Those two main races. Cnns political director is joining us live from tampa, florida where cnn will host a debate for the governors race. Break down the polling for us, dave. Two critical races for governor and senate. Lets first look at the brandnew numbers from cnn in a new poll in the gubernatorial contaft between Andrew Gillum and desantis. Among likely voters, a 12point advantage for gillum. 54 to 42 . This does not look like other polls we have seen in this race. This is a bigger gillum advantage. Its worth noting that every poll in this race since the primary in august has shown gillum leading. I have little doubt that hes leading, but is this poll an outliar or will as we see successive polls, will we see a gillum advantage. A month ago he was at apoint lead. We have him at 12 points among likely voters. Its hard to imagine, they havent elected a democratic governor and this is a big purple state, but thats a big democratic advantage that speaks to the enthusiasm. That helps ex
mccain world view and comes from the mccain wing of the party. the people of arizona voted overwhelmingly for him in the last election he stood in. someone like him should fill that position. senator lindsey graham said something this morning, there s times when i want to pick up the phone and call john. i know that i can t. i think anybody who has lost somebody close to them can feel. i was in first meeting between lindsay and john and tried to pull it to him to sign on with us back in 1998. i know how lindsay is feeling and he s crushed. welcome to the nbc, msnbc family. we like to wrap up the show talking about any story you re digging in on. what are your sources saying to you? i think the desantis gillum
joining me now andrew gillum. it s good to have you on. so good to be with you. thanks for having me this morning. let me start with your opponent had to say in the last couple of minutes on laura ingram s radio show. i want to play what he said then ask you about it. the silly pc stuff has got to stop. the manufactured yoult rage has to stop. the notion that somehow the far left socialist which is disqualifying was not really what i was trying to do send some double secret coded message. it s absurd. i m not going to apologize because i didn t say anything about race. it had nothing to do with race, had to do with a far left socialist platform. a couple of things here, do you believe desantis? i think desantis decided to pull a page from the trump campaign playbook. and i think it s unfortunate but i will tell you this, hallie. i think it will be completely unsuccessful. we ve got fooled once by this
before. people are really sick and tired of this kind of race-baiting division derisive element to our politics. and i think that s why quite frankly we re going to win this race on november 6th because we ve been talking about the issues that confront everyday floridians, not frankly jumping in the swamp with the president. let me ask you then more directly because desantis said i didn t say anything to do about race. it had nothing to do with race. do you believe what he said was racist? do you believe that he is racist? i don t want to jump to name calling at this stage of the race. i m hoping that they will try to avoid it as well, i don t however believe that the congressman was in any way frankly trying to back away from what he was suggesting that he was doing, which was in my opinion, playing a little bit of a race card there.
no one saw it coming but we did the hard work. we worked steady. we engaged voters and talk the to them about the issues. i went to red areas, blue areas and purple areas of the state. i was trying to continue to ride that high of a conversation and unfortunately, mr. desantis went immediately to the gutter. i thought it was inappropriate but i certainly think he s shown us very well where he wants to take this race. he s i think staking his race on quite frankly following trump s playbook and that is going to the gutter and i hope that as we complete these next ten weeks that he ll find a new north star. i certainly plan on staying high and invite him to join me on higher ground. just to wrap up this part of the conversation, quickly here he says he s not going to apologize. do you want him to apologize and would you accept an apology? he doesn t need to apologize to me, he needs to apologize to florida voters.