The Final 5: November 02, 2026

For you tonight on election Eve for the very, very first time making her final five debut hosting this show. Finally, she's hosted every single show on this station except for this one. Until now, here's Huma Bash for the final five. Bing, bing, bing. Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. That's so frickin' cool. I mean, I. That's one way to put it. Tonight on the Final Five, the president's final pitch to voters rattled trust in the polls ahead of election day and what would you do for a Philly cheesesteak. This is your final five. Let's do this. Welcome in to the final five on this Monday night election eve. I'm Huma Bash. Jim is off tonight. The long-awaited midterm election day of 2026 is less than 30 minutes away with control of Congress for the rest of the president's term hanging in the balance. Democrats are talking big game ahead of it all, hoping to regain control of Washington. Some are promising ...impeachment hearings, others... Promising a better economy. Republicans are defending President Trump's record, saying they need another two years in power to make things better. That means there is a lot on the line for President Trump. So what is his final pitch to voters? Where did he give his final speech for the campaign season? And what did it focus on? Tremendous algae problems. And you have that picture with the algae? Yeah, let me see that. This is a... This was a picture taken when it was just before they closed it down. And this picture, this was in the Biden era right after. Well, during that speech, Trump made no mention about concerns over a tough economy, soaring gas prices, and tonight, AAA reporting the national average $4.17. Instead, he promised $5,000 checks if the GOP keeps its congressional majority. Right now, Republicans have unified control of Washington with a slim majority in the House, a margin of several seats in the Senate, and of course, President Trump in the White House. But history Not on their side. Four years ago in the 2022 midterms, Democrats had the same sort of control, but they lost the House. In 2018, Trump and Republicans once again had unified control, but once again lost the House. The trend of the president's party losing seats in the midterms, well, it goes back decades. President Trump admitted as much today. Because if the people that voted for me and voted in the last election where we had such a great victory, if they go out and vote, just a good portion of them, we will win in a landslide. Now, that doesn't happen because usually whoever the sitting president is, Republican or Democrat, good or bad, good president, great president, bad. For some reason, the sitting president doesn't win the midterms, but we gave this a very strong shot. Instead of the reflecting pool, the president has campaigned in a lot of battleground states in recent weeks, as have his supporters. Some of them seem to be trying to channel the president's energy. I work almost as hard as this guy. I try to keep up with him. He doesn't sleep at all. You understand that? The man calls me at like 1 o'clock in the morning and also at 5 a.m. Mikey, are you sleeping? No, sir, of course. Sleep is for sissies. Of course not. What's on your mind, Mr. President? I don't know. Let's talk about whatever. I'm not going to do the impression in front of you. I'm sorry. I didn't plan that. 11 30 on a school night. Here I am. Sleep is for sissies. Meantime, the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., was in the state of Ohio recently talking about the risk of a U.S. capital controlled by dams. One thing really sticks out about his comments. See if you can tell which they want to pack the Supreme Court. They want to make Ohio a state, make D.C. a state, have permanent one party rule. Oh, oh, apparently. I don't know how it works, but, you know, they can do these things and get away with it. We should point out, and having lived there for a long time, I can tell you Ohio is, in fact, a state has been since 1803. But anyway, he probably just misspoke. Everything doesn't always go according to plan with political rallies, especially in the digital age when you have to deal with these sorts of issues. He also personally authorized a bill to make it easier for savage criminals to erase. Folks, it seems as if President Trump has lost connection momentarily. So we'll continue on with. Hello? Yes, President Trump, you're back on. Oh, how long ago did I lose a connection, please? Just a moment, sir. You're live with the same audience, glad you're with us. Yeah, but where did I lose the connection? Well, one of the big races that has been in the spotlight in the final days has been for that Senate seat in Michigan. Democrats have been focusing heavily on the race, hoping to see Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed fend off Republican Mike Rogers, keep the seat blue. But he got a curveball this weekend from a fellow Dem, Haley Stevens. She lost the nomination to El-Sayed earlier this year despite her can-do attitude. And you better believe I'm going to be doing it with a little bit of joy, a little bit of enthusiasm, a little bit of energy, and a little bit of stick it to them. Yeah, well, this weekend, she made clear who she wanted to stick it to by endorsing Mike Rogers, the Republican running against El-Sayed. It caught a lot of people by surprise, leading to moments like this on CNN. And it's just an interesting change. And I think a lot of people are curious to try to understand it. Was that a question, Anderson, or? No, I wanted to see if you wanted to fill in the silence, but you don't. Oh, yeah, look, Michiganders are going to the ballot box. Maybe the connection was bad there. The endorsement might have wound up being good news for the El-Sayed campaign, though hours after Stephen's announcement, El-Sayed's campaign revealing it raised another $2.4 million. dollars You understand, none of this matters. You know what matters? There's a family. you so You can go like 15 minutes that way or 15 minutes that way or 15 minutes that way. And there are families who are preparing to send their kids much to schools tomorrow that look like they did 50 years ago. They're worried about what they're going to feed their kids for lunch. for They're worried that if one of their kids gets sick, joining they're not going to be able to pay the bills. Those are the things that matter. Voting starts in just a matter of hours, and the results could reshape the state of play in Washington for years to come. us. So let's talk through what is at stake with our first guest tonight. Victoria Churchill is a U.S. political reporter for the Daily Mail, up late with us on the Final Five to talk about it. Victoria, thank you so much for being with us tonight. Thank you so much for having me. Always great to be on with you. All right. We love it. Lots to get into. But widespread polling has shown the Democrats really have the best shot of retaking the House tomorrow. But there has been a lot of attention in some key battleground states for the Senate. So is the Senate really at play here? I think that there will be definitely some shift in the balance of power in the Senate. But I do think, at least as of now, Republicans will maintain a majority. It may be by just a vote or two. But I also think that it is important to note that even some of the people doing this polling, particularly this New York Times-Siena poll that came out earlier in the week, that actually Actually, the New York Times themselves have said that they kind of oversampled Democrats. voters because Democrat voters were more willing to take the polls. And so I think that's something that's important to note that, you know, that this is something that I think strategists on both sides of the aisle have made people aware of for years, you know, at least in the Trump era, that Republicans are not huge fans of taking polls. And so, you know, at the end of the day, the only poll that matters is the polling booth. Yeah, absolutely. And we know that, you know, in the polls that we see, it shows the Democrats are surging ahead. But like you said, we don't know how legitimate those can be with who is being polled. What does a potential Republican upset even look like tomorrow on Election Day? Well, I think maintaining control of at least one chamber, again, that is at least as of now looking to be most likely the Senate, you know, the House. I would say even the Republicans tried to do redistricting pushes in a lot of states that they considered safe. That redistricting push may potentially backfire and actually give Democrats a couple of more seats than they would have originally. Gotten by old maps in some of the states like Texas, you know, even like Florida. And so I think it's important to note that the. Flip of the House, at least what I'm looking at right now, that will probably happen quite early in the evening as results are called. I think, you know, within an hour or two of seeing East Coast polls close, we will know the results for the House, which, again, I think that's going to be a flip towards Democrats. But for the Senate, we actually may not have a final result. Tomorrow night, states like Alaska, of course, where there's ranked choice voting, that may take a couple of days to come in. And, you know, I think Democrats are definitely going to, for example, take back the Senate seat in North Carolina. They're also looking quite energetic in Ohio, especially, I think, there because there's been some... I think some reluctance to vote for Republicans for the governor's race, so that may affect the Senate race there, but I also do think that Republicans may eke out wins in states like Iowa. And we know President Trump is not on the ballot, but a lot of what happens in this midterm is a referendum on what he's accomplished over the last couple of years during his administration. How is that tone shift going to play out if the Democrats and this blue wave comes to fruition? Well, I think a lot of this is, of course, going to be decided by who actually comes out to vote. We do know that Democrats are looking quite good in early numbers, but that's also not an anomaly. Even if you look at the last couple of years, Republicans love to turn out early and vote on Election Day. And so, you know, the question at the end of the day is how motivated. Our voters on each side. And, you know, I also think when you look particularly at, for example, younger voters, people that may have cast their first ballots ever for President Donald Trump, some of those voters, I think, are feeling frustration with the economic headwinds that they are feeling. And so, you know, the question with that is, do they come out at all? Are they going to come out for Republicans or will they? Stay home or will they vote for Democrats because, you know, they were so confident in casting that vote for Trump? Just two years ago, or even, you know, maybe in any of his prior elections, maybe there are even two or three time Trump voters that are now being frustrated. And so, you know, I really think younger voters, particularly younger men, may actually be difference makers in some of these races where Republicans have thought that they had their support and they may not end up having it tomorrow. Sure. And we'll see, you know, what happens. A lot of big races going on across the country, coast to coast, even in Alaska. So thank you so much for your insight. Insight, your breakdown, Victoria Churchill with the Daily Mail. Thank you so much for staying up late with us. Thanks so much for having me. All right. The Final Five is back right after this. Start again. One of the ways to predict what will happen before election day is to, of course, look at what the polls say. But not all polls are created equal. Earlier this year, two polling firms admitted to publishing bogus numbers, which major news outlets passed off as real. Let's talk about it with Sean Trendy, a senior elections analyst with Real Clear Politics, up late with us here on The Final Five. Sean, thank you so much for being with us tonight. Thanks for having me. Okay. Let's dive right into this. So how did these fake polls we mentioned even get taken seriously? How did they make their way into these major publications and how much damage was actually done? Well, it turns out the every man a printing press nature of the internet might have been a mistake. It's real simple. You just put out. A professional, you know, you use ChatGPT to make you a logo and you put it out on the internet with some things that look like crosstabs and people are so hungry for polls. They're so hungry for information about how the election is going to go. They'll apparently just put it on the site. We didn't use them. We are pretty picky about the polls that we use in our average and we sometimes catch heat for it. But it has consequences. Thank you. It influenced at least one Senate race this cycle. And there's some speculation that people were trading on predictive markets on the base of them. It's really a bit of a mess. It can be so damaging. Some candidates say the phony polls actually hurt their campaigns. They affected fundraising, voter perceptions. How could they have really altered the trajectory of this midterm? Well, political professionals pay attention to polls. And so the one example is Mallory McMorrow in Michigan. One of the fake polls had her down in the low single digits. And she said that that day her fundraising dried up. She stopped getting consultants returning her calls. The people just kind of wrote her off at that point. And it's really too bad because she was a serious candidate and someone who had a shot who just got messed over by these people lying. And how do we make sure this never happens again? And obviously it is incumbent upon journalists to double check, triple check, quadruple check what they're passing along. But sometimes on social media, you cannot control what goes viral, what starts trending and what people are sharing. So before we put people in our averages, we wait a cycle. We want to make sure that they've gone a full year of putting off polls and their results are reasonable. But we'll also do things like say, hey, we want to talk to your data person. We want to talk to the person who collects the polls. You know, we want to see what your polling center looks like, things like that, just to make sure that people really are above board. And it's not just two people going on Claude and making something that looks like a poll. Sure. And we've heard in the past that Democrats are more likely to take part in polls, even real polls. Republicans are more reluctant. So how much faith should we be putting in these polling numbers overall as we move ahead in this political climate? Well, I think faith is a little bit too strong. They're pieces of information, right? They're data. And I think people sometimes treat them as if they're, you know, etched onto stone tablets to be, you know, taken as the word. But that's not what they are. They're imperfect instruments, but they're like, you know, they still give us some sense of where things rest. But the technical term is differential non-response. That's a problem. And it's something that we're worried about going into election night. Sure. And as we head into election night, what are some of the big races that you're following that the polls are trending in perhaps a way you didn't expect? Well, we just did a poll with Emerson. Thank ...released a poll vault that showed Senator Husted actually a little bit ahead in Ohio, and there was some speculation that the early vote wasn't you as good for Democrats as they'd hoped. We had a poll that we did in Texas showing a one-point race. very So a lot of these races are close. The error margins are real. They reflect real uncertainty about the poll outcome, much. so people shouldn't just write them off. But, um... You know, there's some exciting races tomorrow. We're looking forward to finally knowing. Absolutely. I mean, when you talk about that margin of error, Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers in Michigan are within the margin of error of each other. And this is how close we're talking with these numbers. Yeah, these races are, pretty much everyone agrees, it comes down to election day turnout. You know, as the last guest suggested, Democrats like to participate in early voting and mail voting. Republicans traditionally vote on election day, so it's going to come down to whether the Republicans turn out tomorrow or whether they are dispirited and stay home. And we've seen record numbers with early voting here in Virginia, in D.C., Maryland. So it is going to be so exciting to see who turns out tomorrow, along with the people that have already turned out in droves. Oh yeah. This, this is my, my wife calls this my Superbowl night. Um, you know, we work, we work all year for this and we finally get to see, uh, uh, what's going to come out tomorrow. So we're, we're looking forward to it. Well, Sean, you're our MVP, uh, to put it in football terms. Thank you so much. Sean Trendy was senior elections analyst with RealClearPolitics. Appreciate you. Thank you. All right. The final five is back right after this. He ain't got your love anymore. Listen good, don't mess with America. Welcome back to The Final Five. I'm having such a good time. I said, let's keep going. Let's get into the third block. We start with a man whose priorities are probably not where they should be. And as you might expect, we're talking about tonight's dumb criminal. His name is Robert Kressler, on trial accused of killing and dismembering a woman back in 2021. He faces possible life in prison, which he said last week he would accept in a plea deal, but on only one Very specific condition. Is that for a Philly cheesesteak and an order of fries and a Pepsi? So you're telling me you would open plea, you would plead a life in prison? Philly cheesesteak with onions on it and mayonnaise and fries. I understand. And 20 ounces of Pepsi. Okay, it's got to be 20 ounces. Okay. 20 ounces, gotta be 20 ounces. The judge denied his request, meantime, was on many voters' minds ahead of election day this weekend. The Trump administration rolled out a new strategy for diplomacy, and by strategy, I mean sports. Tonight's sports segment is brought to you by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Last week, he hosted diplomats from the highly influential G20, or Group of 20, wealthiest nations. Their time together including a focus on major issues like war, trade, and of course, college football. There they are at Saturday's game between Southeastern Conference rivals Florida, Georgia. 15 of the 20 foreign ministers from the G20 were at the game. Georgia beat Florida 27-8, which Rubio was probably not so happy about. His son Anthony plays, actually, for Florida. To be fair, Rubio is not subject to any rules saying he is not allowed to root for his favorite team. But you know who is? The Pope. The office of Pope Leo maintains strict neutrality when it comes to sports teams, but he has had some thinly veiled references to his preferences in recent months. When asked if he put in a word with God to help his Chicago White Sox in the playoffs, he responded, quote, no comment. Before he was Pope, his name was Robert Prevost, and he was a big Sox fan. Then, this weekend, cameras caught him dribbling a basketball around with NCAA players, athletes, and fans of Notre Dame and Villanova. Universities were in Rome to play their first game of the season. I think it is fair to say the Pope seems to, maybe, maybe, have a preference. Growing up on the south side of Chicago, we oftentimes heard, go Irish. But as you all know, Prevost graduated from Villanova, so the Pope doesn't take sides. Prevost has another opinion, but we won't do that now. Up next on The Final Five, who's sleeping soundly, who's tossing and turning tonight? There is a lot on the line tomorrow for President Trump. He is not on the ballot. But what happens tomorrow is a key indicator of how Americans feel President Trump has done and how much power he'll wield in the final two years he is in the White House. Recent polling showing the economy is the number one issue that matters to voters. And a majority say they're frustrated with the administration. Whether that polling holds true could be the difference between another two years of Republican control and the potential gridlock of divided government. As for who's sleeping soundly tonight, let's go with Michigan's Democrat Senate candidate, Abdel El-Sayed, raising a record, breaking $2.4 million in a single day this Sunday. $1.2 million of that coming within the first four hours. Haley Stevens announced her endorsement of El-Sayed's Republican opponent, Mike Rogers. Neither candidate resting much before tomorrow's bitterly contested and very close race, making final pitches to voters in Michigan tonight. as we see all candidates are doing. Coast to coast. That does it for the final five tonight. Thank you so much for joining us. Don't forget to cast your vote. But for now, go to bed. Brunswick and a whole bunch of other places in between. But of course, I have to say the very best for last is no place like home. And I am so grateful for all of you all. I've heard that there's, first of all, I heard y'all were having a real good time up here. So thank y'all for holding it down to all of you all. And just thank you. First of all, let's give all of our volunteers a round of applause. And Team KLB, we have been meek and mighty, but we are up against a giant. But a whole bunch of money, but he ain't bigger than our God, okay? And we have said from the beginning, he may have the money, but the people still have the power. And I have said that if you want a man who wants to be Trump's favorite governor, then that's your guy. If you want a guy who doesn't disagree with anything that Trump says and does, then Slick Rick is your man. If you want a man who believes.