to cast his vote.

CROWD: [booing]

AMY GOODMAN: Hillary Clinton went to vote this morning in Chappaqua, New York, along with her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

HILLARY CLINTON: It is the most humbling feeling, Dan, because, you know, I know how much responsibility goes with this, and so many people are counting on the outcome of this election, what it means for our country. And I will do the very best I can, if I’m fortunate enough to win today.

INTERVIEWER: Anything you’re worried about today, Secretary Clinton?

HILLARY CLINTON: Thank you. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: In the first results of the night, AP is reporting Donald Trump has won Indiana and Kentucky. Hillary Clinton has won Vermont. Today also marks the first presidential election in half a century without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. Across the nation, there are 868 fewer places to vote because of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act. We’ll be spending the next five hours bringing you election results with an array of guests from coast to coast.

We’re beginning with four guests right now. Jill Stein is with us, off the campaign trail, the 2016 presidential nominee for the Green Party. Myrna Pérez is with us, deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program here in New York. John Nichols is a reporter at The Nation, usually based in Wisconsin. And Julianne Malveaux, a labor economist, author, commentator, she serves on the board of the Economic Policy Institute, her new book, Are We Better Off?: Race, Obama, and Public Policy She’s the former president of Bennett College in North Carolina.

Well, we have a lot to discuss as these poll numbers roll in. John, why don’t you give us a lay of the land of what you’re watching in this country, a hotly contested Senate race even right there in Wisconsin?

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah, I’m missing my people in Wisconsin, because that is a big deal race. And let me—let’s start with the baseline here. We’re going to elect the 45th president of the United States. There’s a chance it will be the first woman president, and that’s history right there. Beyond that, though, we’re looking at what that result will mean and how it will play. And if Hillary Clinton is elected, will she win a substantial majority in the Electoral College? Will she win a substantial plurality in the popular vote? That’s important because the Republican nominee for president of the United States has suggested the system is rigged against him, and he holds out the possibility of objections. This is—that’s the top line that we will pay attention to tonight. So far, those first returns suggest we’re following pattern in those states.

Then we’re going to elect a United States Senate. And really, the question with the Senate is: Can the next president of the United States govern? Because we have seen, with obstruction over the last number of years, a real barrier to that. I think that Juan is right that the chance of the House flipping—Juan and Amy, both right—is slim, but we’ll watch that, as well.

And I think, most importantly, because we have Jill Stein here and other folks who can go so much deeper into this process, what I’ll be watching across the country is a number of ballot initiatives. We have an opportunity in two states—Washington and California—to say that we want to overturn Citizens United and have a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics. That’s a big deal, because this will be the expense—most expensive presidential and congressional races in history.

We also have the other referendums you’ve talked about. And, to me, one of the most exciting things that’s going on, and I know it’s an uphill fight, Colorado will be voting on a single-payer, Medicare-for-all healthcare system. California will be voting on a huge pushback against the pharmaceutical companies. We have, in Washington state, I believe, a important referendum on climate change, that will send signals there. There’s so much going on tonight. And I love that you’re on for five hours, because I think it’s going to take five hours, if we’re serious about this, to get to the heart of the matter.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Jill Stein, you’ve been the Green Party presidential candidate. The third-party efforts this year have gathered perhaps more attention than at any time since Ralph Nader ran in 2000. What do you think you’ve been able to accomplish, and in terms of the changing the nature of the debate about political options in the United States for the—for the voters?

DR. JILL STEIN: Yeah, you know, I think the American people are changing the dialogue. The New York Times ran a poll the other day that said 80 percent of American voters consider this a repulsive election. We entered into this election with two candidates, who are the most—that is, the establishment candidates, being the most disliked and untrusted. And it’s been all downhill from there. With each day, you know, another shoe drops. And voters, I think, in many ways, have begun to really reject the system. And we know that not only because of the unpopularity of the candidates, but close to 60 percent of voters say that they are clamoring for a new independent political party. Even the voters behind Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, for the most part, do not support them, but actually are mostly afraid of the other candidate.

So, I think we’ve kind of crossed the Rubicon. People have decided they—you know, they’re rejecting these two parties, which are now minority parties. Largest bloc of voters is independent. But people have been systematically denied an understanding of what the alternatives are. Seventy-six percent of people were screaming for open debates. Seventy-two percent of voters do not know about my campaign, the only campaign that is not corrupted by lobbyist money, by corporate money and by a super PAC. This is—you know, this gets to the real heart of the problem, yet voters have been systematically denied understanding of that. But, you know, in spite of the fear campaigning and the intimidation, sort of the lesser-evil stuff, people are having a choice really rammed down their throats between a proven militarist and a neofascist. What kind of a choice is that? There are a lot of people who would reject that, if they knew that there were other options.

So, you know, I’m really looking forward to the cracks in the system now, and that people—it’s going to—I think we’re going to see a lot of buyer’s remorse tomorrow, particularly, well, with—in either case, I think we’re going to see incredible regrets, not only about this election, but about what we’ve been able to get out of it, which is not very much, because we didn’t have options. But I think it’s going to be a perfect storm for organizing. If we get to 5 percent, that’s a big breakthrough. It’ll be a whole new ball game. But even short of 5 percent, I think we’re going to do a whole lot better than we did four years ago.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s a whole new ball game because?

DR. JILL STEIN: At 5 percent, basically, we would then be a recognized party. We would have a guaranteed $8 million to $10 million right out of the starting gate in the next presidential election. And starting on tomorrow, we would have guaranteed ballot access in most states. So we would have a rallying point for political resistance to these two parties who’ve thrown the American people under the bus.

AMY GOODMAN: Julianne Malveaux, you certainly have a very different view of what the choice is in this election. You’re a surrogate for Hillary Clinton. Talk about—if you could respond to Jill Stein, but just talk about what’s at stake right now.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, what’s at stake, number one, the Supreme Court. We have Title 5 of the Voting Rights Act was eviscerated, and we need that back. Number two, you know, there are all kind of things that the court is going to be ruling on, including some labor rights issues, number of other issues. If—Hillary or Donald Trump will be the president. We know that we’ll have vastly different Supreme Court nominees depending on which of them wins. So the court is at stake. The Department of Education is at stake. Hillary Clinton has said that she has $25 billion for HBCUs. I’m a former HBCU president. I’m passionate about the way our colleges have been sidelined. This—

AMY GOODMAN: Historically black colleges and universities.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Historically black colleges, 105 of them. And we still graduate disproportionate numbers of African Americans who get BAs. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump says he has a plan. Well, he has a plan for everything; he just won’t write it down. He knows everything also, and he won’t write any of that down either. He has said that he will appoint Rudy Giuliani—Rudy Giuliani—as the attorney general. I can hardly keep it in. Mr. “Law and Order,” “Stop-and-Frisk,” Rudy Giuliani. I mean, I had a passionate debate with the young man who drove me to the train station this morning, who said he wasn’t voting. And I said—he’s a Howard University student, 23 years old. I said, “How many times have you been stopped by the police?” And he said, “Oh, just about every week.” I said, “And you want Rudy Giuliani?” I said, “Boy, I will pay you money to go home and vote. You don’t have to drive Uber for the afternoon. Just go home and vote, please.” Because we do want, as you say, John, we want the huge margins for Hillary.

I—Jill, you know, I have two things to say to you. I mean, I admire what you are doing. At the same time, I don’t think the Green Party has done its work. And that’s why it, quite frankly, seems marginal to me. And I’m not wasting my vote. I know that some of your positions make sense to me, but, frankly, all of them do not. I’m about as progressive as they come. Reverend Jackson and I tease each other, who’s further to the left? But we know that Hillary works, and Hillary has worked for us. She has worked with African-American people. What’s also at stake? So I said Department of Justice. You know, there’s so much at stake in this election. And I think that if the Green Party had been consistent and persistent in doing its work, you’d be on all 50 ballot states now, and people would have have different kinds of choices. I, quite frankly, find it—and if I’m uninformed, please inform me. But I find the effort relatively episodic, with a lot of sturm und drang around elections, but not going through. I do know that there are down-ballot people who have run on the Green Party, and some have been successful. But if people don’t know about you, that’s not on them, it’s on you. Most—most people read The New York Times, The Wall Street—they read somebody’s newspaper. The black press has covered you. I write for NNPA, the National Newspaper Publishers Association. You’ve gotten coverage from them. So, people—you have to ask yourself why there is so little sticking here. And if you ask yourself that question, I think that what you’ll find, if there is this groundswell of dissatisfaction, which there is—if there’s this groundswell of dissatisfaction, this didn’t start in 2016.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, but before—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I mean, people have been unhappy for a long time about the two-party system. Frankly, I’d love to see a multiparty system, like we have in some of our European countries. But I’m not sure how to get there. But, you know, you’re smarter than me about that. So, why don’t you tell us?

DR. JILL STEIN: I’d love to respond, yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Before Jill responds to that, I’d like to bring in Myrna Pérez, because she may have to leave early, of the Brennan Center, to talk about a big issue in this election already, apparently: problems at the voting booth. There have been problems reported in Utah, in Pennsylvania, right here in New York City, and in North Carolina. And we just have a report that the North Carolina Board of Elections has agreed to keep polls open in eight precincts after a series of computer glitches in those precincts.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Right. Well, I mean, the first thing that I want to say is that, in spite of this conversation, I think it’s actually about the voters. And I would be very upset if any of this conversation led to people being demoralized or disenchanted or not coming out to vote. There are problems in our election system. We do need to focus on them. I am not naive about those. But the polls are still open in many places. If you have not voted, you need to get out and get there. I am going to talk about some of these problems. If you have any problems at the polls, there are thousands of nonpartisan assistance that you can get if you just call 866-OUR-VOTE. That’s 866-O-U-R-V-O-T-E.

So, back to some of the problems that we’ve seen. We’ve seen stuff that we see in other elections. We’ve got—we’ve got long lines. We’ve got registration systems that are not working for the public. We have issues of election officials not knowing the world, not knowing the work and not knowing the rules. And we have a big infrastructure problem with our machines.

And my hope is that the talk of rigged elections causes people of all political stripes to think really hard about how we invest in our elections. We are supposed to be the best democracy in the world. We need to have a top-flight system. And I think there are very, very specific and easy things that we can do. We can make sure that our election administrators have enough resources to do their job. We can enact automatic registration. We can make sure that people with criminal convictions are able to participate once they are living and working in the community. We can restore the Voting Rights Act. We can invest in our machines. This problem that happened in North Carolina was largely due to electronic equipment failing. And this is predictable. This is knowable. This is no surprise to somebody. And I think we need to be in a place where we say we do not want democracy on the cheap.

AMY GOODMAN: Utah, something happening there right now with polling places, concerns?

MYRNA PÉREZ: I have not heard about Utah, but I wouldn’t be surprised, because there are—there are long lines in a bunch of different places.

AMY GOODMAN: In Nevada, talk about the Trump attorneys bringing a lawsuit around too many people voting in early voting.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Yeah, I mean, and that’s one thing I also want to be careful about. We—

AMY GOODMAN: And what the judge ruling is.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Right. We need to be precise about how it is that we talk about it, because it’s actually hard to fix something if we talk in sound bites. There was an allegation that a law was being violated by extending—by allowing people who were standing in line after the polls were closed to be able to participate. And that is wrong. If you are standing in line before your poll closes, in every state that I have ever seen, you are entitled to cast a ballot that will count. The polling places are supposed to stay open to accommodate you. Now, hopefully, the lines are not so long that you’re waiting a million hours afterward so that you’re done. But we need to be in a position where we want more people to participate and we want more people to vote. And trying to have policies and practices that make it harder for people to vote is not a good way to have a robust and participatory democracy.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you also right about here in New York City.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Sure.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Mayor de Blasio blasted again the electoral process here in New York today, because there were long lines, blocks long in some precincts, of people to vote, waiting hours.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this is especially after the primary problems that occurred in the Democratic primary here in New York City.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Right, right. I mean, there’s no question that we aren’t resourcing our elections enough.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, you would think that in a city like New York, the most populous city in the nation, still having to require everyone to vote only on Election Day is really, as the mayor has said, a backward way of running elections.

MYRNA PÉREZ: There’s a myriad of reforms that I would like Albany to take up to try and improve New York’s election system, including expanding early-voting opportunities. But it’s also a question of resources. Do we have enough machines in the polling locations? Do we have enough poll workers? Do we have enough machines that work? Are we being smart about how we queue people up? One of the studies that we did after the 2012 election was looking at how states were allocating poll workers and allocating machines. And we discovered—surprise, surprise—that areas that had higher percentages of minority populations had to wait longer in lines. They tended to have fewer resources. If you had fewer resources, you had longer lines. This is not rocket science. This stuff is like basic inputs and outputs. And this is something that’s also fixable. We just need to make sure that we devote the resources to do this.

AMY GOODMAN: Why do states decide to have early voting, and other states decide not to? And in a place, for example, like New York City, I mean, people were in line for hours in the middle of the day. I’m not talking about sort of rush hour, right before work and right now.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Right, right. Well, when you have a 50-state system, you’re going to have different explanations for every state. So I think we can’t reduce it to one thing. But some of it is political will. We do know the states that have early voting, the election administrators tend to like it. Voters tend to like it. It’s super popular. And one of the things that I would think was so problematic about the wave of restrictive legislation that we saw pass the country after the 2010 elections were attempts to cut back early voting, attempts to cut back early-voting opportunities that were specifically used to help get minority voters out to participate and give those sorts of opportunities.

So, yes, Albany needs to do a lot. Early voting is one of them. They also need to take make sure that our machines are resourced. They need to take on the issue of disenfranchising people with criminal convictions. And we need to get a Voting Rghts Act restored. I mean, it’s time. This is—you know, if we’re going to have a participatory democracy, we need to make sure that people know that when they step into the ballot box, they are going to be free from discrimination.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: You know, Amy, the flexible voting really affects the people who are lower-income and have more inflexible jobs. I mean, everyone sitting around this table, as professionals, if you had to take two hours or three hours to go stand in line, it’s not going to be the end of your world. But if you’re an hourly worker and the only day you can vote is on Tuesday, which is also kind of whack—why just Tuesday?

AMY GOODMAN: And it’s not a holiday.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Exactly. So, you know, you’re going to be penalized if you’re making 10 bucks an hour. That’s 30 bucks that you either have to put on the table, or you may lose your job. I mean, my assistant went to vote, and, you know, she called a couple times and said, “It’s just gotten crazy.” I said, “You know, just take your time.” But everyone’s not going to do that. And so we really need to look at who gets penalized. The early voting and the weekend voting, especially Sunday voting—you know, we do All Souls to the Polls in the African-American community, and many times people will go from church directly to the poll. So, when you cut out Sunday voting, you’re really cutting out not only a source of encouragement, but also a good alternative to the Tuesday voting. And so, whether someone deliberately is saying, “I want to discriminate against people of color or low-income people,” whether they’re saying that deliberately, I mean—

MYRNA PÉREZ: Well, and be clear, North Carolina, the court said that they did. Right?

JOHN NICHOLS: And in Wisconsin, as well. And this is the important—if I can just grow off this for one second. If we would merely compare ourselves to other countries, Iceland voted a week ago. They had virtually 80 percent turnout. We—if we got anywhere near 80 percent turnout in the United States of America, I can tell what we’d have: single-payer healthcare, free college. You want to run down the list? Because you would be bringing in an electorate that our political elites would have to respond to. And so this—these voting problems, which can sometimes seem to some people bureaucratic, are—

MYRNA PÉREZ: I think they’re sexy and interesting.

JOHN NICHOLS: I think they are. But—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What’s the difference between voting problems and voter suppression?

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, no, I don’t make the distinction, and I’ll tell you why. In a system that is serious about it, problematic voting exists because people didn’t care enough. Maybe they didn’t aggressively suppress, but they did not care enough to make it easy and smooth—

MYRNA PÉREZ: Or the legislature didn’t resource it enough.

JOHN NICHOLS: —and functional. And all I can tell you is, in Belgium, they get over 90 percent turnout in many elections. Do you know what Belgium did a couple weeks ago? They stopped the whole global trading negotiations on European trade with Canada, because they were concerned about some farmers. Well, if you have mass turnout, you suddenly change debates about trade, about healthcare, about education, about everything. This is big deal stuff. And so, I do think it’s sexy. I do think it’s exciting. But I also think it’s vital.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yeah, but we’ll be lucky if we—we’ll be lucky if we surpass 60 percent.

JOHN NICHOLS: Oh, yeah. I would be—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I mean, we’re going to be—we will be, you know, extremely lucky. And, you know, the voter problems and voter suppression, in some ways they’re the same thing, but in some ways they’re not, because the suppression is evil. These are people with evil intent who go in and say, “I’m going to try to prevent these people from voting.”

In North Carolina—I was in High Point, North Carolina, on Sunday, doing some stumping for Hillary, of course, and did a couple churches. But High Point, North Carolina, had seven or eight polling sites in 2012. This year, they had one. And the one was at the courthouse. Now, imagine that you have accumulated parking tickets. You don’t want to go to the courthouse, you know, or anything else. You just don’t want to go to the courthouse. So I had a conversation with one brother who said, you know, “I’m going to vote, but I’m going to vote on Tuesday, because I don’t want to deal with that.” And, you know, any—they implicitly said things to immigrants, immigrant people, who are even documented, about maybe checking your papers, maybe doing this or that. In some—in ’12, we saw people—police cars stationed outside of precincts. Hmm, there are a whole lot of people who may not want to exactly have an encounter with the police.

JOHN NICHOLS: We have—we’ve done so many things on so many panels. Let me press you on this one, and I promise this just is quick. But in making this distinction between suppression and just problem—and what we—every election is going to have problems, we recognize that. And yet I have covered elections in two dozen countries. I’ve covered every election in this country for a very, very long time. It’s different here. Our elections are often a mess.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Well, I mean, it’s decentralized, right?

JOHN NICHOLS: It is.

MYRNA PÉREZ: I mean, because, I mean, that’s part of the issue.

JOHN NICHOLS: And so, I believe there is, I think—I would argue that our problems in voting are accepted by people who may not aggressively suppress, but they—they accept a system that is so antithetical to democracy that it is an ongoing crisis. And that’s my—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I’d like, if possible, to—if we can, I’d like to get back to something that we dropped earlier.

DR. JILL STEIN: Yeah, yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jill Stein, your response to Julianne Malveaux about the issue of to what degree is the Green Party responsible for its own failings—

DR. JILL STEIN: Great, great.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —to get a larger share of the vote.

DR. JILL STEIN: Yes, and thank you for putting the issues on the table, because there is really widespread misinformation and disinformation about that. I can’t tell you how many times that I and the Green Party have clarified. We’ve actually had over a thousand elected officials at the local level. An example is Gayle McLaughlin, who was mayor of Richmond, California, a poor industrialized city, where she basically changed their economic policies, massively reduced violence by policing, reduced crime by 80 percent. They actually turned eminent domain on its head, to use it against the big banks that were foreclosing on families, to seize those mortgages and require that the mortgages be resold at market value to homeowners to keep them in their home. So, Greens also initiated the first gay marriages in the town of New Paltz, New York, where the mayor, in fact, went to jail because he actually officiated over those gay and lesbian marriages. So, Greens have actually been there on the forefront at the local level. We won lots of local candidates. In fact, one out of every three of our local candidates gets elected and gets re-elected. So, it’s just not true that we are not there, not doing our homework.

We’re also at the forefront of the social movements and the social struggles, whether it’s the climate justice movement or working with the Black Lives Matter movement. My running mate is a person of color, and there are many people of color who actually see the Green Party as a party that actually does what it says and which raises the bar to the highest level. So, you know, Hillary Clinton said, according to one of her leaked emails, she has a public policy and a private policy. Sowhile she may appear to be the advocate for women and children and the poor and people of color, in fact, you know, she said that Dodd-Frank was for show, that Wall Street should be able to regulate itself, that climate activists should get a life, that the National Nurses United is a fringe group and not a real union. So, you know, she has already floated, in fact, through her various surrogates, the likelihood that she will begin to privatize Social Security and turn it into a private and mandated investment plan, which will suck off—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, she hasn’t said that publicly. While she—while you want to say public—

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, but remember, she has a public—can I finish, please? Because you went on at great length. So I would like to answer the issues that you put on the table. And I would like to be clear about that, that she says one thing herself, but she has other people who are floating her plans. And I think there’s great reason to be concerned that we will see Social Security and Medicare—we also know that she is waiting in the wings to come out on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. She supports fracking, has refused to take a stand against it. Her director of transition, in fact, Ken Salazar, is a big advocate for both the Trans-Pacific Partnership. So, we’re going to have a lot to struggle with under Hillary Clinton. And I think there will be a lot of buyer’s remorse.

And I want to say also, we could fix this voting system right now with ranked-choice voting. It’s a simple reform, which is already used in cities across the country and countries around the world. It lets you go into the voting booth and actually rank your choices. So, if your first choice is an underdog who loses, your vote is automatically reassigned to your second choice. We don’t have to be subject to these fear and intimidation campaigns. We could actually bring our values into the voting booth. But the Democrats won’t pass it. And I can tell you that because I helped file that bill in my home state in Massachusetts with an 80 percent majority in the Democratic Legislature. They refused to let ranked-choice voting out of committee, because it calls your bluff, because the party is actually funded by the predatory banks, the fossil fuel giants and the war profiteers. So they rely on fear and intimidation, because they can’t win your votes.

And I’ll say, finally, about the Supreme Court, you can remember back that under Richard Nixon, one of our most oppressive and regressive presidents ever, we got a lot, not only out of him, but also out of the Supreme Court, where—a very conservative Supreme Court, where we actually enforced and got the decision for women’s right to choose. So, in my view, what really counts here, as our political system falls apart before our very eyes, where voters really feel like they’ve been thrown under the bus, for good reason, and where they are dropping out of these two corporate-sponsored political parties—

MYRNA PÉREZ: Not if I have anything to say about it. I want the whole voting.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, see, I agree with you on the ranked-choice voting.

DR. JILL STEIN: Well—well, but I think we want to vote. What we need to vote, we need—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I agree with you. I think you’re ranked-choice voting is a really great idea. It’s used in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s used in other places. I think it’s—

DR. JILL STEIN: And the Legislature refused to pass it. And the governor of California—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: But—

DR. JILL STEIN: —just vetoed it for the cities and towns of California.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: But I would also say that this whole notion of fear and—I am not afraid of anything. I am voting for Hillary Clinton because I am excited and enthusiastic.

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, millennials—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I mean, I—you know, my ancestors—

DR. JILL STEIN: —are being told that they are bad little boys and girls, because they’re not going along with Hillary Clinton. And voters are being intimidated and fear-campaigned.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, that’s your—that’s your point of view.

DR. JILL STEIN: And we can do away with that in a minute.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I don’t know—I don’t know any voters who feel that they’re—

DR. JILL STEIN: We can do away with that in a minute by—so why won’t the Democrats pass it? Why do they keep it locked in committee? Because they’re very afraid of actually creating real competition.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I don’t know about that. I have not seen that at the national level.

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, Jerry Brown just voted on it at the—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I said I have not seen that at the national level, Jill. OK.

DR. JILL STEIN: But it’s at the state level that we need it, in fact, because that’s where the votes are counted. And by—by passing ranked-choice voting at the state level, we change how we vote for president.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, I would—

DR. JILL STEIN: So, I will challenge you. I mean, join me then, because right out of the starting gate tomorrow—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I’m not joining the Green Party. But I—

DR. JILL STEIN: No, we’re not talking about—

JOHN NICHOLS: About joining the issue.

DR. JILL STEIN: We’re talking about joining us on the issue. We’re working with libertarians.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Absolutely.

DR. JILL STEIN: Let’s work to get ranked-choice voting passed.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I mean, I’d be delighted to do that. I would be delighted to do that, because I think it—

JOHN NICHOLS: And I have some excellent good news, that tonight the state of Maine is voting on a ranked-choice system.

DR. JILL STEIN: That’s right.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I think that ranked-choice voting makes a lot of sense.

JOHN NICHOLS: And it might just happen.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m going to butt in here, because it’s 7:30, and some polls have closed. I want to let people know which polls have closed already. Well, at 4:00, it was Puerto Rico; 6:00, Virgin Islands, Indiana, Kentucky.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But no one in Puerto Rico is voting for president.

AMY GOODMAN: No, that’s important.

JOHN NICHOLS: Which is another issue we should be discussing.

AMY GOODMAN: Seven p.m., Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia. Vermont’s been called for both Leahy and Secretary Clinton, for president. Seven-thrity, North Carolina—but as you’ve pointed out, a number of those places have extended their time—Ohio and West Virginia. And CNN has just projected that Donald Trump has won West Virginia. And also, with 30 percent of the vote in, Clinton has 49.5 percent, Trump has 47.7 percent.

AMY GOODMAN: Myrna Pérez, though—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In Florida.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s in Florida.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: But you are going to have to leave, I know. You have to get out of here, so any final comments about what people should be concerned about? People in different—the times I’m talking about are Eastern times, but are going to be voting for many hours to come tonight.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Yeah, I mean, people need to go out and vote. If they have a problem, call 866-OUR-VOTE, that’s 866-O-U-R-V-O-T-E. There are going to be people that are out there to help you, in a nonpartisan way, be able to exercise your fundamental right to choose. I think that after this election, because of all the talk about rigged, because all of the fear of Russians hacking the system, we have a real opportunity to come together and decide that we are going to rebuild the infrastructure of our democracy. This is not rocket science. We know what the agenda needs to look like. It needs to be resourced. We need to have committed legislators that are willing to do it. And my hope is that all of the viewers will be part of that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: If I can ask you one last question about it, though? In 2000, there was the same kind of public sentiment after the election in Florida, and—

MYRNA PÉREZ: Well, and we got the Help America Vote Act, right? I mean, like—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And do you think—and, overall, that was progress?

MYRNA PÉREZ: I mean, I think—I think, yes. I do think that there has been—that there’s been advancements as a result of crises. I don’t want the crises, but I do think that right now we are experiencing a sort of undermining of our democracy by some folks who profit off of that. And I think what we need to do is to come together as a country and decide that we want a top-flight democracy, we’re willing to pay for it, we’re willing to enact those pieces of legislation that do it. And I think it’s something that we can do.

AMY GOODMAN: Myrna, Sheriff Arpaio, well known for his anti-immigrant views, is running in Arizona. But he also said that he was deploying his deputies at polling stations today, critics, of course, saying that the move was aimed at chilling voter turnout in an election that’s expected to see a record number of Latinos voting. Can you talk about what you’ve heard in Arizona? Among other things, we heard that a whole high school walked out. The kids weren’t old enough to vote, but they were old enough to march against Arpaio.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Well, one thing we’ve heard is that, certainly, in the early-voting period, there were long lines. We’ve also heard, not just in Arizona, but in a few places that there have been complaints of, of intimidation. And to be very clear, that could include a number of things, ranging from there being police presence at the polls to someone standing too close to and hovering over people, to some campaigner screaming at people when they’re walking by. I think what—what should be very clear to folks is that there are federal and state protections that allow them to be free of intimidation and discrimination when they walk into the ballot box. And those folks who would seek to discriminate or intimidate voters do so on very, very shaky ground, because there are people like me, and there are laws that are going to be there to protect them. We are not afraid to call the Department of Justice if we need to. We are going to—we’re going to do whatever it takes to make sure that voters are able to cast a ballot.

AMY GOODMAN: Myrna Pérez, we want to thank you very much for joining us from the Brennan Center. This is Democracy Now!'s five-hour broadcast, from 7:00 Eastern time until midnight, or longer, if need be, as we cover the issues of war, peace and the presidency. And down ballot, we're going to be covering many different races, all over the country, not to mention ballot initiatives. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we also want to welcome Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change PAC, the political arm of Color of Change. His recent piece for Newsweek is headlined “The Political Establishment Is Failing Black Voters, Not the Other Way Around.” Welcome, Rashad.

RASHAD ROBINSON: Thank you for having me. I’m actually the spokesperson for our PAC, but it’s always good to be back with you.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, tell us how you’re seeing—we’ve been hearing—we’ve heard reports of reduced African-American turnout in this election. What’s your perspective on what’s happening in terms of the African-American community and this presidential election?

RASHAD ROBINSON: Well, every single election, we hear this sort of handwringing: Will black people turn out at the levels that Democrats need them to turn out in order to be successful? And oftentimes, in the same breath, we’re not hearing: What have Democrats done to deliver for black folks in the ways that black people need them to deliver, and at the ways that they deserve, considering that black people—and, in particular, black women—have been the cornerstone for Democratic success for decades?

What we’re currently seeing out of the exit polls right now is actually telling—is painting a very different story. It’s painting turnout at the same levels as 2012 in states around the country, in Nevada, in Florida, in Virginia, as these exit polls are coming.

But I do want to say that the Democratic Party can’t continue to rely on the toxicity of the Republican Party as the sole engine for turning out black people. And there has to be sort of a different relationship, a different level of investment in black infrastructure, a different policy agenda that really delivers on results, that I think is going to be incredibly important, especially as a new generation of black leaders take hold of organizations, take hold of movements and really want to push forward. The Democratic Party is going to have to deliver in a new way.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what’s happening right now in Florida, Rashad, where you are.

RASHAD ROBINSON: I’m in Florida right now. I mean, what we are—what we are hearing is, obviously, you know, a lot of stories around challenges during early voting, you know, kind of decreased early voting that happened. We’re also seeing incredibly long lines. There is a real story of the emergence of the Latino community, particularly Puerto Ricans, who have turned out in much higher numbers, who have—numbers have, you know, increased two- and threefold since the last election. And we are seeing numbers and turnout numbers that I think are, once again, a direct result not necessarily of what Democrats have provided on key issues, but a real representation of the pushback and fightback against a Republican Party that has been so toxic, a presidential candidate that has been so toxic. I think the question for the rising American electorate, for black and brown people, for young folks and women, for the folks that continue to be the cornerstone and the fuel towards progressive change, is: What do we get out of a corporate Democratic Party? How do we continue to hold this party accountable?

I think the other story out of Florida is the work that’s been done around district attorney races. In Florida, this election, we are going to see the election of the first African-American district attorney ever in the state of Florida. And this is sort of the capstone of an ongoing movement that’s been happening among young black folks, Color of Change PAC, many other organizations, really joining hands and trying to translate the presence of criminal justice reform, of policing issues, to the actual power at the ballot box. Aramis Ayala will go into office as a black woman, with a formerly incarcerated husband, who’s ran on a reform platform, who’s really put her voice out there for the community. And the community will now hold her accountable to actually delivering on key results. And around the country, over the next several years and several campaigns, we will see a real movement around district attorney races.

The question will be, is: Does the Democratic Party establishment embrace this, see this as a real tool to, for their perspective, turn out black voters and engage them, but also to deliver on real results? If they do, then we can start building the type of alliances necessary to move our country forward. If the Democratic Party just continues to see black people as sort of a voting pool that they can go to every two and four years, I think they’re going to start having diminishing returns.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And are you seeing any—there’s been—obviously, the Black Lives Matter movement has spread across the country. Are you seeing any significant differences between young African Americans and older African Americans in their perspective on mainstream politics?

RASHAD ROBINSON: Well, I think, just for millennials across all races, young people across all races, people are not joiners the same ways that the generations before them were. They’re not going to be card-carrying members of the Democratic Party, like they’re not going to be card-carrying members of the ACLU or the NAACP or even my organization. People are going to move inside and outside of campaigns that matter to them. And the sort of idea of joining has changed because of the ability to get and receive information through social media, the ability to be your own sort of validator or to find validators in your network. And that sort of lack of joining, that new way of being, I think, is going to be incredibly important for these old, traditional establishment infrastructures to have to evolve, to have to continue to deliver, to have to find ways that their efforts and work is not just about promises, but about results.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ve just gotten this from WNYC—that’s NPR in New York. Exit polls in Virginia and Georgia say nine-tenths of black voters and two-thirds of Hispanic voters are backing Hillary Clinton. But I want to ask you, being in Florida, Rashad, talk about the races there. Talk about what you think is about to happen. At about one-third of the vote in, CNN says, oh, Hillary is just slightly ahead. But you also have the Senate race of incumbent, Marco Rubio, who said he wasn’t going to run, but then did run. And if you could talk about the significance of the Marco Rubio versus Patrick Murphy race for the Senate?

RASHAD ROBINSON: I think it’s actually a very significant race, because I think it underscores exactly what I’m saying. It’s sort of underscores this idea of harm reduction in the voting of certain communities, where folks are turning out and voting against Trump, but not necessarily standing lockstep with the Democratic Party. I think what you’re going to see—and I’m making a prediction. These could be played back tomorrow, and I could be wrong. But I think Hillary Clinton’s going to take Florida, or it’s going to be very close, at the presidential level. And I still think you’re going to see Marco Rubio win this, win this Senate race. And I think that what you’re—what you’re seeing is the sort of overwhelming turnout, particularly among Latino communities, is going to turn out in large force for Hillary Clinton or against Donald Trump, and still support—and split tickets, and Patrick Murphy won’t have the same level of support.

And I think that, in terms of the next four years of governing, the next four years of building a coalition, speaks to what the Democratic Party has to deliver, what they have to deliver on across a wide range of issues, from criminal justice reform to immigration reform, to deep investments in housing and education, and all the things that work to sort of turn us back from the sort of austerity era that started in this Bush administration and, in some ways, still carried through the Obama administration, with blips around healthcare and other things. But especially with a Republican Congress, we’re going to need a strong fighter in the White House to fight back against attempts like that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I think we also are joined by Ralph Nader, who’s in a studio in Washington, D.C., the legendary consumer rights advocate and former presidential candidate. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ralph.

RALPH NADER: Thank you, Juan. Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Hi, Ralph.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Give us your take on this presidential election.

RALPH NADER: Well, I think it’s Hillary’s victory tonight, which means something pretty predictable, not very speculative: Hillary is going to find common ground with the Republicans on foreign and military affairs. They both want to enhance the military budget. She’s never seen a weapons system or a war she hasn’t liked. She’s ready to pick a fight with Putin. So are the Republicans. She’s ready to pivot to Asia and provoke China. So are the Republicans. It’s on domestic issues that there will be a gridlock. But the true danger is the expansion of empire and the huge diversion of public budgets overseas at the neglect of domestic necessities, including, for example, a major public works program to employ millions of people. The Democrats want that. The Republicans may be pressured from back home to want it, but it hasn’t happened yet under the Obama administration.

Now, I think also—let’s look at the Trump and Bernie Sanders insurgencies. They were basically insurgencies against the Republican and Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders made no mistake about it. And, of course, Trump didn’t either. And they almost won. And so, the question is: Where are all these energies, which have been repulsed, going to end up in the next two and four years? And I think where they’re going to end up is in increasing common ground resentment of Wall Street over Main Street and a captive Washington indifferent to the necessities of people regardless of their political labels. And that’s going to come through a kind of left-right alliance, waiting for one of two things: a mass movement back home with laser-beam focus on congressional districts, because Congress is the great enabler, constitutionally, for progressive society, and it’s the great graveyard, the way it’s been behaving, against a prosperous society, or another billionaire or two. I think the ripples from the Trump campaign are not only going to lead to the defeat of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in early December, that Obama is going to try to get through, but it’s going to encourage more than a few billionaires around the country, who are saying, “Good heavens, if a failed gambling czar and a corporate welfare king, that has cheated his employees, his creditors, his suppliers, his taxpayers, his shareholders, can get this far, within distance of the White House, well, what about the head of the Dallas Cowboys [sic], Mark Cuban? What about now the head of Starbucks, Howard Schultz? What about somebody from Silicon Valley? So I think you’re seeing the fissures of two-party establishment beginning to crack. And social media, of course, will facilitate that. And I think there’s going to be a major assault on the presidential debate corporation. And there are very significant ways around the country on how to break its grip, which is, of course, a way to exclude dissenting voices before tens of millions of people.

AMY GOODMAN: I just want to update with some news. AP is confirming authorities say one person is dead and three are injured following reports of a shooting near a Los Angeles area polling site. Pictures taken inside the polling place, says New York Magazine, show groups of voters, as well as groups of kids who had accompanied their parents to vote. Another group of about 20 children have been evacuated from the rec center’s gym, where they were playing, when shots rang out. Also, some updates—and all these updates are going to—we will talk about gun initiatives around the country, as well. But, also, the numbers are changing. In Florida, with more of than half of the vote counted, now Trump is in the lead. CNN is reporting that Clinton is leading in New Hampshire, but that’s just with 1 percent of reporting in, and that as soon as Ohio closed its polls, CNN also called Ohio for Rob Portman in a Senate race that he easily won. Again, Senator Leahy in Vermont also easily won his Senate seat in the re-election there. Your comments on any of these victories, Ralph, and why at this early point, at 7:47 Eastern time—we’ll be on until, well, midnight or beyond—you feel this is Hillary Clinton’s victory?

RALPH NADER: Well, obviously, the early votes come in from rural areas, which have favored Trump. So, we’ll see what happens with the cities. But the question is: What’s the future for Bernie Sanders’ movement? And I think, unless he has a massive rally in early December in Washington, D.C., to bring together the various people who supported him, who are now looking for some sort of cohesion around his agenda, the Clinton folks, being very politically cynical, will be able to marginalize him, because, you know, they’ll say inside their councils, “How many votes does he have in the Senate?” He had trouble getting one co-signer on full Medicare for all, single payer, before he became more known. So, I think we’re going to see—

AMY GOODMAN: If Democrats take the Senate, isn’t he promised a very high position, maybe, say, head of Senate budget or something?

RALPH NADER: Yes, of course, that will be important. But you know the Senate. If you don’t have 60 votes, very hard to get anything done, especially with stubborn McConnell still there. That’s the problem with the Senate. That’s why I call the Senate the graveyard of democracy, because even when you have 58 senators, they can block it and block it and block it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we’re also joined in studio here by Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. Welcome to the show.

RASHID KHALIDI: Thanks.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Your perspective on what’s going with the race so far?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, as is always the case with American presidential elections, nobody’s talking about the fact that the empire will be ruled from Washington, and foreign policy has just not been on anybody’s screen, unfortunately. This will be the president of the United States and will be the person who is involved in wars all over the world, mainly in the Middle East. And it’s very important. We’re going to have—we’re going to have in January an entirely new administration, even if Hillary wins, as she seems to be winning.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And your concern in terms of foreign policy between Clinton or Trump?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, as Ralph said—as Ralph said, Trump is unpredictable. I don’t know what to say about Trump. I don’t know what would happen in a Trump administration, as far as how he would behave. And I think that we’d be very wise not to predict anything with him.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: If past behavior is any indication, his behavior would not be acceptable.

RASHID KHALIDI: That’s probably true.

DR. JILL STEIN: And if past behavior is any indication, we’re in a lot of trouble with Hillary Clinton in the White House, as well, who has promised to start a no-fly zone in Syria, which amounts to a declaration of war against Russia and—

JOHN NICHOLS: And Iran.

DR. JILL STEIN: Yes, absolutely, and assures us that—you know, that hundreds of thousands of more people will be killed, as the bombs—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: What do you think should happen in Syria, Jill?

DR. JILL STEIN: Pardon me?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: What do you think should happen in Syria?

DR. JILL STEIN: Oh, man, there’s no doubt. We need a new kind of offensive in the Middle East. It’s called a peace offensive. It starts with a weapons embargo, which we can lead the way on, since we are providing the majority of weapons, which get into the hands of all combatants. And I would follow that with a, actually, freeze on the bank accounts of those countries that continue to fund terrorist enterprises, which Hillary Clinton herself identified, and, in particular, as the Saudis and the Qataris and so on.

JOHN NICHOLS: In the leaked emails.

DR. JILL STEIN: Yes, exactly. So, it’s not rocket science how we do this. Right now we are serving the military-industrial complex through both parties, who are funded massively by the money of war profiteers. And I do want to just go on record that this is one of the reasons why it was very important to keep my voice out of the debates. Seventy-six percent of Americans were screaming to open up the debates, because, in particular, the war policies of both of these candidates were not challenged. They are both kind of on the same page: more militarism, more—you know, it’s over half of our discretionary budget which is being spent on these wars, nearly half of your income taxes, that are being spent not on a defense department, an on offense department. And its track record is absolutely catastrophic: failed states, mass refugee migrations, worse terrorist threats. This is an utterly failed policy. It needs to be challenged. Few Americans know that half of their income taxes are funding this, yet it makes us less safe, not more safe. Reason could prevail here, if we could only have that discussion. This is why, in my view, casting a lesser-evil vote is not a safe thing to do. In order to fight militarism under Clinton or under Trump, it’s very important that we cast a vote on behalf of peace and on international—and a policy based on international law and human rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Julianne Malveaux?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: You know, maybe you were excluded from the debates because you didn’t pass the threshold. I mean, let’s just deal with that. Maybe—

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, but let’s—who sets that threshold?

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, if I could just—

DR. JILL STEIN: That is set by the Democrat and Republican parties. We need—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: But you didn’t even, in fact, pass the 5 percent threshold.

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, another—let me just tell you, another major campaign coming out of this race is to actually create a real debate commission. Right now we have a bipartisan debate commission, when most Americans are not members of the bipartisan establishment. We need a nonpartisan debate commission that actually allows candidates, who are on the ballot in enough states that they could win the election—voters not only have a right to vote, we have a right to know who we can vote for. We need to open up the debates, so we can actually have a real debate, we can challenge this failed war policy and the failed climate policy of both of these administrations.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: But I—well, if—I mean, you have—there probably were a couple of dozen people running for president. I was—

DR. JILL STEIN: Four of us? Four of us. Qualified—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: No, there were people who were running—

DR. JILL STEIN: No, there are four who are on the ballot in enough states.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: There were people who were running as minor-party candidates. There were people running—you have Evan McMullin running, and other people.

DR. JILL STEIN: There are four candidates. Two—there was Gary Johnson—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: So, you didn’t—honey, you didn’t pass the threshold.

DR. JILL STEIN: No, no, there are four candidates.

JOHN NICHOLS: But let me—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: You didn’t pass the threshold.

JOHN NICHOLS: Could I just—

DR. JILL STEIN: The threshold established to maintain a monopoly on political discussion.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: You didn’t even pass the minimal threshold that you yourself said 5 percent would suggest that you—you didn’t even pass that threshold.

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, we don’t have the results. No, the threshold—the League of Women Voters—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: In terms of the polling, you didn’t even have that threshold.

DR. JILL STEIN: The League—may I speak, please? The League of Women Voters said, at the time that—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: You’ve been speaking.

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, at the time the Democrats and Republicans took over the debate commission, the League of Women Voters quit, saying this is a fraud being perpetrated on the American voter. We need to have a debate commission that actually is not designed by the Democratic and Republican parties in order to silence debate about the war, which we agree is an absolute catastrophe.

AMY GOODMAN: John Nichols.

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, the only thing I’d throw in, and—and we have one of the most brilliant professors on many issues I care about sitting at the table, and I want to make sure that I don’t take too much time here. But I want to just say that—that when we compare ourselves to virtually any other country in the world, at the start of the debate process, we X people out. And in most other countries in the world, at least at the beginning, you have the array of candidates out there, and they can make their pitch. And if they say something that connects, they can—you know, you move through the process. And the interesting thing about it is, all these other countries have dramatically higher turnout. They have dramatically broader debates. And I cannot understand why the United States allows representatives of two political parties and a group of corporate donors to essentially define how we debate in this country. It’s not healthy. And but—this is not to—I’m not going to give you every inch and say, you know, there is—I think there can be thresholds, but I do think that the threshold that ought to exist is if you’re on enough ballots to get elected president of the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Jill Stein, I know you have to leave in a few minutes, and I wanted to ask about your lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission against both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton for—well, what is your allegation?

DR. JILL STEIN: That’s right, that they colluded in violation of FEC rules and laws. They colluded between the campaigns and the super PACs. And this was the whole basis of the Citizens United ruling, was that there would be an iron—an ironclad wall here, a firewall, between super PACs and unlimited so-called independent money and the campaigns themselves. But there was very obvious and clear evidence of collusion between Republicans and their super PACs, and between Democrats and their super PACs.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you give an example?

DR. JILL STEIN: So, for example, there were emails that were leaked that showed that high officials—and, in fact, emails addressed to Hillary Clinton talking about how they would be collaborating with the super PACs on strategies, on dealing with GOP candidates, etc. And among the Republicans, they rotated from right out of the Trump campaign into their super PACs, which is a sort of—it’s an ironclad way to assure that there’s—there’s very close coordination and collaboration on strategy.

RALPH NADER: Let me jump in here and support Jill on this. There’s—

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, also a former Green presidential candidate.

RALPH NADER: Yeah. There’s almost open coordination between super PACs and the candidates. And the reason why they do it is because the ultimate collusion is the Federal Election Commission. It has—it’s split right down the middle, Republican and Democrat, and they both have a stake in this kind of coordination and never can make a decision. There’s not an odd person on the election commission to tip the balance. So they do nothing. We made major complaints, with huge documentation, and they do nothing. They don’t even send the complaints to the accused. They just sit on it, because it’s split right down the middle, built for deadlock, built for the entrenched two-party tyranny.

And as far as the debate commission is, by what authority do public debates for public elections at the presidential level be corporatized? The debate corporation is a corporation. It’s funded by corporations. It’s relayed by media corporations to the public. It’s created by the two parties, which are corporations. We should have public presidential debates all over the country run by public institutions.

DR. JILL STEIN: Right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I just want to break in here and say CNN is reporting now in the all-important state of Florida, with 72 percent of the vote counted, it’s Hillary Clinton 49.9 percent, Donald Trump 47.3 percent. So that vote continues to seesaw back and forth.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank Rashad Robinson, who was joining us from Miami, Florida, and also Jill Stein. I know that you have to leave. Green Party presidential candidate. Again, polls are still open in many places in the country and even places where they were supposed to close, like in North Carolina. They’ve been extended some 90 minutes in certain areas. Also want to thank John Nichols, who will be back with us, of The Nation magazine. Julianne Malveaux, Ralph Nader and Professor Khalidi will be staying with us. This is Democracy Now! We’re going to bring you a music break for a minute.

[End of hour one]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, and we are in Hour 2 of our five-hour—it might be longer—special that we are bringing you from 7:00, now it’s 8:00 Eastern Standard Time, until, well, at least midnight. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, it’s 8:00 Eastern time, and the polls have now closed in more than half of all U.S. states. So far, the Associated Press is reporting Donald Trump has won Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia. NBC is reporting Donald Trump has also won South Carolina. The Associated Press reports Hillary Clinton has won Vermont. The key battleground states of Florida and North Carolina are still too close to call. In the battle for control of the House and the Senate, Democrats have picked up one House seat, while the Senate count has stayed the same. In a key Senate race, Republican Senator Rob Portman has been re-elected in Ohio, beating out his challenger, Democrat Ted Strickland. Meanwhile, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy has been re-elected in Vermont. Republican Senator Rand Paul has been re-elected in Kentucky. And Republican Senator Tim Scott has been elected in South Carolina. Democrats are attempting to pick up four seats to reclaim the U.S. Senate.

AMY GOODMAN: In Florida, the Senate race between incumbent Republican Marco Rubio and his challenger, Democrat Patrick Murphy, is still too close to call. Voters across the country are also deciding more than 160 ballot initiatives. Marijuana legalization is on the ballot in nine states. There have also been a handful of lawsuits filed today to extend voting hours, including in North Carolina, where eight precincts remain open until 8:00 p.m., after computer glitches.

We’re joined now by a number of guests. Ralph Nader is still with us in Washington, D.C., a four-time presidential candidate. Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi is with us. We are also joined by labor economist Julianne Malveaux. And joining us this hour also is Eddie Glaude, who is chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, author of Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul.

We’ll be bringing you updates throughout these hours. Again, there was a shooting near a polling place in Los Angeles. One person is dead. We’ll bring you more on that, as well.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Amy, real quickly, I just—

AMY GOODMAN: But I want to go—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: —got an email from someone who said that the polls in North Carolina will now be open—someone—one of you just said 8:00—8:30 in Durham County, and 9:00, 8:30 and 9:00. So people should check. Hundreds of people went home because of the glitch. And so, I just got an email from North Carolina that said 8:30 or 9:00.

AMY GOODMAN: And that’s a critical point. In some places, it’s going to extend an hour and a half. But let’s continue on North Carolina, Julianne Malveaux. You were the president of HBCU, of a historically black college, Bennett College—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —in North Carolina. Can you talk about what’s happening there, both the presidential race, though we don’t know the results at this point, but also the key other races that are taking place in the state you lived in for several years?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: You know, North Carolina is a fascinating state, because you’ve got these urban areas. You’ve got the Piedmont Triangle—Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point. Then you’ve got the Research Triangle—Durham—

EDDIE GLAUDE: Raleigh.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Raleigh and—what’s the other one? Anyway, it’s three of them. So you’ve got these two triangles that are huge population centers and that are very urban. Then you’ve got the mountains. It’s just a really diverse state. So, it depends on what people come out about that—or what excites them.

Bev Perdue, who was the first woman governor of the state, lost in 2012, and, again, people were able to—Pat McCrory was able to push a lot of buttons. McCrory, the governor who made transgender bathrooms a huge state issue and caused the state to lose millions of dollars, and NCAA pulled out of bringing tournaments there—others have pulled out of having big events there. So, he’s on—you know, he’s hotly contested, and he’s become unpopular, because, basically, he took a social issue, that he didn’t have to deal with, turned it into a ballot proposition. And so he’s very likely to lose, and we, of course, hope he does.

They did some redistricting that put some African-American folks—I won’t say in jeopardy, but moved their districts around. Alma Adams, who was a faculty member at Bennett College when I was there, and went on to be in the Congress, had her district changed, but she, I think, is going to prevail.

The exciting race in North Carolina is Deborah Ross. She is a former president of the North Carolina ACLU, a former state legislator, very good woman, had been a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and she’s a senatorial candidate. She and Richard Burr, the incumbent, are pretty much tied. But now, Richard Burr is a special kind of human being. He said that if Hillary is elected, that fifth—that ninth Supreme Court seat will stay empty for four years, if he has anything to do with it. President Obama and I—

AMY GOODMAN: Wait. Didn’t he say something else about Hillary Clinton?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Oh, yes. Her picture was on the cover of a gun magazine, and he said there should be a bullseye on it. And, of course, this was a—

RASHID KHALIDI: Lovely fellow.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yeah, “just a joke.” President Obama nominated two eminently qualified African-American women to the Eastern District Court of North Carolina. He singlehandedly has blocked both of them from the court. What that does, of course, is that justice is very delayed in that Eastern District. You know, being justices short means the other justices are taking on a greater burden, and people are waiting longer for their cases to come to trial. So, Burr is—Deborah Ross, I just hope she can pull it out. But, of course, as I said, North Carolina’s one of these states where it can go either way. You have an increasing Latino population, which is a good thing, but at the same time you have a very—this is the South. I mean, there are parts—if you go to Durham, if you go to UNC, you go to Chapel Hill, you wouldn’t think you’re in the Deep South. But if you go over to Asheville, you’re in the South. And so, that—the South has all of that baggage with it. It’s going to be—if the Democrats are able to pull this off, it’s going to be—it’s not a certainty either way.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You mentioned President Obama. He traveled to North Carolina several times. The importance—he has done everything possible to be able to get Hillary Clinton elected. The importance for him and his legacy of this race?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, you know, African-American people adore President Obama. I mean, in my book, Are We Better Off?, I’m a little critical, but I don’t regret my votes for President Obama by any stretch of the imagination. But lots of African-American people really so adore him that they’re unwilling to even be mildly critical of him. Young African—millennials really love him. And he went to North Carolina A&T State University, which is the largest HBCU there, one of the largest producers of black engineers nationally. And he went to NC, North Carolina A&T, had a huge turnout. ESPN broadcast his talk there. He went back—he’s been back, as you say, several times. And basically, what he’s saying is, “If you respect me, you know, vote for Hillary.” I’m not sure that argument really sells, but I do know that people were extremely excited to see him come, and they may come out for Hillary. Those who have been at the margin may come out for Hillary because he’s endorsed her so strongly. And in a state like North Carolina, that makes a difference.

By the way, don’t believe the hype that black North Carolinians are not voting. We’ve heard this time and time again. It’s just not the truth. The fact is that the number of polling places, as we mentioned earlier, has gone down, so there were fewer opportunities for people to vote. I expect that people—and from what I’ve heard in talking to friends all day, long lines, but people are staying in line. People are determined to vote. So, this hype about black people not voting, I have a lot of questions about. I wonder what the subtext is.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ve got some news, Juan, to announce.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, CNN is now calling that Hillary Clinton has won Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and that Donald Trump has won Oklahoma, Mississippi and Tennessee.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, we also have some high-profile races. Tammy Duckworth defeated incumbent Mark Kirk in a high-profile U.S. Senate race. That’s NBC News projecting. That’s in Illinois, a place that you know well, Rashid Khalidi, where you worked for many years and lived. And we also have this breaking news out of Florida that Marco Rubio has been re-elected to the U.S. Senate in Florida.

By the way, you can join us in conversation online on Facebook. You can tweet us your questions for our guests using the hashtag #DNVote. Again, we are talking about this historic election. Right now, people are gathering at the Jacob Javits Center, not far from where we are right now. That’s Hillary Clinton’s gathering. A lot has been made of the glass ceiling over the Javits Center. Will she crash through it? Not meant in any violent sense.

Also, in Rochester, New York, there is a live stream of Susan B. Anthony’s tombstone, and hundreds of people, if not thousands, have been going there through the day, putting stickers, “I voted.” Susan B. Anthony, the great suffragist. “I voted today” is the sticker that’s being used. And they have kept the cemetery open, Mount Hope Cemetery, through the night, so people can continue to come. I remember going to Mount Hope Cemetery a few years ago. It’s also where Frederick Douglass is buried. Frederick Douglass, who was actually not just an ally of Susan B. Anthony when it came to voting and suffragettes and supporting women’s right to vote, but also a friend. And there is a statue of them having tea together. Susan B. Anthony is buried right next to her sister.

Eddie Glaude, your thoughts tonight, as more and more results are pouring in, as we wait for more?

EDDIE GLAUDE: Well, right now we’re not seeing any surprises, right?

AMY GOODMAN: Professor of African American studies.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Right now there aren’t any surprises. This is pretty much following form. I think it’s important to understand that North Carolina has been ground zero for conservative backlash. The Koch brothers is—they have been particularly, shall we say, aggressive and militant in their efforts in North Carolina. I want to just point out the extraordinary work that the North Carolina state NAACP have been—that they’ve been doing, and Reverend William Barber II, as they’ve been trying to challenge voter suppression. I mean, we’ve seen, ironically—it’s not—I want to say ironically in relation to the standard narrative. We’re seeing African-American voting, early voting, at least the numbers are showing, across the South is actually at the same level as 2012 or higher—or it’s higher. So, in Louisiana, for example, you see an 18 percent increase in African-American early voting in Louisiana. You see increases in Georgia. You’ve seen increases in Florida. It’s in—only in North Carolina where you’ve seen an 8.6 percent—right?—decrease. And it has everything to do with voter suppression efforts. It has everything to do with the limiting of the number of polling places, the specific attacks on voting rights, right? And I think—

AMY GOODMAN: I should also say, by the way, that Reverend Barber will be joining us in about 45 minutes—

EDDIE GLAUDE: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —from Raleigh.

EDDIE GLAUDE: So, I want to—I want to—so, nothing right now is surprising. I think we need to be very careful. At least some of us need to be very careful in running to coronating Secretary Clinton. I think she’s going to—I know—my instincts tell me that she’s going to win. But I think we have some really serious issues we’re going to confront as a nation. We’re divided, deeply divided. I’m concerned about how she’s going to govern. I’m concerned about the kinds of conversations that are being had, about how will she work with Paul Ryan—typically, that involves kind of capitulating to what the right wants her to do—what that will mean in terms of disciplining the left, and what we need to do in order to hold her accountable once—once she—once she wins.

RASHID KHALIDI: Very important.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, we hold—we have to hold anyone accountable. I mean, you will not get fed in your mama’s house if you don’t bring your plate to the table. You know, if the chicken is being fried, you’ll get a chicken back, if you don’t ask for a wing or a breast. And so, you know, we didn’t hold President Obama as accountable as we might have. And I think the takeaway from not holding President Obama accountable is, no matter how enthusiastic you are about Hillary Clinton, no matter how enthusiastic you are, the first thing that needs to happen is that people need to start planning how to hold her accountable. So that’s not—that’s really not—

EDDIE GLAUDE: But this is an important—this is an—

RALPH NADER: Can we—

EDDIE GLAUDE: Oh, I’m sorry. Go ahead.

RALPH NADER: Yeah, I was going—

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader wants to butt in, in Washington, D.C.

RALPH NADER: Yeah, I think—

AMY GOODMAN: You’re sort of the odd man out here.

RALPH NADER: Yeah, I think we should make a closer link between domestic policy and an interventionist militaristic foreign policy.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Oh, absolutely.

RALPH NADER: Militaristic foreign policy is destroying this country. All empires eventually destroy themselves. That’s the record of history. And the issue of empire, the dominant global power—Hillary Clinton calls it global leadership—has been taken off the table. It hardly was discussed. Bernie Sanders didn’t spend much time on it. Trump threw some epithets about, you know, why don’t we get along with Putin. But he wants to smash his way through the world, and he wants a bigger military. So I think we should discuss what’s going to happen in the interregnum, before the inauguration in January, to bring Hillary Clinton to her senses in terms of talking more about waging peace, about international treaty negotiations. There is no effort coming out of her record to bring up to date nuclear arms agreements with Russia and China and others. There is no indication of a treaty negotiation for cyberwarfare, as we both engage in it, between the U.S. and other countries, rising to critical masses here. And, of course, on the Middle East itself, it’s nothing but brute force. That’s all she’s talking about.

RASHID KHALIDI: Right.

RALPH NADER: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has radiating impacts throughout that whole area, is like off the table. So, why don’t we talk a little bit about that, especially since we have one of the country’s greatest experts from Columbia University on Middle East politics and American policy?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. Well, Rashid, I would like to ask you about that, in terms of how you see, with either candidate winning—you know, there’s been a lot of talk about the rise of the Latino vote in this election, because of Trump’s anti-immigrant positions, but there’s been little discussion of the Muslim community in the United States, how it is—how it is seeing this election, and also what impact they can have on U.S. policy in the Middle East.

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, they have to have to organize themselves, like other communities have. I mean, you have to—you have to get yourself to the table. And they’re not yet quite there. But I think that in terms of voting, you’re going to see a lot of votes going against Trump, just because of his horrific anti-Muslim positions.

AMY GOODMAN: And this certainly wasn’t always the case with Muslims—

RASHID KHALIDI: Not at all.

AMY GOODMAN: —and the Republican Party.

RASHID KHALIDI: Not at all. A lot of Muslims, a lot of Arab Americans, Muslim Americans were very attracted to the Republican Party—conservative social values and so on. But Trump has horrified them. So, I think there will be a big—I think there will be a big vote. The problem is, these are people in states like New Jersey, which has already gone for Hillary Clinton, and Michigan. Now, maybe in Michigan they’ll have an impact.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Michigan, they’ll probably make a big difference—

RASHID KHALIDI: They might have an impact in Michigan.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: —because Michigan looks like it’s more in play than we thought it was a week ago.

RASHID KHALIDI: Exactly, exactly.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: And so, you know, if the Muslim community in Michigan comes out strongly, I think they will make a difference.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s talk about that.

RASHID KHALIDI: But they have to organize themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: Isn’t it one of the largest Muslim communities in the United States, Dearborn, Michigan.

RASHID KHALIDI: The Detroit area is the largest—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yes.

RASHID KHALIDI: —concentration of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. But they have to organize themselves. Neither party has reached out to them. Secretary Clinton said things that were actually almost insulting: You have to basically spy on each other, because we are afraid some of you are disloyal, instead of saying, “You are Americans. We respect you. We want you.” She made no outreach to Muslim Americans or Arab Americans. So they have to insert themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: How does Khizr Kahn fit into this story?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, that was—that was a wonderful thing, because, of course, you have to be a soldier and a veteran, or a soldier who sacrificed your life for your country.

AMY GOODMAN: His son.

RASHID KHALIDI: To get—his son—to get onto the national radar. But it was—it was a very good thing. But actual—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: At the same time, don’t you think—

RASHID KHALIDI: —outreach to Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, we really didn’t see. So, they’re going to have to put themselves at the table.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: No, but at the same time, don’t you think that the relationship that the two of them have developed can be used to incent her—

RASHID KHALIDI: I hope so.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: —to begin to talk to more Muslim Americans?

RASHID KHALIDI: I hope so.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Because I think that there’s a clear respect there. He has gone beyond just using the convention platform to go out and do, you know, like serious surrogate work.

RASHID KHALIDI: He’s been very active. He’s been—

AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about Khizr Kahn. And she made a commercial with him—

RASHID KHALIDI: Right, right. No, he’s been very active.

AMY GOODMAN: —to directly address Donald Trump. But let’s go beyond, to the issue of empire, as you describe it.

RASHID KHALIDI: Right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: Israel, Palestine, Syria, Russia.

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, several things. First of all, Russia. Russia and Iran are not going to allow the Assad regime to fall. This administration talked of—and the French and many other countries said, “We want to bring the Assad regime down.” You want to bring the Assad regime down? You have to beat the Russians and the Iranians in Syria. That is not going to happen. Like it, don’t like it—it’s not going to be very pleasant. But instead of deciding, which I think the president actually wanted to do, not only not to intervene, but not to allow American allies to intervene, essentially, we have a free-for-all, where so-called American allies are actually supporting some of the nastiest, most extreme Islamist radicals in the business, including people who are associated with al-Qaeda. I mean, how much worse can you get? We are actually—we and our allies. And so, there are multiple problems there.

How you deal with the Russians, which is not just Syria, which is also NATO—President Bush Sr. and Secretary Baker, way back when, told Gorbachev, “We are not going to advance NATO into Eastern Europe. We’re not going to—we’re not going to advance NATO into East Germany, if you allow the unification of Germany.” Where is that pledge? Where is the logic behind a military alliance, devised in the time of communism, before the Berlin Wall fell, now being in the Ukraine, in Poland, in Estonia, in Latvia and Lithuania? I don’t understand. Now, if you talk, as Ralph did, or as Jill Stein did, about militarism and the arms industry, you can see the logic behind it. But I cannot see the logic in terms of national interests and a sane relationship with Russia or any other country. And those things all have to be addressed. And they haven’t been part of the debate.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And one country where President Obama, along with Hillary Clinton, did succeed in toppling a leader was Libya, with Gaddafi. And now we have the Republicans focusing more on Benghazi than on the failed state that resulted from that policy.

RASHID KHALIDI: Exactly.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: How do you—what do you think the–what pressure can be brought to bear on the—on a Clinton administration on Libya?

RASHID KHALIDI: The Clinton administration is going to have to get tough with American allies. There is a civil war in Libya going on, with the British on one side, the French on the other side, with the Egyptians and the Emirates on one side and Qatar on the other side—American allies using American weapons, NATO allies are fighting each other through Libyans, one group supporting the Benghazi group—government—”government”—and one group supporting the Tripoli government. I mean, the president of the United States should get up and say either arms embargo on countries that are using American weapons—to fight other American allies? I mean, really? Seriously? And in the middle you have the Islamic State taking advantage, of course.

We have—we have an even worse situation in Syria, where the United States’ allies are actually supporting people who are violently opposed to the United States, who are dangerous, radical Islamist fanatics. I mean, where is the logic of that? When are we going to call the Saudis on the support of intolerant, bigoted, fanatical types of Islam? When are we going to call this ally?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I mean, President Obama visited Saudi Arabia more than some American states. But why this relationship?

RASHID KHALIDI: Money. Money. Boeing, General Dynamics. Real estate. Citibank. Oil. I mean, you just have to talk about the people who buy and own senators—

EDDIE GLAUDE: Right.

RASHID KHALIDI: —and have more lobbyists than—

AMY GOODMAN: And made the largest weapons deal in the history of the world with Saudi Arabia.

RASHID KHALIDI: Precisely, precisely, I believe $40 billion in 2012.

AMY GOODMAN: As it’s pulverizing Yemen.

RASHID KHALIDI: All American weapons. All American weapons. My daughter is an archaeologist. The museum that all of the work that she and three other teams deposit all of the—all of the artifacts that they deposit in, a museum in a place called Dhamar, was flattened. No military target. Saudis just took it out. And that’s happened all over Yemen. They’re not just killing people; they’re destroying heritage sites. That’s—those are American weapons.

EDDIE GLAUDE: And there’s nothing about, in—to your view, in your mind, is there anything about Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy agenda that would suggest that the fundamentals of that reality will change?

RASHID KHALIDI: You know, one of the things that the president did that I was the most supportive of was his opening to Iran. If she can maintain that, that openness to Iran, a willingness to at least see if Iran’s policies can be moderated, that would be a good thing. I’m not terribly optimistic. I mean, look at the people that she’s so far surrounded herself with.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Exactly.

RASHID KHALIDI: That’s what really concerns me.

AMY GOODMAN: Who are those people?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: There’s no inclination. I don’t think that there’s any inclination that she would discontinue, you know, some of the Obama openness. I mean—

RASHID KHALIDI: I hope so. I hope so.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I mean, the way that they work together, especially in this past several months, suggests that there have been conversations about some fluidity and continuity. John Kerry certainly, as secretary of state, has done the work. And so, I really don’t—I’m optimistic.

EDDIE GLAUDE: When you say Obama openness, you mean Obama openness with regards to Iran?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yes.

RASHID KHALIDI: Yeah, yeah.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Or the—because there’s an Obama openness with regards to drone wars—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Oh, no.

EDDIE GLAUDE: —Obama’s openness with regards to the five fronts that he—I mean, I’m just trying to be clear about what we mean by—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, I’m talking about Iran, Eddie, and I think you knew that. I think you—

EDDIE GLAUDE: I just want to make clear—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I think you knew that. You’re smart enough to have known that.

EDDIE GLAUDE: I just—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: He’s trying to—

RASHID KHALIDI: He was just trying to get a point in there.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Part of what I want to say is that there’s some consistency here across—

RASHID KHALIDI: Yeah.

EDDIE GLAUDE: So, what we—in some ways, the bye that we’re giving Hillary Clinton in the public debate around foreign policy, many, many folks on the left or many folks who have supported Obama have given him a bye with regards to his positions with regards to foreign policy.

RASHID KHALIDI: The thing that kills me about hawkish interventionist [inaudible]—

EDDIE GLAUDE: Exactly.

RASHID KHALIDI: The thing that just disturbs me about them is that they will never win over the Republican base, which just wants to bomb and kill and have the United States intervene everywhere. They should do what, at least on Iran, the president did: ignore those people, face them down, succeed with your policy and show that you can do something else than use force and bully your way around the world. I’m not terribly optimistic, because she is surrounded by people like Michèle Flournoy, who may become secretary of defense, by people like Victoria Nuland, who was in the Maidan agitating for the Ukraine to enter NATO. She was assistant secretary for Eastern Europe when—

AMY GOODMAN: In Ukraine, you mean.

RASHID KHALIDI: Yes, when Secretary Clinton was at the State Department. Dennis Ross, who sabotaged what the president and Senator Mitchell were trying to do between the Palestinians and the Israelis, from—Mitchell was a presidential envoy. Dennis Ross was picked up by Hillary and brought over to the State Department when she was secretary of state. So, I mean, if she follows some of the leads that the president followed, we might be better off. I hope she will.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: One of the challenges, though, I think, is that Americans are not sufficiently vested in foreign policy.

RASHID KHALIDI: Right.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: So, while people are prepared to talk about Social Security, about marriage equality, about any number of other issues, people are not prepared—your layperson is not prepared to have a conversation about foreign policy. And we have a very large military community—veterans and others—who basically do believe in the militarism. And so, one of the challenges—

RASHID KHALIDI: Some do, and some don’t.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, many do, though.

RASHID KHALIDI: Some of my best students are veterans who have been in Iraq and Afghanistan and understand perfectly well the stupidity of those policies, that you cannot export—

RALPH NADER: That’s right.

RASHID KHALIDI: —revolution, progress, by force of arms.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, your response on that issue?

RALPH NADER: I was going to say, yeah, that’s right. I mean, Veterans for Peace, for example, had an occasion in Washington, D.C. It was blanked out by The Washington Post and the media. But if you look at—if you poll a lot of returning veterans, and before they returned, they came out against continued U.S. presence in these countries. They say, “The people don’t want us there. What are we doing? We’re only going to make more enemies, spread more attacks all over in that area.”

RASHID KHALIDI: They understand.

RALPH NADER: And they know—and they know it’s coming here. Here’s the thing. For anybody here who’s very worried about domestic priorities, just consider we have created, with this war on terrorism, more fighters, more countries embroiled. They’re learning new weapons. They’re learning new techniques. They’re coming here in social media. The lone wolf thing is expanding. And once that blows here, then forget about domestic priorities. It’ll be total black—blacked out and crowded out with terror, terror, terror. And that’s why Hillary Clinton’s got to be extremely careful and restrain her hawkishness and have a Department of Peace effort in the State Department, instead of a militarized State Department goading the Defense Department to be more interventionist.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think, Professor Rashid Khalidi, that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state and now, has learned anything from the debacle in Libya? Does she consider it a debacle? And do you see her doing the same thing in Syria?

RASHID KHALIDI: I don’t know what she considers. I mean, it was a partisan issue. She’s not going to say anything about it. I have no idea. I am deeply concerned about the kind of people she’s surrounded herself with in the past. I hope that she’s learned from some of the things that this administration tried to do and, in many cases, unfortunately, failed to do, and from some of the bad things that this administration has done, to follow less foolish and dangerous policies.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of veterans and also the Israel-Palestine conflict, Mark Kirk, who just lost his Senate seat in Illinois, was the number one recipient of pro-Israel money, this according to Nathan Guttman of The Forward.

RASHID KHALIDI: Interesting, interesting. I mean, I haven’t talked about Palestine, but that’s another place where this president actually, to his credit, with Senator Mitchell, tried to do the right thing, which is to actually bring all of the Palestinians, including Hamas—imagine that, Hamas—to the table. And Mitchell had the track record to do that, because he brought the IRA to the table in Ireland. And that was derailed by the lobby, by—with the point man on that being Dennis Ross at State.

EDDIE GLAUDE: And I still remember, resounding in my ears, Hillary Clinton’s, the candidate’s, speech at AIPAC.

RASHID KHALIDI: Yeah.

EDDIE GLAUDE: And it was—it was not a speech that would give one any indication that something different was happening.

RASHID KHALIDI: On the other hand, she has had a very rough experience with Benjamin Netanyahu.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Netanyahu, well, among others.

RASHID KHALIDI: So, the president’s very difficult relationship may well carry over there. And, I mean, the day that an American Democratic president realizes that the base of the Democratic Party has moved, and just because a lot of rich people give her money and want her to keep the policy on Israel does not mean that the American Jewish community or young Americans—

EDDIE GLAUDE: Right, absolutely.

RASHID KHALIDI: —or Latino or African-American or the other people who make up the base of the party support those policies.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Absolutely.

RASHID KHALIDI: They don’t. And that change is extremely rapid.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I want to interrupt just with an update. It looks like it’s going to be a long night here. CNN, with 88 percent of the vote counted in Florida, Trump leads Hillary Clinton by 28 votes.

RASHID KHALIDI: Wow.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Oh, my.

RASHID KHALIDI: This is going to be a long night.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And meanwhile, the races are also too close to call in North Carolina, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. So, we’re having—and in North Carolina, with 55 percent of the vote counted, Clinton is ahead 51.6 percent to Trump’s 46 percent. So I think what you were saying about North Carolina, she does seem to be opening a lead there.

EDDIE GLAUDE: And I’m wondering if Brown or Miami-Dade have reported fully yet in Florida.

AMY GOODMAN: And with 56 percent of the vote in North Carolina, Deborah Ross is at 49.5 percent, Richard Burr 47.5 percent.

RASHID KHALIDI: Let’s hope that holds up.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: And since Durham—since Durham is still open—I mean, that’s a city, heavily African-American.

EDDIE GLAUDE: That’s a good sign.

RASHID KHALIDI: They’re still voting, actually.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yeah, they’re still voting until 9:00, 8:30 or 9:00, so—and if you’re in North Carolina, get to the polls please. Please, baby, please, baby, please.

AMY GOODMAN: Final comments, Professor Khalidi, because I know you have to leave now—

RASHID KHALIDI: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —on what you want to see happen and what you think Donald Trump has exposed or what he put forward when it came to Israel, Russia, Palestine, Syria?

RASHID KHALIDI: You know, he wasn’t saying anything consistent or sensible about foreign policy. So, to talk about a Trump foreign policy as laid out in this ridiculous campaign is almost impossible. He said—

AMY GOODMAN: Because he said he didn’t want to reveal anything to the enemy.

RASHID KHALIDI: He didn’t—exactly. He did say a couple sensible things about Russia. I mean, Russia is a difficult country to deal with, but I think that our policy on Russia has been foolish in the extreme. There’s absolutely no reason for NATO to be sticking its fingers up the nostrils of Russia at every orifice. I mean, it’s absurd. It’s absolutely absurd. And they’re not going to give up easily on Syria. They’ve had a relationship with that country since 1955. It’s very close to them. It’s like the Bahamas or Nicaragua for us. It’s important to them. So you’re going to have to cut a deal. And you’re going to have to tame your allies. And so I very much—and I don’t think Trump is capable. I don’t think Trump can understand what we’re talking about.

AMY GOODMAN: What was his affinity for Putin?

RASHID KHALIDI: I think it’s the strongman thing. Trump really has authoritarian, dictatorial instincts. I mean, he really is a—he actually had an affection for that model of leader, I think. Who am I to say?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: He has been on record as talking a totalitarianism or authoritarianism. But in addition, because we haven’t seen his tax returns and we don’t know where his money is invested, I’m betting that there’s also a financial relationship of some sort. I mean, I don’t have no evidence of that, but I do know that, you know, he has a global portfolio, and many global investors are in Russia. I would not be surprised.

RASHID KHALIDI: Could be.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And we’ve got another big Senate race being projected. NBC is saying that Todd Young, the Republican, wins Indiana’s Senate seat over Evan Bayh.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Evan Bayh, wow.

RASHID KHALIDI: That’s a big, big, big one, to keep the Senate.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was one seat that the Democrats were hoping to pick up.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Really, really had to win. What was the percentage on that? Did they say?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I don’t have that here. And that’s certainly a blow to any Democratic hopes of taking the Senate, although there’s still quite a few battleground states for the Senate race that have to come in.

AMY GOODMAN: The incumbent, Dan Coats, is retiring. I know you have to go, Professor Rashid Khalidi. I want to thank you so much for being with us, a professor of Arab studies, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, author of several books, his most recent, Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East. But people should not fear. We still have many authors at the table. Julianne Malveaux’s latest book, Are We Better Off?: Race, Obama, and Public Policy. And Eddie Glaude is with us right here in studio, who has also written a book, chair of Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. His latest, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. Not to be outdone, Ralph Nader has also written many books. Among them, Ralph, what’s the latest book you’d like to talk about? Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think? Can you—

RALPH NADER: That’s right. That’s the book for people who want to do something between elections back home in congressional districts, because Congress is the most powerful branch. It can expand a progressive society, or it can block a progressive society. And what we need to recognize, less than 1 percent of the people organized around issues that are already supported by conservatives and liberals, and there are a lot of them that aren’t publicized, back home, can overcome corporate forces in Washington. And that’s what this book is about, the basic citizen’s summons of members of Congress to town meetings around agendas created by the citizenry back home, turning the complete dynamic, from members of Congress choreographing the masses of people and flattering them to members of Congress being tutored and being accountable to open town meetings all over the country. Less than 1 percent can pull it off. That’s what this book, Breaking Through Power, demonstrates throughout history and contemporary activity.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why don’t you expand on what you were saying earlier—you’re talking about a mass gathering of people, if Hillary Clinton is elected tonight or tomorrow, and we can talk about what it means if Donald Trump is elected, or perhaps you would just say either—when you were talking about Bernie Sanders and what he is calling Our Revolution?

RALPH NADER: Yes. He’s out with a book. He’s campaigning on the book and his agenda. And what he needs to do as he goes around the country is mobilize a mass rally in Washington, with decentralized rallies around the country, behind a progressive agenda, so he has real power in the Senate, because Hillary Clinton is going to be very worried about the 2018 Senate races, where three times more Democrats are going to be up than Republicans. And she—even if she wins the Senate now, she can lose it dramatically in 2018. That’s what Bernie’s got to do. He’s got all these social media geniuses. He can raise a lot of money. He can hire full-time organizers all over the country. But I’ve often bewailed Bernie because he’s been a lone ranger for so long. He just doesn’t return calls. He doesn’t network community groups the way Senator Paul Wellstone did. But he’s got to change. He broke new ground. He showed you can raise $235 million in tiny denominations, forsaking super PACs and fat cat fundraisers in Beverly Hills. Now he’s got to go to a new level. He’ll have Sherrod Brown. He’ll have Elizabeth Warren. He’ll have some new senators, Russ Feingold. Otherwise, it’s another status quo extension of what we’ve seen getting worse under Hillary Clinton, the candidate of Wall Street and war.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Ralph, as you know, transforming an election movement into some sort of more lasting organization is a tough task. Didn’t Bernie Sanders start out initially trying to create a new political organization to put forth his political revolution but immediately ran into troubles with differences between himself and some of the key organizers?

RALPH NADER: Those were staff revolts against Mr. Weaver, the person running Our Revolution. But that’s abated now, because they’ve left. And they can raise a lot of money. By the way, Bernie has support from populist super PACs that are now developing, using social media to raise large amounts of money in small denominations. I think if Mr. Weaver starts taking money from big corporations—that’s what I think is reflected in your question, Juan—that is going to dilute and compromise the effort. But they don’t need to do that, because the technicians, the geniuses who raised the money for him, now are saying that it can continue, year after year, which is quite an unprecedented base of resource and full-time organizers that progressive groups have not been used to for the last century.

EDDIE GLAUDE: So why does it have to happen at the level of Bernie—

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Eddie Glaude?

EDDIE GLAUDE: —at the level of Bernie Sanders, organizing? Why can’t it be at the level of a number of local mass mobilizations that then have a national implication? In other words, why do we need to rely on Bernie Sanders, the charisma of Bernie Sanders or the infrastructure of Bernie Sanders’ election—or campaign, in order to have the kind of wildcat expressions, as it were, of organizing, of mass mobilization, in places all across the country? Why do we—

RALPH NADER: No, you don’t. You don’t need—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, he has the momentum. I mean, the thing is that he has the momentum.

RALPH NADER: You’re quite right. You don’t need that.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Right.

RALPH NADER: You’re quite right. You don’t need that. I’m just talking about his impact in Congress, that he’s got to have a base. But the base is never going to grow without having local fervor and local organizing on issues that are all over the country.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Right.

RALPH NADER: You’re quite right there. But in terms of the way the Clintons choreograph the Congress and how many deals they’re going to cut with the Republicans, like repatriating trillions of dollars of profits from overseas for a very small tax tab, which they’re already talking to Paul Ryan and McConnell about—

EDDIE GLAUDE: Right.

RALPH NADER: —that’s where Bernie has to have a base. But there’s no base without local power.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, Bernie has the momentum, and I think that that’s something that we can’t ignore. You have a lot of young people who still feel somewhat marginalized, even if they do vote for Hillary. You know, they still say they “feel the Bern.” So, you know, the challenge, I think Ralph has pointed out very well, is that Bernie just seems to not have the personality to engage with people at the grassroots level, of this distance between he and others. But I was with some—an organization called Democracy—it wasn’t “Democracy”—Education Anew, and they were looking—juvenile justice people. I was with them in Memphis on Saturday. And these young organizers were extremely impressive and talking about doing thing like putting together town hall meetings and bringing people together, have those conversations. I think it has to be something quite simultaneous, that something is happening. But the lesson has to be, for our voters, that voting is not the most you can do; it’s really the least you can do. I mean, if we—if people are—Hillary should be worried about 2018, because we could very well have major losses in the Senate. And we should all be worried about 2020, because there’s the Trump—assuming that Hillary wins, there’s a Trump machine come roaring back again.

AMY GOODMAN: And we are not there yet. No, Hillary Clinton has not been coronated yet. By the way, NBC News has called the House of Representatives for the Republicans. We’ll see what happens in the Senate, but it is a serious blow to the Democrats’ desires to take the Senate with Todd Young, the Republican, winning the Indiana Senate seat, taking—beating out Evan Bayh. Also, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, known for some accurate predictions, said Republicans’ chances of winning the Senate are up to 69 percent after Indiana and Florida calls for the GOP. Again, Marco Rubio has retained his seat, despite saying he would not run for that seat, but then, of course, once he gave up his presidential bid, went back to that.

The difference between the moment when President Obama was elected back in 2008, Ralph, and today, if Hillary Clinton is elected, back in 2008, with that election, all the different movements joining together to—to elect President Obama. He immediately said he was going to close Guantánamo in a year. He was going to end the wars, a number of other things, became the—as many of his allies called him in the immigration rights movement, the deporter-in-chief, deporting more—and this continues—immigrants than any president in history, not closing Guantánamo. Afghanistan is the longest war in U.S. history. But people backed off, maybe partly because of the racist attack on him, the birther movement. Among those who led it was Donald Trump, and they didn’t want to contribute to that. And they thought he would actually do this, and it might have been a great disservice to him and to this country, thinking that one person could do it alone. But there’s certainly nothing like that feeling when it comes to Hillary Clinton. I mean, the unfavorability ratings that they keep touting today, talking about in all the polls that have been done, are enormously high. The issue of trust, especially among millennials, but going across the population, even if she’s elected, even by those who elected her, the lack of trustworthiness that people feel that she has. In one sense, people are already chomping at the bit, waiting to, you know, race out of the gate. Would you say that, Ralph Nader?

RALPH NADER: Yeah, well, we would like to see that happen, but, you know, it just doesn’t happen without full-time organizers. You know, look at any movement in our country’s history. Was there a labor movement without full-time organizers in the field? Civil rights movement, full-time organizer in the field? Women’s rights movement? And we never ask that question. Progressives never ask that question. When you say, “Why don’t we have full Medicare for all with free choice of doctor and hospital, half as expensive as it is now? Look at Canada: better outcomes,” nobody says, “Well, you know, there isn’t—there isn’t a dozen full-time people around the country pushing for it.” When the Pentagon isn’t audited, half of the government’s operating budget going crazy with waste and corruption and redundancy, how many people are there around the country trying to get the audit of the Pentagon? Zero. Zero. Zero. That’s why we’ve got to deploy into the congressional districts and just say, “Look, it’s Congress that is on the table here.” You’re not going to deal with the judiciary, you’re not going to deal with the executive branch, unless you deal with Congress, which has the taxing power, the spending power, the investigative power, the confirmation of nomination power and, of course, the taxing power and the war power. So, that’s where the emphasis has got to be. “How many organizers can you field?” is always the question that should be asked.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Ralph, on another topic, if Hillary Clinton does win, she has promised to move forward on comprehensive immigration reform in her first hundred days. Now, of course, we heard from President Obama, when he was running in 2008, that he would move on immigration reform. That didn’t happen. Do you think that, even if the Republicans retain the Senate, that there’s been enough of experience of the Republican Party, with the suicidal nature of their continuing not to deal with this issue of what to do with immigration in this country, that they’ll be a majority to be able to achieve comprehensive immigration reform? I’d like to ask you and the other panelists, as well.

RALPH NADER: I think—I think if it reaches a point where both parties want to get it off the table and put it behind them, they can come together, but only if the pressure, the turmoil that the non-resolution of the immigration issue continues to put the pressure. There are times, you know, when both parties in Congress just want to get rid of an issue, like they want to get rid of the Palestinian-Israeli issue, so they resolve it in favor of the Israeli military machine and occupation. So, I think that—Juan, that’s what’s going to have to happen. It’s got to be—it’s got to involve a lot of elements in our society other than the people who have most at stake.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: You know, with Marco Rubio—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Julianne Malveaux?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: —going back to the Senate, it’s bad news for the Democrats in terms of the count, but it may be decent news in terms of immigration reform. He actually, before he tilted, as he was running for president, had worked with a bipartisan group in putting together a plan that did have some reasonable features to it. And so, that’s something that perhaps he and Hillary Clinton can work together on. But I think Ralph is right. You know, you’ve got to have the disruption, and you’ve got to have the pain, but this is something that isn’t going to go away. The fact is that Mexico is our contiguous neighbor. The fact is that we actually took Mexico, and so maybe they’re coming to take it back. Not so sure about that. But in any case, the fact is our contiguous neighbor, and we are interdependent. And so, it’s not going to go away, and the piecemeal reforms that we’ve so often seen are not good. We need something that’s very comprehensive, that talks about protecting the people whose families are here, so that you’re not deporting parents while their children are here. And we need to talk about how people are able to get their citizenship. What’s a path to citizenship that does not force them to leave the country?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Eddie Glaude?

EDDIE GLAUDE: Well, I think—you know, I think it’s going to be a very difficult issue to come out of the blocks and embrace, and it has everything to do with what we’re hearing now in the echo chamber about she has to bring the country together. And so, when I’m—when I’m listening to Republicans and people on the right, the thing that they’re talking about is she needs to come out and hit the issue, or the question around infrastructure. That’s something that both sides can come to terms with, come together on. But I think what’s going to drive immigration reform—right?—is the indisputable fact of the Latino vote. If we—if the numbers are what they—what we think they are, and the community is as organized as it looks to be, there is going to be pressure from below, I think, to bring this issue to some form of resolution. So, you know, I agree, Marco Rubio opens up space. I agree that Hillary Clinton, in relation to this issue, we want it to go away. But at the end of the day, it’s going to have to be pressure from organized—organized people to get this issue resolved. And I think what we’re seeing in this election cycle is that the Latino community is preparing itself. As complicated and differentiated as the community is, it’s preparing itself to bring pressure to bear, not only around immigration, but also around the question of Puerto Rico. Right? There’s going to be some pressure to be brought to bear, and what it’s going to look like, how she’s going to respond, I’m not sure.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: You know, the Latino community, however, needs to be well advised to deal with allies in the progressive community that are non-Latino. I mean, one of the big challenges we had—and Mr. Trump articulated some of this, but many of have—is the black-brown tension that sometimes is there and sometimes is not. Latinos do not take black jobs. Undocumented people are not taking black people’s jobs. I mean, first of all, nobody had their name on a job. But secondly, when you look at the—giving people—making people legal, makes labor competition a different kind of animal. When you can pay somebody less than you’re paying somebody else, of course you’re going to hire the person that you can pay under the table. And so it makes sense, but I think that the Latino community is going to have to open up conversations with progressive African Americans, so that we move together on a united front around some of these issues.

EDDIE GLAUDE: And we see examples of this with, for example, with Dream Defenders in Florida, right? We see this extraordinary grassroots organization that has been on the front lines with regards to immigration reform, with regards to protecting undocumented workers, as well as—right?—speaking to the question of police brutality. And this goes to the earlier point that Ralph Nader made about organizers, right? And I think it’s important to kind of link that point to the presence of Rashad Robinson earlier—right?—and Color of Change and the super PAC, and how—and the super PAC around DAs—right?—and how it linked up with organizers like Assata’s Daughters and Project NIA and BYP100 in Chicago and Black Lives Matter or Movements for Black Lives Matter policy platform, where you see folks who are not kind of focused simply on this electoral cycle, but really thinking about organizing and conceiving of a broader—a broader kind of politics that goes beyond just simply coronating the next president, as it were.

AMY GOODMAN: I know that Ralph—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I don’t know why y’all keep saying “coronating,” because I don’t see any coronation. This woman has fought like hell.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Oh, no, no.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: If she wins, she’s fought like hell.

EDDIE GLAUDE: A lot of folks are coronated.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: No, I—

EDDIE GLAUDE: I mean, of course, some folks [inaudible]—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I don’t see it as a coronation at all, Eddie. I think—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s get to that issue in a minute. But I do want to ask Ralph Nader, before you leave, Ralph, about any of the ballot initiatives you’re particularly following. I want to comment that marijuana legalization on the ballot in nine states, and right now it looks like Florida voters have overwhelmingly approved an amendment legalizing medical marijuana. I think it’s something like 5 percent of the population could legally partake in marijuana before today. And if all of the amendments—rather, the ballot initiatives pass, it’ll be a quarter of the country, which is quite astounding.

RALPH NADER: Yeah, three—

AMY GOODMAN: What else are you looking at, in addition—you want to comment on marijuana?

RALPH NADER: Yeah, three quick comments. Four states have minimum wage on, and in 2012 four conservative states passed minimum wage, such as Arkansas. Maybe that will build up the pressure on Congress to lift up the ossified $7.25 federal minimum wage. So, that’s a good sign. I think they’re going to win. The $2 additional tax on tobacco in California is a good one, too, because the money is going to be used for good purposes.

But here’s the dilemma: You have nine states going for legalization of marijuana; you have no efforts dealing with industrial hemp, which can create all kinds of jobs. It has thousands of uses, but is banned, in terms of growing in this country. We import it from Canada, Romania, China. It’s used for energy, fuel, paper, food, lubrication, auto parts. Isn’t this an amazing example that the huge effort to legalize marijuana is not bringing along with it getting off the DEA prescribed list one of the greatest plants in the history of the world, industrial hemp? Isn’t that amazing? A dichotomy that nobody’s talking about?

AMY GOODMAN: I will also say, though, Florida, according to the Drug Policy Alliance, did become the first state in the South to legalize medical marijuana. And again, for those—it’s been legalized for those with specific medical conditions, including cancer, epilepsy, glaucoma, Parkinson’s, MS, ALS, Crohn’s disease, AIDS or other debilitating medical conditions. Caregivers and distribution centers would be licensed by the state. It would not legalize non-medical use or possession. Other initiatives—we’re talking about over 160. There’s more now than there’s been in a decade, Ralph.

RALPH NADER: Yeah, a lot of them are reforms of governmental processes, as in Connecticut, for example. The important thing about the initiative process is to begin to shield it from corporate takeover. So, they use the initiative process, as they have in California, against the interests of the people. And the initiative process was designed to circumvent captured lawmakers by commercial interest and let the people write the laws, repeal the laws or recall incumbent legislators. So, it’s very encouraging that there are a record number of statewide initiatives in the country, but we need to get more states to adopt the initiative referendum recall east of the Mississippi, where there aren’t that many.

AMY GOODMAN: Sixty nine, the citizen-initiated constitutional amendment, which, if passed, would finance universal healthcare?

RALPH NADER: Yes, that’s—that’s another good one in Colorado. That’s a nip-and-tuck race. Colorado could be the first to have single payer, in effect, and that could spread around the country. But let’s face it: There are certain things that have to be done through Congress. That’s why I emphasize in my book, Breaking Through Power, the growth of Congress watchdog groups. If they reflect majority opinion, Amy, they can defeat the health insurance-industrial complex. They can defeat corporate power, as long as they represent a growing left-right consensus of Main Street over Wall Street against the concentrated takeover of the corporate state. They can defeat it. We’ve got to get very, very zero focused, laser focused, on 535 people. Twenty percent of them are already on the side of progressive causes.

AMY GOODMAN: Big Pharma has poured $100 million into—

RALPH NADER: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —the ballot initiative in California that would reduce the cost of drugs.

RALPH NADER: There’s an example. All that initiative does is say that California buying drugs shouldn’t pay more than what the Veteran’s Administration or the Department of Defense pay in terms of mass wholesale bargaining. And they’re putting $100 million to defeat that. They’re using the initiative process to boomerang against the state Legislature, because state Legislature says, “Oh, gee, it lost in the vote. What are we going to do in Sacramento?” So it nullifies the overwhelming Democratic Party control of the state Legislature.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to ask Eddie Glaude about a subject that hasn’t received much attention, but definitely has had an impact on voting in this race, which is—you’re a professor at Princeton University—the skyrocketing cost of higher education and student debt. To what degree the despair of many young people about their student debt helped fuel their support, first, of Bernie Sanders and now may have an impact on this race, as well?

EDDIE GLAUDE: Absolutely. And Julianne could talk about this, as well. I mean, we know—we know that student debt sits high on the agenda of students, as they—as they, in some ways, try to imagine not only the value of their degree, but the prospects of their future. And so, they’re asking questions. And they’re asking questions of this two-party duopoly, whether or not Democrats are on the side of them, or whether or not Republican policies have in some ways created the environment that in some ways has—holds their future hostage. And so, I think we need to think keep track of the way millennials have participated in this election cycle. Many of my students—I taught a seminar on James Baldwin this past Monday, and there were some students, this was their first election, participating in their first election. And we know the trend lines, right? Typically, how you vote first will determine, in some ways, how you will vote over the next 10, 15 years, at least some data suggests that. And what they are saying is that they—that they actually find themselves repulsed by the entire process, because they don’t feel as if Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump offers viable solutions to the problems that they think they will face. And so, I think it’s absolutely—I think you’re absolutely right.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: When we come—when we look at student debt, and we look at the whole cost of—the cost of higher ed is one issue. And we’ve seen just the unbridled increases in the cost of higher ed, of almost twice as rapid as inflation, and even more in these past few years, when you haven’t seen inflation increasing. Average student graduating with roughly $30,000 worth of debt, but nearly half of all students having no debt, which means that the average is much higher—

EDDIE GLAUDE: Right.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: —something closer to $60,000, African-American students having even more debt. And the Pell Grant having been flat for the past decade, with minor—I think President Obama might have raised it by $100 or something like that. And when President Bush came in, he raised it by another couple hundred dollars. But it’s not gotten to $6,000. So, students whose parents make less than $35,000 come to school with a guaranteed roughly $5,500. Where does the rest of their money come from? It’s basically loans, unless they’re brilliant and have lots of scholarships.

Bernie excited people by talking about free tuition. But from my perspective—first of all, it was at public schools. So, private—I was a president of a private college. So, for those who are private colleges, that’s a big question mark. But secondly, he never said how it was going to be paid for. So, how did—was the Fed—was federal government going to make the states open up a school like, say, University of North Carolina and say it’s got to be free? How was the Fed going to incent the state to do that? Hillary has talked about cheaper tuition or more student loans. She hasn’t said free, although she’s worked with Bernie on some form of a plan.

But students are concerned because the amount of debt they carry, given a tepid labor market, basically postpones their adulthood. So, people marry later because they have more student debt. People live in their mama’s basements because they have more student debt, and they’re trying to get that paid off before they start to buy a home. That has economic impacts on our whole economy, because we have projections that say the average person buys a home at whatever year, but now it’s pushed back out. So, it’s a serious issue that I—as you say, people have dipped around it, but they have not talked about it comprehensively, and I don’t think that either the Hillary plan nor the Bernie plan was a perfect plan.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break for just a minute, and then we’re going to come back at 9:00 Eastern time. A lot of polls have closed. So far, more that half the polls in the country have closed. I want to thank Ralph Nader for having joined us, a longtime consumer advocate and four-time presidential candidate. Julianne Malveaux and Eddie Glaude, thanks so much for staying with us. Thomas Frank is also going to join us, as is Reverend Barber. Stay with us.

[End of hour two]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We are doing a five-hour-and-maybe-plus special tonight. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, it’s now 9:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, and polls have just closed in New York, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Michigan, Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Wisconsin and Wyoming. The battleground states of Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia are all too close to call. So far, Hillary Clinton has won Delaware, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Illinois, the District of Columbia, Vermont, Maryland and New Jersey, while Donald Trump has won Alabama, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia. NBC is projecting Republicans will retain control of the House. Democrats are continuing to battle for control of the Senate. In a key Senate race in Illinois, Democrat Tammy Duckworth has defeated Republican incumbent Mark Kirk, while in Indiana Republican Todd Young has defeated Democrat Evan Bayh for the Senate. And in Florida, Republican Senator Marco Rubio has been re-elected after beating his challenger, Patrick Murphy.

AMY GOODMAN: More than 160 initiatives are on the ballot in 35 states today. In Florida, a medical marijuana ballot initiative has passed by a landslide, that now legalizes marijuana use for specific medical conditions, including cancer, epilepsy, glaucoma, Parkinson’s, MS, ALS, Crohn’s disease and AIDS. The Drug Policy Alliance says this means Florida has now become the first state in the South to pass medical marijuana legalization. Meanwhile, in Rochester, New York, there are still long lines at the gravesite of suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony, who died 110 years ago, 14 years before women won the right to vote in the U.S. In Chicago, voters are also placing “I voted” stickers on Ida B. Wells’ gravesite.

We’re joined right now by four guests, some of them new, some of them staying with us. Thomas Frank is joining us from Washington, D.C., author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, also founding editor of The Baffler. Professor Eddie Glaude is still with us, chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, author of Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. Greg Grandin has just joined us, professor of Latin American history at New York University. His most recent book, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. And Julianne Malveaux is still with us, labor economist, author and commentator, serves on the board of the Economic Policy Institute. Her new book is Are We Better Off?: Race, Obama, and Public Policy. She’s former president of Bennett College in North Carolina. And joining us from North Carolina is Reverend Dr. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP and Moral Mondays leader. His most recent book, Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement.

Reverend Barber, let’s go to you in Raleigh. North Carolina is still too close to call, but what can you tell us on the ground?

REV. WILLIAM BARBER: Well, what we can tell you is that we have a massive turnout effort here. We have 1,200 temples, mosques and churches that are turning out people, 2,000 volunteers. We’ve put out over a half-million robocalls. We put out over a million voter guides. Every one of the NAACP branches are adopting precincts. But now, the media—some of the media got it wrong when they said the black vote was down in North Carolina. What actually happened was, after we beat the state on this monster voter suppression, the Republican Party sent a memo out to their members of the local boards of election and asked them to put in place rules that reflect the Republican policies and not that of the Constitution and the courts. Following that, they put in 158 less early voting sites than we had in 2012, 2008. They removed all of the early voting sites for the first week in the HBCUs. And even during the flood, they refused to extend voting hours. They refused to add Sunday voting. They refused to add early voting sites. So, we’ve been battling back against that. They also purged thousands of voters in three counties. We went to court and won. So, we’re seeing an uptick now, in the last two days of early voting and today, in the black vote, because all of the precincts are open. Had a glitch this morning in Durham of computers. We’ve been fighting. We got the polls extended for an hour in some places in Durham.

But we’re fighting hard down here, because, last thing, Amy, what we tell people is Donald Trump is talking about what he will do. In North Carolina, we’ve seen what extremism will do. Our governor, you know, rolled back voting rights. Our governor and Legislature denied Medicaid expansion. Our governor and Legislature cut 900,000 people’s earned income tax credit, 170,000 people unemployment. And our Legislature and government cut a billion dollars from public education and sent $13 million to private schools that our children can’t even afford to go to. Our government and Legislature attacked the LGBT community, attacked living wages and attacked the immigrants in policy. So we know what racism and classism in public policy really looks like. That’s why we don’t have the option of sitting out this election.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Reverend Barber, the opening of some of these polling places beyond the scheduled closing time, do you think that that will have a major impact in terms of being—assuring that the African-American vote is not as suppressed as folks are seeking to try to do?

REV. WILLIAM BARBER: Two things will assure it. Number one, we have said to the people, “Go to the polls, stand and stay. Stand and stay. Do not leave, because we have fought too hard to beat back all of the systemic voter suppression for us now to just walk away from the polls.” But, yes, it will help, because people who left will be able to come back. And now, if you’re in line by 8:30, for instance, in some of the precincts, then if the line stay there 'til 12:30, you'll still be able to vote. We’re telling people stay, stay, stay. If there’s any question about your ballot, you have the right to vote a provisional ballot.

But there is a whole lot of enthusiasm. You know, last night, I was at a church for two hours, three hours. Three hundred people showed up for a calling rally, not just to hear me speak, but they came with their cellphones, and we did call posts all over, calling of voters. So, we’re fighting, and this is a fight. In fact, I contend that at the end of the day—and this is something that we didn’t talk about in the debates, which is sad, they didn’t talk about voter suppression.

We need to remember these numbers: 181, 26, 31, 13 and 13. What are those? If you can control the 13 former Confederate states, you start out with 101 electoral votes. If you control those 13 states, you control 26 members of the United States Senate, which means you only need 25 from the other 37 states. You control 31 percent of United States House of Representatives, which means you only need 20 percent from the other 37 states. You control 13 governors and 13 boards of elections and 13 general assemblies. That’s what the extremists in the Republican Party—that’s their crown jewel, those 13 Southern states, the solid South. As we are breaking through—and that’s why they’re fighting so hard to hold onto North Carolina and Virginia and Florida, because when you break through in North Carolina and Virginia and Florida, and you upset the solid South arithmetic, you have changed the demographics, and you’ve changed politics in America. I believe we’re headed toward a third Reconstruction in politics, and it’s being shown in the way that we’re now turning these states, that once were not even considered battlegrounds, back into battleground states.

AMY GOODMAN: Just some breaking news from Reuters: Donald Trump projected the winner in Kansas, Texas, Wyoming, Nebraska, North and South Dakota. Hillary Clinton has won in New York. And we know that earlier she won in Vermont. Their polls closed at 7:00, and that was immediate announcement, also in Illinois. But Business Insider is saying, on North Carolina, in Durham County, as many as six precincts reported software malfunctions with the laptops used to verify voter registration. The glitches prompted a county-wide switch to using paper rolls, causing one precinct to run out of authorization—authorization-to-vote forms. The issue could end up hurting Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Nearly 40 percent of Durham County residents are black, one of her key voting blocs. The county voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama in 2012. And Paul Krugman tweeted, “Notice that North Carolina appears to be on the edge, and might be decisive. If Trump wins, suppression of of black votes did it.” Reverend Barber, your response?

REV. WILLIAM BARBER: Well, that is the truth, not just what happened today, but, as I said, what has happened with this race-driven state Board of Election and General Assembly. You know, the courts said they engaged in surgical racism. And, Amy, this just shows us also what is so diabolical. You know, we talk about Trump and his racism. But the racism of Ryan and McConnell and Boehner, in that they have sat on fixing the Voting Rights Act for over 1,200 days, a thousand—more than 1,200 days longer than Strom Thurmond filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Act. That is the ugly side of this, and that’s why I tell people you can’t just look at the loudness and the boisterousness of Trump to look at racism. The fact is, systematic racism is clear when you look at the way in which voter suppression is alive and well. Voter fraud is a lie, but voter suppression is alive and well.

But we do believe that we’ve been able to hold in Durham. People are staying at the polls. They did have this computer glitch. We disagreed with the state board ordering that all of the precincts go to the paper polling book, where you come in, and that’s where you check off, you know, that you are who you say you are. But people are there. There are Republicans and Democrats inside of those precincts. People have said to me, “We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to stay here, and we’re going to vote.” We did go to court this evening. Well, one group went to court, but the judge would not go beyond the one-hour extension. But that, in itself, was a major victory, even though we wanted 90 minutes. We were able to secure, in some places, a one-hour extension, and in others 30, in others 45 minutes. But make no—make no doubt about it: This is a battle for the soul of this country. And once again, the South is right in the middle of it, just like it was in the 1800s, just like it was in the civil rights movement. And we are seeing the adolescent stages of the falling of the solid South and the Southern strategy. We’ve just got to stay strong, keep organizing and keep fighting.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we’re also joined by Thomas Frank. He’s the author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? Welcome to Democracy Now!

THOMAS FRANK: It’s great to be here.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, your take on the—on the election right now?

THOMAS FRANK: Well, it’s—you know, it’s amazing that a sort of lone idiot, you know, campaigning around the country, like Donald Trump was doing, has been able to go up against the sort of collected might of the celebrities of America, the Democratic Party, every editorial page in America, and has done as well as he has. So far, it’s kind of—it’s kind of startling. I’m watching. I’ve been watching the returns come in, and he’s—he is looking strong in Florida and strong in North Carolina. And there’s sort of some some shocking results in Virginia. And, of course, he won my home state of Kansas. The most moral place in America went for this guy. But I think Hillary is probably going to pull it off, you know, by the end of the evening. But I just keep going back to the—this thought: the bankruptcy of corporate liberalism, you know, the sort of liberalism that has been building and—you know, for the last couple of decades. And, you know, that they can’t beat a guy like Donald Trump, who is—I mean, what can we say about this man that hasn’t already been said? He’s a—you know, he’s a buffoon. And that he can’t—that he has a chance at all is shocking to me. And this is just the first point I want to make. But the real question tonight is the weakness of, you know, the form of liberalism that we have these days in the Democratic Party.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean by that?

THOMAS FRANK: I mean it’s a liberalism of the rich. You know, there’s a lot of good people. I went out and voted for Hillary myself, right? And there’s a lot of good people who are working so hard. The Reverend Barber, by the way, is one of the people that I admire the most in this country. He gave, for my money, the best speech at the Democratic convention. There’s a lot of really good people who are aligned with the Democratic Party and who are working hard for Hillary Clinton. But at the end of the day, her form of liberalism is a liberalism of the rich. You know, her—the speeches to the Wall Street banks, this was not—you know, this is not just because they are funding her; this is because it’s a form of idealism for her, that she really believes in their mission in the world. And this is—this is just not a good time to be that kind of Democrat, you know. A while ago, I was going through, you know, the Podesta emails that got—that got hacked and then leaked via WikiLeaks, and the thing that comes through—you know, you can put all the individual scandals and embarrassing statements that all these people made, you put all that aside, what—the thing that really gets you, when you read through a whole lot of these, is that all of these people, you know, whether they work for the Clinton Foundation or the State Department or this startup or that venture capital firm, they all know each other, and they’re all friends. And there’s—it’s not just the revolving door between the Treasury Department and Wall Street, you know, JPMorgan or Citibank or whatever it is; it is a big revolving door here in Washington, D.C., and people are disgusted with it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Julianne Malveaux?

GREG GRANDIN: Amy, may I say something?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Do you—I saw you shaking your head a little bit there.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, I mean, actually, what I was thinking, when he was talking about the liberalism, is it—is it really liberalism? I mean, I don’t think that we’ve seen a liberal in the White House since perhaps an LBJ, who really wasn’t a liberal either. So I’m not sure that we really have seen a liberal. We’ve seen sort of neoliberals. And so, yes, I agree absolutely about the revolving door. You see these folks, and they switch jobs, and they go to that think tank and then there and there. Podesta is certainly a good example of it, but there are so many others. But as I’m listening, I’m just thinking, reflecting on the conversation with Jill earlier, of how we get out of this duopoly, this two—

AMY GOODMAN: That was Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yeah, how we get out of that. And, you know, her notion of doing the ranked voting is a good notion. But the other thing is really the development of robust alternative parties. Then when I think about what Ralph Nader has said about the 535, you know, why have not—Bernie and his colleagues really need to be looking at congressional districts that have changed demographically in the same way that the nation has, so that we can really talk now, in 2016, about who’s going to run in 2018. I mean, that’s really how you break the logjam, is to really come find some hot 35-year-old who’s a professor at the University of Nevada, or some—I’m using that as an example—and just say, you know, “Let’s start building this person up now.” What tends to happen is that people come in nine months, a year beforehand, and they don’t have the funding or anything else. So, you know, the classic definitions of liberalism, I think, went out the window a long time ago.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask, on this issue of Donald Trump being a buffoon, as Thomas Frank called him—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Might be President Buffoon.

AMY GOODMAN: The Democratic Party, Reverend Barber, has filed lawsuits in four battleground states—Ohio, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania—alleging Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party are conspiring to threaten, intimidate and thereby prevent minority voters in urban neighborhoods from voting, the lawsuit citing the Voting Rights Act and the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act. Who would have thought, in 2016, every which way, we’re talking about the Ku Klux Klan, whether it’s the Klan paper endorsement, whether it’s David Duke’s endorsement of Donald Trump, who at first didn’t disavow it and then came under enormous pressure, or now this lawsuit invoking the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act?

REV. WILLIAM BARBER: Well, I think that shows, number one, that we’ve never really dealt with the power, again, of the Southern strategy, what Kevin Phillips helped design for Richard Nixon. And we also make the mistake of making Trump the bogeyman rather than recognizing that he is an amalgamation of what the Republican Party has done for the last 40, 50 years in terms of being able to use race and class as wedge issues and divide and conquer. I contend that what we need is—we talk about liberal and conservative, but we need a moral agenda that we are aggressive about, that we’re not ashamed of, that puts race at the center and class at the center, and we need to build from the bottom up. I’m convinced that Trump, in some ways, was used as a distraction.

Let me tell you what I mean by that, is if we have a grown-up conversation about racism, it’s not just about whether you retweet some words by David Duke, who’s a known white supremacist, bad as that is, it’s about the fact that you stand up and say that you’re going to cut—repeal healthcare, Medicare—Obamacare, and not deal with the fact that that’s 3 million African Americans that will be removed, that in the 19 states that have decided to not expand Medicaid expansion, six out of 10 African-American people live there. It’s about the fact that when you say you believe the minimum wage is too high, and you’re not going to raise the living wage, yes, that affects 64 million Americans, but 54 percent of all African Americans make less than a living wage. The fact that even a Democrat—and I said this—we went through all of these debates, even the primaries, and we did not spend one hour on fixing the Voting Rights Act and where candidates stood and dealing with voter suppression. We cannot allow that to go on, because what that ends up doing is we end up, as you said, talking about the Klan and talking about David Dukes and talking about those things, and not really dealing with a systemic racism and bringing it to the fore in a way that it’s really dealt with. And I think sometimes my so-called liberal friends, they want to play around the edges. I’ve been in a lot of conversations where they will say things like, “Well, let’s figure out how we can talk about economics and not really talk about the race piece.” That’s the problem. We have to deal with it. We have to deal with it in all of its ugliness. I’ve heard commentators say—when people say that Trump has played the race card, they say, “Well, that’s too simplistic.” Nothing simplistic about racism, especially when you—when Trump has been successful at even getting black people, some, to support him and his race-driven agenda.

So what we have to do is have a deeper moral intersectional fusion agenda that brings blacks and whites and Latinos together, helping us—helping them understand their common lives together, and then working from the bottom up. We are not going to, ultimately, be able to stop people like Trump just working from the bottom down and simply calling out a few black surrogates to speak. We’ve got to show people how his type of policies will endanger their lives, their children’s lives and the very soul of this country. And that’s why, you know, Amy, I’ve been on a peace—over 22 states, doing a moral revival. And there’s a lot of hunger out there for that. There’s a lot of hunger. I think people saw that DNC speech. It wasn’t me. There’s a deep hunger for us to reclaim the moral center, to take on the so-called religious right, to frame issues not just as being Democratic issues or liberal issues, but literally moral issues, constitutional issues, issues at the heart and soul of this democracy. And I’m hoping, if there’s a victory tonight, that the Democrats will not simply say, “Phew, we made it through. We beat Trump.” You’ve got 40 percent of this country voting for him. You have him, as somebody said, being competitive in these states where he really shouldn’t even be competitive. We have to take a serious inside look at where we are in this country and how we’re going to be able to move forward in the 21st century.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring Greg Grandin into the conversation. The Guardian is now reporting that—that in Florida, which is, again, a key state and still much too close to call, with more than 90 percent of the vote counted, that the third-party candidates, Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, are polling at twice the rate that Ralph Nader did in 2000, which would mean that the third-party candidates could play an important role in the final Florida vote. Your take, Greg?

GREG GRANDIN: Well, I see on social media that people are already circling the wagons and attacking Jill Stein, and not mentioning Gary Johnson, but pretty much holding Jill Stein accountable for a feared Florida loss. And, you know, I think we’re going to be back where we were with the recriminations in 2000, where the point, I think, was, if Clinton couldn’t win over those votes, then why should we assume that they were going to vote for Clinton if Stein wasn’t in it? I mean, people wrestle with the vote, and there’s a lot of performativity among what passes for the left or progressives about the vote, either getting on a high ground in terms of people refusing to vote for Clinton or insisting that Clinton is the only choice. And I think it’s a kind of performativity of the powerlessness. I think people wrestle with who they’re going to vote for. And I think that if—I think it’s a mistake to be holding—to already start looking for recriminations and blaming a third party for doing what Clinton can’t do. I mean, Tom talked about the liberalism of elites, or liberalism of the rich, and I agree with that. It is a neoliberalism, a corporate neoliberalism. It’s also a neoliberalsim of fear, you know, the use of the fear of Trump to hold the Obama coalition together—right?—desperately, and—or to expand it and to include more Latino votes. But there’s not—there’s not much of a positive case that was made by the Democratic Party. I think Tom is right. It’s bankrupt, and I think we’ve seen an increasing move toward the Democrats out of desperation, because Trump is a lunatic and is, I think, objectively more dangerous than Clinton in the short term. I think Clintonianism is the ground in which Trumpism spreads and grows. But I don’t see the point in already starting to hold—to turn on Jill Stein.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: See, I reject this notion of fear. I mean, I abhor Donald Trump. I would say that I abhor him, but I’m not afraid of him. I ain’t scared.

AMY GOODMAN: Julianne Malveaux?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: But what I would say is that I’m enthusiastic about Hilary Clinton as a presidential candidate. I’m not voting against Trump—well, I am, but I’m voting for Hillary. And I’ve written about it at length, about the things that I think she does bring to the table. I do think that she gets race in a way, frankly, that Bernie Sanders did not get, and none of the Democratic—Martin O’Malley, who was in the race very briefly—got. I think she does get race. Reverend Barber, I won’t quote him, since he’s here, but let him—ask him to tell you about the blood test. Reverend Barber, you want to talk about the blood test? Or do I get to talk about your blood test? I’m going to let you talk about your blood test.

REV. WILLIAM BARBER: All right.

AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Barber just has two more minutes, I understand. Reverend Barber, why don’t you talk about the blood test?

REV. WILLIAM BARBER: The blood test, yeah. Well, you know, that’s my friend and my president, Dr. Malveaux. And I’ve got to go check on this thing with the lawyers, because some of these polls are closing, I see what’s going on. But listen, several things we’ve not—let’s be real about the [inaudible]. There would be no Trump without an Obama. And if we don’t deal with the reality that this is about psychic imagination—there are people that are voting for Trump simply because they’ve been in psychic distress for seven years with Obama. Even though President Obama bent over many times to try to do what he could to appease this and that, the fact of the matter is there are a lot of people—and that’s the power and the strength of racism, that they—their entire world has been messed up. I will never forget when the South Carolina legislator said, “You lie.” In other words, you are a liar, you’re not even real, you’re an anomaly. We can’t forget when schools wouldn’t even allow schoolchildren to look at the TV when President Obama was speaking to the nation. So, we are dealing with psychic imagination and psychic trauma that many people have gone through simply by seeing a black man in a White House that was built by slaves. And that’s another piece of the race argument. And it’s not simplistic. It is very serious.

The other thing I’ve said on the race question, again—and this is the blood test. There are things in this country that black people—and whites, but let me talk black people—suffered blood for: the right to vote. We’ve died and bled for public education. We died and bled to get included in Social Security. We died and bled for affirmative Action. We died and bled, in many ways, for fair wages and to fight for fairer wages. When you take a—when you take a paternity test, it’s a blood test. That’s what the Sister Malveaux is talking about. And you only take—you only claim that child if that blood test is 70, 80, 90 percent. If it’s 30, 20 percent, then there’s no kinship. What I’ve said is any candidate, whether they be Clinton or whether they be Trump or whoever they are, make them take the blood test. Where do they stand on voting rights? Blood test. Where do they stand on healthcare? Blood test. Where do they stand on public education and fully funding? Blood test. Where do they stand on living wages? Blood test. Where do they stand on affirmative action and equal rights for everybody? Blood test. And if, when they take the blood test, they come up zero, then they have no kinship with our community, and we should not take them home, nor should we cast our vote for them. But if they come up 70 percent—they may not come up 100 percent, no blood test is 100 percent—but if they’re 70 and 80 percent, then that’s where we need to stand. And then, once we get them in office, we need to push them to become even more a part of the family of justice and civil right. But if they can’t pass the blood test on the basic issues, we should not even be dealing with them.

AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Barber, what did you mean by you have to talk to attorneys right now? What is happening at the polls?

REV. WILLIAM BARBER: Well, I just got—that’s what I need to find out, because some lines are still going on. You know, some polls just closed at 8:30. I’ve just been texted there are people still standing in line. I want to make sure that that’s OK. I want to make sure that people don’t leave. So, they’ve just asked me to call into my group. We still have people out in the field who are still in Durham, North Carolina.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course—

REV. DR. WILLIAM BARBER: And so I need to go and check and see what’s going on.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, the race still is too close to call. Reverend Dr. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP and Moral Mondays leader, thanks so much for joining us. His most recent book, Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusions Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement. We just want to update you that The New York Times is now saying in its live presidential forecast that Hillary Clinton has a 58 percent chance of winning, down from 84 percent earlier today. And it’s just before 9:30 Eastern time on this Election Day.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, and the polls have closed in the majority of U.S. states. CNN is reporting Donald Trump is currently leading the electoral count, 128 to 97. The battleground states Florida, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Michigan are all too close to call. In the last half-hour, Trump has picked up wins in Arkansas, Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Wyoming and three of five electoral votes in Nebraska. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, picked up the state of New York. And as Amy said, The New York Times is now reporting Hillary Clinton has a 54 percent chance of winning the presidency, down from 84 percent earlier in the day. Meanwhile, NBC is projecting Republicans will retain control of the House, while Democrats are continuing to battle for control of the Senate. New York Senator Chuck Schumer has been re-elected, while in a key Senate race in Illinois, Democrat Tammy Duckworth has defeated Republican incumbent Mark Kirk. We want to go to Tampa, Florida, where we’re joined by Mitch Perry, a reporter with Florida Politics. Can you—can you hear me, Mitch?

MITCH PERRY: I can, Juan, yes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, tell us, what’s happening in Tampa?

MITCH PERRY: Well, Tampa, Hillsborough County, which is considered really a bellwether country, is going for Donald Trump, but the rest of the state is not. And this is pretty huge news. I know the race was expected to be very close here. Right now, Donald Trump, the last I looked, has a one-and-a-half percentage point lead. There’s not that many more votes. There still is more votes coming in, but it looks like Trump may win Florida, which means he’s got a very much—still has a chance to win the election overall tonight.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And so you’re saying what percentage of the vote is still out there?

MITCH PERRY: I don’t know. I haven’t see that. It’s less than 10 percent is still to be counted. He’s had a lead since a little after 8:00. It’s going down a little bit now for the first time, but it’s still well over 100,000 votes. I believe it’s about one-and-a-half percent he’s leading right now.

AMY GOODMAN: New York Times, again, projecting Trump has a 51 percent chance of winning. Let’s talk about the Marco Rubio race.

MITCH PERRY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: It has been called, Mitch. The significance of this? He will retain his Senate seat, whether he wanted it a few months ago or not.

MITCH PERRY: Exactly. Marco Rubio, as everybody knows, was—dropped the Senate seat last year, was in full pursuit of beating Donald Trump and becoming the candidate who would run against Hillary Clinton tonight. It didn’t exactly work out for Marco Rubio. He got skunked, especially here in Florida. It was humiliating. He lost 66 of the 67 counties to Donald Trump back in March in the primary. It looked like at that point nobody knew what he was going to do, except make a lot of money in the private sector. And then he announced in June, just weeks before the deadline, that, what the heck, he’s going to get back and run in the race. And he’s going to—he’s beating—he’s defeated, I should say, Patrick Murphy, a 33-year-old congressman, second-term congressman, from the Treasure Coast area in South Florida—and, frankly, not a great candidate for the Democrats.

You know, this is a night where it’s not looking like a great night for the Democrats, overall, and, you know, we’ll have to hear the recriminations later on. Murphy did defeat Alan Grayson, much better-known candidate nationally. Grayson was considered to have—he was never too—he was, although a hero to the progressives in Florida and nationally, Florida likes nominating centrists. They’ve done it with the governor’s race the last two times around. Bill Nelson is the only statewide elected Democrat. Patrick Murphy, he won easily over Grayson, actually, but he got—he got knocked around pretty quickly against Rubio. Reports about him inflating his résumé—you know, again, he’s only—he’s only 33. He’s a—he’s a former Republican. His dad was a Republican. And this race was never that competitive. It probably should have been, and it certainly was something that Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate Committee, he realized about a month or so ago that it wasn’t going to be worth investing money into it, and so they stopped putting money into that race. People thought that was premature, but as it turns out, eight points, not very close. Rubio goes back for another six years, or at least four years. He’s never committed. He may very well run for president in 2020 again, depending on what happens tonight, I guess.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you, Mitch Perry, this latest news from your outlet, Florida Politics, the first black state attorney in Florida’s history—talk about Aramis Ayala.

MITCH PERRY: Yeah, right. That’s, I believe, in the Jackson—Orange County, I believe that is. I don’t really—I haven’t been following that race too closely, Amy, so I can’t really tell you much more about that one. Democrats are—I will say this: The Democrats, overall, are going to probably win some seats this year. There was some redistricting. Another big victory down here in Pinellas County, across the bay, Charlie Crist with a political comeback, winning a seat in Congress against GOP incumbent David Jolly. So, Charlie Crist, the man who thought he was going to be the vice president with John McCain back in 2008, lost to Rubio in Senate in 2010, lost the governor to Rick Scott in 2014, keeps his political career alive by winning a redistricted district that made it much more easier for a Democrat to win in Pinellas County, across the bay from Tampa.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and, again, the latest from Florida, with 94 percent of the vote in, Donald Trump is ahead by 141,000 votes. So, Florida looks like Trump is holding a larger lead—a larger lead now. Florida, of course, was a state that Trump must win. Hillary Clinton had many paths to the presidency without Florida, but it would have been decisive for him if she did win that state. We don’t have the final results yet.

MITCH PERRY: Yeah, you know, I will just say this: It’s somewhat surprising. Clinton has led most of the polls, but it’s never been that large—six points, four points. But a Quinnipiac poll came out yesterday morning, had Clinton only up by one point, which, obviously, margin of error. Trump could end up winning it by one point. So, he did narrow it. He spent an extraordinary amount of time here in the Tampa Bay area. He was in Tampa again on Saturday, Sarasota yesterday morning. So, Trump really investing a lot of time and energy. And as everybody knows, really, he needs those 29 electoral votes. Democrats used to think they needed to get that, but they learned four years ago, when Obama defeated Mitt Romney by less than 1 percentage point, it took four days to decide the election in Florida four years ago. He had won it on election night. So, that’s when it became real—Democrats realized, in terms of the electoral battleground state, this election is still alive for Hillary Clinton, if she does not win the state, which it does look like she’s going to lose tonight in Florida, which is—you know, Donald Trump has basically overperformed from Mitt Romney in some of the big key counties in the I-4 corridor. I think that’s the big story here.

AMY GOODMAN: Thomas Frank, I know you have to leave soon, author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? I have this latest breaking news out of Minnesota: It’s elected Ilhan Omar, the nation’s first Somali-American lawmaker. But CNN is doing an electoral count right now, and it says Donald Trump has 128, and Clinton, 97. Your final thoughts, Thomas Frank?

THOMAS FRANK: [inaudible] 97,000. You meant 97,000. Well, it doesn’t really matter. But can I just say that one of the things that has come up now several times is people’s—

AMY GOODMAN: I meant Electoral College, 128 to 97.

THOMAS FRANK: Oh, oh, OK, OK. The frustration of voters and many of the people that are here on the program with you tonight, their frustration with the two-party system, that has brought us to this terrible impasse. As so many people have pointed out, two of the most unpopular—I believe the two most unpopular candidates of all time, and we’re stuck with one or the other of them, you know? There’s no way out of it. And this is—this is what our modern two-party system has yielded us, you know, where the—each party is captured by a certain faction. Trump actually did something kind of interesting, sort of dynamited the Republican Party this year. Bernie Sanders tried a similar thing in the Democratic Party, didn’t get very far. And the Reverend—

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think he would have gotten farther simply if the media gave him as much of a megaphone as they gave Trump—Trump? I mean, a lot of people are talking about him setting up a network, Trump TV, but didn’t he have it on all the networks, not just Fox?

THOMAS FRANK: You mean, how would Bernie Sanders have done in the general election? Is that what you’re asking me?

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah, I mean, even in—even in the primaries, I mean, considering he had almost no amplification of his voice, the fact that he had the largest rallies—

THOMAS FRANK: Yeah, that’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —he won as much as he did, it’s quite astounding.

THOMAS FRANK: No, that’s right. He did an amazing job, considering that he is—was regarded in Washington as a marginal figure, you know. And that he did as well as he did is amazing. But, no, he had to—he needed to start earlier. He needed to be in the South a lot more. He needed to be reaching out to Southern voters. And he—well, you know the story now, that the Democratic National Committee was determined that he not be the candidate. We know that President Obama did everything in his power short of endorsing Hillary to make sure that Hillary was his handpicked successor.

Now, I just want to keep—I want to keep emphasizing this: The Democratic Party, the—virtually every elected official in the Democratic Party wanted Hillary Clinton to be the candidate. The didn’t want Biden; they wanted Hillary. They didn’t want Sanders; they wanted Hillary. And they got what they wanted: Hillary is the candidate. Hillary is—you know, one thing about Sanders, he wouldn’t have these scandals. He was a relatively scandal-free guy. And one thing you can say about Biden is he has a blue-collar streak to him that would have come in very handy in this general election. But they wanted Hillary, and they got Hillary.

And Hillary was uniquely vulnerable to Trump’s attack in all sorts of ways. We were talking earlier about systemic racism, and Hillary has this—you know, the past of the Clinton administration to deal with: welfare reform, mass incarceration. Trump’s big issue is trade, and here’s Hillary, who has voted for a number of these trade deals, who really is kind of a neoliberal on this issue. I mean, she was uniquely vulnerable to his attack.

I want to go back to the Reverend Barber and his book, which I really admired, by the way. And he talks a lot about a fusion voting in his book, and what that is a reference to is the Populist movement in the 1890s. It was often called the—it was often called fusion in a lot of the Southern states, because they would fuse with the local Republican Party, and that way they would win—they would win elections in a lot of these states. And that sort of option has basically been taken off the table for us by the two major parties, and people are disgusted. People want out. You know, they want something different. And you see this wherever you go. People are just so profoundly disgusted with the Washington way. And a lot of people can feel their way of life slipping away from them. And, you know, Trump has managed to take that sentiment and twist it into something very ugly.

And if Trump—I mean, I hope Hillary is able to hold—you know to hold her lead in the polls that we saw earlier. I hope she’s able to pull this thing off. But, even if she does, you’re going to see someone else four years from now doing the exact same thing as Trump, only probably doing a better job of it, not acting like a complete, you know, buffoon, like I mentioned before, somebody that knows what they’re actually doing.

EDDIE GLAUDE: I think it’s—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Eddie Glaude?

EDDIE GLAUDE: I think it’s important for us to make a distinction. You know, I think Tom—Tom is absolutely right, in a number of ways. So it’s one thing to say that Hillary Clinton is a—was or is a bad candidate. It’s one thing to make that argument. We can disagree—

THOMAS FRANK: Yeah, I can stay for one more segment.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Yeah, we can argue about whether or not that’s true or not. But it’s another thing to kind of try to make sense of what it means for this many Americans, white Americans, principally, to vote for Donald Trump. And it’s—I don’t think that—I don’t think we can account for that simply by talking about Hillary Clinton. Right? And I think part of what we’re seeing here—right?—is, in some ways, the last gasp. And it’s a huge gasp, I mean, and it’s a long gasp. I’m thinking about James Baldwin, wrote a piece in Harper’s in 1961 entitled “The Dangerous Road Before Dr. Martin Luther King.” And he said that, in effect, we are witnessing the funeral, the end of white America as we know it. Right? The question is how long and how expensive will the funeral be. And obviously, the funeral has extended into our own moment. And so, just by virtue of the data, we know that Americans of color do not, in large numbers, support Trump. Trump is a white American phenomenon. And it looks to me that white America is willing to throw this country into the trash bin, in light of its commitments to an idea of whiteness, in light of—and how we might even think about it—and, Tom, I know you would concede this claim—how they’re interpreting—right?—the pain, the pitch of the contradictions of a neoliberal economic philosophy that has, in some ways, dashed their dreams.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Eddie, you know, I think if you talk about a white phenomenon, I think you have to say a white male phenomenon, because the issue in this dream or notion of whiteness—

EDDIE GLAUDE: It’s not that many white men, though. It’s—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: No, no, no. The notion of whiteness and the patriarchy is hardwired into our economic and social fabric.

EDDIE GLAUDE: OK, yeah.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: And some of what’s happening with Hillary is that she is woman, and if there are white men who can—first you had a black man in there, and that was a gasp, as Reverend Barber said. And then you go put a white woman in there? Where is room for the white man? I mean, I can’t even delicately say what I want to say, so I just won’t say it. But, basically, they’re holding onto their identity, if you get my drift. It’s feeling extraordinarily threatened, saying, you know, “Where is the space for me?” And so, I think you’ve got to add the male piece in there, because if you look at the bifurcation among whites, college-educated white women are going, by and large, for Hillary. College-educated white men, equally educated, equally repulsed by the buffoonery, the tactics, but still leaning Trump. What’s that about? It’s about the fact that it’s not only white, but it’s white male and that many working-class white women buy into patriarchy as opposed to feminism. So, they do see. You know, traditional values—when Republicans talk about traditional values, many people perceive traditional values as traditional families—traditional families, male-female, male in charge, female subservient. And maybe I state that a little strongly, but not so much. But I think you have to look at the gender piece here. I don’t think that we’d have it so close if it had been a Biden, a white man. I don’t think that we’d be seeing something like this. I mean, basically many white men would feel reassured. And as the brother with the liberal book has said—because his name—

AMY GOODMAN: Thomas Frank.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yeah, his name just escaped me for a moment. Joe Biden has a bit of the blue collar in him, which also that appeals to some of the white men, who are still workers, who, you know, see their jobs threatened, but see Biden as one of their folks. I mean, Hillary has a bit of the blue collar in her, too, but she’s papered it over with all those Wall Street speeches. But in addition to that, quite frankly, she is a woman. And I don’t think we’ve talked very much at all about the amount of sexism that this woman has experienced in the course of this campaign, flawed or non-flawed, talking about—well, we talk about Trump’s hair, too, so that’s not a fair comparison. I was just talking—but talking about what she wears and all of that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I just want to interrupt here on another bulletin from CNBC, that the Dow futures index is down more than 500 points as the election results come in.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Oh, my god.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, clearly, as this election begins to tighten and—but, of course, we’ve still got to hear from the West Coast. And so far, no major state has—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: They have no surprises.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —changed hands that people did not expect to change hands.

AMY GOODMAN: And according to the Financial Times, the Mexican peso goes through the floor as Donald Trump gathers pace. And AP says Paul Ryan has been re-elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in Wisconsin, as was expected.

EDDIE GLAUDE: And what I’m seeing here is that he’s pulling ahead in—Trump is pulling ahead in Ohio. And I’m seeing that, in my Twitter feed and among folks that I know, that he seems to have a nice pathway in Michigan. And it’s one of the things—

GREG GRANDIN: Oh, my god.

EDDIE GLAUDE: So that one of the things that he has to flip, of course, is either Michigan or Pennsylvania, as well as win Florida. And so, the nightmare scenario, for some, is—seems to be taking form, not that it’s going to take shape, but it seems its outlines are beginning to—

GREG GRANDIN: And Virginia. And Virginia, it seems—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Is Virginia—is he leading in Virginia, as well?

AMY GOODMAN: Boston Globe is reporting Trump has a slight lead in Virginia, a state that Clinton was expected to win.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: This will go—this is going to be a long, long night.

EDDIE GLAUDE: It’s going to be a long night.

GREG GRANDIN: So if these states, then Colorado and Nevada might not be—may not go Clinton either, I mean.

AMY GOODMAN: One last response, Thomas Frank, as you hear all of these results coming in? Again, none of these—

THOMAS FRANK: What can I—

AMY GOODMAN: —particular states—by the way, Hillary Clinton did take Connecticut.

THOMAS FRANK: That’s reassuring. I mean, look, everything that everyone—everything that everyone has said tonight is totally right. Of course there’s massive misogyny in this vote, and we’ve talked about the racial factor here, which is particularly ugly this year. I mean, what more is there—I mean—

AMY GOODMAN: I will say that the Detroit Free Press is projecting that Hillary Clinton is going to win Michigan.

THOMAS FRANK: Oh, well, that’s a relief.

EDDIE GLAUDE: That’s a relief.

THOMAS FRANK: But this is a—you know, this is kind of terrifying. And we’ll watch and see what happens. But this is, in some ways, I mean—

EDDIE GLAUDE: Oh, they called it, yeah.

GREG GRANDIN: Michigan?

EDDIE GLAUDE: No.

THOMAS FRANK: You know, Hillary was saying to us—it was just what? Last week? Two weeks ago?—in The New York Times, “I’m all that’s standing between you and the apocalypse.” People have been using the word “fascist” to describe Donald Trump. I don’t think that’s accurate, but people have been using it. When you’re talking about the apocalypse and you’re talking about fascism, and then you say, “Well, and our candidate, to stop it, is going to be Hillary Clinton,” you know, this is—this doesn’t make sense. You know? If that really is the stakes, if that really is what’s on the table, you know, you need to put an Obama kind of—you need somebody out there that’s going to clean up. I don’t know. This is a—I’m—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Julianne Malveaux, would you like to respond to Thomas Frank?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: No, actually. I mean, I think he has a point. I mean, I do think that Hillary—I don’t know whether Trump is a fascist or not. I know—I agree with you that he’s a buffoon. Hillary is not the kind of change agent that President Obama was. We’re seeing that. She doesn’t elicit that kind of excitement that he elicited. She’s been around for 30 years. People have known her. They know her—her goods and her bads, her good points and her bad points. And she’s admitted, herself, she’s not as good a speaker as President Obama or as her husband. And so, she doesn’t have that charismatic stuff that—so, no, in terms of pitting her against Donald Trump, it’s not the best pairing for people who—

AMY GOODMAN: What draws you to her? Why do you say it’s not just about not liking Trump, but that you support Hillary Clinton?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I’ll tell you, Amy. I was at a banquet in North Carolina for a YMCA, and they were talking about what YMCA stood for. And several of the speakers used the term “It takes a village.” And I thought about Hillary immediately. In fact, I used that as I opened my remarks, to say, you know, this should be Hillary land if it takes a village, because that was a term that she embraced, that she used. Her passion for women and children, which has been something that she has embraced for more than 30 years, while she was in law school, is something that just basically endears me to her. The whole issue of women and children and the extent to which children, in particular, but women, as well, with the pay gap, what we see, she—we know that she’s going to put her hands around those issues. And we know that women need equal pay. We know that women at the bottom need equal pay.

I’m also very—the women who work for her and work with her are my friends. Donna Brazile, Minyon Moore, Yolanda Caraway, Tina Flournoy, they’re my friends. And so I know that when people say she’s not going to listen, I know that if I picked up the phone and called Minyon and said, “Minyon, she can’t do this,” it’s not going to be that Minyon’s going to say, “Malveaux said you can’t do it,” but that she’s going to say, “This economist, who we know, says this is a bad idea.” It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen my way, but I know that we have ears. And so, that also—this is the first time, you know, I think, that we have someone—of course, President Obama cared about women, and one of his first pieces of legislation was around women’s issues with the Equal Pay Act. But that also attracts me. So, you know, I could go on and on, but there are others here. But the women and children thing and the fact that the black women around her are good, solid black women, all with roots in the Jackson ’84, all of us with roots in the Jackson ’84 campaign, progressive women.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Greg Grandin, I’d like to ask you, in the potential of a Trump presidency, how would you see a Trump foreign policy, especially in terms of Latin America?

GREG GRANDIN: I think it would be a disaster. I think that Trump tapped into two impulses that he didn’t know how to actualize. One was this critique of free trade, and one was this critique of interventionism. I think that he tapped into a rejection of that, but he, himself, not only has he not followed through with policies that actually might be coherent, he’s actually submitted more—I mean, I think that he will be more of the same, but dangerous and unpredictable and impulsive. I think that—I think that he didn’t have either the intellectual framework or the larger administrative structure around him to follow through with a critique of those two pillars of U.S. foreign policy—free trade absolutism, neoliberalism, whatever you want to call it, the foreign policy wing of the corporate neoliberalism that Tom and we’ve been talking about, and the interventionism that Clinton has been a center of and what concerns many people about her potential presidency, her very hawkish disposition. And I think, you know, to get beyond the politics of personality, I think—whether Clinton herself, what her intentions are and what her history is, I think she’s obviously been part of this larger free trade regime and militarist regime, and that’s undeniable. And that’s the problem. I think it’s absolutely right. Joe Biden is just as complicit in and implicated in the deregulation of finance and the financialization of the economy as Clinton, if not more so. I mean, he’s the senator from Delaware, right? He’s the one who—you know, so and I don’t think he would have had the same reaction, visceral reaction. I think sexism is obviously embedded in it. But Clinton does represent those two—those two centerpieces of foreign policy: markets and militarism. And Trump, though he began his campaign as a critic of both of those, I think he would wind up not only extending them, but in a very unreliable, unpredictable way, and that’s what makes him dangerous.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Absolutely, absolutely. I think what we’re seeing, in a number of different ways, as I said, we find ourselves in what the late Stuart Hall described as a conjunctural moment, a conjunctural moment of crisis and possibility, right? And the conjunctural moment is defined in part by this—the fundamental contradictions that have been evidenced in a neoliberal economic regime that has devastated and decimated workers in this country. And the ways in which that has evidenced itself, has been articulated in politics, has been in so interesting sorts of ways. It has taken the shape of a kind of authoritarian—what Stuart described as Thatcherism is authoritarian totalitarianism and a kind of left populism that we’ve seen with Bernie Sanders. But it’s all shot through with the overwhelming legacy of race in this country. It’s all overwhelmed by it. And we have to grapple with it, obviously.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, obviously, we’ve got a—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: But an interesting—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We’ve got a ways to go on the vote counting. And for those of us who have been through many of these election campaigns, we know it’s a—in a close race, you’ve got to wait ’til you come into California and Oregon and Washington and—

AMY GOODMAN: But I will say Wisconsin Public Radio is saying, with about a quarter of the vote reported in Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, the incumbent, is leading Russ Feingold 53 to 44. CNN is also now saying Clinton has a 5,700-vote lead in Virginia, and more Democratic votes are still out.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Right. Well, the key thing to understand at this point is that there’s been no surprises—

EDDIE GLAUDE: Right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —in terms of which states have turned which way. All—the race is much closer than some of the polls were indicating, but there’s been no state that was expected to go one way that has gone another. And so far, of the battlegrounds, only Florida does Trump appear at this point to be on the verge of winning. So it’s going to be a long night, folks.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Yeah, you know, and I’ve always said that I think that the Clinton campaign made a bad decision or that it was confused. On the one hand, it wanted to activate the Obama coalition, and, on the other hand, it wanted to engage in a strategy that we can take back to Bill Clinton, a kind of strategy of triangulation, not necessarily with regards to black voters and appealing to white resentment, but finding a way to take your base for granted and appealing to these disaffected Republicans who couldn’t quite vote for Trump, right? And so, you had this kind of move for a long period of time where she was kind of saying, “It’s safe to vote for me, Republicans,” and that they were kind of making that move and taking, in some ways, the base for granted and not really taking advantage, because it’s not really in her DNA, of the energy that actually defined the Sanders movement. And I think this is just a case of the chickens coming home to roost strategically and tactically. And, I think, ideologically—right?—given that the contradictions that I’ve just described earlier, in full view, she’s just—she just is, in some ways, an example of an extension of what the problem is, as opposed to a—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, no, I mean—

EDDIE GLAUDE: —a person who will resolve the problem.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: There’s an extent—

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Malveaux does not agree.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: —to which I would agree with you. No, there’s an extent to which I do agree. I mean, I really—lots of us were asking that resources go into African-American mobilization sooner than they did. I think, again, that there was a notion that we were safe. The money that went to the black press went later than it could have, the National Newspaper Publishers Association. I did go, but it didn’t go. And this was the same thing that happened, frankly, even with President Obama. The Democrats tend to be slow on the uptake with the African-American community, all too often just assuming that the African-American community is there. And if Hillary loses is when we look carefully at the black vote. I don’t think we’ll see that black folks aren’t voting, didn’t vote, but I think you might have, could have generated more enthusiastic votes with earlier engagement.

EDDIE GLAUDE: And you combine that with her earlier strategy of distancing Republicans down ballot from Donald Trump. Remember the early—the alt-right speech: This—”Donald Trump is not like the Republicans I know.”

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah.

EDDIE GLAUDE: And creating that space allowed down-ballot Republicans to actually breathe in that—in that moment. And it was only near the end, where she saw that she could link, that we began to see that down-ballot effect. This is before the Comey letter hit—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yeah.

EDDIE GLAUDE: —11 days ago, right? But—11 days out from the election. But there was a—there was a decision, in some ways, not to open up the space for down ballot. So, we’re—this is chickens coming home to roost.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, there were some—there were some clear—there were some clear tactical errors. There always are with campaigns. And, I mean, I’m—you know, I’m not on the tactical team. I was simply a surrogate that gave up eight days of my life. That’s all. Not that that curbs my enthusiasm at all. But I would just say that, you know, the tactical folks make decisions based on what they think happened in the past. Failing to engage Bernie in a different way—I mean, Bernie has been used, and he’s been excited about being used, but I think he could have been used in some different ways.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to continue this discussion at the top of the hour. It’s 10:00 Eastern Standard Time, 7:00 Pacific time. Thanks to Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, and Reverend Barber, as well as Mitch Perry. Our guests will stay with us. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Keep tuning in, and tell your friends.

[End of hour three]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman. Juan González had to make his departure, but we are joined by a very important group of people as the polls are closing around the country.

Yes, it’s 10:00 p.m. Eastern time, Election Day. Polls have just closed in Nevada, Utah, Montana, most of Idaho, and Iowa. Florida, Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Michigan are too close to call. But Donald Trump is currently leading in the majority of these battleground states. Over the last hour, Donald Trump has won Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, North and South Dakota, Texas, Wyoming and three of the electoral votes in Nebraska, while Hillary Clinton has won Connecticut, New York state and Vermont. Earlier in the night, Hillary Clinton also won Delaware, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Illinois, District of Columbia, Maryland and New Jersey, while Donald Trump won Alabama, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia.

The New York Times is now predicting that Donald Trump has a 64 percent chance of winning the presidency. Dow futures have plummeted more than 400 points as election results come in. In Asia, stock markets have also tumbled today as Trump has outperformed expectations. CNN and NBC are both projecting Republicans will retain control of the House. House Speaker Paul Ryan has been re-elected to his House seat in Wisconsin. Democrats are continuing to battle for control of the Senate. Meanwhile, Minnesota has elected the nation’s first Somali-American lawmaker, 33-year-old Ilhan Omar.

We are joined by Professor Eddie Glaude, chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, author of Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. Greg Grandin is still with us, professor of Latin American history at New York University. His most recent book is Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. And Dr. Julianne Malveaux is with us. She’s a labor economist, author, commentator, serves on the board of the Economic Policy Institute. Her new book is called Are We Better Off?: Race, Obama, and Public Policy. She’s the former president of Bennett College in North Carolina. And we have a rolling roundtable of guests, who we’ll introduce as they come in. This latest news, Donald Trump has won Montana.

Eddie Glaude, as you listen to the list, your thoughts right now?

EDDIE GLAUDE: Well, there’s no—there are no surprises. We knew, coming in, that Florida would be a battleground state. We knew that if she won Florida or North Carolina, it was over, that if he won Florida, he still has to flip one of the battle—one of the firewall states. So, if he wins Florida and he continues—and he runs the table, he still has to flip one of the blue states, so he—and, typically, they’re saying that it has to be either Michigan or Pennsylvania. Those are his best chances. So, in terms of some of the predictions and what folks are saying out there, nothing—nothing is surprising me so far. I think what—if I would—if I would say, the one thing that stands out is that—the fact that the nation would throw its support behind him in the way that they have. I shouldn’t be surprised. I shouldn’t be disappointed. But it reveals the rot that’s at the heart of the country. And it just seems to me that we have some really difficult days ahead.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: You know, if you go back and look at—we talk about race being at the foundation of the challenges that this country faces. And if you go back and look at the correspondence with John Adams writing to Abigail, as they were putting the Constitution together and talking about his fears about race matters in the future because of the decision that—to allow enslavement, so that the South could come in, and also to have African—you know, people of African descent as three-fifths of a person. Then, Thomas Jefferson, himself, petrified with fear over what’s going to happen because of this. We didn’t deal with it at the end of the Civil War. As a matter of fact—well, for five minutes we dealt with it, and then we had, you know, Reconstruction.

EDDIE GLAUDE: [inaudible]

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yeah, exactly. And here we go again. We didn’t deal with it in terms of the civil—after the civil rights movement, the Civil Rights Act, etc. We dealt with it a little bit, and then we reverted. Then we had Ronald Reagan. Interesting statistic: In every economic recovery until 1982, working people captured more than 80 percent of the value of the recovery. Since 1982, the top 10 percent has captured 90 percent of the value of the economic recovery. So while we see—so, just interesting. And race had something to do with that. Ronald Reagan’s attack on people who receive public assistance was partially an attack on people of color. I remember when he was the president—not president, when he was the governor of California, he kept talking about the woman with 13 kids, you know, the black woman with—who has 13 kids? I mean, there may be some statistical outlier with 13 kids, but the average number of children that a person on public assistance has is no different than the average number of children that the average woman has. And so, he used race to essentially cut taxes, flow money to the wealthy. And we saw—we’ve seen that in every subsequent recovery.

So, in this recovery, we have—you know, economic expansion is not tepid, is decent. But you still have people at the bottom who have not recovered from the wage—they have not yet attained the wages they had in 2009, when we saw both black and—from 2009 until 2014, black and white wages down, now back up to their old levels out of—median, so some people still haven’t recovered. And so, you know, we just have to look at the way that, you know, the whole issues of—set of issues around enslavement seep in to today, the fact that not—you shouldn’t be surprised, Eddie. You’re so smart. You’re so smart. I mean, you study this stuff.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Yeah.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: You know, so, when you study this stuff, though—we come from the same home town, so I can rib him every now and then. Well, my mom is from the town that he was growing up—that he grew up in.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Moss Point, Mississippi.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Moss Point, Mississippi. I was born in San Francisco, by the way, so I don’t necessarily claim Mississippi, until I want to mess with Eddie. But no, I mean, if you study this stuff, you understand that, you know, wego forward, and then we go backward. And like Reverend Barber’s book talks about, you know, this time—this time, this fusion thing is going to have to happen. This time, the white working class may have gone, by and large, for Trump, but eventually they’re going to have to see that Trump is not going to have beer—not going to invite them to have a beer at Mar-a-Lago. I mean, he is not their friend. I mean—

EDDIE GLAUDE: The billionaire populist.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Exactly. He’s exploiting them, and they’re going to get as little as anyone else gets if Trump does win this.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m just going to interrupt with some latest breaking news, this from Bloomberg. Hillary Clinton is projected to win New Mexico. Also, as we reported, Hillary Clinton lost Wyoming, which is the first state to give women the right to vote. Wyoming Territory was the first to give women the vote in 1869, quickly followed by Utah Territory in 1870, Washington Territory in 1883. As with Wyoming, when these territories became states, they preserved women’s suffrage. Our guests are Julianne Malveaux, her new book, Our We Better Off? Race, Obama, and Public Policy; Professor Greg Grandin, who we’re going to discuss more about foreign policy, particularly Latin America, under a Clinton presidency, under a Trump presidency; and Eddie Glaude, who is head of African American studies at Princeton University. But we’re going to turn right now to Los Angeles to speak with Melina Abdullah, who is an organizer with Black Lives Matter, also a professor and chair of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. This latest news, Professor, around all of these issues right now: too close to call in Florida, though it looks like Donald Trump is pulling that one out. He last was 141,000 votes ahead. Too close to call in North Carolina. It may be, if the Detroit Free Press has it right, that Hillary Clinton will pull out a victory in Michigan, where they just both were yesterday in a last plea to voters. Melina Abdullah, your thoughts tonight?

MELINA ABDULLAH: I think, like most people of color, I’m extremely nervous about the outcome. Although I was not a supporter of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, I think that it poses kind of a possibility of a very quick descension into really rampant anti-blackness, really rampant anti-people of color, really rampant anti-poverty policies. And I think that if Trump wins, all of us are very anxious about what that will mean for the country.

And I think it also causes us to question our neighbors, right? So, who is it? I was watching the returns come in, and I’m thinking, “Who is it who’s actually voting for Trump?” And we’re realizing that we don’t know our neighbors as well as we think that we do.

It’s apparent to many of us that Trump shouldn’t even be an option, but now we’re talking about the possibility of a Trump presidency. I think most of us had braced ourselves for how do we engage with a Clinton presidency, how do we deal with her. But a Trump presidency, I think, is something that is really kind of one of our worst nightmares, what it does once we awaken from this nightmare, if he wins. And either way, whether he wins or whether Clinton wins, I think it reminds us that the work that we have to do to advocate for people of color, to advocate for our own communities, to advocate for working-class people really has to be done outside of electoral politics. So we have to create tremendous, overwhelming pressure in the streets to make sure that this country doesn’t just—and the world, really, doesn’t just descend into chaos. And so, that’s what we need to brace ourselves for tomorrow, whether it’s a Clinton presidency or a Trump presidency, and probably more so if Trump wins.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you surprised at this point, Professor Abdullah?

MELINA ABDULLAH: Am I surprised? Yes, I am surprised. And I’m surprised that people are doing what we thought that even—there’s theory, right? So there’s all this theory that we know that working-class white voters often vote against their own interests, because in this country white people have been convinced, since really, you know, the birth of the nation—right?—that their interests are aligned with their whiteness. And they’ve really kind of failed to examine what their class status means. So, even though we know that theoretically, even though that we know that—you know, the famous book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, that, you know, working-class white folks often don’t vote their class interests, I think that we’re often surprised that they actually will go as far as they will.

And I think a Trump presidency reminds us how deep white supremacy runs. I think something else that comes out is there’s a lot of data that talks about kind of the anonymity of voting behavior and that once people get behind that curtain and have the pen or whatever device they have in their hands, they sometimes are—feel completely free and unbridled in their racism. And I think that, you know, we cannot minimize the racism that a Trump victory would mean, not just Trump’s own racism, but the racism of Trump voters. And so, they can pretend like it’s something else, but we know exactly what it is. Even if we just look at his campaign slogan, “Make America great again,” right? Great for who? Because for black people, for people of color, for women, for LGBTQ folks—right?—anything that goes back in time means less for us. It means more oppression for us.

And I think that as Black Lives Matter organizers, it reminds us that we have to continue to create tremendous pressure, that when we think about where black people stand, along every—virtually every economic, social and political measure, that we continue to stand at the bottom, that we continue to have the highest unemployment rates, the lowest amounts of wealth, the highest infant mortality rates and absolutely the highest rates of death by police and law enforcement, where we are three times more likely to be killed by law enforcement than whites are, that it means that we have to stay organized. And we have to really have a plan. I think the Movement for Black Lives platform has to be revisited. And we have to figure out how do we advance those policies that we want, recognizing that we have one of the staunchest opponents of our plan in office, in either a Trump or a Hillary Clinton. But, yes, I am very surprised that Trump could very well be our president, come—or president-elect, come tomorrow.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg Grandin, let’s talk a little about a Trump foreign policy and Clinton foreign policy, when it comes to Latin America. That’s your specialty, professor of Latin American history at New York University.

GREG GRANDIN: Well, a Clinton foreign policy, one would expect a continuation of some general tendencies that began well before—well before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, and began before Obama and George W. Bush, and started under Bill Clinton, in many ways. The three signature policies of Bill Clinton were—Latin American policies, were NAFTA, which came to symbolize free trade—I mean, beyond what it actually was, it came to embody this turn, this move away of the Democrats from a party of the working class to a party of corporate America and free trade; the militarism of Plan Colombia, which has now extended from Colombia and into Central America and into Mexico with a series of serial policies, franchises—Plan Mexico, Plan Central America, etc., etc.; and the militarization of the border.

So the question is: To what degree would a Hillary Clinton presidency—and we saw how, as secretary of state, she largely continued that. She supported various free trade agreements. She supported a very harsh deportation regime while she was secretary of state. And she also supported wholeheartedly the ongoing militarization of that Mexico-Central America-Colombia corridor. And so, the question is to what degree she would continue it and to what degree she could continue it. It’s a different world. Trade is down, both the prices of commodities and—so, in some ways, Trump isn’t—Trump is in the vanguard, in some ways. He’s catching up with a larger—with a larger trend, and that is the retraction of global trade and the return to some form of kind of national economy that precedes Trump and Trump has managed to tap into. To what degree Clinton would—a Clinton president would be able to continue along the path that she and her husband and Ronald Reagan set in Central America and Mexico, that remains to be seen. I doubt that she could. It’s a changed world.

AMY GOODMAN: I just want to say that NBC News has projected that Senator Richard Burr has beaten Debbie Ross in North Carolina. And I want to get Dr. Julianne Malveaux’s response to this, having been a president of a historically black college in North Carolina, if you can talk about this.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, I’m devastated. Deborah Ross was one of the persons, when I went down to North Carolina—of course, I was stumping for Hillary, but Deborah Ross was also someone whose campaign I took a lot of interest in and asked people to vote for. She’s a phenomenal woman, former president of the ACLU and former North Carolina legislator. Richard Burr has said that if he was elected and Trump was elected, he would not approve a Supreme Court justice to replace Antonin Scalia. How can that be? He has attempted to slow down the judiciary, President Obama nominating two phenomenal black women for the Eastern District in North Carolina. And he—you know how a senator can put a ticket in, so your nomination is never even heard. And he did that. So he held both of those nominations up. The Eastern District has been curtailed in terms of its ability to move swiftly and judiciously. I’m devastated, personally, frankly. I’m really disturbed. I think she would have been great.

And also, of course, this makes it difficult for the Democrats to take the Senate. And that’s something we’ve also been concerned about. I mean, this is not, so far, of course—as, you know, we heard earlier from Juan, if we’ve done this—and, you know, I started voting in '72. If we've been doing this a while, we know that it’s going to take a while to get the Western results in, and it’s not over 'til it's over, but this so far is not a good night for Democrats.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk more about Senator Burr. We were talking about him earlier, those comments that were caught on tape when he was talking privately to a group of people.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Oh, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: This is North Carolina Senator Burr, who looks like he’s been re-elected.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Saw—he saw Hillary on a magazine cover, said he’d prefer to see it with a bullseye on it, to make a joke about killing and assassination. Then later he said it was only a joke. You know, he has a reputation also, even in his own party, of being one of the—he keeps a very light schedule, because he spends a lot more time fundraising than he does legislating. As I said in a letter I wrote to an editor in North Carolina, you know, Deborah Ross hit the ground running. Burr is just running his mouth. And he sells a lot of wolf tickets, but he’s not around a lot. I mean, his attendance record is lower than many, might be as low as Rubio’s. No, that’s not fair, but he does have a—

AMY GOODMAN: And he’s not even running for president, Burr.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yeah, he—

AMY GOODMAN: At least for the moment.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: No, he just—he spends a lot of time fundraising. He’s missed—he’s very inaccessible to his constituents. He’s missed several constituent events. You know, when we heard the talk from Ralph Nader about town halls, he doesn’t come to town halls. And so he misses constituent events so he can do fundraising. So, you know, he’s not one of the good guys. There are some Republicans that we can count on on some fusion initiatives. He’s not one of those. I mean, he’s a dyed-in-the-wool, die-hard, ol’ Southern gentleman-type Republican.

AMY GOODMAN: It looks like Donald Trump is up in Ohio. That was expected. Of all of the battleground states, that’s the one that was predicted to go to Donald Trump. We have Nina Turner, the former state senator, joining us on the telephone right now from Cleveland. Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Nina Turner. Talk about what’s happening in Ohio right now, former Ohio state senator, national surrogate for Senator Bernie Sanders.

NINA TURNER: Thanks, Amy. Yes, it’s always good to join you. As you were mentioning in your intro, Ohio, you know, it has always been close for Mr. Trump and Secretary Clinton in Ohio, with him having a slight edge over time, but always pretty much being within the margin of error. But right now it looks like Mr. Trump may take the state. You know, the Rust Belt has suffered a lot because of trade deals. Mr. Trump and Secretary Clinton spent a lot of time in Ohio. Even the president came and spoke at the Ohio Democratic Party dinner just this past Saturday. There was a concert where Beyoncé and Jay Z were here. So, lots of surrogates and the candidates themselves have spent a lot of time in Ohio. But it may very well—the state may very well go to Mr. Trump. And it is a state, my state, that the president won both times.

AMY GOODMAN: So talk about what we are seeing right now—the Dow plummeting. It looks like Donald Trump will take Florida. Too close to call in North Carolina.

NINA TURNER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Looks like Hillary Clinton will take Michigan. Pennsylvania, still too close to call. But, you know, the significance of—NBC has just given your state, Ohio, to Donald Trump.

NINA TURNER: I’m not—you know, Amy, a lot of people are suffering in this country. And I think the political class, just overall, has underestimated the suffering in this country. And again, states like mine, where you have so many blue-collar workers, who have not totally rebounded—you know, I had a student in one of my courses who is probably in her late twenties, early thirties now, but she remembers when her mom was laid off. Her mom was a machinist, and her mom was laid off during NAFTA. And to this day, you know—and she was a Berniecrat. But to this day, she still, you know, remembers the suffering of her family, how long it took for her family to rebound and for her to, you know, share that story. So, there are other people like that, not just in the state of Ohio, but all across this country. And this has been a disruption election, Amy, no matter how you cut it. No matter who wins, on November 9th, we are going to have to do some real soul searching as a country and try to bring this country together, because it is divided. But we cannot deny that people are suffering, and they are making that suffering known at the ballot box. This has been one of the most unpredictable elections, as you know, in our lifetime.

AMY GOODMAN: What would you say, your assessment of Hillary Clinton and how she dealt with your candidate, Bernie Sanders? And what do you think she did well? What do you think she did poorly? All the news that’s coming out through WikiLeaks that was suspected, but now a great deal of confirmation?

NINA TURNER: Yeah. Yeah, it’s very unfortunate. You know, in his primary—you know, I don’t know what Secretary Clinton herself, how she felt, but it is very clear that her campaign operatives, from John Podesta all the way down, really handled this election cycle in a poor way, in a way that is not becoming. And there are some levels that—about which you can go too low. And so many of the Berniecrats were hurt. They were not treated fairly at the DNC. I was there. And I’m not just talking about how I was treated. I mean, I watched Berniecrats not being treated with respect and treated as if we wanted to bring in the big tent. And that stuff is coming back to haunt. You know, when you win, you can afford to be gracious, you can afford to have a little more mercy. And that certainly did not happen, especially at the hands of the Clinton campaign. And it’s very sad, because the Berniecrats, as hurt as they were, I believe the vast majority of them—and even the polls show that the vast majority of the Berniecrats, are certainly willing to vote for the secretary. So I certainly—I certainly won’t—you know, I don’t know what her thoughts and her feelings were, but I can certainly go by what her campaign—you know, how they acted and how they treated Sanders supporters. And everything that you saw on TV, it wasn’t a whole Kumbaya back with the family. I mean, there were really some things that happened that should have never happened. So—

AMY GOODMAN: Like?

NINA TURNER: —it’s unfortunate, but the senator was a man of his word. He supported the secretary. He traveled all over this country for her. And some of his supporters were supporting her and still do support her because of his support.

AMY GOODMAN: We have a full table right now, as more people join us, as Nina Turner is talking to us on the phone from Ohio. Again, the latest news: Donald Trump has taken the battleground state of Ohio. But AP has called New Mexico for Hillary Clinton. That’s the latest news so far. And the latest news about the markets is they are plummeting. And we’re going to be going to Nomi Prins, who can talk about the significance of this. Nomi Prins is a former managing director at Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs, previously an analyst at Lehman Brothers and Chase Manhattan Bank. Her latest book is All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power. So, we want to turn to Nomi Prins to find out about this latest news about the markets, Nomi, that you’ve heard—the Mexican peso plummeting in Mexico, hearing news of Donald Trump gaining in his victories, and he—right here, the Dow going down.

NOMI PRINS: Right. So, basically, markets don’t like uncertainty. Trump has indicated uncertainty in every aspect of his personality and throughout the race. And so now what’s happening with him racking up the numbers in the electoral vote, the markets around the world are plummeting. So the futures market, which is the market that indicates where things are going to open tomorrow morning, in the Dow, is down 500 or 600 points. All the countries that he’s basically lambasted throughout his campaign—Mexico, in particular, is reeling. It has been reeling throughout the campaign. So whenever he was ahead, the Mexican peso would drop in value, Mexico’s market would go down, and vice versa when Hillary was ahead. So what’s happening right now and tonight is, all of the exchanges, like the peso, are going down on the potential that he could win. The same thing is going down in Asia right now, in terms of the uncertainty that he could bring into trade agreements, that he could bring into relationships, in general, with that area. So, right now everything is looking rather ugly on his potential victory, on the uncertainty of it, and what it means in terms of potential policy going forward with respect to the United States and those countries.

AMY GOODMAN: This breaking news from New York Times forecaster, now at 81 percent for Donald Trump. Your response, Nomi Prins?

NOMI PRINS: Well, that’s the issue. We’re looking at an election that was supposed to, by the polls, by everything else, go the other way, and right now we’re looking at it swinging back towards Trump. There was a lot of conversation about Brexit, about how this is going to be a comparison to what happened over in the U.K., where the polls were saying one thing. Wall Street’s equivalent over in the city of London was saying one thing, and that was all that it wouldn’t happen. And then, when it did happen, everything did plummet, and there was a lot of uncertainty. There’s continued uncertainty that’s going to go through the U.K. And the same thing is really unfolding here. It was something that was warned about by certain people, and it’s something that looks like it could be unfolding here, which is that, on the one hand, we’ve had polls that have had Hillary up 65 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent and so forth, and Trump nowhere near those numbers, not in the popular vote, not in the Electoral College, and now, all of a sudden, with that potentially happening, it throws all of that on its head. And that’s sort of a repeat of what happened over in the U.K., which is not something that’s going lost on the rest of the world, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: And the latest news—latest news is—you know, it’s all just breaking now. ABC has just predicted Hillary Clinton has won Virginia. And we will continue to bring you these updates and showing you a map at democracynow.org. Nomi Prins is with us from Los Angeles. And we’ve been joined by two new people at the roundtable here—well, it’s sort of an oval table—in New York City. In addition to economist Julianne Malveaux and African American Studies Chair Eddie Claude from Princeton University, and NYU Latin American historian Greg Grandin, Allan Nairn has joined us, award-winning investigative journalist and activist, and David Sirota, as well. David Sirota is the senior editor for investigations at the International Business Times, just co-authored a piece, “How Donald Trump Bamboozled His Taj Mahal Investors.” Allan Nairn, let’s begin with you. You have predicted for some time, despite what everyone was saying, that Donald Trump would win.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, I thought—except for two moments, I always thought Trump was ahead. After the Democratic convention, Clinton probably had the edge. And then, just in these recent days, I thought it had become unpredictable, because with the crosscurrents from the FBI intervention on behalf of Trump, I thought that had the potential to drive up Democratic turnout. But yeah, it seemed pretty clear to me all along that Trump had the edge.

It all depended on whether his white voters would turn out. I think the reason the polls were so wrong is that voter turnout is so low in this country. Turnout usually only runs in the range of 50, 60 percent. So that means you have 40 percent, sometimes more, of the electorate, potential electorate, just sitting out there, not participating. It shows how alienated people are. It shows the general disgust with the system in this country. The polls do, I think, a very good job of modeling the electorate of people who turn out. You know, if you had the same people turning out as did last time, the polls would have been accurate. But it becomes very unpredictable when new people might come in. And whites constitute 60 percent-plus of the electorate. So if Trump is able to bring out just 10 percent, less, extra of the whites, that’s it. And so, that’s the reason why it always seemed to me he was ahead. The only question was whether they would get demoralized at some point and fail to turn out. Now, the election isn’t decided yet, but he definitely has the edge. It’s not surprising.

I mean, I think a couple things to note are, one, this wouldn’t be happening if not for a degree of elite racism that I think a lot of people don’t usually acknowledge. Trump launched his campaign by going out and saying, “Mexicans—rapists, criminals. “Just imagine if he had said, “Jews—rapists, criminals,” or “Christians—rapists, criminals.” He would have been ostracized immediately. He could not have gotten on network TV. And the Republican leadership would have intervened against him very heavily. But they were willing to tolerate that. They were willing to tolerate that. So he got the—you know, I think it was nearly $2 billion worth of free TV time. And he got a road, even though they weren’t happy with him because he was kind of blowing their cover with regard to racism, but he did get an open road from the Republican leadership.

Another thing I think it shows is the problem of the corporate Democrats. I think if this had been a race against—of Trump versus Sanders, it would have been very different, because Trump wouldn’t have been able to pull so much of the nonsense he did. You know, when they’re talking about money in politics in the debates, Hillary is reduced to saying, “Well, my contributions don’t influence me. And actually, Obama got more Wall Street money than I did.” What a pathetic argument. When Trump says, “Hey, yeah, I’m a crook. I’ve been buying politicians all my life. But now I’m going to be a crook for you. Screw this system,” it’s powerful. When he attacks the trade deals, which have helped to gut the American working class, it’s very powerful, even though his solutions are nonsense. And Clinton can’t really defend it, because that’s part of the life’s work of her and her—of her and her husband.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I’m going to interrupt for one second just to read the latest update. Again, this—all these races are by—clearly not done at this point, haven’t been called. It’s 10:34 Eastern time in the evening. In just 30 minutes, the polls close in California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and the rest of Idaho. CNN reports that Donald Trump is currently leading Hillary Clinton in the electoral count 167 to 109, with the key battleground states Florida, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan all too close to call, though the Detroit Free Press did declare Michigan for Hillary Clinton. NBC is projecting Hillary Clinton is winning Virginia. So far tonight, Donald Trump has won Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Mississippi, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming, where women first got the right to vote, and three of five electoral votes in Nebraska. Hillary Clinton was won Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York state, Rhode Island and Vermont. The New York Times is now projecting Donald Trump has an 87 percent chance of winning the presidency. As election results come in, Dow futures have plummeted more than 400 points, while Asian stock markets have also tumbled. Republicans are projected to retain control of the House. In Wisconsin, House Speaker Paul Ryan has just been re-elected to his House seat, while NBC News projects Senator Richard Burr is beating Debbie Ross in North Carolina. That’s the news we have so far. Senator Schumer was re-elected here in New York, the Democratic senator, as was Senator Patrick Leahy in Vermont. And these were clearly not really contested. I mean, there were people who were running against them, but these are expected wins. If you want to continue with what you were saying?

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, and I think the other thing that it kind of tells us something about is human psychology. I mean, people have a tremendous range of options of how they can behave. There’s so much in people. I mean, you know, seeing this in so many countries, in extreme situations, where some people, they just rise to the heights of nobility and heroism, and other people manage to let themselves become these monsters, these beasts. And it’s inside every person. It’s inside every person. And Trump has this ability to reach out and touch the beast inside so many people. It’s interesting. In Iowa, the surveys up to today indicated that there was a fair group of white Obama voters who are now going for Trump. Now, I think, in part, that represents, you know, the disgust with the system. But Hillary Clinton isn’t that different from Obama in terms of policy. The substantive difference between Clinton and Obama is not really that great. But I think probably the bigger element is that whites who otherwise were able to tolerate a black president, Obama, because on certain issues he appealed to them on substance, Trump was able to reach down into some of those same people and pull out this racism inside them. He has this ability to trigger. He makes that kind of gut appeal. And, you know, this is very dangerous now. I mean, this is a national emergency, if Trump wins.

AMY GOODMAN: We do have this breaking news: NBC is saying that Hillary Clinton is winning the key battleground state of Colorado. And that’s going to bring us to David Sirota, who we usually speak to in Denver, Colorado. Your thoughts? Does this surprise you, David?

DAVID SIROTA: Well, it was close. I mean, it’s always been pretty close. It closed at the end in Colorado. If those results hold, it will be one of the states that came through in the way that it was predicted. For a while, it wasn’t close. Hillary Clinton had a big lead. I think that has obviously shown itself to be the case in a lot of states across the country, where a big lead becomes a smaller lead or not a lead at all.

You know, I think—to play off of what was just said about Donald Trump, I think that what we have seen tonight is that the Democrats ran a very weak candidate, a candidate who was, I think, pushed to be—to emote stronger views on policy through the Democratic primary. But the problem for Hillary Clinton was—and she may still win, but the problem for her was, was that she was running against somebody who was critiquing, in a very clear way, her record and that of her husband and that of the party establishment and, really, the Washington establishment that she represented. I mean, I was talking to a friend when I was coming over here who said, you know, when was the last time somebody ran for president, running—essentially conceding that they are a Washington insider and that they represent the establishment and that they—in some cases, the Clinton campaign touted her ties to the establishment, arguably as proof to the fact that she represents stability. But when was the last time someone was willing to run and assume that mantle, and actually won? Now, again, she may still win tonight, but I think it is a huge wake-up call to the Democratic Party that if you run as the candidacy of the same, a candidacy of change, no matter how terrifying, no matter how extreme, no matter how bigoted that candidacy is, that typically elections are—when you strip it all away, are a referendum on change and more of the same. And most often the electorate votes for change. Hillary Clinton did not represent, on a lot of policy matters, what the American public perceived to be as a change.

Now, we can go deeper and ask, “Well, why would the public want such a change when various metrics in the economy, for instance, look better, certainly, than they were eight years ago? I mean, there was a decent jobs report out. There’s a lot of trend lines in the economy that have been decent. Still persistent problems, but why would the country vote for a change candidate when you have a Clinton campaign that’s running as continuity to a president who is, in the polls, quite popular? And I think that speaks to the fact that we are living in a country where the deep economic problems have not been solved and arguably, in many cases, haven’t been addressed.

AMY GOODMAN: New York Times is now forecasting Trump is 91 percent likely to win. Allan Nairn?

ALLAN NAIRN: If he wins, it’s a national emergency. You know, some people have made the argument, well, Trump is bad, but Clinton may be worse, or there’s really no difference. That’s insane. That’s completely insane. They are on entirely different levels. If Trump wins, it represents a rightist revolution in this country. This really was a referendum on a rightist revolution.

AMY GOODMAN: You say it’s a national emergency.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Not an international emergency?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, also international, but first and primarily within the United States. In a sense, I mean, what’s happened in this election season just shows what’s been happening in the country the past 40 years, with the collapse of the—the implosion of the middle class and the working class. And in a sense, in the primaries, there was a referendum on leftist revolution with Sanders. And that did well, but it was turned back. This is the referendum on rightist revolution. And, I have to say, if Trump wins, it’s much worse than we realize, because in 2017 it’s almost locked in that the Republicans are going to make huge gains in the Senate, just because of which seats are up for each party. If Trump wins, the only thing blocking complete implementation of the programs of Trump, Paul Ryan, the Koch brothers, etc., is the Senate filibuster by the Democrats. Even if the Democrats lose the Senate, they’ll still have enough to filibuster. The Republicans are not going to have 60 votes. But in 2017—I’m sorry, by '19, if they make progress in the Senate in this election, there's a very good chance they will have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and then they have a complete open field. There’s absolutely nothing to stop them. And that’s a true revolution. I mean, they can restructure the United States from head to toe. But even before that, in these two coming years until that time, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of guns going off, you know, guns held by white men acting as vigilantes, cops who feel more free to open fire against African Americans. Whatever inhibitions may have been imposed on them by the success of the Black Lives Matter movement up to now, I think those will be just stripped away. It’s a very dangerous—

AMY GOODMAN: And the Black Lives Matter movement itself?

ALLAN NAIRN: Oh, my god. I mean, think of it. An Attorney General Rudy Giuliani, or someone like him, under a President Donald Trump? And at the Republican convention, they specifically talked about Black Lives Matter as terrorist. They specifically—and it’s illegal to be a terrorist in the United States.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: So, what we’re really talking about is this is—

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Julianne Malveaux?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: What we’re really talking about is like the end of Reconstruction, when, essentially—

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: —black people lost rights; when state legislatures were empowered; when black men in South Carolina, who were legislators, were lynched simply because they were legislators; when black men were killed because they wouldn’t move out the way, having been empowered by the vote, right to vote, feeling equal, wouldn’t move out of the way when a white person’s walking—white person just goes into their pocket and shoots first, asks questions later. So that’s where we’re at. And the only thing—Amy, I’m looking at FiveThirtyEight, as opposed to The New York Times, and FiveThirtyEight is slightly more optimistic. They’re projecting a 50 percent chance that Hillary will win. So—

EDDIE GLAUDE: And the thing is that—this is the thing. The fundamentals are still there. I mean, unless—her firewalls. She has to lose Michigan, or she has to lose Pennsylvania. Right? Nevada—

AMY GOODMAN: And it looks like she’s winning Michigan.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Right, so, the thing is that they said that even if he wins Florida—at least this is the projections—even if he wins Florida and Ohio, there’s a ceiling. He has to flip one of the firewall states. So, unless—so, what we need to be paying attention to, you know, is we need to be paying attention to Nevada. We need to pay attention to Pennsylvania. We need to pay attention to Michigan. She’s already won Virginia, or they project—they’re calling Virginia. So, it’s one of those states. And I know that they’re saying Michigan is too close to call, although Free Press has already called it. Pennsylvania is still too close to call. But so, I think, you know, this is what I was confused about with The New York Times talking he has a 87 percent chance to win, because all of—all of the data points are still present.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, Wisconsin, she’s dragging—

GREG GRANDIN: They’re worried about Pennsylvania.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: She’s dragging in Wisconsin.

EDDIE GLAUDE: She’s dragging in Wisconsin.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yeah.

DAVID SIROTA: I mean, this is—the Clinton campaign telegraphed that they were worried about Pennsylvania when she was—

ALLAN NAIRN: She’s going to win Wisconsin?

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: No, she’s dragging.

ALLAN NAIRN: Oh, she’s behind.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yeah.

DAVID SIROTA: —when she was in Pennsylvania so much before the end of the election. I mean, I said—I grew up in Philadelphia. And I said to a couple friends back there, “Why is she in Pennsylvania so much?” In a sense, where the campaigns put their candidate is telegraphing what they are concerned about. And typically in a general election, a Democrat shouldn’t have to worry so much about Pennsylvania in the waning days of the election. It’s been a blue-leaning state for a long time. So I think you’re right to say Pennsylvania is where Trump was betting, and clearly Michigan, as well.

I just want to throw out one other point about, you know, if Trump wins, and I think everything that you said was right and true and based in reality, but I also think there’s a flip side, which I think that there is a chance to mobilize against Trump’s agenda in a way that will be harder to mobilize against Clinton’s agenda that progressives oppose, because typically in politics it is easier for the left to mobilize against a Republican president than it is to mobilize against a Democratic president, even in the cases when the Republican president or Democratic president are pushing the same exact thing. That’s not to say, you know, anyone’s hoping for Trump to win, but it is to say the reality of politics is, if Trump is the president tonight, every progressive group in the country will be able to mobilize in a way tomorrow that they may not necessarily have been able to mobilize yesterday.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Except for the fact, if Trump is the president, and they’re projecting that Republicans keep the House, Paul Ryan has suggested this thing called A Better Way. This is why he was so ambivalent—ordinarily, someone who calls somebody a racist would not necessarily embrace them. But his proposal, A Better Way, requires a Republican president that will not veto some of this regressive legislation that they’re looking at. First item on the agenda, of course, is to eliminate the Affordable Care Act. But they’re going down the list and looking at eliminating entitlements. They’re talking about things like food stamps, where you have people who are working full time, full year—full time, full year—who still qualify for food stamps.

AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t Donald Trump say his first act would be to end Obamacare?

EDDIE GLAUDE: Yes.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Yeah, but that’s also the first item on the agenda of Mr. Ryan’s A Better Way, which is something that—it’s a legislative piece that the Republicans have been working on for a while, and they’ve sort of circulated it. Don’t—you know, let’s not even talk about—we just talked about tuition in the previous hour. Let’s not even talk about what happens with colleges and historically black colleges [inaudible].

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking about a different college, the—one thing to note about The New York Times forecaster, they’re predicting Trump will win the Electoral College and Clinton will win the popular vote.

ALLAN NAIRN: Wow.

EDDIE GLAUDE: And Fox just called North Carolina for Trump.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: They did?

EDDIE GLAUDE: Fox did.

AMY GOODMAN: Fox just called North Carolina. Allan Nairn?

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, I think it’s true that if Trump wins, there will be a real activist mobilization, no doubt about it. But, you know, if someone’s pointing a gun at you, you get a surge of adrenaline, but it would be a lot better if they weren’t pointing the gun at you in the first place. And also, you know, initially, at the beginning of a presidency, activists will be free to mobilize. But one of the priorities of a Trump administration will be to immediately start narrowing the legal space that activists have to mobilize. They’re going to start going after people. And after maybe a year, maybe two years, people are going to be worried about things like staying out of prison, possible raids on their offices, you know, basically living under the kinds of conditions that activists live in in other countries.

DAVID SIROTA: And I think there’s a danger to journalists also.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely to journalists, yeah.

GREG GRANDIN: Of course, yeah.

ALLAN NAIRN: Absolutely.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Really. I mean, he’s already talked about libel laws and other things.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: You know, when—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, his wife is already suing a reporter who, she said, libeled her. And he has banned people from attending his news conferences. And when journalists said, “Is this what you’re going to do in the White House, if—with the White House Press Corps?” he said yes.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: You know, but your argument about progressives basically coming together reminds me of the Ronald Reagan coming in, in 1980, and people had that same conversation. You know, Ronald Reagan comes in, we all organize, and we change the conditions, and it brings us together. It didn’t do it. I mean, we did struggle, obviously. There was a lot of pushback. But our tax code was changed. And changing the tax code basically accelerated the domination of the 1 percent. So, we could struggle all we want to, but the tax code was changed.

I’ll tell you a really brief story. When Ronald Reagan became president, students could no longer get food stamps. My sister’s roommate in San Francisco at the time was getting food stamps. She went to get—pick up her food stamps—this is when they really had stamps—and they said, you know, “No, you don’t have them anymore. New president, new day, sayonara, good luck.” And she said—her comment was “Something needs to be done about this man.” Very vague comment. “Something needs to be—” The next morning, the FBI came to her house, and she was arrested. She was taken to jail, because she said, “Something needs to be done about this man.” Now, blessedly, you know, we know people, and phone calls were made, and she was out of there before noon. But just imagine someone coming to your house at 6:00 a.m., took her in her PJs, didn’t even let her change clothes, and—because she said, “Something needs to be done about that man.” In contrast, there’s a minister in Arizona who prayed for President Obama’s death openly, and the FBI finally got around to seeing him sometime in February, but he prayed for his death from his election, past the inauguration, into the middle of February.

ALLAN NAIRN: And the Cliven Bundy people were out there pointing automatic weapons at federal employees. And, you know—

AMY GOODMAN: In Oregon.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, that was the follow-up—

AMY GOODMAN: And before that.

ALLAN NAIRN: —by his family. But on the original Cliven Bundy, you know, action, pointing automatic weapons at federal employees. Now, usually, in a—on the streets, an African American points a gun at a cop, they immediately draw, and it’s not even—it’s not even an issue. In this case, these people didn’t even get arrested. The ones who were carrying—they decided it was the better part of valor to just let the whole thing—let the whole thing slide. But, you know, in a way, if Trump wins—

AMY GOODMAN: And with their weapons in Oregon, they were acquitted.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah. If Trump wins, in a certain sense, and—

AMY GOODMAN: Again, it hasn’t been called.

EDDIE GLAUDE: No, it hasn’t been called.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah. But if Trump wins, and I—

AMY GOODMAN: By the way, Trump did win Florida. It was just called by AP.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Definitively? Yeah.

ALLAN NAIRN: If Trump wins—and I don’t want people to misunderstand this, so I want to say it carefully—in a certain sense, the U.S. will be getting a mild taste of its own medicine, because, for years, overseas, the U.S. has been willing to not only tolerate what is in effect violent fascism, but implement it in country after country after country, in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, overthrowing elected governments and backing the rise of military dictatorships. And, you know, I’ve spent many years in countries like this, fighting against these U.S.-backed killers. But Americans have been living in a bubble, not—barely even knowing that that was going on, and certainly, in daily life, not really having a sense of what it’s like to live under a regime that feels completely unconstrained. But if Trump comes in, we could begin to get a mild taste of what that’s like. And certainly, it will be dramatically new for a lot of the white population. They may, you know, get the curse of having their prayers answered, say, “Oh, Trump, great.” Well, you know, a lot of nonwhite people in this country know what it’s like to feel heat from the authorities, but, you know, all sorts of people can start to feel it now if Trump comes in.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring in Melina Abdullah before she has to leave, organizer with Black Lives Matter, professor and chair of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. This latest news—and I will say that although the Detroit Free Press called Michigan, said that it looks like Hillary Clinton is winning in Michigan, that’s not what CNN is saying. They’re saying it’s looking like she is losing Michigan. She has lost North Carolina, Hillary Clinton. Trump has won in North Carolina and in Florida and in Ohio. Hillary Clinton has taken New Mexico. Your thoughts, Melina Abdullah, at this point?

MELINA ABDULLAH: I mean, I think that it’s really pointing to the really strong possibility that we will awaken tomorrow to a President-elect Trump. And so, what will that mean for us? I think that, one, we really need to unpack how this happened. We need to think about, you know, the failures of really the two-party system, that this lesser-of-two-evils model failed to invigorate folks around—you know, the liberals and leftists were not invigorated by Hillary Clinton. And I think that’s a failure of the two-party system. And I think it demands that we look beyond both the Democrats and the Republicans and kind of reject the duopoly and think about how to move forward from here to construct a system where we can have a president that people can actually be enthusiastic about.

I think the other thing that it points to—and I was listening as folks were talking about what it means in terms of activism. I think what it points to is a real need to have a street campaign, to have an outside model, where we say we’re not solely entrusting elected officials to advance our interests. The people have to organize themselves. And I heard Dr. Malveaux talk about the Reagan presidency. I think that one huge difference that we have right now is that people are already organized. So if we think about the growth of Black Lives Matter and the tens of thousands of folks who are organized under that banner, if we think about what’s happening at Standing Rock and the thousands of people willing to put their bodies on the line, if we think about the awakening of folks over the last three-and-a-half years, four years, I think that we’re seeing people who are ready to move. And I think that if we awaken tomorrow, whether there’s a Clinton presidency or a Trump presidency, I think it reminds us that if we’re going to move forward and really build a just and free world, we can’t entrust elected officials who are really under the thumb of corporate interests, of white supremacy, of patriarchal interests and of heteronormativity. I think that we have to recognize that it is us that’s going to bring in justice and usher in justice. And I think that we can do it. And, you know, for a moment, I think many of us will be kind of disoriented and anxious and depressed and scared and—you know, especially if we have a President Trump, I think we’ll be feeling that way. But I think we have to shake that off really quickly and figure out what it is we can do from the outside to pressure for the kinds of policies and the kind of world that we want to live in.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Melina Abdullah, I want to thank you for being with us. We’re moving into the top of the hour, and I know you have to go, organizer with Black Lives Matter, also professor and chair of Pan-African Studies at California State University, speaking to us from Los Angeles. We’re going to continue with our other guests: journalist and activist Allan Nairn, Princeton University African American Studies Chair Eddie Glaude, NYU Latin American historian, as well, Greg Grandin, David Sirota of International Business Times and Julianne Malveaux. She is former president of Bennett College in North Carolina and author of a new book, Are We Better Off?: Race, Obama, and Public Policy. Also special thanks to Nomi Prins. We’re going to go to Arizona after break and continue this discussion. I’m Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now!

[End of hour four]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman. It is 11:00 p.m. Eastern time; it’s 8:00 p.m. on the West Coast. Polls have just closed in California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, the rest of Idaho, meaning polls have now closed in every U.S. state except Alaska. One a.m. Eastern time is when Alaska closes. In breaking news, the Associated Press reports Donald Trump has won the key battleground state of Florida. CNN is reporting Donald Trump is currently leading Hillary Clinton in the electoral count 167 to 131, with the key battleground states, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan all still too close to call so far tonight. Donald Trump has won Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Mississippi, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, Wyoming and three of electoral—five electoral votes in Nebraska. Hillary Clinton has won Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York state, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia. The New York Times is now predicting Donald Trump has a 94 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, although the Times reports Clinton is projected to win the popular vote.

As election results come in, Dow futures have plummeted more than 400 points, while Asian stock markets have also tumbled. Republicans are projected to retain control of the House. In North Carolina, Republican Senator Richard Burr has beaten Debbie Ross, while in Wisconsin, Republican Representative House Speaker Paul Ryan has been re-elected to his House seat. Meanwhile, in Phoenix, Sheriff Joe Arpaio is losing his race for re-election by 10 points, with a quarter of the votes counted. And in Delaware, Lisa Blunt Rochester has made history tonight, becoming the first woman and first African American to be elected to Congress from the state of Delaware. This comes after Minnesota also made history by electing the nation’s first Somali-American lawmaker, 33-year-old Ilhan Omar.

And in breaking news, CNN reports that Hillary Clinton has won Hawaii and California, while Trump has won Idaho. This brings the new Electoral College count to 190 for Hillary Clinton to 171 for Donald Trump.

We’re joined by a number of guests. As we go around the table, journalist Allan Nairn is still with us, known for his investigative reporting from Indonesia to Guatemala. David Sirota is with us, with the international financial—the International Business Times. Eddie Glaude is professor of African American studies, chair of the department, at Princeton University. And Julianne Malveaux is with us. She was supposed to be going to the Jacob Javits Center, where the big victory party was supposed to be held for Hillary Clinton. We still do not know at this point who will win. Many people have commented that the Javits Center has a glass ceiling. We’ll see what happens with that. And John Nichols is back with us. Usually in Wisconsin, he is a reporter for The Nation magazine, has been following this Wisconsin race closely.

What do you know at this point, John Nichols?

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, it depends on your politics, but if you were hoping that Russ Feingold would get back to the U.S. Senate, doesn’t look very good. As I look at those numbers, I think that what we see from Wisconsin and a host of other states is that Donald Trump has registered unprecedented numbers in rural America. And those rural counties, which everybody forgets about and most of the Democratic Party never pays any attention to, those rural counties are stacking up votes at a level that’s offsetting those higher-than-expected turnouts in the cities. In Wisconsin, where I come from, which has not voted for a Republican for president since Ronald Regan in 1984, Trump is well ahead. He may not win it, because there’s still Dane County, which really does reap—

AMY GOODMAN: Madison.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah, Madison, which reaps a large Democratic vote, is—so it’s about half out, and there’s some other areas.

AMY GOODMAN: Where 150,000 people marched against the governor, Scott Walker, at the state Capitol.

JOHN NICHOLS: We like to say 180,000, but, you know, we won’t—we won’t—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Why not just—why don’t we just round it up to two?

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah. We won’t—as time goes by. And, you know, it’s a very interesting thing, if we might just reference on that for a second. I mean, this is a tough night. We don’t know where we’re headed here. But I will tell you that the other day I watched Newt Gingrich on one of the shows, and they asked him what would happen if Hillary Clinton won, and he said “Well, everybody’s going to—investigations, indictments,” you know, he ran down the whole list, and it’s, you know—and they said, “Well, what would happen if Donald Trump won?” And it was fascinating, what he said. He didn’t paint some pretty picture. He said, “Oh, it’ll be like Scott Walker in Wisconsin.” People will be in the streets. It will be—he will quickly implement an agenda that will be viciously anti-labor, militantly destructive to a lot of the infrastructure on the domestic level of, you know, what we think of as civil society. And this was Gingrich predicting a Wisconsin-type future for the country. I don’t know if Gingrich is right. I usually say he’s wrong. But I think we are looking at something that is very jarring at this point. And it’s a real—it’s something real. David’s written about it a lot. This is—this is the Democratic Party forgetting—just absolutely forgetting about vast stretches of America and assuming that they were going to be there, or at least enough folks were going to be there, and they just weren’t there.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk about James Comey and his influence on this race, the FBI director. Allan, if you could talk about his power in relation to previous FBI directors?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, if it turns out that Trump wins narrowly in the Electoral College, it would be entirely fair to say that the FBI swung the election to Trump. And I don’t think anyone has ever claimed that J. Edgar Hoover swung a presidential election. I mean, Hoover had people assassinated. He tried to drive Martin Luther King to suicide. He blackmailed presidents. But I don’t think he ever swung a presidential election. In the case of Comey specifically, it looks to me like he probably had his hand forced by his people, because the FBI, as an institution, is just as it was in Hoover days. It’s been, I guess, somewhat reformed since then, but it’s still a deeply right-wing institution.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m just going to butt in to say that this is just in: CBS News is projecting Donald Trump has won North Carolina.

ALLAN NAIRN: He saw that his people were going to leak the information about Weiner’s laptop anyway, so he had to come out and say it. So, it’s not so much Comey trying to hand the election to Trump, I think, as the FBI trying to hand the election to Trump.

And it’s really important to note that since the '90s, up until the—there was a period from the ’60s through the ’90s when all sorts of people—the press, the left, liberals—were basically attacking institutions like the FBI, like the CIA, like the U.S. military. But since the ’90s, a lot of liberals, at least, have basically dropped that attack and have started to make these institutions somewhat sacred and not questioning them. And now it's, you know, coming back to bite, in a way. If what you mentioned before, that one projection that says Trump wins the Electoral College, but Clinton wins the popular—if that happens, it will be bitterly ironic, because one of the things that happened in this election was you had Trump, the true revolutionary, the rightist revolutionary, running against Clinton, the candidate of the status quo. And so you had Trump saying, “The system is rigged, the system is rigged,” and then, in response to that, the Democrats basically saying, “No, the system isn’t rigged.” Well, in fact, the system is rigged, but it’s just rigged in the opposite direction than what Trump claims. And if you get that particular outcome—Trump wins the Electoral College, Clinton wins the popular—that was rigged in the Constitution. Rather than having presidential election by popular vote, which is the logical thing for a democracy—

JOHN NICHOLS: And every other country.

ALLAN NAIRN: Just about—you have this—you have this system, which was supposed to be a check. The Constitution is full of various checks on what they used to—they thought of as the mob then. And yeah, so you had this incredible situation where the rightist was the candidate of revolution, and the Democrats were basically saying, “Oh, no, no, no. The system is essentially OK.”

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Amy, FiveThirtyEight is now saying is now saying 61 percent chance that Trump wins the presidency. So they’re—the number has been going up for them. So, it was—

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, if I might—

AMY GOODMAN: So, this is important, because Nate Silver used to work for The New York Times, but now FiveThirtyEight is not with The New York Times, and that’s an important point, 61 percent. And yes?

JOHN NICHOLS: I was just going to say, I’m enough of a student of capitalism to say that I’m actually going to put less faith in FiveThirtyEight or The New York Times and more in the futures markets. And they are running screaming from the room, because, as I think was just well pointed out there, Hillary Clinton was the candidate of a mainstream, of an establishment. You may like it, you may dislike it. You may, you know, have different perspectives.

AMY GOODMAN: Is it fair to say of Wall Street?

JOHN NICHOLS: I think a lot of Wall Street was counting on logic.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: But while you may dissociate from The New York Times and Nate Silver, the fact is that the markets are basically responding to them. That’s why—

JOHN NICHOLS: Oh, no, I’m not in any way dismissing—what I’m actually saying is, there’s your radical confirmation, right? I mean, this is—they don’t move the money unless they think something’s happening.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: But they’re getting the same projections, I mean—

JOHN NICHOLS: They are.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: —that we are, and they’re responding more—when the second Comey letter came out, and they said, “Well, actually, we were wrong, and we don’t have any reason to investigate,” we saw the markets respond. So, clearly, Hillary was indeed the candidate of—basically, of the status quo.

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, and also, one thing to remember about the Brexit vote, if we look back to that, and many of us wrote articles about the Brexit vote, and then we said, “You know, well, you should keep conscious that there can be a hidden vote out there. There can be stuff going on.” Well, the Brexit vote, even folks who were in the markets, in the European markets, who weren’t necessarily fully invested in the European Union, it’s just something shocking happened, something that they did not expect, they hadn’t put into their calculus. And what I’m suggesting is that we are seeing an indication from folks who have to make decisions tonight based on what they think is going to happen. And they are making—they are talking billions of dollars moving all around. This is a—this is something—we are not there yet, and it could definitely shift, but we are—if you watched after the Brexit vote on that next morning, if you watched the BBC, as I did, you saw people in shock.

AMY GOODMAN: AP is reporting that Sheriff Joe Arpaio has lost his bid for a seventh term, after facing criminal charge two weeks before Election Day.

JOHN NICHOLS: There is something good there.

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’re going to be going to Arizona, but right now we’re going to go to Michigan to Dawud Walid, who is the executive director of CAIR Michigan. With 52 percent of the vote in—that’s like just over half—Trump is beating Clinton 48.3 percent to 46.6 percent in Michigan. CNN has predicting—has been predicting that Trump will win. The Detroit Free Press suggested that Hillary Clinton would win. Dawud Walid, welcome to Democracy Now! Your thoughts right now?

DAWUD WALID: Well, it’s still pretty much too early to say who’s going to win the state of Michigan. Detroit, which is still the largest city in the state, about half the vote has been counted, and Detroit is about an 80 percent African-American city. So, there still could be enough votes to push Secretary Clinton over the top to win the state of Michigan. But it’s really too close to call.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re saying Detroit hasn’t been counted?

DAWUD WALID: No, no. All the votes, at last I’d been checking, they had about half of Detroit’s votes still have not been counted yet.

AMY GOODMAN: And your thoughts on whether or not Hillary Clinton wins, or Donald Trump—at this point we can’t be sure—that Donald Trump has surged so much? You work in Michigan, representing the Muslim community, the largest Muslim community inside the United States. Your thoughts tonight?

DAWUD WALID: Well, Donald Trump, in his last week of his campaign, and really in the last few days, he, of course, went back to some things he was saying earlier on in the year, which was Muslim bashing and Arab bashing. He was in Sterling Heights just two days ago, and he was making comments about Arab refugees. He was also in Grand Rapids and made some comments relating to Muslims, as well. And, you know, our—a state that’s close by, Minneapolis, he also made comments bashing the Somalian-American community. So, Donald Trump is tapped into something that I think a lot of Americans have underestimated, which is white nationalism. And between the racism in our country and the economic woes and challenges, especially in Rust Belt states, like the state of Michigan, he’s really stirred up a type of anger amongst people, and Muslims are low-hanging fruit on that tree.

AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of the very hard push that the Clinton campaign made with Khizr Khan, who spoke at the Democratic convention, then he’s been campaigning directly with Hillary Clinton, who lost his son in Iraq? He was an honored war veteran. Of course, the famous image of him holding up the U.S. Constitution and telling Donald Trump to read it?

DAWUD WALID: Yeah, well, Secretary Clinton did do that. And, you know, the American Muslim vote was not going to go Donald Trump anyway. But, you know, her continuing to use Khizr Khan as a surrogate, who knows? That may have had an opposite effect. It may have given her a little push or a little goodwill at the DNC, but as far as those people who were on the fence who don’t like Muslims and kept on hearing that rhetoric and xenophobia from Mr. Trump, perhaps they just exceptionalized Khizr Khan as one particular family, but, you know, looked at the rest of the Muslim community, as well as immigrants and other people of color, as the real threat to our country. So, that may not have helped Secretary Clinton in the long term in her campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think a Trump presidency—again, it has not been called, by any means—but what do you think a Trump presidency would mean for the Muslim American and the Arab-American community?

DAWUD WALID: I think it would be a further erosion of civil liberties that started under the Bush administration, as well as under the Obama administration. I mean, the Obama administration has been very friendly in terms of rhetoric, and he hasn’t said a lot of anti-Muslim comments. But when we look at his legacy of eight years of being the deporter-in-chief of the United States of America, if we look at his controversial surveillance programs and CVE, Countering Violent Extremism, program, you know, I think that Trump would, at best, keep the status quo, but would probably expand as many of those programs that really have negatively affected all Americans’ civil liberties, but in particular have focused on and targeted American Muslims.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Dawud Walid, I want to thank you very much for being with us, executive director of CAIR Michigan. Again, with just over half of precincts reporting, Trump is beating Clinton by a small margin, 48.3 to 46.6 percent, in Michigan. CNN is leaning towards Trump; the Detroit Free Press said they believe that Hillary Clinton was taking this. Allan Nairn?

ALLAN NAIRN: Two things. If Trump wins, in terms of political activism, I think people have to look very seriously about trying to truly take over the Democratic Party. Sanders came somewhat close to doing that. I mean, I was shocked that he got as far as he did. If you look at history—

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s interesting that Bernie Sanders won the Michigan primary.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, yeah.

JOHN NICHOLS: It was a surprise.

ALLAN NAIRN: If you look at history, when a party has a disaster, the other wing of the party, the wing whose nominee was not the cause of the disaster, they tend to take it over. When McGovern was crushed by Nixon, the Democrats started to swing right. Then, later, when Carter failed to win—win re-election, was beaten by Reagan, the Democrats went further right.

AMY GOODMAN: And this just in: Donald Trump has won Utah. Yes, go ahead.

ALLAN NAIRN: And the process basically culminated in the Bill Clinton new Democrat—Democrats, which is this, you know, neoliberal Democratic model that we’re seeing, if it’s not totally collapsing, at least being completely slapped in the face tonight. So, you know, if—I mean, right now, but especially if Trump wins, people, activist people, people who want some decency, have every grounds to say to the Democrats, “Look, get out of the way. This party has to change and go more in the direction that actually speaks to working people.” That’s the first thing.

The second is, if Trump wins, in a political sense, we really have to go on a war footing, because people have to appreciate just how bad it is, especially given the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, there’s the first two years of a Trump presidency, and then there’s the second two years. In the first two years of the Trump presidency, the Democrats will, all but certain, have the filibuster power to block movement through the Senate. But in the second two years, all but certain—or, not all but certain, but highly likely that the Republicans will have such control of the Senate that the Democrats will no longer be able to block. And then, God help us. The things that Trump and a filibuster-proof Republican Senate and Republican House can do, you don’t want to think about it. But keep in mind, you know, people in much of the world live under these kinds of political conditions, leadership like a Trump presidency, and they still manage to stand—many people still manage to stand up and resist. It’s a whole different style of politics. It’s a whole different way of living. But this is the way most of the world lives.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: But the terms and conditions of resistance will be so different—

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes, yup.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: —under a Trump than they would be—I mean, you’re talking—we’ve never, in the United—well, not never. I mean, certainly in the ’60s.

AMY GOODMAN: Julianne Malveaux.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: But, you know, we’ve not thought in the—since the ’60s, of people being gunned down in the streets.

ALLAN NAIRN: Right.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: You know, when the Black Lives Matter young people lay down, remember, lay down in the streets to block traffic or whatever, the expectation is that there will not be shooting, that tanks will not run over them, that people will stop. Under Trump, there will be no such expectation, with a Giuliani as attorney general. I think the only shining light here, if Trump wins, and we’re still—we still have not called this, but the only shining light is what I think Ralph Nader was talking about earlier, when he was with us, is how resistance begins to be organized. If we know now that in 2018 we have, you know, 20 of the—I’ve forgotten the numbers of the Senate seats that are up. I mean 33 up, but, I mean, the number of seats that the Republicans are likely to win. If we know that now and we note that the Democrats forgot all these rural areas, I mean, are these rural areas that Democrats can now go in, starting with a two-year kind of organizing, and say, “Let’s start now, because we know that this is what we need to have happen”?

JOHN NICHOLS: Could I just offer, in agreement with you and somewhat countering my friend, who I’ve almost always deferred to for his wisdom, we have been in a counter—we’ve been in a whipsaw situation politically now for quite a while. When a political party gets to a dominant position, it’s whipsawed. We go back in the off-year elections. We saw that even in 2002 under George W. Bush. The Republicans didn’t do as well, shortly after 9/11, as some people thought. In 2006, they were devastated. In 2010, the Democrats were devastated. In 2014, the Democrats are devastated. Now, I don’t for a minute underestimate money in politics, gerrymandering, a host of other factors. Those are all real, and I think they, often, in this case, benefit the Republicans. But I would say that a President Trump creates the possibility for a whipsaw situation. And where that becomes very significant is someplace we don’t talk about much, which is in the states, where the Republicans, at this point, have their greatest dominance, and this trifecta dominance—governorships and state legislators. There are many states—many of those states, like Michigan, Wisconsin, others, are states that could in fact be more progressive. If the Democrats got their act together, which I would never predict, but if they were to get their act together and you get control of those states, you are drawing—whatever happens in the House and Senate, you are drawing the lines for the 2020 election, for congressional seats and for a lot of other things.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, I agree with that.

JOHN NICHOLS: So, there’s a building possibility. I know you do.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, I agree with that. And I actually think that’s quite possible. But the thing is, if Trump wins, he’s locked in for four years.

JOHN NICHOLS: Oh, he is there, yeah, yeah.

ALLAN NAIRN: And from the federal level, he will be unleashing Attorney General Giuliani or Chris Christie or whoever, even as states—or even if states are swinging the other way. That’s what happened in—happens in times of revolution, times of crisis, when history accelerates, and big changes can happen quickly, and you start getting all these crosscurrents of a kind we haven’t seen here. But, again, this was the way much of the world lives. We’re seeing it now in the United States for the first time in a while.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Christie, you mentioned. It would be very interesting to see if he gets investigated, the New Jersey governor. Two of his top aides were just convicted on all charges. This is around Bridgegate, the shutting down of the George Washington Bridge. And that goes to, for example, also the issue of Sheriff Arpaio. I mean, think about this. He’s been sheriff since 1993. He lost to former Phoenix police officer Paul Penzone, who received endorsements from some of Arizona’s biggest newspapers. Sheriff Arpaio is currently facing criminal contempt of court charges. The trial for the now-ex-sheriff is set for December 6 in U.S. district court in Phoenix. If convicted, the 84-year-old could face up to six months in jail. It’s interesting—yes?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, that is sweet, in spite of everything else that is happening, Sheriff Joe losing and facing the possibility of jail. I just hope they put him in the pink jumpsuit that he used to make prisoners wear, deliberately humiliating. And also, one of his things was, he said he deliberately cut down on the calories of the food he would feed the prisoners, to keep them weak enough to keep them from acting up. That’s basically the same effect that, throughout history, has been effect—in an effect in the poorest countries. In the '80s, when much of Central America was rising, it wasn't happening in Honduras. And what everybody said was that Hondurans are just too hungry to do anything. That was the principle that Sheriff Joe applied to his prisoners. So, I hope he gets a taste, or a smaller taste, of his own principle there, if he goes in.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Lizet Ocampo, who is director of Latinos Vote and manager of political campaigns for People for the American Way, speaking to us from Phoenix. Talk about the defeat of Sheriff Arpaio, what this means, and also what you understand is happening right now in Arizona.

LIZET OCAMPO: Yes, definitely. Well, it’s really interesting. You know, one narrative coming out of this story here in Arizona is that I think we can finally say that Arizona is a true battleground state. I mean, we have a 3—3 percentage point difference, about 40,000 or so votes between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And we see Sheriff Joe Arpaio lost by 10 percentage points. We also see McCain winning by 10 percentage points. And in addition to the Arpaio win, we have another win over here, which was a proposition for the increase of the minimum wage. And that won by 20 percentage points—60 percent to 40 percent.

So we truly see something changing here in Arizona. I think we can talk about why that’s the case. I think a lot of folks compare Arizona to what happened in California with Proposition 187, Pete Wilson, the organization that happened after SB 1070. And there’s been a lot of work on the ground since SB 1070 to ensure that everything is in place for the community to come together to beat Arpaio, for the community to come together to pass this minimum wage increase. And we see great opportunity here to continue to expand that in elections to come.

AMY GOODMAN: Arpaio is known as a major Trump supporter. It’s unclear what the disposition of the Justice Department would be in investigating him, if Donald Trump becomes president, Lizet.

ALLAN NAIRN: Put him on the Supreme Court.

LIZET OCAMPO: That’s a really interesting question. I mean, I think—well, he’s definitely no longer going to be in office. So, that, in and of itself, is a huge win for the people of Arizona and what they’ve had to go through with him as sheriff. I think it will be interesting to see what does happen with his criminal charges.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we also have this breaking news out of Wisconsin: Ron Johnson was just re-elected to the U.S. Senate, beating Russ Feingold. The race was just called.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah, and I think what—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Was it close?

JOHN NICHOLS: No, not close. Not that close. In fact, I—

AMY GOODMAN: You’re very surprised by this.

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, I wasn’t surprised—well, I think I came in and sat down and said I—I’m surprised that this is the result tonight. It was clear when the numbers started coming in. And, look, I have to tell you, Russ Feingold ran as good a campaign as you would expect. I mean, he—

AMY GOODMAN: He was running again for his old seat.

JOHN NICHOLS: He was running for his old seat.

AMY GOODMAN: He had given it up, then was defeated—

JOHN NICHOLS: He lost. He lost.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Spent a lot of money.

JOHN NICHOLS: He had money. He ran a good campaign. And he ran, in many ways—I mean, I hate to say this, but he ran many of the ways that I think we’re sitting at this table talking about. He was counter to some of the, I think, mistakes the Democratic Party frequently makes. And he ran a much more populist campaign. He did, in fact, talk about a host of issues that the Democrats don’t talk about, especially—very close to Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders came twice to Wisconsin to campaign for him. Elizabeth Warren said—essentially said this was—have to get this guy in. And—

DAVID SIROTA: The problem is, is that it’s so hard to defy the top of the ticket, especially as a challenger.

JOHN NICHOLS: I’m going to—

DAVID SIROTA: It’s so hard.

JOHN NICHOLS: I’m going to strongly back what David just said, because I’m just looking at those counties, and I have to tell you, I don’t know every state, but I know Wisconsin pretty well. And I can tell you this: There’s a set of counties along that Mississippi River. They started voting Democratic for Adlai Stevenson in '56. They've pretty well held all the way through. When I see those counties going for a Republican for president, that’s done. The state’s—you know, it’s not going to—the Republican is going to win. And tonight they were going, and Feingold was not able to get out of that. I think that if—as David suggests, if Hillary Clinton was doing well, I think—

DAVID SIROTA: I mean, I haven’t done the math on the map, but I think it will be interesting to look at what candidates, as a challenger—I mean, incumbents can sometimes defy the top of the ticket more often, but challengers defying the top of the ticket is almost—it’s so rare. It’s so difficult, because—especially, I mean, in Senate races, it’s—

JOHN NICHOLS: Very.

DAVID SIROTA: —at least you’ve got a shot. But, I mean, then you go down to Congress, then you go down to statewides, and—

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, look at here in New York state.

DAVID SIROTA: Yeah.

JOHN NICHOLS: New York state’s a state that’s going to vote for Hillary Clinton by a pretty good margin. But in your competitive districts, Trump has done pretty well.

DAVID SIROTA: Yeah.

JOHN NICHOLS: And so, you’re looking at Zephyr Teachout up in the Hudson Valley. Zephyr Teachout is, by any measure, one of those people who I think progressives were desperate to get into Congress, because she’s talking about monopoly, she’s talking about just a host of issues and healthcare. She’s trailing. And I think that on another night she wouldn’t be trailing.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s 11:31, 11:32, as we speak right now. That’s Eastern time, 8:32 California time. Polls have now closed in all U.S. states except Alaska. In the last half-hour, Hillary Clinton won California and Hawaii, while Trump has won Idaho, Utah and the battleground state of North Carolina. Other key battleground states—New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Michigan—are still too close to call. The New York Times is reporting Donald Trump has a 95 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, but not the popular vote. So far tonight, Donald Trump has won Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming and three of five electoral votes in Nebraska. Hillary Clinton has won California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York state, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia. Markets are reacting to the news with the Dow futures plummeting more than 400 points, Asian markets tumbling more than 700 points, the value of the Mexican peso falling.

In Wisconsin, Republican Ron Johnson has won his Senate re-election race, beating Democrat Russ Feingold, who had been backed by Bernie Sanders’ organization Our Revolution.

In Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio has lost his bid for re-election. He’s been the sheriff of Maricopa County since 1993. But he lost tonight to challenger Paul Penzone after a massive grassroots effort led by Latino organizers across Arizona to oust Arpaio, who’s been a major Trump supporter and is currently facing criminal charges for contempt of court. In fact, just today, a high school marched out. The kids were too young to vote, but they voted with their feet. They did a walkout of their high school against Arpaio, holding a banner as they marched down the street.

Meanwhile, California Attorney General Kamala Harris has won her U.S. Senate race in California, becoming the nation’s first Indian-American woman in the Senate and the second black woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate.

I wanted to go back to, oh, The Guardian saying this is “bigger than Brexit.” And if you remember, The Guardian said Brexit was the biggest thing to hit Britain since World War II, now saying this is “'bigger than Brexit': markets, US dollar plunge as Trump takes Florida.”

We’re joined also in the studio in California by Lee Fang, who writes for The Intercept. Lee, you’ve been covering the intersection of money and politics. Your recent piece, “Donald Trump Recruits Corporate Lobbyists to Select His Future Administration.” This is coming closer to possible, though this race has not been called yet. The two candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, are like 20 minutes’ walking distance from each other, Hillary Clinton at the Jacob Javits Center, Donald Trump at the Hilton. Talk about what you know about how Donald Trump is preparing for a Trump presidency.

LEE FANG: Donald Trump was very savvy in constructing his brand as the character that he presented to voters. He was very unorthodox. He cut against the Republican tradition by campaigning to protect Social Security and Medicare, to protect entitlements, that he would fight against big business and lobbyists, he would drain the swamp, that he would reject big money and not have a super PAC. And that’s something that he said on the trail consistently for the last two years, and I think that’s attracted a lot of support for Donald Trump’s candidacy. I mean, I’m seeing some of these exit polls that show that, in some states, half of union households voted for Trump. I mean, that’s an incredible drop-off for Democrats.

But unfortunately for the American people, I suppose, that image that he’s constructed doesn’t really comport with reality. He’s been quietly working to cultivate his own super PACs, his own big money, working with lobbyists. His entire transition team—and that’s the story we published today that you just referenced—almost his entire transition team is run by corporate lobbyists, by lobbyists that represent foreign governments like Saudi Arabia and South Korea. His energy adviser, who’s helping to select his future EPA and energy policy agenda, is a Koch Industries lobbyist. There are pharmaceutical lobbyists who are running his healthcare policy agenda. And this kind of transition team effort is being led by Chris Christie, who is very cozy with the business elite and the Wall Street elite. So, this image that Trump kind of manufactured, that he’s a anti-establishment populist who’s rejected big money, rejected lobbyist influence, it isn’t real, but it’s certainly helped him attract many voters, especially if you look at some of these outcomes in swing states like Michigan.

AMY GOODMAN: Allan Nairn?

ALLAN NAIRN: It’s a very important point about money in politics. Earlier we were talking about Senate races. Remember that because a lot of the corporate elite on the Republican side were uneasy about Trump, they poured their money down ballot into Senate and gubernatorial races, and that’s a massive factor. And it’s very ironic that Feingold is one victim of that, because Feingold was the leader in trying to diminish the role of money in politics, the famous—or at least what used to be the famous McCain-Feingold bill, which they got passed and which cut it back to some extent, but which then collapsed.

But one thing that happened after that was the Democrats started to completely legitimize again the scope of money in politics. Now, they did—they did criticize Citizens United. They said that was the final—that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, Citizens United. But also a key event was when Obama decided not to accept the public finance money, not to accept the limits, because he felt he had to outspend in order to defeat, ironically, first McCain and then Romney. And he was probably right about that. Those—in terms of the tactical challenge he was facing, those were the real conditions. Money is that possible—is that powerful. But once Obama did that, it opened the door.

And this time around, when Clinton—I mean, nobody even talked about the question of whether Clinton would accept public finance and whether she would abide by the limit. It wasn’t even mentioned, because the Democrats had completely accepted, again, the principle of unlimited money. And although, on paper, Clinton did outspend Trump, it was still, in the end, a money election, because most of Trump’s—most money in politics goes for TV in presidential campaigns, and Trump got his TV free.

JOHN NICHOLS: And that’s—I wanted to just pick up on that for one second. I’ve written a lot of books about money in politics and looked at these issues pretty closely, and other people at this table brilliantly, as well. And, you know, yes, it goes to TV. This is a money-in-politics election. But this is also the first election in the new age of media. And we should fully understand that not only did we—did Donald Trump—because he was more entertaining and because media was so obsessed with him, not only did he get hour-long infomercials on cable stations and long periods on broadcast stations, also, they—cable in America, which is a driving force—not, certainly, central to everything—but also a lot of broadcast shifted from a traditional situation, where you might have David Sirota on, and David Sirota is going to say something nasty—well, I know, I’ve realized, we’re unrealistic, but David might say something nasty about Donald Trump, and he might say something nasty about Hillary Clinton, and there might be quite a bit of reality in there. Well, that’s not there anymore. Now it is a absolute surrogate for Donald Trump and an absolute surrogate for Hillary Clinton. And they just argue, and they say, “This is my truth, this is your truth.” Well, it makes it all so unreal and so unfalse that—or, so false that I think the situation of you—money is a big factor, but now we have a new media system, a new media reality. And that new media reality means that if you have sufficient celebrity and prominence to get that wall-to-wall, yeah, you don’t have to raise as much money, but you get the same—you know, it’s the same thing—

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah.

JOHN NICHOLS: —because you come—they are having their parties a couple blocks apart.

ALLAN NAIRN: And there’s media companies themselves are driven by money.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Yeah, and I think John makes a great point here, because it’s the failure of the fourth estate. I mean, to—and we understand the fourth estate to be a crucial dimension of the functioning of democracies, right? And part of—part of what we’ve seen is a complete failure to vet the branding of Donald Trump as a billionaire populist, right? They kind of—they were tickled by the phrase, right? And instead of kind of doing the work that we’ve just heard, kind of looking at—you know, understanding what it meant, you know, personnel—policy is personnel, understanding what this meant, right? They just kind of allowed this to go. And, you know, I witnessed it up close—right?—as one of those persons who found himself on Morning Joe kind of witnessing the way in which Donald Trump was covered.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: But he was very—

DAVID SIROTA: Although I think it’s worth adding, though, there was a lot of great investigative journalism—

JOHN NICHOLS: Fabulous.

DAVID SIROTA: —about Donald Trump.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Granted.

DAVID SIROTA: And I think there was actually less of it about Hillary Clinton.

JOHN NICHOLS: I agree. I agree.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Oh, that’s true.

DAVID SIROTA: And I think—so there’s two points. There’s, one, I think there wasn’t enough investigative journalism about both of them, but there certainly was a lot—within the not-big-enough pie, there was a lot about Donald Trump. The question, the vexing question, now is: Why didn’t much of it land? I mean, that’s the—

JOHN NICHOLS: But—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well—

EDDIE GLAUDE: Repetition.

DAVID SIROTA: That’s the sort of [inaudible]. Why doesn’t it land?

JOHN NICHOLS: No, but I think there’s also an answer. There’s a simple answer [inaudible].

ALLAN NAIRN: Repetition.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: It’s repetition. Now, there are a couple things, though. I mean, Morning Joe is a great example. These folks were thrilled to get a call from Donald Trump.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah, I know.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I mean, it wasn’t that an interview was scheduled, and he came in and did the interview. It was not that a call was scheduled, and he called on time.

JOHN NICHOLS: Absolutely.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: It was that he just might feel like calling, and they would take the call. I mean, you don’t have to take the call.

EDDIE GLAUDE: But Joe came in early, though, with the—with the ban, with the Muslim ban, and said that he couldn’t vote for him. And then, of course, the spat that followed.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: But—

EDDIE GLAUDE: And so, I mean, there is this moment where, you know, that wasn’t the site, so he was just calling into Fox whenever—any time he wanted to.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: Well, and Fox just gave—Fox just turned the network over to him.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Right.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I mean, his best friend, Sean Hannity, and he were talking all the time. But, you know, the second thing, when we look at the whole way this Trump thing worked, there was some great investigative journalism. I think The Washington Post did a good job on some things. The Times broke the story about his tax returns.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Late.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: But business journalists did not look at his business dealings. I still maintain that—I mean, if anybody, he should be—

AMY GOODMAN: And again, this is race is by far—it is not called.

EDDIE GLAUDE: It’s not over, not called at all.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: No, but I—

JOHN NICHOLS: But we’re talking—but I think we’re talking now about—

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: I’m talking just in general. I mean, if you have—

JOHN NICHOLS: —about how did we—what got us to this point, no matter what happens, yeah.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX: If you have a businessperson in there who has cheated as many people as he has, which that didn’t stick, either. The whole Atlantic City story didn’t stick. But I maintain—and I have no knowledge of this; this is pure speculation. I believe he has business dealings with Russia. We have not seen his—the entirety of his international portfolio. We know that Manafort had some relationship with Ukraine.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Manafort being his former campaign manager.

DAVID SIROTA: You don’t even have to look that far, though. I mean, look, we did a story at International Business Times about how Donald Trump, in his defense of himself from his investors that he basically lost their money, that he helped set a national precedent making it much more difficult to file securities fraud suits against Wall Street.

EDDIE GLAUDE: Right.

DAVID SIROTA: It was a story rooted in policy, a story about how Donald Trump didn’t just hurt his investors, but actually changed, effectively, national policy for millions of people. And I thought it was a good story. We did the best that we could on it. The thing was, though, is that I—we knew, or at least I knew, that when you write a story at this point about—that is rooted in policy, that is rooted in things that the TV media—present company excluded—doesn’t care much about, it is particularly difficult to expect stories like that to land, to have traction, to have impact. Part of that is because of the bubbles, that you described, that media creates. But part of that is that there’s something less sensational about a story that may affect millions of people.

AMY GOODMAN: Wayne Barrett is joining us right now on the telephone—

DAVID SIROTA: Speaking of which.

AMY GOODMAN: —who writes for the New York Daily News, The Daily Beast. His 1991 biography of Donald Trump was just republished as an ebook with the title of Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. It’s good to be able to talk to you again, Wayne. We were at your house interviewing you about Donald Trump. Your thoughts tonight at this point? It’s 11:45 Eastern time. The latest news we have, that Donald Trump has won Florida. Fox News has called Wisconsin for Donald Trump. Also, I believe that Iowa—Fox News has called Iowa for Donald Trump. Your thoughts?

WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah, well, CNN has not called it yet. And I don’t think the race is over yet, but certainly it seems to be leaning in Donald’s direction at the moment. I think, you know, it’s—it’s a very, very, very tough night for at least our part of America, very, very tough to believe and to accept. I keep thinking about Bruce Springsteen, strangely enough. The first time we saw him was the last few hours of the campaign, and I think that’s a reflection of how little the Clinton campaign thought about white working-class voters. And, you know, it was—I saw Springsteen interviewed maybe two months ago, and somebody asked him, “Well, why haven’t you been out on the stump like you were for Obama?” And he said, “Nobody asked.” You know? And if you’ve got a messenger like that—they never went to Wisconsin in the whole campaign, and they may lose the election in Wisconsin. So—

AMY GOODMAN: We actually played a clip of Bruce Springsteen being interviewed in Britain about Donald Trump.

WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I’m just using him as kind of an embodiment of how Democrats can appeal to white working-class voters. I mean, this is a tragic failure, even if she pulls it out. It’s a tragic failure of the labor movement to the degree in which it has been—I mean, we’re seeing, remarkably, I think, in county after county—just take Scranton as an example—or sections of the country after sections of the country, where white working-class workers—I mean, voters, were will to vote for Barack, you know, and are now voting for Trump. And—

AMY GOODMAN: This breaking news, Wayne: Donald Trump has just won the key battleground state of Georgia. But keep going.

WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah, well I—yeah, well, I mean, I don’t know why they didn’t call that hours ago, or it seemed to be quite clear from when the tallies were coming in. But it’s—you know, when you look in the Rust Belt and you look in states that should have some white working-class voters for the Democratic candidate, I don’t know whether labor has any kind of an Election Day operation anymore. I don’t know whether or not they prepare for Election Day and get to their members. Some of the exit polls have indicated in some of these states that half of labor members, members of labor unions—excuse me—are voting for Trump. So, you know, this is what is really shocking. It’s certainly something that I didn’t anticipate.

You watch—you know, you watch the guys on television, who have done so much to make this possible, and you realize that the people who believe the polls more than anyone else are the people on television who talk about them endlessly. So I think they thought, “Well, you know, we’ll give Donald a break here. We’ll give Donald a break there. And we’ll keep that part of our audience that likes him.” But they thought, “We’ll still coast to victory here,” because I do think most of the people who are on these shows—I think Donald is absolutely right about that—couldn’t imagine him as the president. But they thought, “Well, we’ll toss a bone here. We’ll toss a bone there. We’ll skip a good story here.” You know, so many. I mean, the Melania story, since he pivoted his whole campaign around immigration, when it turns out that his wife was here illegally, that should be a giant story. It got almost no coverage on television journalism. So many stories.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, what you’re saying—but I think that story came out, Wayne, at the point where James Comey had essentially said—I mean, or at least the media misinterpreted it to be—that Hillary Clinton was under investigation for the new emails that were found. But you’re talking about Melania Trump, when she was here before she got the approval for work. As an immigrant in this country, she made something like $20,000 modeling.

WAYNE BARRETT: Right, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: But I wanted to ask you, Wayne—

WAYNE BARRETT: She violated the immigration laws. And, you know, he built his campaign around immigration. Well, I bet you, if you added up the airtime that that story got, it would be infinitesimal, infinitesimal. And look, in another kind of context, it’s an unimportant story. But if your campaign was launched on the basis of illegal immigration, it is a major, major story, that they just chose to completely ignore. Now, I could cite you 20 examples of that, of very significant stories that got almost no airtime. And this is the canvas on which elections occur. And so, they are responsible—

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about a story—I wanted to ask you about a story you’re covering. And I also want to notify our stations we’ll be going 'til at least 12:30 at this point, Eastern Standard Time, because this election has not yet been called, though it does sound like we're moving in a certain direction. We’re talking to Wayne Barrett right now, who’s one of the leading biographers of Donald Trump, certainly not authorized. But you most recently have been writing about Trump’s relationship with the FBI and his allies within the FBI. Can you talk about this? Because this is so significant. It cannot be underestimated, what happened in the last week with FBI Direct Comey saying they were looking into reinvestigating Hillary Clinton.

WAYNE BARRETT: Well, what I really wrote about was Rudy Giuliani and James Kallstrom. James Kallstrom was the head of the FBI office in New York. And I also wrote about Louis Freeh, who used to be the FBI director, but played a more subdued role in this, stirring up and, by their own accounts, freely talking on Fox about how they were talking, Rudy said with active agents, Kallstrom said with agents directly involved in the Clinton investigations. And, you know, these were not one-way conversations in which the agents just kept them abreast of what was going on. There is what I call the fifth column within the FBI, centered around the New York FBI office, that was pushing Comey. They’re the ones who went to him with the results of the Weiner emails. That’s not my reporting; that’s everybody’s reporting. And they really tipped—they really forced Comey to write the letter, because he knew that these guys were professional leakers, and so he issued the letter to avoid it coming out as a leak of how he was covering up that an ongoing investigation was occurring.

So he writes the letter, and then they manage, in very quick order, to figure out that there’s nothing in the emails, and issued this final letter. But meanwhile, they were leaking all over the place. And certainly, if you just take Rudy at his own word and James Kallstrom at his own word—and Kallstrom is a big Trump backer, known him for 40 years, endorsed him as he received $1.3 million in contributions to his foundation from Trump—and so, the two of them, as Trump agents, were talking to the FBI agents that were working these cases. And there’s no question but that the Comey letter, the initial Comey letter, certainly had some impact on this election. I’m not sure the second letter, coming so late, had much of an imact at all. But yes, that was something that I think was manipulated, in large part.

Louis Freeh is the only FBI director who previously started out as an FBI agent and is beloved by FBI agents across the country. And he was, in the last year—they have an annual event for the FBI office in New York, and he was their guest speaker. And all he did was run the Clintons in the ground in his speech. And, you know, Louis Freeh was appointed by Bill Clinton as FBI director and spent eight years trying to put him in jail. So, it was a jihad going on there with these guys. And it turns out that, in my last story, that Rudy Giuliani has been getting money from the Mercer super PAC, $563,000 his law firm has received from the Mercer super PAC, which is the most anti-Clinton super PAC. They just come out with vile stuff about the Clintons. So that was—you know, it was big part of what pushed this whole Comey exercise that we’ve seen take place over the course of the last 10, 12 days.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m just look at Talking Points Memo, which said supporters of Hillary Clinton are trickling out of the Jacob Javits Center in tears as electoral returns show an increasingly grim picture of her presidential prospects. And this also report from Talking Points Memo: Attendees at Donald Trump’s election night festivities celebrated the announcement of projected wins for Trump by turning on Hillary Clinton and chanting “Lock her up!” Of course, that’s what they were chanting at the Republican National Convention and at so many of the rallies. And it’s what Donald Trump has promised. He said he would seek prison for Hillary Clinton, Wayne Barrett.

WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to be on the top of his agenda, you know, if he beats her. You know, there was that one moment when that chant started at the convention where he corrected the audience. He had stopped doing that, but he said, “Let’s just—let’s beat her,” you know. And I think that’s really where his mind is at. I can’t imagine that, as a president, that he’s going to make a top priority arranging the indictment of his opponent. I just—you know, although so many crazy things have happened that I hesitate to predict that. I think he’s going to have some sort of an agenda where he’s going to try to get something moving along the lines, the terrible lines, that he’s made clear in the campaign are his priorities. This is—you know, this would be a terrible outcome. We all know that. And hopefully there’s still some hope that this election will go another way tonight. You know, Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, you know, some of the networks have not called.

AMY GOODMAN: Wisconsin has been. Wayne Barrett, we want to thank you so much for being with us at this late hour. Wayne writes for the New York Daily News, The Daily Beast. And all should read the biography of Donald Trump he wrote in ’91, that was just published as an ebook, newly titled Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. Wayne Barrett, speaking to us from his home. Our guests are Julianne Malveaux, economist, former president of Bennett College in North Carolina; Eddie Glaude, head of African American Studies at Princeton University; journalist and activist Allan Nairn; David Sirota of International Business Times; John Nichols with us from Wisconsin, here in New York right now, with The Nation. Lee Fang is joining us from San Francisco. And Lizet Ocampo from Latinos Vote, manager of political campaigns for People for the American Way—

[End of hour five]