Trump won't accept election results if he loses

PETE WILLIAMS: Donald Trump says he'll accept the election results on one condition.

Hillary Clinton holds a clear lead in most battleground polls, but the nagging email

issue won't go away.

I'm Pete Williams, in for Gwen Ifill tonight on Washington Week.

DONALD TRUMP: (From video.)

And I will totally accept the results of this great and

historic presidential election if I win.

(Cheers.)

PETE WILLIAMS: A defiant Donald Trump doubles down on charges of a rigged election

during the final debate with Hillary Clinton.

The candidates sparred

over taxes, gun rights, abortion and the vacancy on the high court.

FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON: (From video.)

We need a Supreme Court that

will stand up on behalf of women's rights, on behalf of the rights of the LGBT community,

that will stand up and say no to Citizens United.

DONALD TRUMP: (From video.)

The justices that I'm going to appoint will be pro-life.

They will have a conservative bent.

They will be protecting the Second Amendment.

PETE WILLIAMS: And between the sharp exchanges over policy, plenty of personal attacks.

HILLARY CLINTON: (From video.)

When it comes to the wall that Donald talks about

building, he went to Mexico, he had a meeting with the Mexican president, didn't even

raise it, he choked.

DONALD TRUMP: (From video.)

The one thing you have over me is experience, but it's bad experience.

HILLARY CLINTON: (From video.)

Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger.

DONALD TRUMP: (From video.)

Such a nasty woman.

PETE WILLIAMS: Meantime, the Clinton campaign grapples with the release of more hacked

emails by WikiLeaks.

We gauge the mood of America and undecided voters in the sprint

toward Election Day, with Jeanne Cummings, political editor for The Wall Street

Journal, Philip Rucker, national political correspondent for The Washington Post,

and Jeff Zeleny, senior Washington correspondent for CNN.

ANNOUNCER: Award-winning reporting and analysis.

Covering history as it happens.

Live from our nation's capital, this is Washington Week with Gwen Ifill.

Once again,

live from Washington, sitting in for Gwen Ifill this week, Pete Williams of NBC News.

PETE WILLIAMS: Good evening.

Early voting is now underway in nearly half the states,

including five considered battlegrounds.

That means everything the candidates say and do between now and Election Day is even more

important, especially for undecided and independent voters.

This week, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump went from a bitter clash on the debate stage

to poking fun at each other at a high-society dinner in New York.

It's 70-year-old ritual, the candidates for president trading jokes in late October to

raise money for charity at the Al Smith dinner, named for the first Catholic presidential

candidate of a major party.

But this year, the comments had an especially rough edge.

DONALD TRUMP: (From video.)

Hillary is so corrupt, she got kicked off the Watergate

commission.

(Audience jeers.)

HILLARY CLINTON: (From video.)

Donald really is as healthy as a horse, you know the one

Vladimir Putin rides around on.

(Laughter.)

PETE WILLIAMS: It's hard to conceive of one of them congratulating the other when it's

all over.

During the debate, Donald Trump said he might not accept the outcome of the

election.

But the next day, Trump said that he simply meant he was preserving his right

to go to court if there are signs of irregularities in how the votes were counted.

DONALD TRUMP: (From video.)

Of course, I would accept a clear election result, but I

would also reserve my right to contest or file a legal challenge in the case of a

questionable result.

(Cheers, applause.)

Right?

And always, I will follow and abide by all

of the rules and traditions of all of the many candidates who have come before me, always.

PETE WILLIAMS: President Obama called Trump's threats not to accept the election results dangerous.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: (From video.)

When you try to sow the seeds of doubt in people's

minds about the legitimacy of our elections, that undermines our democracy because our

democracy depends on people knowing that their vote matters.

PETE WILLIAMS: Those comments, Jeanne, sparked bipartisan outrage, but how dangerous

were they to Donald Trump?

JEANNE CUMMINGS: Well, there were several, I'd say, three, there were three risks that

he took in doing that.

First of all, that night we had a group of voters who were

undecided voters, who said in our poll the debates will mean a lot to us.

We called them

immediately after that debate and for three or four of them that was a deal-breaker.

It moved them from undecided away from Trump, so he risked there.

His fellow Republicans piled on again, creating more confusion and separation and

division within his own party.

And some of them have real interests here.

For instance, what if Senator Pat Toomey running in Pennsylvania wins his reelection, but

Donald Trump decides to challenge the results because he doesn't win the presidential?

So is it a rigged campaign for Donald Trump, but not for Pat Toomey?

The same kind of situation, conflict could arise in New Hampshire or in Arizona or North

Carolina, so that is one of the reasons that a lot of Republicans were, like, stop, slow

down, do not say this anymore.

PETE WILLIAMS: I hadn't thought about that.

So it's not possible to say that the results

were just rigged in the presidential election without questioning the whole rest of the ballot.

JEANNE CUMMINGS: Right.

That's right, you throw the night out and everyone -

JEFF ZELENY: And Marco Rubio in Florida said the same thing.

JEANNE CUMMINGS: Absolutely.

JEFF ZELENY: And that's another example there.

JEANNE CUMMINGS: And so it's a major risk to them.

PETE WILLIAMS: You had a piece in the paper today about the sort of shockwaves this had throughout

the Republican Party.

What is their worry about, beyond Trump, about the rest of the party?

PHILIP RUCKER: Well, first of all, Trump's comments seemed to delegitimize the American

system of democracy and that's a real concern for a lot of Republican leaders.

But politically speaking, we're now two weeks from the election and there's yet another

fresh issue that's dividing this Republican Party over its nominee.

Just in the spin room after that debate, Reince Priebus was trying to explain Donald

Trump's position and saying, you know, I don't really think he means what he said, and

his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, was trying to do the same.

And it's just another distraction for him when he's not talking about the issues that a

lot of Republicans think can help him gain ground.

PETE WILLIAMS: We didn't hear, Jeff, from Mitch McConnell, from Paul Ryan.

We heard from some

other senatorial candidates, a couple of governors.

Why not?

Why didn't they say anything?

JEFF ZELENY: Because they simply do not want to get caught up in more comments on Donald

Trump.

They know, A, it can alienate some of their conservative voters and they simply

don't want to weigh in.

The MO basically for Mitch McConnell over the last several

months is to speak only when he is pressed on camera about Donald Trump.

Otherwise, he tries to stay out of it.

His theory all along has been that Senate

races are big enough to withstand the presidential situation, this undercurrent.

Now some people close to him, I was talking to a couple of them earlier today, are very

worried about these Republican Senate races in the states you mentioned, Jeanne, because

Democrats are four seats away from a tie and five seats away from a victory controlling the U.S. Senate.

PETE WILLIAMS: Well, let me ask you about that right away.

What are the prospects that the Republicans could lose control of the Senate, that the

Democrats could either tie or take control?

JEANNE CUMMINGS: Well, there are good prospects for the Democrats suddenly, for several

reasons.

Some races have tightened up where they didn't expect them; Missouri, Arizona

are a couple of them that they never expected to go compete in these areas against

Senator Blunt and Senator McCain, longstanding Republican incumbents.

They're tied.

And the Democrats have a lot of extra money.

Hillary Clinton in particular has a whole lot of extra money, and Donald Trump doesn't

have extra money, so her campaign and her super PAC are now discussing, and in fact

doing, sinking money into Missouri where she's not competitive, but only to help the

senator and in Arizona which she would like to make competitive.

So they have the resources, they have numbers that are looking much better for them, they

have a Republican nominee who continues to worsen or stumble and make it much more

difficult for the senators themselves to avoid conversation about him or taking a stand

on him.

And we saw in New Hampshire with Kelly Ayotte, the latest poll has her down 8.

This is after she turned away from the Trump campaign.

PETE WILLIAMS: And she was one of the first ones after the comments at the debate to say

that you don't say that - JEANNE CUMMINGS: That's how dangerous it is to do that.

PETE WILLIAMS: Is there any concern that this talk about the election is rigged would in

any way suppress the Republican turnout, that Republican voters would say, well, if it's

rigged, why bother?

JEFF ZELENY: I think it could, without question.

You know, the whole conversation of

the election, I think, could sort of depress turnout.

People are so sick of all of it.

Now, Trump's own supporters are motivated, yes, and some Republicans are motivated to

vote against the Democrat, of course.

But I think without question, if people are saying it is rigged, they simply may not turn

out, which also worries the Republican Senate candidates Jeanne was just talking about,

because Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania needs those voters, Kelly Ayotte needs those voters.

But I think more interestingly is how we are trying to see Republicans separating

themselves.

A new super PAC is coming out with a new ad strategy, you know, basically

bluntly saying Donald Trump is going to lose, you need me to block Hillary Clinton's

agenda here.

I think we are going to see that more and more and more in the next two

weeks or so.

We'll see if there's enough time.

But that may work in a Florida where

Marco Rubio is still holding on, or other states like that, so it's not a done deal

that Republicans lose control, but they will lose seats.

PHILIP RUCKER: But what we're also seeing is Hillary Clinton's campaign and President

Obama trying to tie these down-ballot candidates directly to Donald Trump.

And the president was down in Miami on Thursday, yesterday, really attacking Marco Rubio,

eviscerating Marco Rubio, saying, you know, you called him a con artist, you've called

him dangerous, and here you are saying you're going to vote for him, and that's the

height of cynicism.

PETE WILLIAMS: Let me turn the turnout question upside down.

How much might this encourage Hillary Clinton supporters?

She's saying we need you to come out and show that this election isn't close so no one

can say it's rigged.

Is that going to work?

JEANNE CUMMINGS: It's an argument that they're making.

But their operation is so much more sophisticated that they know exactly who they have to

get out and they're calling that person, whereas, you know, Trump's is kind of a ragtag

group.

There might be some states that are really good and there are likely to be

many that aren't.

But -

PETE WILLIAMS: But won't the RNC help him with that?

JEANNE CUMMINGS: Well, they're doing their best.

That is their assignment.

But getting back to the message of it's rigged, there have been political analysis of

that kind of rhetoric and the people that it most alienates are the people who are Donald

Trump voters.

They're not regular voters, they're intermittent voters, they're

lower-educated voters, and if they're told repeatedly, you know, the system's rigged,

it's not going to matter, then they don't think their vote counts.

They are the ones most likely to stay home, not the higher-educated ones, so what he

risks is turning off really some of the margins of his own base.

PETE WILLIAMS: OK, so let's talk about after the votes are cast and if there are

questions, irregularities, recounts, does the Trump campaign have a SWAT team of lawyers

ready to be dispatched to any trouble spots to file their papers?

PHILIP RUCKER: Well, we know the Clinton campaign does.

They're recruiting hundreds of lawyers and training them to monitor at these polling

places and look for any irregularities and any problems that might emerge from the Trump

forces.

I assume the Trump campaign is getting some lawyers together.

But interestingly,

the Republican National Committee is not.

That's just their standard practice, they

don't do that.

So it's really incumbent on the Trump campaign, and as Jeanne was saying

it's a ragtag group, it's not the fully staffed, professional campaign that we've come

to expect in presidential races.

JEFF ZELENY: I'm told, though, in so many areas there definitely are Republican lawyers

who are gathering to do these Senate races again.

The overlap between the battlegrounds in the presidential states and these competitive

Senate races are almost one for one, so Republicans will have lawyers in Pennsylvania

watching things there and other things.

And Donald Trump has been saying he wants

average citizens to be out there.

So I think on Election Day itself will be a social

media, real-time, polling place social experiment that, you know, we hope does not

turn ugly.

But some of this rhetoric about who's voting certainly is the most ugly

and vile that I've seen.

PETE WILLIAMS: So this is a question about not irregularities, but voter intimidation, I

think, is perhaps what you're talking about, is the Clinton people saying we have to be

out there and make sure nobody's trying to keep people away.

PHILIP RUCKER: That's right.

And there are rules that govern this.

I mean, Donald Trump is on the campaign trail saying to his supporters, you know, come

out, monitor the polls, look in certain areas, but that's against the law in a lot of

places.

All of these elections are governed by state and municipal ordinances and

you can't, in some cases, stand close to a polling place, you can't go inside as a

lay person and try to intimidate voters.

JEANNE CUMMINGS: You can't tape, you can't film.

JEFF ZELENY: Well, and you've seen Republican secretaries of state really come out

across the board pushing back at their nominee.

That's what's the most

extraordinary thing, you know, saying that, no, elections aren't rigged, we're

actually running these elections.

So, you know -

JEANNE CUMMINGS: He's attacking the integrity of their own work.

JEFF ZELENY: Exactly.

JEANNE CUMMINGS: Yeah.

PETE WILLIAMS: And these are Republican secretaries of state who have been caught in

lawsuits in the past, being accused of, for example, insisting on voter I.D., suppressing

the vote, who are now saying, wait a minute, our elections aren't rigged, and they're

pushing back at him.

JEFF ZELENY: Exactly, Ohio -

JEANNE CUMMINGS: That's right.

And you have local Republicans, you know, the guys

and women who gather all these volunteers to actually run the precincts on the day

of the election, you know, there are lots of Republicans in that position at a very

local level who work really, really hard.

And it is their work that he is criticizing.

PETE WILLIAMS: Donald Trump has recently suggested that there should be term limits for

members of Congress.

What is that all about,

and is that a shot at the Republican leaders in the Congress?

JEFF ZELENY: I think it is a shot at that.

And it's also just a shot at the government overall, it's a shot at Washington.

He is trying to run as this change agent, someone who's outside the system, so the most

popular, easiest boiler-plate way to say it is term limits for all.

But, of course, I think Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Orrin Hatch, you name them, there are

a lot of Republicans who do not support that idea at all.

It's popular somewhat

in the public area, but you don't hear it talked about as much as you used to.

PETE WILLIAMS: And, of course, it would take a constitutional amendment.

JEFF ZELENY: It would.

PETE WILLIAMS: Right?

It can't be something that Congress could do, limit your own terms.

JEFF ZELENY: Right.

Indeed.

PETE WILLIAMS: Well, this week Russia proposed to send a team here to monitor the

polling places just as the U.S. does in countries where there's a history of

government interference in elections.

This was another tweak at the U.S.

American intelligence agencies have blamed Russia's leaders for the cyberattacks on

campaign-related emails, and that subject came up in the final debate.

(Begin video segment.)

DONALD TRUMP: She has no idea -

HILLARY CLINTON: Fine.

You take a stand because if -

DONALD TRUMP: - whether it's Russia, China or anybody else.

HILLARY CLINTON: I am not quoting myself - DONALD TRUMP: She has no idea.

HILLARY CLINTON: - I am quoting 17 - DONALD TRUMP: Hillary, you have no idea.

HILLARY CLINTON: - 17 - do you doubt?

Seventeen military -

DONALD TRUMP: Our country has no idea.

HILLARY CLINTON: - and civilian agencies.

Well, he'd rather believe -

DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, I doubt it, I doubt it.

HILLARY CLINTON: - Vladimir Putin than the military and civilian intelligence

professionals who are sworn to protect us.

DONALD TRUMP: Putin, from everything I see, has no respect for this person.

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the

United States - DONALD TRUMP: No puppet, no puppet.

HILLARY CLINTON: - and it's pretty clear - DONALD TRUMP: You're the puppet.

(End video segment.)

PETE WILLIAMS: (Laughs.)

It's so much more civilized here in this room.

Jeff, were you surprised - JEFF ZELENY: You're the puppet, Pete.

PETE WILLIAMS: Yeah, well, all right.

So you are.

Were you surprised there wasn't more during the debate about the Clinton emails?

JEFF ZELENY: I certainly was.

I mean, there was so much more new information

available between the first debate and the third debate, which doesn't happen all

that often in presidential campaigns.

Usually by debate three there's not really

any new information to chew over.

PETE WILLIAMS: To attack the other guy with, huh?

JEFF ZELENY: Right.

But I think that, one, Chris Wallace, who I thought did a very

admirable job, very good job, had his hands full on a lot of other topics he had to ask.

But I think the thing I was surprised by, that Donald Trump did not seize upon this

opportunity to prosecute some of these questions about his opponent, about when she said

in those paid Goldman Sachs speeches that, you know, you can have a position in private

and a public position, that she is not at where the populist movement of her party is, on

and on and on.

Some of the calculating things that all candidates do, or most do, but

this was sort of laid bare in these emails.

I was surprised that didn't seize on that.

But that shows you preparation versus not preparation.

She injected sort of her

research file into ever other sentence she could, every breath.

He did not.

JEANNE CUMMINGS: Well, I have - I was really surprised he didn't bring up that particular

email because her answer in the second debate, when he did bring it up, was so bad.

JEFF ZELENY: The Abe Lincoln defense.

JEANNE CUMMINGS: It was the worst answer.

Yes, it was, I'm Abraham Lincoln, really.

And even - you know, Trump is a great counterpuncher.

And he smelled that one and

then hit her right back, that she was certainly no Abe Lincoln.

PETE WILLIAMS: He did mention John Podesta, which I'm sure the average debate-watcher

had no idea who he was talking about.

But some of these Podesta emails have been

embarrassing.

Do you think in any way they've damaged Hillary Clinton?

PHILIP RUCKER: I mean, to some extent - the polling doesn't suggest that there's any

real shift in the trajectory of the race, but she'd rather these emails not come out.

She maybe would rather they come out earlier in the summer, although interestingly not

during the primaries.

They might have had more damage to her candidacy in the primary

when she was running against Bernie Sanders, because they exposed inconsistencies in

her positions.

They exposed sort of the politicizing issues like trade and the paid

speeches that would have been a vulnerability.

PETE WILLIAMS: And he - had Podesta called Bernie Sanders a doofus at that point,

as he said in the emails?

PHILIP RUCKER: It could have hurt her then.

I mean, I don't think it's going to end up hurting her in a general election here.

It seems like the election is about bigger issues than what these emails -

JEANNE CUMMINGS: And the irony is, it's because Bernie Sanders won't condemn her, again.

JEFF ZELENY: He is being the definition of a good soldier.

JEANNE CUMMINGS: Absolutely.

PHILIP RUCKER: He really is.

PETE WILLIAMS: To what extent is the Clinton campaign worried about the other shoe that

hasn't dropped yet on these emails?

What could be to come?

JEFF ZELENY: I think they are.

I think they are.

I mean, in conversations I have

with them, they, you know, obviously know everything that's in John Podesta's emails.

They have gone through all of them.

You know, they're not sharing what they saw.

So we don't know if there'll be anything more explosive between now and November 8th.

But a lot of Democrats are concerned that this is going to continue through the

transition, if she wins, and perhaps into her presidency, if she wins.

This could be something that, you know, is embarrassing.

It could be even more than

that.

So they are concerned.

And this is just one slice of the hacked emails.

At the DNC and the other committees, they're also concerned about another shoe to fall,

because there's not been a huge smoking gun.

And maybe there won't be.

But you know,

this is a big unknown over the final weeks of the campaign, which you don't like.

PETE WILLIAMS: We saw the interjecting Trump again at this debate.

And one of his interruptions during the debate has taken on a life of its own.

It came while Hillary Clinton was talking about her economic plan.

HILLARY CLINTON: (From video.)

My Social Security payroll contribution will go up, as

will Donald's - assuming he can't figure out how to get out of it.

But what we want to do is to replenish the Social Security trust -

DONALD TRUMP: (From video.)

Such a nasty woman.

PETE WILLIAMS: That phrase quickly became an internet sensation, picked up as a kind of

badge of honor by women, who put Clinton's face over Janet Jackson in her music video for

the song, Nasty.

So, Jeanne, has this had any effect on potential voters?

JEANNE CUMMINGS: It's had a really important viral effect.

You know, Hillary Clinton has been running this traditional old-fashioned kind of

campaign and has not been able to link up with Millennials.

She doesn't talk their language.

They build the machinery for them, but it isn't fun.

So this was, though, amazing.

The women - I think from Hollywood across the

country, women got online and adopted the "nasty woman" title.

PETE WILLIAMS: As a badge of honor.

JEANNE CUMMINGS: As a badge of honor.

And there are now reports - when we came upon

it the Millennial women suddenly woke up and, like, this is cool.

This is not boring

anymore.

And they also appreciated in the debate her strong defense of women on

abortion rights and sexual harassment.

So she, you know, through accident and through

some policy, I think she has awakened the female Millennials in a way that she would

maybe not been able to do if he hasn't used that -

PETE WILLIAMS: But they weren't that excited about being the first woman president?

JEANNE CUMMINGS: No, that wasn't jazzing them up in the way that, like, President

Obama's historic status was doing for the black community eight years ago.

It just wasn't the same.

PETE WILLIAMS: I want to ask you, Phil, about something else.

The Clinton campaign is capitalizing on some polls that show that her support in the

battleground states is expanding, sending some of the star surrogates - Bernie Sanders

that we talked about earlier, Michelle Obama.

Is it really that close in those states?

Does she really have a shot at some of those red states?

PHILIP RUCKER: In Arizona, certainly.

The public polling that we're seeing shows

Hillary Clinton either tied, and in some cases a little bit ahead in Arizona.

That would be a remarkable turn.

This is a red state.

It's been reliably Republican

for a generation, if not more.

And the Latino vote is really important there.

That's one of the reasons Trump has struggled so much.

And Hillary Clinton is sending surrogates there, but she's also spending a lot of money

on television ads, on digital ads, putting boots on the ground in staffers and volunteers

to try to mobilize voters.

And it might pay off.

And it might in fact help lift up

Ann Kirkpatrick who's running behind in the Senate race there against John McCain.

Unclear if she'll be able to actually win, but it could make that race closer.

PETE WILLIAMS: In 10 seconds, Georgia and Texas too?

PHILIP RUCKER: Georgia as well, certainly.

Texas seems like a little bit more of

a stretch, but some of the polls are showing that to be pretty close too.

PETE WILLIAMS: Phil, thank you.

Thank you all.

The conversation continues on the Washington Week Extra, where we'll tell you about the

independent presidential candidate who is surging in the polls in one state where he

might defeat Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Plus, Trump has been warning his supporters of the potential of widespread voter fraud in

the election, but the experts say your odds of getting struck by lightning twice are more

than the odds of voter fraud.

See more at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek.

I'm Pete Williams.

Good night.