Electoral Map Trending Clinton's Way
KING: Welcome back. It is hard to overstate the stakes for Donald Trump heading into night's second presidential debate. Even before his caught on tape crisis, the race was trending Hillary Clinton's way. Let's take a look. This our national poll of polls, an averaging of all the national polls conducted in recent days, these are all since the first debate. And, look, Hillary Clinton with a four-point lead over Donald Trump nationally. You see the third party candidates pulling a combined 10 percent. Now, you might say, four points that's not much, and you're right, it's not that much. But let's go back and look at time. Remember, 2012 was actually a pretty competitive race. Hillary Clinton today in better shape than President Obama was at this point in 2012. Thirty days out, that's where we are today, President Obama had a slim one-point lead over Mitt Romney. The day of the second debate the debates were later four years ago. It was October 16th. The two candidates were actually tied on the day of the second debate. So tied in this race a four-point lead in this race, no question, Secretary Clinton right now in a better position at this point of the race than President Obama was four years ago, especially when you go and take a state by state look. Now, this is our current electoral map. If the election were held today, we believe Secretary Clinton would win the dark blue and blight blue states, and had enough to be president. The gold states are the remaining tossup states. Even if Donald Trump won tossups, it wasn't enough. He would have to turn something on this map that is blue red. And guess what? Just in the last weeks, polls in Nevada showing Clinton ahead. Polls in Ohio, a tight race, but the latest has Clinton with a small lead. Polls showing Clinton pulling slightly ahead in North Carolina and in Florida. At the moment, Donald Trump needs to win them all, she's leading in them all. You cannot overstate the stakes tonight for Trump. His team scheduled a practice session the other day in New Hampshire. Trump insists that's not what it was at all.</s>TRUMP: They were saying this is practice for Sunday. This isn't practice. This has nothing to do with Sunday. We're just here because we just wanted to be here and, you know, Hillary frankly they talk about debate prep. That's not debate prep. She's resting. She's resting. I want to be with the American people. I want to be with the people from New Hampshire. And she wants -- she wants to win.</s>KING: Now, let's remember that event was before this whole caught on tape moment broke, even before that, the stakes were pretty high tonight. What does Donald Trump say behind us on this stage tonight when this issue comes up? I assume it comes up out of the gate.</s>RESTON: Well, I mean that that's what they have been huddled trying to figure out over the last 24, 48 hours. But this is not an easy format. I mean, the town hall format first of all the town hall he had in New Hampshire the other night was not a town hall by any stretch of the imagination. You don't get like hand-fed friendly questions at a New Hampshire town hall. But there are so many things that you have to do in this kind of format. You have to appeal to the audience members. You have to show empathy. You have to at the same time land your attacks on your opponent, and Donald Trump has this whole overlay of potentially questions about this coming up throughout the entire course of the evening.</s>KING: Can he go where he's gone in some of these statements? In his first paper statement --</s>HENDERSON: Yes.</s>KING: -- issued by the campaign and then in the video he released and twice retreated -- retweeted excuse me a woman who says 30 plus years ago Bill Clinton sexually assaulted her. Can he do that? I understand some people feel past and everything, but the question before us today is his behavior.</s>HENDERSON: I mean, he can do that, right? I mean, he certainly has done it off stage. The people around him, people like Roger Stone, people like Bannon, people like Rudy Giuliani, it seems like their instinct will be to go there. We'll hear from Rudy Giuliani later today. I think Kellyanne Conway hasn't been out in public talking about this. He's done things unexpectedly before, right? I mean, he's very unpredictable. But again, I think to Maeve's point, it's so hard to do that. It's also a matter of we're in a different time, right? Bill Clinton he was impeached. He was highly scrutinized. He paid something of a price for that and to bring that up now, it doesn't take away blame from Donald Trump.</s>RESTON: And think about all of those reaction shots in the town hall tonight. I mean, this is not a warm Donald Trump crowd. These are undecided voters who are coming there to pose questions to candidates. And the people at home, you know, if he were to go on that kind of an attack are going to be watching those people in the audience and what they're feeling, how uncomfortable they're feeling. I don't think that that can be discounted in terms of how that affects his performance.</s>BALZ: I don't think -- I don't think we should assume that he won't do it.</s>RESTON: Right.</s>BALZ: But I think that we should assume that if he does, it could cost him more support among the Republican rank and file as well as the rank -- the leadership. It's a very dangerous thing for him to do this. I know that they would like to do this. They clearly want to go in that direction. They want to turn this against her. Not just against Bill but against Hillary Clinton and talk about her as an enable of Bill Clinton's behavior. But it's so difficult for him to do that. I do think -- I mean, we have this notion that the town hall debates are constricting. I have a feeling that this will be less constricting in part because I think both Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz who will be moderating, they will be players as well as the people asking questions from the audience.</s>THRUSH: But I also think he is such limited political performer. I mean, we tend to sort of think of him as being this sort of consummate showman. But, you know, this is not an environment unless the rules have change where you can remove dissenters from the crowd necessarily, right? This was sort of his favorite technique to deal with that, and talking to the Republicans over the last couple days. There was feeling maybe 24 hours ago, before the cascade of defections, that if he really appeared on bended knee and really expressed deep contrition about this and had a more fulsome discussion of this, but that isn't who Donald Trump is. So, he cannot rebrand himself on the stage tonight. People won't let him do that.</s>BALZ: I think there's another aspect to this, that is what happened in the first debate. I mean, her ability to get under his skin time and time and time again, there's no reason to expect she's not going to try to do that same thing tonight and how will he be able to control himself to be more disciplined than he was the first time. There's so much in his head at this point.</s>RESTON: That's what his advisers have been trying to dos to -- to the extent they can get him to prep for debates is to try to get him to resolve not to go down those rabbit holes that she led him down so successfully in the last debate.</s>KING: To do what Pence did, when you ask him about something, you just turn -- pivot to e-mails, pivot to Clinton Foundation.</s>KING: The interesting thing also is that Hillary Clinton has not said anything publicly about this. All she has done -- she did do a tweet I believe it was Friday afternoon after the tape broke and said this is horrific. We cannot allow this man to be president. But her campaign made a conscious decision not to put her out yesterday, to not have her say anything, because they saw that Republicans were flailing their own nominee. There's not reason --</s>HENDERSON: And they also kind of cautioned Democrats not to get out there too far to let her have her first fulsome statement on this tonight on this stage. And in some ways that is what they've done all along, right? If you think about August, they kind of just let Donald Trump be out there and hang himself. Even in that first debate between the two of them, she hung back. I mean, she was almost operating about 30 percent and letting him just talk and talk and talk.</s>KING: Another quick point and we'll talk more as we go through the rest of the hour, but as we talk about the metrics of campaign and the nuts and bolts of campaign, 30 days, the election is 30 days from today. Now, Donald Trump's campaign promised well before all this happened, they were going to spend $100 million on television in the final days of campaign. Well, we can show you, they only reserved 45 million. They've actually pulled back in some markets. There is not a chance Donald Trump will be able to raise the money to be competitive on television unless he finds a way to put this behind him. You mentioned bended knee. I was e-mailing with a bunch of donors yesterday, including people who loved her. Now, some of his biggest that said, we're with him. We're gong to fight with him. But unless they're willing to put up a lot more money, Donald Trump's campaign was already in trouble with fundraising. And I can assume this is going to be a big problem.</s>THRUSH: She raised 150 -- roughly $150 million in the month of August. It was a high risk strategy. She really let him back into the game by going dark for most of the month of August. But, you know, for example I was in Colorado over the last couple of days and I had, of course, CNN on loop as always I do in a hotel room or --</s>KING: Bless you, child.</s>THRUSH: And I saw a few Hillary Clinton ads and few generic GOP ads. I did not see a single Donald Trump ad.</s>KING: Everybody sit tight. Much more to talk about. Donald Trump says the reprehensible comments caught on tape are on aberration, not who he is. We go through the tape library and you make the call next. Please take our INSIDE POLITICS quiz this morning. Who do you think will do a better job in the town hall debate setting, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton? Vote at CNN.com/vote.