The journalists at CBS This Morning on Tuesday effectively declared the presidential race over, predicting 341 electoral votes for Hillary Clinton in a likely “blowout.” Citing the CBS News battleground tracker, Gayle King marveled, “The way you’ve got this now, 341 electoral votes for Hillary Clinton. You only need 270 to win. That suggests a blowout.”
CBS News elections director Anthony Salvanto agreed: “It does at this point. It's not over but it does. It's even the case where we're starting to see some reliably Republican states places like Georgia and Arizona that just don't vote Democratic have started to get close and Clinton is within striking distance.”
Neither the CBS This Morning hosts nor Salvanto mentioned other polls, including Tuesday’s CNN poll finding Trump with a slight edge.
A transcript of the segment is below:
CBS This Morning
9/6/16
8:04am ETGAYLE KING: CBS News elections director Anthony Salvanto is with us at the table to break it all down. Good to see you, Anthony.
ANTHONY SALVANTO: How are you?
KING: I'm good. Really good. So, 63 days and counting. What do the numbers tell you as we sit here today?
SALVANTO: Clinton is leading. She is leading where it counts. You’ll see the national polls bounce around here and there. But if you look state by state and this election is won state by state, the story of the summer has been that in all of the states we thought the race might be close, we have seen her take a lead. Sometimes in single digits. Sometimes in double digits. So what that does is makes Donald Trump's road a little harder. And it puts some states a little bit harder — You’ll hear about Ohio, of course. You’ll hear in Florida. He's got to win those states. He's got a narrow path, he can do it, but he's got to start picking them off.
O’DONNELL: But Anthony, the way you’ve got this now, 341 electoral votes for Hillary Clinton. You only need 270 to win. That suggests a blowout.
SALVANTO: It does at this point. It's not over but it does. It's even the case where we're starting to see some reliably Republican states places like Georgia and Arizona that just don't vote Democratic have started to get close and Clinton is within striking distance.
CHARLIE ROSE: And what is the down ballot implication?
SALVANTO: Well, you know what? Poll after poll, Senate races, people say that they think their Republican Senate candidate is a different kind of Republican from Donald Trump. So right now, we don't see Trump being that much of a drag on a lot of these Senate candidates
O’DONNELL: We’ve seen Donald Trump spend the last two weeks trying to clarify his immigration plan, just again saying some undocumented immigrants may be able to stay. Where do you see his polling Hispanic voters? How does that affect him in some of these battleground states?
SALVANTO: He’s not doing well with Hispanic voters. And what that’s done a little bit is its cut him off on that map we were talking about in places like Nevada and in Colorado. It’s hurting him a little bit in Florida, too.
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O’DONNELL: Arizona. Arizona I was surprised to see has one of the highest Hispanic populations in the entire country.
SALVANTO: It does. And in the polling, Hispanic voters say they are more motivated to vote in this election than they have in the past and that's hurting them because they're voting for Clinton. You know, having said that, with regard to immigration, his base likes his policies on it. But when you look at the folks that aren't with him, they don't like his policies.
ROSE: Explain to me what he has to do to win if he can.
SALVANTO: Well, it's not immigration. People who don't like his policies are already against him. Where he does do a little better, in fact, many cases better than Hillary Clinton is on the economy. So, I would not be surprised, he's probably looking at the same numbers we are, if he starts talking about that because he's got a little bit of an edge there fixing the economy over Hillary Clinton which is, in fact, not good news for Clinton. Democrats usually lead on that metric.
O’DONNELL: Which is what his paid media strategy is. His paid ads are about the economy, it’s just what he’s doing interviews on is the immigration.
ROSE: Or he steps on his message.
O’DONNELL: Yeah.
SALVANTO: Or that.
KING: And they both have high negatives, too, Anthony. Have you ever seen anything like this, on both sides. They both have high negatives?
SALVANTO: Literally, no. We have not. But that introduces certainly into this race, Gayle. You look at this big lead but it's fragile. It's fragile because you have a front-runner who is unpopular. You have a front-runner who 38 percent of her voters say they're voting for Hillary Clinton just to oppose Donald Trump. I mean, you need to be an affirmative choice. Right? Nobody ever says, “Hey, who are you voting against this year?”
O’DONNELL: Thank you.
