and quickly, zach, regard lets regardless of what trump just said, do you see he ll use the midterm results as a template on his plans for 2020? for every reason that ron just said f he used the midterm plans, it would turn out very badly for him. you ll see this sort of play out as democrats, are they going to try and rebuild the blue wall there in the upper midwest? are they going to go out west? i think the larger thing is looking at what trump just said, in the space of one breath, he said both i won and i wasn t on the ballot. what s interesting there is he both wants credit for everything that s good and no bad things for anything that s bad. that s going to be a conundrum for republicans. it s all about him for them. it was about him in the midterms. it s definitely going to be about him in 2020. all right. zachary wolf real quick. he has strength in rural small
specifically, instead saying, quote, i don t think it had any effect. fred? all right. boris sanchez, thanks so much. all right. let s talk more about this. ron brownstein is with me, along with zachary wolf. good to see you both. ron, you first. the president says he probably won t sit for an interview with mueller. and he says he will leave it up to his acting attorney general to make decisions on whether to curtail, you know, the russia probe. trump says he wouldn t get involved. so then why again was attorney general jeff sessions asked to resign? yeah, right. so this is an extraordinary situation. you have the target in some ways of an investigation deciding the limits of what he will answer and constraining that, curtailing that in two very significant ways. first, signaling he would not sit down for an in-person interview. second, that he will not answer questions having to do with
and jared kushner. the president is expected to ask for the resignation of homeland security secretary kirstjen nielsen soon. cnn has also learned he s also discussing potential replacements for chief of staff john kelly despite announcing kelly would remain on the job until 2020. the vice president s chief of staff nick ayers told two friends he is in the running for the position. he s grown close to the president and key members of the administration including once again the president s daughter and son-in-law. now to digital director zachary wolf. good morning, wednesday, how are you? good morning, great. do you feel relatively secure in your job, can i ask you that, this morning? it sounds like the washington in white house there s not a lot of job security. you put me on the spot there. i don t mean to laugh about it. at the end after a midterm election, especially when you ve lost a lot of seats showeure, could be 40-plus.
institutions, in our elections? and that s exactly what they re doing. if you re crying fraud for an election that you re winning, as trump also did with the 2016 election which he won when he said there were millions of illegal votes, it sort of makes you wonder, you know, what the what do you accomplish by doing that. especially when you re going to win it. it doesn t make a lot of sense. you know, tortured sport analogies are one thing. but this is it s not a game. this is american democracy. imagine your vote not counting because of a technicality, because of a bunch of republican and democratic lawyers. probably more concerning, i think, than the poor folks who are watching this drag on longer than they would like. yeah. he s a football fan. but i think wide right on that attempt. zach wolf, thank you, my friend. good to see you. thanks. breaking news this morning. 50 lives already lost in the california wildfires. the threat appears to be widening this hour. 48 of tho
in this country are voting earlier than ever before, record numbers in some states. let s bring in cnn political commentator joan walsh and also with us, jack kingston, cnn political commentator and former republican congressman from georgia. i want both of you to listen to this. i spoke to our politics digital director, zachary wolf, earlier about this surgery in early voting. this is what he told me. i think if you look in texas, certainly, you know, the beto o rourke campaign would be very excited to see the number of young voters rising, the same in georgia, the governor s race there, potentially in florida. but, you know, it s really hard to extrapolate exactly what this means. they are far and away above the last midterm election but they re not too much above and probably below the presidential election. and that most recent presidential election, of course, texas and florida, didn t exactly go towards the democrat.