13th amendmeant. vote because our rights mat. our lives matter. our planet matters and because you matter. i'm asking, i'm pleading. you have got one more souls to the polls weekend. one more, america, vote this weekend, if your state allows it. vote on eelection day, drop off the ballot at your precinct, it's too late to mail it. please, for the sake of our country's future, vote. that is all for "the reid out," tonight, "all in with chris hayes" starts. >> tonight on "all in," this president has done everything to discourage us. we will not be silenced. 85 million people have voted so far. we have had enough. >> the wild discuss story of early voting in a pandemic with

pennsylvania governor jon wolf, steve kornacki puts the state of the race in historical context and what the last minute court decision means for absentees in are they talking about deaths? oh, oh, because the number is almost nothing. >> and from the trump presidency to covid to climate and beyond, the most important take awayfrom the biden closing argument. >> doesn't have to be this way. >> when "all in" starts right now. good evening from new york, i'm chris hayes, happy friday, there's only four days until election day. it's final day for early voting in a bunch of states. arizona, georgia, idaho, maine, massachusetts, nevada, texas and utah and a lot of states where you can still vote early after today that includes florida, north carolina, michigan, and wisconsin. all very important states. now, more than 85 million americans have already cast

their vote. and if that sounds like a big number to you, you are correct. it is an enowhere us number. let me give you context. about 137 million total votes were passed in 2016 in the last president aly election. so, right now, we are already more than 62% of the weight of the total. we have a weekend of early voting still in a lot of states plus, election day, that is traditionally when most people cast their ballots. get this, tonight, someplaces have exceeded their total 2016 turnout. one of those places the state of texas. where already more votes have been cast for president in 2020, i can't believe i'm saying this this, four days before election day than all of 2016. a lot of it is driven by harris county, where houston is located that we spotlighted before. and the governor won an upset victory in 2018 in the mid terms as a part of the strongest democratic ticket to run in the

state of texas in years. and she committed herself to expanding voting before the pandemic. they tripled the number of early voting sites. they created multiple had drop boxes for early ballots even though the texas supreme court limit will-- that limit will -- you make it easier to vote. more people will vote. harris county should be a model throughout the county. red states and blue, liberal municipality. and the city i'm from and love, does not have all night voting. the people of west virginia, will probably vote for donald trump by 30 points they deserve to be having voting as easy as possible as well. we have been reporting on the efforts to suppress the vote and make voting and counts votes as

hard as possible. we will stay with that. i want to take a step back for a second and look at the glass half full. the picture in total is when it was clear that we were going have a pandemic in an election year, those around the country, took steps to make it easier to vote safely in 2020. all of these states took different actions. from adding no excuse absente e-mail-in voting, where counting the risk of covid was an excuse. to do automatically mailing ballots to every voter like wisconsin and vermont did or increasing the number of takes for early voting. they also had some states that removed ballot witness restrictions, right? you have to get somebody to sign an affidavit for your ballot, and the state's like alaska and rhode island took it away to

make it easier. that's just to name a few of the innovations. and in total, this huge distributed policy has worked. it has been good for democracy and we are cruising towards what will probably be the highest turn out election of all time. think of the alternative, given the interest in the election and the stakes that we have seen to vote in the election. imagine the disaster that the election could be in the middle of a case surge record with the worst outbreak we have seen so far. with 10s of millions of people going to overwhelmed polling sites in america or not voting at all. the single most watched state this time around, and you have been hearing about it is pennsylvania, the tipping point state. if biden wins in his birth state, he wins the presidency. it's a state that massively expanded mail in voting under the democratic governor and has

been under constant attack for doing so. joining me is the governor of pennsylvania, thank you, governor. can you give us a sense of what steps you took to make voting more accessible in the midst of the pandemic and how it's going so far. >> thanks, chris, good to be with you. we, pennsylvania has a republican majority in the senate and the house. and republicans actually got together with me, and we put together in 2019, the most dramatic change in pennsylvania's voting laws in 80 years. we went from only voting on election day to having no excuse absentee ballots where you could vote for 50, up to 50 days before the election day. and so, that really opened up the access to the polls. so far, we have had three million people registered to vote by mail.

we have a record nine million people who have registered to vote in the election. that is an all-time record. and i think around 2.5 million people have already voted by mail in pennsylvania. all these things suggest that this, there's a lot of enthusiasm about this election and people are stepping up and exercising that fundamental responsibility of citizenship, the right to vote. >> let's talk about the sort of d the deadline issue, i saw your lieutenant governor saying basically at this point, don't put your ballot in the mail. if you have a mail-in ballot, bring them to the drop box. that is because of this contested question. so far, it seems to have been resolved by your state supreme court that you can count ballots that arrive after election day and that has the u.s. supreme court declining to take the case. but there's a few justices on the supreme court that may be interested and now will segregate the late arriving ballots. what do you tell citizens right

now for clarity and what the situation is and what they should do? >> what the lieutenant told. we have been doing it here in pennsylvania, don't take a chance. walk your ballot to the election office, to the drop box, wherever, take can deficit -- take destiny in your hands. if you want to vote in person, make a plan now, interest go to the polls and vote. but take your destiny in to your own hands. don't trust the postal service. don't trust whatever -- just go ahead and do it. so, the lieutenant governor is right. >> there's, you talked about the cooperation you have with the republican majorities in your state, in the, in the voting legislation you passed, there's been friction around a few issues here and one of them is a weird one. and a fascinating one to me. that's the question about the state allowing what's called precanvassing of the mail-in ballots which is a presorting, taking steps to get things ready

to count quickly. republicans seemed to object to that. there were talks that broke down. what's the story there? >> actually, that is really an interesting question, chris. because early on, in 2020, actually, before the pandemic, republicans agreed to move up the precanvassing, it used to be that you could not start to precanvas until the polls closed. they moved it up to 7:00 a.m. on election day. the county commissioners, republican and democrat, wanted it to go to 21 days before the election day. and they were unsuccessful, so, something happened between the beginning of this year and last couple of months, and i think it is sort of a general republican strategy that they don't think that they will actually win the vote, so they are going to play games with the elections and call in to question all kinds of things. they are even threatening, a number of counties saying they are not going to count ballots on election day, which is really

strange andif the supreme court comes back and cuts the count, they are cutting off hundreds of thousands of military ballots. i'm not sure it is a good strategy. it reflect-s poorly on the trump campaign. we pennsylvanians don't like people who play games. we like an honest argument. we don't like smoke and mirrors and hthat is what this seems like. >> the final question for the pandemic. pennsylvania is topping cases records as many states are in the country. what are you on doing about it? i have seen a hot lot of folks are content riding it out, it's not clear that the messages or interventions are working. what are you going to do to turn it around? >> first of all, we are not going to ride out. we didn't do that the first

round, and we are not doing it this round. we are this this a different situation. you will recall in march and april, we didn't have personal protective equipment, or ventilators or the capacity. we were concerned about having capacity in the health care system. we have that now. we have been stockpiling personal protective equipment, we have -- we have a little over 100 people on ventilators who were suffering from covid. and the health care system has learned more about the disease. so we are in a different situation. but we have learned that you cannot ride it out. look what happened in the states that tried that. florida. arizona. texas. they were overwhelmed their health care systems and we don't want to do that. i think, what we have now, more contact tracing abilities with we can do hundreds of tests today in the beginning of the pandemic. we are now at 40,000 tests a day range and we are doing more each day. we can, we can do things that we could not do in the past that we are going to do, continue to do

more targeted things to try to make sure that, that this does not overwhelm our health care system. we don't want to get to the point where we have any concern at all where the health care system will be overwelmed at all. >> pennsylvania governor, tom wolf. thank you so much. joe biden is spending the last week in the campaign shoring up votes in critical states like aforementioned states. but today kamala harris, stopped in texas, with just a few days until polls close. >> so, i know people were -- people sent me pictures of standing in line at mud nigmidn. people are committed. and so, today is the last day of early voting in texas. we want to make sure that we see it through. and then, let's make sure on

election day, everyone we know has made sure that their voice, their powerful voice is represented in this election through their vote. former 2020 presidential candidate was with senator harris in texas today. and he joins me now. all right, we are all looking at this this, and we are looking at the numbers. you know, there's been a story about texas and texas might turn blue and it's a little bit of lucy and the football. we have seen that narrow, that margin shrink. we saw it shrink, what is going on down there? >> well with, what's going on, you are watching the metamorphosis of texas. every cycle, you hear this is the year, and this is the year, and then we fall short. the suburbs are abandoning donald trump and the represent are cans and -- trump and the

republicans. and we tare seeing it this year where poll after poll after poll shows a very, very competitive race. so much so that the polls have showed joe biden ahead, and to have harris visit the valley of texas and fort worth and harris county that is blowing out out of the water as you all have noted. it's giving the extrapush that i think we need. >> you mentionedval valley, it's one of the poorest parts of of tthe country. and got hit by covid as hard as anywhere else other than new york. what is the importance to see a democratic candidate show up and be there and what does it look like politically? >> it was fitting.

because it is often ignored and often dismissed and under invested in. mccallum, where we were, there's no public hospital there. even though that area has been hardest hit in texas by covid. and so, it means a lot for her to be there and to say, we care. we see you. we understand your needs we will make sure that everyone is able to get health care. we are going to make the investments for a better quality of life for you and your children. it resonated tremendously and i think it will hepburn her now up in a an area of the state that is an untapped resource for democrats that consistently vet to the lower rate than san antonio or houston or dallas or austin. >> one of my favorite statistics about harris county is that barack obama won it by 112 votes and hillary clinton won it by 200,000 and beto won it by 400,000 if i'm not mistaken.

but there have been this exponential growth in the margins. what do you see happening in harris county? >> i think all of the demographic changes that people have been writing about and talking about over the last 15-20 years the growth in the latino american community and the asian american community and the suburbs around houston abandoning the republicans. you can tell that, because it used to be home base for tom delay and now it's blue. it has a democratic county judge who was elected in 2018. that is how much the suburbs have changed and that's especial empowering along with the demographic changes, and turning it blue. >> the state democratic party has been for many years a joke. a rump enterprise, and i don't mean that to individual democrats from your state.

you know what i mean, it's been a rough go. you show up and watch the republicans go to war over stuff with each other and you walk away. you have a shot at actual state had houses here down ballot. what is it looking like? >> well, we, so, democrats need to pick up nine seats in the state house. to gain back the majority. it will be the first time since 2003 that democrats will visit and this would come just in time to have a seat at the table for a restricting when it's done in the next couple of years. fortunately the texas democratic party has been better organized, better prepared better resourced, than it has been in a very long time. >> yeah. >> and it's a great thing, benefthey have been a lot more effective. >> it was an amazing story to people about you know, really matters. these, you know, every position on that ballot and who is filling them really matters.

up and down the whole chain, -i don't know what is going on down there. it will be fun to watch what happens on election night either way, thank you so much. >> thanks, chris. >> next, what may be the most brazen way to suppress the vote yet, what minnesota's last minute court decision means for absentee ballots in that state, next. shrimp for one dollar with any steak entrée. only at applebee's. with any steak entrée. vicks vapopatch. easy to wear with soothing vicks vapors for her, for you, for the whole family.

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appeals court forced a last minute change in the rules. absentee ballots have to be received by tuesday. so, if you want your voice to be heard, drop off your ballot. but you have to get it done. and make sure everyone you know societies as well. >> that was joe biden in minnesota, talking about what may be the most egregious case this year in fighting the basic rights of associating. we have been covering the campaign lawsuits that have been trying to make it harder to vote, suppress vote and make it harder to count ballots. an agreement was challenged of accepting the ballots after election day, as long as they were postmarked by election day. and yesterday, five days before

the election. a federal appeals court ordered the state to segregate mail-in ballots received after 8:00 p.m., or received in person 3:00 p.m. that day, in case they are later ruled invalid. that goes against rules that minnesota had before the election, that are on the ballots. a man tweeted a shot of the unsent ballot said your returned ballot must be postmarked on or before election day, and be received within seven days. those are the rules and then the federal judges came in and said, maybe not. it like being told five days before the tax filing that you have to have the taxes in to the irs by april 15th. not postmarked by then. it set off a scramble of voting rights activists and democrats to make sure that people knew the change. amy klobuchar, minnesota, do not

put ballots in the mail any more in the middle of the pandemic. the republican party is doing everything to make it hard for you to vote. stand up for your rights and take the ballot to the ballot box. melissa, it's great to sihave y and there's been a ton of litigation on voting and this one stood out to a lot of people and i saw a bunch of normally fairly measured stayed experts on election law throwing this. what happened in the decision? >> so, this was an unusual and striking decision. this was from the federal appellate court on the eighth circuit. it's a three judge panel and two of the judges ruled that the secretary of state's consent decree that allowed for absentee ballots to be counted up to seven days after the election, that could no longer happen.

so, any late arriving ballots in minnesota, anything that arrives after the close of the polls on election day, will be sequestered, that was unusual. they never made a ruling as to what happened would happen. whether the late arriving ballots would be counted or not. it does leave open the possibility that there will be litigation that may invalidate and prevent the votes from counting. >> so, broadly here. i'm going to over simplify. but there's been two kinds of cases that have gone up to federal courts. in one kind of case, federal judges in the lower level have changed the rules of states and by and large they have been overturned by appeals courts and supreme courts. another set, north carolina, pennsylvania, the state, or the state supreme court has changed the rules and made it easier to vote and the federal courts said you do your thing, we are not getting in there. this is, the state had its plan. on what legal basis do two federal judges say to the state

of minnesota how they run their elections five days before the deadline? >> you are exactly right. and there's generally a principal that federal courts do not intervene in state election procedures especially when it is this closes to an election. this thely really is anomoulous and there's a dissenting vote, it's worth stating, 2-1. she said, this would sew enormous confusion for the reasons you suggested. the ballots are printed with the consent decrees and discussion of how the ballots will be cast and still counted. and that contradicts with this decision. that said it will not be counted at all. late arriving ballots will not be counted. she acknowledged that it would sew confusion. the majority opinion said yes indeed there would be confusion,

but more confusion if there's subsequent litigation, better to have the voters be on notice now that they needed to get their ballots in before election day. >> so, we have now got this category of the segregated ballots that come after election day. and we have a category, if i'm not mistaken, pursuant to jshlg rulings, pennsylvania, and minnesota, where they are being contested and it just feels like, it's setting up, obviously by their states are close, the trump campaign is going to rush in and try to kill the ballots as its first strike to win a contested state. >> let's step back. we saw in early spring and throughout the summer. all of the efforts for the republicans to stop different alternatives to voting in person. so, a lot of places because of the pandemic, wanted on to provide voters with alternatives to standing in line at the polls.

because of the pan itdemic. we saw lots of them trying to cut off those avenues. they were largely unsuccessful. now that we have volumes of voters voting for absentee ballots the strategy has shifted to try to invalidate the different measures. now we have seen in clark county, a democratic strong hold in nevada, there's a lawsuit where the republicans are seeking to get the signatures of every registered voter in the county in order to challenge the validity of signatures on absentee ballots. we have seen a lawsuit recently filed in texas, to invalidate ballots using curbside voting procedures. the strategy shifted from objecting to the alternatives to simple many t-- to simply tryin to invalidate the votes. >> in terms of the categories andthe ballot litigation, it strikes me that a huge

determination will be how close it is and then what the federal and ultimately the supreme court does. is that right? >> i the think that's exactly right. obviously, these are very targeted. you are not seeing challenges on the absentee ballots in new york, california, or idaho, you are seeing them isolated in the swing states where they will determine the outcome of the election. and many of had thethis cases w up to the supreme court. we have soon a active shadow election dockett from the supreme court. we may see more litigation and more as the election proceeds and maybe even litigation that goes on beyond november 3rd. >> melissa, that was clear. thank you so much for coming on. >> thanks for having me. >> next up the painful reality the trump administration is trying to wish away, record breaking coronavirus numbers as the pandemic spreads essentially unchecked around the country.

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the trump campaign's final message on covid as the country accelerates in to a third spike that could be worse than anything that we have seen before is don't believe what you are seeing. >> the reality is this. if you look, i put it up on my instagram a couple of days ago. i went through the cdc data and i kept hearing about new infections. i said why are they talking about this? oh, oh, because the numbers are almost nothing. >> you put it on your instagram, the numbers are almost nothing? it's not almost nothing and they are talking about it, yesterday's deaths were almost a thousand. those numbers are going up. and we are not down playing the deaths. trump and hannity and the rest want you to focus on the fact that most people that get the

virus don't die. the overall majority, which is true. look at me, trump nowrallies, it it dominate your life. and of course he received the best care on the planet and experimental treatments available to only a tiny few people that you promised to make widely available and you are still not, of course. the experience that many more people who are surviving this disease, the people that end up had in the charts as recovered, as not dying, that experience is very different and often very brutal. carlos sanchez is the director of public affairs in hidalgo county, texas, we were just talking about. it survived covid-19 and told his story. i had no intention of let willing covid-19 dominate me, but the virus had other ideas. i will tell my other fellow residents to not dominate them, but it's not helpful advice for the more than 1900 people that are already dead. he authored the fantastic piece

and spent ten days hospitalized with covid. i have to say, it's some of the best writing i have read of what it's like to go through covid. first, tell us a bit about what your own experience was this summer with your diagnosis. >> well, actually, chris, it begins on the morning of my birth day, my 60th birthday in july 1st. i had been espousing to the community the signs of covid-19, what you need to do. so, i immediately checked my temperature and found that i had a low grade fever. and at that moment, i knew my life had changed. >> you go in, you end up being, you sort of self segregate for a while, and then you end up talking to a doctor and you are having trouble breathingand you end up going in to the hospital, and the picture you paint of the hospital system in the rio grand valley, this summer amid ft tst

peak, what was the hospital system like? >> it was completely overwhelmed. in fact, ironically, the time that i can trace when i was exposed to someone that was testtest ed positive for covid was in a press conference, involving the ceos of the five major hospital groups in texas. the press conference i organized, everybody had masks and social distancing. we had a nurse at the door to check temperatures before the media could come in. one of the participants later tested positive and a couple of days later, i began to come down with the same symptoms. this press conference was intended to warn the public that the hospital system was starting to get crowded intere crowded a public to stay home.

what we did did not understand was how quickly the hospital system would be overwhelmed and how quickly the death count would mount. >> this was a sort of jerry-rigged room, where a fan was installed for the system. the health care staffer from surrounding states who have had to come in as surge capacity and eventually your sort of waiting around for a bed in another hospital, it sound s harrowing and i don't think that it was communicated how bad it got in the rio grand valley in that period. >> well, in the three months leading to the july time period in which i came down with the symptoms, we had a total of 46 deaths related to covid. in july, alone, there were 598 deaths. >> my god. >> in that single month. the average hospital population for covid patients in the three

months leading up to july was 47 patients per day in july, alone, that shot up to 800 patients a day. so, it was a system that was pushed ott brink, supplemented by first care responders from across the country. many of whom became personal friends of mine in terms of providing care around the clob. giving you insight in to what was going on in the rest of the hospital. >> did you think you were going to die? >> you know, i didn't know that -- i never really confronted that thought, but my personal doctor who helped me throughout the process basically said is i had a 70% chance of survival. and that is the first time in my life that any doctor had given the odds on my survival. and that was a very horrible moment for me. >> you know, there's sort of a

line you see about well, you know, the percentage of people that are succoming to the illness has gone down and that that is true. and protocols have gotten better and that's also true. but as someone who went on to sur sief this, you come up on the chart that everything came out fine, what is your reaction to that? >> my reaction is one of the motivatations for writing the piece. it's been three months since i left the hospital. i continue to have difficulty breathing. i continue to have periods of depression. my, i have the general physician that said that she wanted to aggressively measure my improvement. so i have been seeing her every two weeks and just two weeks ago, i got a ct scan which indicated that there continues to be scarring in my lungs and that could be a cause of my

difficulty breathing. so, there's a lot that i think is still to be learned about covid and how it attacks the body. for me, personally, i'm convinced there's still something going on. >> carlos sanction there texas and the rio grand valley, one of the greatest parts of the country, an amazing, amazing place where people have bourn a terrible brunt from the pandemic. thank you so much for coming on. >> thank you for having me, chris. >> coming up with four days left of voting, what could the electoral map look like, we have steve kornacki himself at the board, don't go anywhere.

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character is on the ballot, the character of the country, and this is our opportunity to leave the dark, angry politics of the past four years behind us, to choose hope over fear, unity over division, science over fiction. i believe it's time to unite the country, to come together as a nation, but i can't do it without you. so i'm asking for your vote. we need to remember this is the united states of america, and there's never been anything we've been unable to do when we've done it together. i'm joe biden, and i approve this message. just four days until voting understands in 2020 election. we want to check in on the final days of the race. this was a fascinating tweet of polling averaging four days before the election, historical perspective. take a look at this, joe biden

is ahead of donald trump by nine points. more than double hillary clinton's lead going in to the 2016 election. andthe biggest lead this close to an election since bill clinton's 14 point he lead. the biggest lead since a challenger in 1992. this is not to say that we know what's going to happen, because god knows we don't. it just means that for donald trump to win, there had would have to be a larger polling error than anything we saw in 2016. could happen. 538 simulates the election 40,000 types. the taller the bars the more often that outcome occurs. see the big blue bump on the right side. that's abi biden land slide and there's not much difference from the close fought election and the big spike. someone who digs in to what those scenarios look like is of course, steve kornacki. steve, this is one of those sort

of fascinating things about the race is, it's not that far from a narrow trump win to a enormous historic biden blow-out. depending on the bunch of stuff going two or three points in either direction. >> exactly. here is one way -- to visualize it. if you gave biden all of the hillary clinton states. there's a couple of question marks but for the sake of argument. he starts with the states. everyone has seen the polling trump is done in wisconsin, michigan, and pennsylvania, and ohio's close, iowa's close, texas is close, and all of the states as you say, individually it's very much with in the realm of the possibility that biden gets. what if he got them all. what if he won every one of those. that's what it would look like. >> right. >> joe biden would be over 400 electoral votes. you have not had somebody do it since george bush, sr., in 1988.

but there's other ways of looking at it too. that's sort of the maximum biden scenario. it's not much of a miss. >> on the other hand, when you look at pennsylvania as a tipping point state. which is polling averages around 5.5. you know, a polling miss of five points and we are in a nail biting contest. that is it. >> and again, start to look at the states. maybe biden wins ohio by one. maybe he loses it by one. >> right. exactly. >> texas the, georgia, all of those. you could get to. here is one that we put up here. this is a close very, very close election. again, these are swings. a swing of a couple of points in texas. in florida, georgia, carolina, ohio, iowa. we are not talking about massive shifts here. it's like you say, a point or two. and biden could be sitting, for instance, in a nail biter. 270-268. could flip to the other side of that plausibly. >> let's talk about historical

context. i was going back and looking at the 1980, which, in some ways, there's a bunch of reasons that 1980 makes some sense as a comparison point. you had a challenger, you had a incouple -- incumbent amid strong head winds. that race, i didn't realize how close it was for how much of that race until the bottom falls out in in the end. >> yeah, i mean, look, the iran hostage crisis, and the thing that people forget good ronald reagan. it broke late, two reasons, i think. number one, there was the debate, they had one debate, regan and carter, it was a week before the election date. regan got off the lines, there you go again, are you better

off. people forget the degree to which there was broad anxiety about ronald regan, because, believe it or not, his age. he was going to turn 70 a couple of weeks after being inaugurated and it was thought that was pushing it at that point, only 16 years, a decade and a half, since barry goldwater, and ronald reagan was a barry goldwater disciple, and there was a sense out there the country was not going to elect a president that conservative. there were fears that reagan was too extreme. the debate performances would allay that. >> final question for you. because we're talking about this distance between a narrow victory, or a narrow trump victory or a big biden win and things in between, i guess the question is how much is your sense that these results are correlated, right? like if we're looking at north carolina, georgia, and florida, for instance, do we think -- is there a reason to believe demographically or politically we'll see those move together one way or not? >> it depends. look, florida, i think, is independent of all of them because you've got that different movement there. but, you know, georgia, you're

talking about the metro atlanta area. fast-growing, you know, diverse, incredibly fast movement to the democrats. look, i would say the atlanta metro area a lot like the dallas metro area in texas, houston, maricopa. those are the correlations that i see. >> steve kornacki, always great to have you. thank you much. don't go anywhere. i have something i want to say to you, dear viewer, as we head into the last stretch of this election. so please stick around. stressballs gummies have ashwagandha,

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the president said something kind of offhand at a rally last weekend that i've been thinking about a lot. he was whining, as he's wont to do about how unfair it is the news media covers the coronavirus so much, the largest mass fatality event in the country since world war ii, and he said this. >> all they talk about. covid, covid, covid, covid. if a plane goes down with 500 people, they don't talk about it. all they talk -- because they're

trying to scare everybody. you have to lead your life, and you have to get out. >> now, like everything he says at rallies, this is a bit. but it's an incredible thing to say for a bunch of reasons, and it reveals something, i think, essential about the choice in this election. first of all, there has not been a 500-person air fatality anywhere in the world not related to terrorism since 1985 when japan airlines flight 123 crashed killing 520 people. and if a plane went down in the u.s. today or tomorrow and it killed over 500 plane, i can assure you it would lead the evening news, be on the front page of every major newspaper, and every cable network including this one would go into rolling coverage immediately, which is to say the reality is the exact opposite of the point trump is trying to make. if 1,000 people died in one day from plane crashes, that would reverberate for a generation in the world of air travel. and if it happened two days in a row or three, imagine that for a

second. 3,000 dead air passengers in three days. what do you think would happen? we would shut down all air travel until we can, to quote a phrase, figure out what the hell is going on. but that level of death and horror is precisely what's happening in this country day after day due to the pandemic. and in that context, you could say coronavirus is actually being undercovered. it's a 9/11 every three days. it's two planes going down every day. it's more than three katrinas a week, and it's getting worse. and there's another aspect of this compare son i can't change, which is because donald trump's brain is forever locked in 1985, he thinks of airplane crashes as relatively common because they used to be. but then you know what we decided as a country was that it didn't have to be that way. and through regulation and laws and institutions and innovation, we made airplanes much, much

safer over the course of the last few decades. this chart shows the decline in accidents per million flights from 1977 to 2017. look at that. and it's not just airplanes. with he have done the same thing for cars. look at how the fatality rate per million vehicle miles traveled went from 1966 on the left side of your screen to 2000. that is progress. that is tens and hundreds of thousands of lives saved. and of course, of course we can make the same decision with the coronavirus. the most powerful refrain from the biden/harris campaign is "it didn't have to be that way" because it doesn't have to be this way. we can beat this. we can save lives. this is, in fact, the most powerful message to remember amidst the worst year of my lifetime. it doesn't have to be this way. better things are possible. another world is possible, and that's not just about the narrow question of suppressing the

coronavirus, but it's actually about a whole host of different social challenges we face from racial segregation and injustice to inequality and monopoly capitalism and low wages and the decline of our democratic institutions to the greatest problem we've probably ever faced collectively as humans on the planet, climate change. it is so easy to just think that things have to be terrible and always will be terrible. it's so hard to conceive of and hope for a better future. but that is the only escape hatch. it's the only way out of the locked room we're in. and it could be hard to marshal hope. everyone's hearts have been hurt by 2016, and they've been brutalized by the last four years and particularly the last eight or nine months. but that's really what it's about. we are mass tters of our own fa control our destiny collectively as a democracy, and we can make things better than they are. and that's a civic faith we all have to keep.

that doesn't mean everybody gets solved because of one election. lord do we know it doesn't work that way. there is no magic wand to wave. air travel got much safer over a period of decades to use the example i was citing above. but over time, day after day, year after year, enough of us have to insist that things can be better and to keep acting together collectively to demand improvement, to make a better country and a better world, because it doesn't have to be this way. it really doesn't. and you can use your vote to make it better. that is "all in" on this friday night. "the rachel maddow show" starts right now. good evening, rachel. >> god bless you, my friend, chris. that was much needed. exactly what i needed to hear. thank you. >> thank you. all right. thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. you know, sometimes at big moments, sometimes when our country is wrapped up in big historic events, particularly when