Senator Kamala Harris. And now warning signs show Trumps Campaign can use all the help it can get. Just an hour ago nbc news and the wall street journal released a poll showing biden with a staggering 14 points lead, this is up from an 8 point lead before the debate on tuesday. The poll was taken after the trump debate but before trumps diagnosis. Another poll from the New York Times draws a similar conclusion. That voters were turned off by trumps aggressive behavior at the debate. In that poll biden is ahead by a comfortable margin in both florida and pennsylvania, swing states for trump the last four years ago. Joining me now is virginia senator and former democratic Vice President president ial candidate tim kaine to break it all down for us. Senator, thank you for joining us. Absolutely, maria teresa. I want to talk to you because everybody right now is obviously talking and concerned about the president s health and talking about the importance that he may be actually accessing different therapies than other individuals have even though they, too, are suffering from covid. What can you talk about the asymmetrical Health Care System that we live in that even Chris Christie can step in and check himself into the hospital with covid systems when we know that millions of americans are unable to do that. Maria teresa, it shows as graphically as it can that we still have huge inequities in our Health Care System. Look, we want the president to recover, we need him to recover from this because the last thing our country needs now is, you know, more chaos and uncertainty and we want him to get the best treatment possible so thats all good and we have such great practitioners and institutions like walter reed, but the problem is so Many Americans dont have that access and as fate would have it, right after the election in november, the Supreme Court is taking up the trump administrations efforts to destroy the Affordable Care act, to take Health Insurance away from millions, to leave those tens of millions with preexisting conditions out in the cold and you just couldnt, you know, heighten in a more dramatic way the dangers of a policy that would strip more americans from their health care at a time of such suffering. Lets pray the president recovers, but lets also pray for a realization now that we need to be giving more americans access to health care, not less. Absolutely. And i also want to talk a little bit about how there was this confusion on what the president s doctor was saying and his chief of staff was saying. I used to be a congressional staffer. Nothing was ever read without multiple eyeballs looking at a document. Can you talk a little bit about that process because i think folks are genuinely confused. Maria teresa, im confused. But this is just kind of part of the package with these guys, the mixed messages around covid, the mixed messages around so many things. So yesterday the president s physician, you know, basically painted a very sunny picture about how the president was doing. Thats great. But then there was a first and a main source and it was later revealed to be the chief of staff mark meadows who talked about the fact that there were really troubling signs with the president and particularly with respect to a drop in blood oxygen level, which is one of the most troubling aspects of coronavirus. Theres also significant confusion over when the president realized he was sick and then thats relevant because he was doing all these Public Events at the golf course in bedminster, certainly the flights with staffers and others this week, and now we see all these Senate Colleagues of mine coming down with covid. So theres just a real significant level of confusion about exactly what went on, when the president knew he was sick and was he exposing others after he should have been quarantining in the white house. I think the timeline is quite important but i want to talk about your colleagues in the senate right now that have been diagnosed with covid and others that are selfquarantining. That disproportionately make up the judiciary committee. Were now hearing from your colleague Mitch Mcconnell that he wants to actually undertake Virtual Committee hearings for processing the Supreme Court the potential Supreme Court justice. Whats your take on that . Well, to take your last question first, there is no way we should do a Supreme Court nomination hearing virtually, everybody should be there in person. This is the single most appointment that the senate makes in its advise and consent role as somebody to have life tenure on the Supreme Court and we shouldnt do this virtually and we also shouldnt do it until everybody can safely be in the room together. Thats only fair. Well, and i think a lot and i think a lot of these Committee Hearings folks dont realize when you are in the room you get a different sense of something. You get a different sense of what the person is doing and in some cases you could actually disrupt it as we saw during kavanaughs hearing of protesters and you lose those elements. Are you concerned that by doing virtually that you would actually basically be red lining what the American People are actually seeing and actually experiencing . Yes, and you also make the senators less able in their questioning because when we are in Committee Hearings live, we usually have Staff Members sitting right behind us who are reminding us, hey, here is what needs to had a. Or you should ask this. As a former hill staffer we are your external hard drive. But in the virtual hearings that we do now, for example, im in a room by myself, my staff might send me a text that i may or may not get when im talking to a witness, plus you see somebodys credibility live in a way you dont in a virtual setting and the credibility and honesty and character of somebody is much easier to assess when youre doing it live. So we need to do these live and we shouldnt do them live until we can safely do them live. And so i would be remiss if i did not ask you when you were prepping for against a debate with Vice President pence, what is your suggestion for Kamala Harris . How can she prepare . We know that Pete Buttigieg is sitting in as mike pence, sweet jesus, is that not ironic, but id love to get your take on what advice you would give her. A hoosier sitting in for another hoosier. Look, i think kamala is going to do very well but you have to remember the Vice President he was a radio talk show host, he made his living as a you know, as a communicator before he was in politics and so shes got to prepare for that. Shes very, very good, but here is a key thing, maria teresa, thats very different, in 2016 both tickets were neither were incumbents so the debates were largely about here is what we will do if we get the chance. The trump pence ticket is an incumbent ticket so it gives Kamala Harris the prosecutor the ability to argue evidence. 10 million jobs lost in the last year, 200,000 plus people dead, the deficit and debt exploding, social unrest unlike weve seen in the 1960s and she gets to look at a Vice President and say you are the head of the Coronavirus Task force, are you going to apologize to the American Public for how poorly this has been handled . She gets to argue evidence and that was a different feature four years ago when neither ticket was an incumbent. I think youre absolutely right. Pence is going to have to answer to those lives lost as well. Thank you, senator kaine, for joining me. And now joining the conversation tim owe brian, senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and author of trump nation and aaron haines. Tim and erin, thank you for joining me. What did you take, tim, on the advice that we just heard from senator kaine to Kamala Harris . Well, i think hes right that she needs to be prepared for who mike pence is on a debate stage. You know, he is very calm on a debate stage, he knows how to talk soothingly into a microphone because he is a former radio host, and i think they shouldnt underestimate his presence on a debate stage. I think he was very effective against senator kaine in 2016. Having said this having said that, hes also completely right that the entire nature of this debate is not only transformed by the fact that trump and pence have a record they have to defend and a lot of problems they have to defend, while mismanagement, racism, faulty leadership and trumps own personal lawlessness, this all now gets swept up into trump coming down with covid, which only makes that an issue that they were trying to avoid and now gets highlighted. I think as long as harris has done her homework and is in command of the facts shes going to be in a very strong position against him, but she cant take him lightly. Tim, that checklist you did was basically you could have a news story for each one just in the past week. So i want to bring erin into the conversation. We are finding now that the rnc and the white house are refusing to provide full disclosure for Contact Tracing purposes specifically in new jersey where at the fundraiser staff was exposed, staff that were highlighted that were living in multigenerational families. We know that this covid epidemic has sadly hit the latino and africanamerican communities disproportionately, most of the workers we could actually say were perhaps of immigrant families and thats why they were talking about the alluding to the multigenerational. How irresponsible is this of the president and is this just along the lines of the disregard of what they have for the American People . Well, maria, i think that maria, i think that the reason that transparency is so important here is because of this administrations complicated relationship with the truth, frankly, on a range of issues, including the pandemic. You have had people like senator Kamala Harris calling for that racial data on the pandemic, the impact of the coronavirus which we know is disproportionately affecting black americans, latinoamericans and yet, you know, that was something that was not initially available having that proof so that resources could be appropriately delegated has been important in this moment. So, you know, i think that, you know, seeing that that information now is not coming out of new jersey, you have journalists doing better Contact Tracing frankly right now in the past 72 hours, you know, that is going to be very important for people to kind of understand what is going on, not only with the president s health, but the people who also may have been impacted in the past several days who may have come into contact with him or others who may have been sick. But, yeah, i think this sets of stage for this debate, as tim was saying, you know, you had Vice President pence as head of the Coronavirus Task force and yet we dont know i cant remember the last time there was a briefing from that task force and so he should be coming into this week touting, you know, what he did as head of the Coronavirus Task force, but instead were talking about this administration which includes him and their handling of this pandemic whereas you have senator harris as somebody who has been really, you know, talking about the pandemic nonstop since she has become the nominee and even as a senator before that, pushing to address some of these disparities and the inequalities that have been laid bare by the virus. Tim, picking up on that, what advice do you have for Vice President biden right now . We are hearing of course that he was going to pull back a lot of these ads because he wants to respect the health of the president until we learn a little bit more, but at the same time trump is going full force it sounds like, at least his campaign is, with a new maga. What do you say to the Biden Campaign given these developments . I thought it was in keeping with joe bidens character and optimism that when all of this stuff swamped trump around covid19 over the last two days, biden pulled down his negative ads, he and jill biden sent well wishes to the president. And i think joe biden occupying a higher moral ground and a higher ethical ground than the president is a good place for him to be because i think people are worn out and tired of Donald Trumps caustic, chaotic and destructive behavior day in and day out. I think another thing that biden has going for him is i dont think people doubt his authenticity or his sincerity. Errin is not only smarter than i am, but shes also more polite than i am. I would not phrase it as a complicated relationship to the truth, i would just say that they lie repeatedly and, you know, this administration errin, im sorry, but i actually have to go with tim on that. You know, they spin, they lie in order to try to bury negative stories and the interesting thing about whats happened this past week is the tax issue on monday, it was in the numbers, it couldnt be denied, on a debate stage wednesday night he was asked to disavowed white supremacy, he couldnt, and then lo and behold on early friday morning a Global Pandemic that he has repeatedly called a hoax rolls not only into the white house but into his own body and he cant deny those things anymore. Joe biden is in a position to simply observe the facts, highlight trumps failed leadership and reassure americans that hes going to bring a team of adults into the white house instead of a group of rank amateurs who cant shoot straight. So, errin, you talk a lot about women voters and how they are perceiving this epidemic and how its hitting the president disproportionately. What do you expect from Kamala Harris to persuade more women because she already has them, but more women to actually fall into the biden camp . Well, i think, you know, the biden harris ticket is one that is doing better with women voters, were seeing that in poll after poll, this latest nbc wsj poll is showing a 27 gender gap. The gender gap is going to be the story in the home stretch. We are now less than 30 days out until this election and we are seeing in poll after poll that women are powering this election and i think that the pandemic is absolutely political for them, not only from the Public Health perspective but from a economic perspective. We saw 865,000 women dropping out of the workforce in september, we just learned that news on friday, and, you know, we know that a lot of that is because they are working from home and homing from work, so theyre viewing this pandemic as theyre headed to the polls seeing the precautions that they are taking, navigating child care as theyre trying to, you know, maintain a career, they are the essential workers, they are frontline workers and all of that, you know, is happening as they are finding out about this president s diagnosis and, you know, thinking about all the precautions that they are taking, you know, as he has not really followed guidelines and modeled the type of behavior that a lot of them are doing in their homes and trying to do for their own families. I do think that that absolutely is having an impact on this election and will continue to do so in the final weeks. I absolutely agree and i think that errin, what you are highlighting is the fact that women are fed up and we always have to ask ourselves do we actually trust the president to take care of our families. Thank you tim obrien and erri. Thank you. Tomorrow at 8 00 p. M. Eastern lester holt will host a live town hall with joe biden live from miami right here on msnbc. Wednesday dont miss our prime time coverage of the Vice President president ial debate beginning at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Coming up, we ask our doctors to separate fact from fiction about trumps diagnosis. Fiction about trumps diagnosis. This is the feeling of total protection now that we protect your identity, mobile phone, auto, home and life youve never been in better hands allstate click or call for a quote today youve never been in better hands allstate verizon knows how to build unlimited right. Start with americas most awarded network. Im on my phone 24 7. 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