It or not, for holding one of the toughest seats in a swing district along the border between texas and mexico. He is one of six republican incumbents to retire in the last two weeks. And the third House Republican from texas not to seek reelection. Hurds departure leaves his district the largest in texas and a majority hispanic one as well vulnerable to democrats looking to make headway in the lonestar state. Joining me now is the dc bureau chief for the Texas Tribune abby livingston. I know you cover this and know this better than anyone. Lets start with what the reaction has been to hurds surprise retirement. I saw your tweet. It is blowing up as you said, with all kinds of strategists calling you. Tell us more about what youre hearing. I mean, its borderline panic both in texas and in National Republican circles. The official line from the house Gop Campaign Committee is theyll fight hard for this seat and it is a seat that they can win in good circumstances. But hurd is a uniquely talented and hard working candidate. He raises a ton of money. Every friday night he is flipping a coin at a High School Football game and this huge district that is extremely hard to represent. So there is just a real sense this is going to be a hard seat to hold on to but that someone who cares that much and works that hard is ready to leave congress is the bigger question and bigger issue for republicans right now. That is a really good question. Do you know the answer . Why is hurd, who was once seen as the future of the gop when he won his district back in 2014, now deciding that he is going to leave at a very critical time for his party . I think he still perceives himself as the future and part of that is not having to go to votes every single day and having to answer questions about donald trump and that this may be something about waiting this out, seeing where the party goes after trump leaves office, whenever that happens. And being able to still reach out to general election voters at a later date, which could be years from now. I think its a sign of his youth that he is still very ambitious. What does this say about the state of the Republican Party that someone like him who had so much potential wants to distance himself from everything that is happening with this party in washington, d. C. At the moment . I think it shows the u. S. House Going Forward for the next few years is going to be full of trump loyalists. Hurd has been one of the few texans willing to speak out against the president , and so i think it says if you want to be in the u. S. House youve got to be on the trump train Going Forward. Interesting. All right. Abby livingston live in washington, d. C. Thank you very much for that. I want to turn now to our nbc road warriors following the 2020 candidates this morning. Nbcs ali vitale is in washington, d. C. And Garrett Haake is in new york following senator cory booker. I know youre from texas and youve covered both texas politics and spent a lot of time on capitol hill so you have both ways in being able to explain how big a deal is it that congressman hurd is retiring . Its really hard to over state. The fact that republicans will almost certainly lose that seat in texas is probably the smallest of the implications here. Hurd was the last republican representing any stretch of the u. S. mexico border so now republicans lose a credible voice on border issues. As abby pointed out he is also the only africanamerican member of the republican conference. There are only about a dozen women left in the republican conference in the house. The Republican House conference now is almost entirely just white men. If youre a party who is trying to expand the map anywhere else, losing someone like will hurd is really disastrous for republicans in the house. Lets switch gears and let me get you to comment a little bit about what you are covering in detroit. That is cory booker. He held his first post debate rally last night. How was the crowd and has the senator been successful in turning his debate performance into some momentum . Some were saying he actually came out of that debate as one of the winners. Has that actually translated into anything on the ground . Reporter it has. This was a well choreographed move by the booker campaign. They held a proper rally in downtown detroit. They had a young, diverse crowd. The crowd was high energy. So was the candidate. You want to have a big event like this t aate because right now youre staring down the barrel into august. Its traditionally the slowest campaigning month, the slowest fundraising month. If you feel you had a good debate or even if you didnt you want to capture as much of that bounce as you possibly can. As you said, bookers performance was widely praised. The Campaign Says they raised more money in the first 24 hours immediately following the debate so ending last night than in any other 24hour period including the campaign launch. That is big. But it is very difficult to sustain. So trying to kind of get one last bite at that apple with one more big rally here in detroit last night was certainly helpful as we now head into the long, hot summer. All right. Garrett, stay with me a second. I want to cross over to ali vitale in d. C. Where already as we are breaking down and analyzing what just happened in detroit we are already looking forward to the next debate in houston. We know at least one more person will be there because the threshold has gotten a lot harder for some of these candidates. What have you learned about who else is joining that stage, ali . Well you mentioned the threshold. When you put it up to at least 2 polling and 130,000 donors youre effectively doubling the things these candidates need in order to make the debate stage. It threatens to have the number of people who make the stage and can make their pitch to a national audience. We reported first this morning Amy Klobuchar has met the 130,000 donor threshold. She had already met the polling threshold. She is now the eighth candidate who is going to be on that stage. The really interesting thing about Amy Klobuchar is the way in which she was on the debate stage this past week in detroit she didnt attack many of her other candidates. That is something that kind of made it hard for her to have one of those pop out moments because we see the things that tend to catapult off the stage are those moments of division between the candidates. But klobuchar took a very different approach highlighting last night on Lawrence Odonnells show she is there to highlight how she is against trump not necessarily against other democrats. That does make it hard to stand out in the field. But i remember when she first announced and i remember the announcement in a blizzard. Im still thawing out from that. There was a lot of excitement from democratic strategists and donors about this midwest messenger with a midwest message. Im interested to see if once the stage gets a little smaller the message will percolate out a little more. That announcement should qualify her for at least several rounds of the debate because it shows grit. Thank you. Joining me now to weigh in is matt bennett the Senior Vice President of the think tank third way. He has worked on multiple president ial campaigns over the past three decades. The senior Political Correspondent at the hill and the senior director of programming for sirius xm and an msnbc political analyst. Let me begin with last night. Essentially what you saw, which was really interesting at this rally in cincinnati, ohio, he really went after joe biden. He always goes after him but it seems he carved out a little more time for joe biden in last nights event calling him sleepy joe and attacking him. Here is the interesting thing. I want to play you what joe biden has said after his post debate performance the other night. Watch this. If i get the nomination, i will win michigan. I promise you that. I will win pennsylvania. I will win ohio. I will win these states that he got 72 extra thousand votes on to give himself an election. Look, folks, its not there was this great migration to him. It didnt occur. Were talking about 72,500 votes in three states that changed. All right. So a lot of votes up for grabs in ohio at least so to speak. Biden seems to be pretty confident he is going to win based purely on his electability. Is he risking or over reaching with the i am the most electable guy and i will easily win michigan, ohio, and pennsylvania . No. Its an argument thats worked for him. When he looked back at 2016 he used to kind of grumble to aides and anyone who would listen that the Democratic Party kind of turned its back on these voters and he would have been able to sort of captivate them and bring them home. Thats something that has always been. He thinks that those people are his base and he is going to zero in on that. Its really only 70,000 plus votes and so he thinks he can get it. You know, he is sort of running that strategy already where he is focused on those states where he feels like he can win just on those states, specifically. So to that point, if he is relying on the socalled Obama Coalition that turned out in 2008 and 2012 and put them in the white house does he risk at least a little bit of alienating the younger vote that needs to also be energized . Because he had a huge and substantial lead when he got into this race with the africanamerican vote. That has diminished so the criticism sometimes against biden is he just doesnt energize new voters to come out. I think that is a risk and i think when i think about 2016, it was such a small margin and, basically, every single reason you could list out as to why the outcome was what it is, is correct. Right . Part of that was the turn out of Young Millennials of color. I think i can sort of telegraph that joe biden may have some of those same challenges because of the crime bill and other pieces of legislation he supported over the years. And, also, the fact that he hasnt adequately defended those positions and said what he is going to do to rectify some of those negative consequences. And i think that the turnout piece is critical. Because youre talking about a small margin and youre also talking about hundreds of thousands of black americans in wisconsin who are suppressed by the voter i. D. Law and then youre also talking about those voters that chose to stay home or vote for jill stein. There are a number of different factors at play. I dont understand the math behind trying to tailor your message toward a small group of white, working class voters, when you could tailor your message to the emerging majority of young people of color. Thats actually the base of the Democratic Party women of color. I think that every candidate should be thinking about that as theyre framing their message. I think if history shows us anything, its that the Democratic Party has not won the white, working class vote. Since 1964. It will be interesting to see how that goes into the calculation. Matt, we saw a lot of attacks on the legacy of former president barack obama. Its caught a lot of people by surprise and is something the former president himself predicted and warned against a couple months ago. Could that come back to hurt the party in the long run that they are going after the obama legacy in some ways to spite the biden candidacy . Yes. I was outraged by these attacks on obama as many of us were. We better see it stop. I think we will. You saw a lot of backtracking yesterday in the wake of that debate from some of the candidates who engaged in some of those attacks. What theyre going to have to do is find ways to put daylight between themselves and their rival, joe biden. Thats legitimate. Without attacking barack obama. That is not legitimate. Democrats do not want to hear that obama was a failed presidency, that the aca wasnt a really good piece of legislation. Now, there may be there are real differences of opinion about what we do Going Forward. But i think those kinds of attacks on the legacy of a very successful democratic president are not going to play well either with democrats or with the general electorate next year. Matt, before we start looking and talking about the debate coming up i want your thoughts quickly about william hurd stepping down or i should say not seeking reelection after his term is over. How much of a Significant Development is that for the democrats in their attempt to try to retain control of the house and going after his seat in the next midterms . I mean, it is huge for all sorts of reasons. First of all, hes one of the few relative moderates. Hes not that moderate but hes not very radical and is one of the few relative moderates left in the conference. They used to be like the buffalo and roamed in great numbers. Theyve been hunted into extinction. Now the caucus is very radical. There will be no African Americans left in the House Republican conference. There are more men named jim than women running for election as republicans in the house. To the point about the electorate, it is going to be very difficult for the House Republicans to win if the only people they are presenting as candidates are white men. This is a huge problem for them immediately and an even bigger problem for them down the line as america becomes more diverse. Lets look ahead at some of the contenders going up for the second debate in houston in september. Who really is on the line here to try to make that threshold . Who needs to have a breakout performance . Are we going to see this field completely shrink to the final set of horses in this race . I think there are only eight right now in this race. Amy klobuchar joining today becoming eighth. Julian castro is sort of on the cusp. He twoonts have a break out moment and hasnt been able to. Hes hung on to immigration as his one issue. That hasnt happened. A lot of candidates. This field is going to be split in half basically because its going to be a really tough climb for people to make that measure. They did that on purpose obviously. They got to do that by august 28th. What can the second tier contenders do between now and august 28th to get on to that debate stage . Decide to run for senate. Probably the first step. To be clear, i think whats interesting is youre seeing the drop off is going to be white guys basically. I think that is an interesting dynamic when talking about a party that is growing more diverse and we want to see representation that looks like us on the stage not just, you know, weve lived through hundreds of years of just having one example of what it looks like to be a leader. And its about time that we have to change that dynamic and i think what you saw this week especially when the subject turned to womens issues, you saw two women on the stage challenging joe biden. I thought that was a really important moment that reflected why its important to have representation on the stage because they talk about policies in a really different way. All right. Thank you so much. Matt, stick around. Were going to talk to you again in a little bit. Crossing back to cincinnati where the president held another Campaign Rally last night a lot of focus was on what would happen with the crowd after the last rally and those racist chants of send her back. That didnt happen last night. Give us a little bit of atmosphere and what you saw in the tone there. Reporter you know, it was clear that the president sort of wanted to address the chants from two weeks ago in North Carolina and so he said and went out of his way to say im not going to name the four members of congress to sort of avoid that. He addressed it while avoiding it at the same time. He hit all the notes the pr see likes to hit. There were renewed attacks on representative cummings of baltimore, renewed attacks on inner cities around america. But these rallies are also a story of what goes on outside. It is very emblematic of the tone and atmosphere out there. What we saw were a very small group of protesters facing off with trump supporters. Something we see at these rallies. We investigated sort of what went on to try to find out a little more about that atmosphere outside. Take a look. There were protesters over there. Ah, they dont know do nothing. Do they have a job . Where do they work at . They dont know nothing. Reporter why did you tell that girl to go shoot herself . Did i tell her that . Reporter thats what she said. Did you hear me say that . Reporter i heard you say something. You heard me say something. I told her i loved you. Reporter i saw a man walk by. Was that the sign you were holding up . End white supremacy. What did he say . Shoot yourself. Reporter how does that make you feel . To be honest ive been pretty strong through a lot of the stuff theyve been yelling but that one made me choke up a little bit. Just a little too i dont know. It just it hits you. Im still a person. Reporter so a sense sort of there of the tone in the parking lots. The other thing worth mentioning trump staffers taking advantage of the crowd size, 17,000 people inside a thousand people outside. They were passing clip boards trying to register people to vote. That is obviously something democrats want to keep an eye on especially in states like ohio. Okay. Cal perry live in cincinnati with the pulse on the ground. Thank you for that, cal. Coming up the Trump Organization subpoenaed over the hush money payments to stormy daniels. What state investigators are now looking into. Plus, President Trumps latest comments on russia interfering in our elections and despite a warning from his own fed chair, President Trump escalates his trade war with china. 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