 distinguished journalists in the United States, the former executive producer of Meet the Press. She also serves now as a distinguished scholar at American University. She has spent some time in South Africa and has some sense of the expectations that South Africans have of this partnership. And she is one of the foremost experts in what's taking place right now in America in the election. So I hope that Betsy is connected and can hear me. I can hear you. Can you hear me? Hey, Betsy. Hey, how are you? I'm great. I'm great. It's nice to see you there. It's fantastic to see you. The last time I saw you was here in this home in South Africa. It was. So I was just telling our crowd here that you are quite familiar with this country, but you're also one of the foremost experts that we have in political campaigns in the United States, particularly presidential campaigns. And since this is the first U.S. election since 1988, that I'm sitting out. I'm going to rely on you to share some intelligence with our friends here to give them a sense of what's taking place in the contest, where it stands right now at this moment, and what some of the trends are that you see developing. Absolutely. And I'm happy to be here with you. It must be strange for you not to be pouring through the exit polls, right? I am pouring through it. You're still doing it. Well, you said earlier that democracy can be messy. And it can also be a nail biter. And that is what is happening right now in the United States. Everybody's on pins and needles. There's many key toss-up states right now that are too close to call. We're watching raw vote coming in. And this election at this point could go either way. So you picked the perfect time to come into this conversation because we are really at a moment that some big states could be coming up here and calling. We haven't called Florida yet. Michigan, it could be a surprise. Pick up for Donald Trump. His strategy thus far has been sort of that rust belt. He needed to kind of pick up a lot of these toss-up states and flip some of those, like Wisconsin and Michigan. And he's up in those states right now. So it really could go either way at this point. Betsy, can you help our South African friends understand the distinction that we are making between urban Americans and ex-urban voters who seem to be coming out in record numbers and performing well for Donald Trump? If I look in places in Northern Florida, for instance, it seems as if it's going to be very, very difficult for Hillary Clinton to make up the gap that she needs in Broward because of the performance in ex-urbs in Northern Florida. Right. And we're really seeing across the map here the largest divisions I think that we've ever seen between urban and rural America. And that's playing out in these key states that we're seeing Donald Trump winning two-to-one right now among white non-college educated Americans. And that's something that is very divisive in the country. We're seeing these large gaps among gender as well. And we're seeing things play out on education level and demographically on where people are living as you point out. So this is sort of unprecedented in the last couple of elections where we've seen this largest division right now between urban and rural America. Betsy, can we get you to just say a little bit more about the gender gap? Obviously, if Hillary Clinton should be elected this evening, she'd be the first woman ever to serve as the president of the United States. And that's been a dynamic throughout all of the polling. What are we seeing in the exit polls, seeing in the gender gap? And is there a difference between college educated women and non-college educated women in terms of performance for Donald Trump? Yeah, definitely. We are seeing this major gender gap right now. And especially when you add in that second component, like you said, among college educated. Most college educated women are supporting Hillary Clinton. Non-college educated women, it's a little bit more evenly split between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. If you mails, non-college educated mails heavily, heavily toward Donald Trump. So it is coming down to those gender issues. It's interesting, as you know, Hillary Clinton in this campaign, a lot has come up about gender. She's sort of embraced the concept of a first woman president breaking the glass ceiling. She's having her victory or concession speech, whatever it's going to be tonight at the Javits Center in New York, which actually is a glass building. And so maybe that was on purpose. But very different from the 2008 campaign when she ran, where she did not really embrace her gender. She sort of didn't want to talk about it. And this campaign, it's been much, much different. Betsy, two questions for me. First is about the race. And then another question about American institutions, particularly the integrity of our voting systems. So on the horse race right now, the horse race right now, I'm assuming that Florida is going to go into Donald Trump's column, which means I think that happens, that Hillary Clinton will need to absolutely hold on to Michigan. And I'm assuming she'll take Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania looks good for her right now, but he's already flipped Ohio. Yes, absolutely. But he doesn't seem to be performing as well in the observes in PA as he did in Ohio. But if we just look at her hold of PA, I'm assuming she would then need either Nevada or New Hampshire to get to 270. Is that correct? Yeah. She wouldn't need both. If you look at the map from 2012, where Obama had 332 electoral votes and Mitt Romney had 206. So she started off as an advantage if you look at that map. Now Donald Trump has been able to flip Ohio, so that's plus 18. He will most likely flip Florida. That's plus 29. So those are big pickups for him. She is the projected winner in Virginia, so she holds that toss-up state. But Nevada only has six electoral votes. Colorado, they have projected our winner there. That's nine. But it could come down to New Hampshire. And then again, Michigan and Wisconsin, if he flips those two, that's a total of 26 electoral votes right there. So his path tonight has really been from the beginning that he had to sweep all of these toss-up states and find some areas to flip. And that's what he's going to try to do in Michigan and Wisconsin. If you remember that for the last couple of days of watching this campaign, he was all over the place, campaigning in those battleground states, but also making trips to Michigan and Wisconsin. And it seems schizophrenic, but maybe there was some strategy in it after all. So just a question about our institutions and the integrity of our voting system. Coming into the homestretch, one candidate made a lot of noise about a rigged system and the possibility of this, that the election could be stolen. Are we seeing any evidence in any of the 50 states of any challenges at the ballot box? I know that the Trump campaign went to court in Nevada, and it was tossed out of court. Are we seeing any instances of any irregularities, anything that would make this question the integrity of the outcome? Not anything of significance. We have early voting in this country, and so in fact, kind of record numbers of voters turned out to actually early vote this year. And we did see an issue that popped up in Nevada where people were getting to the polls after they had technically closed, but the polls were kept open for them, and the Trump campaign sort of dispersed their lawyers to challenge that. It doesn't seem like that really is going anywhere, but that was really the only thing legal-wise that has happened so far that we've seen. But the United States, the VR elections here are not overseen by a grand concept of the federal government. They are run state by state. So you've got 50 states plus a district of Columbia that each have their own monitoring, the polls that open and pull closing times for the polls. You have the Department of Justice and their civil rights division that deploys election watchers to some areas. But by and large, the secretariat states in each state and at the local level sort of monitor for any sort of voting irregularities that come up. So I'm going to ask you two more questions, Betsy. I want to ask you a question about the prospect tonight, the possibility of having a split between the Electoral College and the popular vote, because we know that there will be a very, very large vote total that comes out of California for Hillary Clinton. Right. So I'd like to get your sense of there's a possibility of that split and the implications of that. And then I hope that you can have a conversation, a quick conversation with our friends about what life might look like on the other side of this election, regardless of who wins, because of just how incredibly polarizing the contest has been with the growing prospect that the Senate, more likely than not, will be held by Republicans. It's already clear they're holding the U.S. Congress by a healthy margin. What do you see for the prospects of bridging some of the divides after January 20th with all of the challenges that exist between the parties and intra-party? Yeah. Well, in terms of the Electoral College and what we might see happening there in terms of a popular vote margin, there are some places, like you point out in California that would expect for her to put a lot of points on the bar. But our system provides that the winner, winner-take-all system in the state so you can win a state by one vote and get all of the electoral votes that go along with that state. Hillary Clinton made a lot of inroads into some typically red states. She was doing some outreach in, for example, Utah. Georgia, which she's not going to pick up, but she probably put points on the board there. And some of these states that are, you know, part of the blue wall that we talk about in the Electoral College, states that have been blue for the last couple of election cycles, big-populated states like California. The last time that happened in the United States, of course, was 2000 with Bush versus Gore. And, you know, we all know how that turned out. But it's really only happened four times in our history. I was on the globe and spent weeks in Broward County. Yeah. I was hanging chads and all of that. But, you know, this, you know, as we were talking about before, these enormous divisions that exist right now. I just have a couple of statistics from the exit polls to read you about sort of what people's mood are right now. Four in 10 voters in the exit poll said they'd be scared if Trump is elected. Three in five said that the country was on the wrong track. Two thirds said that their personal financial situation is worse now than it was four years ago. So we have that sort of economic issue in the way in here. And half of the, half of voters were disatisfied with the way that the federal government is working. So we have the mood of the country right now. It's going to be very hard. This election is not going to end tomorrow and then everything is going to be fine. I think there will be a peaceful transition of power, but you're still going to have a large percentage of the electorate unhappy about the election results. It's interesting to see those sharp wrong track numbers when you consider that Barack Obama has a 54% approval rating in the U.S. today. So really hard to reconcile those two things. Right. And Trump has tapped into that. That's right. I'm going to conclude by asking you just one last question about what we see as demographic trends in the United States. And I'm going to ask you to please address that in the context of the question of immigration reform. Much has been made about the performance of Latino Americans in states like Florida, Nevada, California, the participation we've seen from them in early vote. Some of that is in response to the rhetoric around immigration reform, but there seems to have been a backlash against some of that in the excerpts. What does the new America look like in the next five, 10 years? What are the political implications and how should our allies here in South Africa and elsewhere think about all these issues? Yeah, and immigration has been, you know, this basically has been a rather issue-less campaign. I'm sort of sad to say that. But immigration has been one of the very few issues that has played a role in this campaign. And we're seeing more and more, you know, talking about demographics, more and more Hispanic voters. But historically, Hispanic voters, as compared to other demographics, haven't turned out as a higher rate. So I will be curious to see in this exit polls what percentage of the Hispanic voters actually did turn out to vote in this election. But the issue of immigration, very divisive. And, you know, Donald Trump, when he stays on message, that has been one of his messages throughout the campaign, make America great again, build a wall against immigration in Mexico. And he sort of tapped into, you know, into that sentiment that some people in America had. And like I said, this is not going to end tomorrow. This is going to be a debate that is going to continue in the months and years to come, probably. Betsy, I lied. I actually have one more question for you. One of the more pronounced dynamics in this contest is the criticism that we have seen of your industry. Oh, yeah. Media reporters who have come under direct attack by both campaigns. There's a cynicism that's really taken root in much of America about the free independent press. And I wonder if you might have anything to say about the performance of the media in this campaign and what the implications are going forward, particularly with the prevalence of our ability to curate our own news on social media platforms. Yeah. And I think that, you know, if we do see, you know, Donald Trump victory out of this, there will be sort of a lot of media soul searching because, you know, early on, you know, then the question is debatable. Did the media create Donald Trump or did Donald Trump start doing well to get paid more attention? But there's no doubt that during the primary process, he was given an inordinate amount of free media, as we call it, where he would, you know, have his rallies be sort of uninterrupted on cable news. He would be able to call in to interview talk shows like the show I used to produce Meet the Press would be unheard of for us to have candidates calling in to do interviews. He was allowed to do that because at the end of the day, the television news executives live and die by ratings. And so he was a ratings draw and they kept putting him on the air. And I think there will be a lot of soul searching. You know, in the last couple of months, the media has gotten more critical of him and that's why you see him sort of turned on the media. But I can't remember a time where we've had, you know, a presidential candidate ever at a campaign rally, you know, turning and screaming toward the press, you know, that the press, you know, were liars and they can't be trusted and all sorts of other words. And he's really sort of made this kind of anti-media campaign a centerpiece of all of his rhetoric. But I do think that there will be some self-reflection as we look back to see about how could we have done more scrutiny of Donald Trump earlier in the election? You know, he's also a candidate who actually started to ban reporters. We talked about the First Amendment. If he didn't like, you know, what a publication published about him, he would simply ban their reporters from covering his campaign against. Again, unprecedented in any sort of recent times that that would happen. So the press and Donald Trump, I think that sort of back and forth war will continue. And I think, like I said, there will be some reflection on how this campaign was covered, especially in those early couple of months. I think there'll be reflection not only amongst the journalists, but amongst pollsters as well, because the model is breaking right now. Betsy, thank you so much. Thank you for having us. I know you're looking forward to your next time in this country. Let's go poll watch. Thank you. Thank you.