The Coronavirus Pandemic and US Politics

[MUSIC PLAYING] DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson Institute at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Trending Globally's producer and your guest host Dan Richards. The spread of the coronavirus and the efforts to contain it have upended every aspect of our life and society. We at Trending Globally are going to bring you more conversations and insights about this pandemic in the coming weeks from our community of experts at Watson and Brown.

On this episode, how the coronavirus is affecting our politics in the US, how might it change the Democratic primary going forward, and how might it affect concerns and considerations of voters going into the general election, and also how are our politics affecting the development of this public health crisis. To talk with us about all this, we have on the show Watson Faculty Fellow and Chair of the Political Science Department at Brown, Wendy Schiller. Wendy, thanks so much for being with us.

WENDY SCHILLER: My pleasure.

DAN RICHARDS: So we're taping this on Wednesday. And yesterday, democratic primaries were held in Illinois, Florida, and Arizona. They were postponed in Louisiana, Georgia, Ohio, and Kentucky. Before we get into the postponements and what that all means, I wonder if we could just talk a little bit about what happened in the primaries yesterday.

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, in the primaries yesterday, Joe Biden had significant victories over Bernie Sanders in Illinois, Florida, and Arizona. His margin of victory was especially strong in Illinois and Florida. And the turnout in Florida was, I think, much higher than people had expected given the coronavirus crisis. So what that tells you is that there's still this fairly strong enthusiasm among Democrats across different categories for solidifying Joe Biden's lead and making him the nominee of the Democratic Party in Twenty-Twenty.

DAN RICHARDS: Now, did any of those states have early voting?

WENDY SCHILLER: Yeah, some of them did. The one that's really-- was supposed to be affected by early voting was Ohio because they had the longest period of early voting although Arizona has had voting by mail for a couple of weeks as well. So we're wondering how Ohio would go because so many people voted early. And there was a lot of controversy over the decision to cancel voting at the last minute in Ohio because so many people had already voted.

DAN RICHARDS: And none of those states that have postponed have made a plan for when they will be holding their election yet. Am I right?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, not a specific date but certainly are open to holding them in April and May and June. Now, remember, the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama primary contest in Two Thousand and Eight went until June 30 when Hillary finally conceded even though Barack Obama only had about 110 delegate lead on her, maybe a couple hundred delegate lead. It wasn't a huge lead. And she did not concede until the very end.

So it used to be that democratic primaries went until June. California used to be in June. So the idea that it will go much longer is not actually new to the Democratic Party or the history of primaries. But it seems new to us because we're used to things like Twenty-Sixteen and certainly now wanting it to be over so that we could start the general election.

DAN RICHARDS: And Sanders' campaign manager, I think, just said this morning that they were going to assess their options in the coming weeks. So it is possible that this primary could be over sooner than any of us thought a few months ago.

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, you still wonder about that. I think there are some very significant implications for democracy, for voting, for presidential elections in sort of short circuiting this process. Even though people want to unify around Biden, and they don't want division in the party, the act of actually voting in the primary is a really participatory act.

And it actually helps the party in the general election. Because when people vote in the primary, they're significantly more likely to vote in the general election. Mostly, they're registered already. And they know where the polling place is. So the Democrats could really be hurting themselves in this rush to sort of cancel everything else and unify because you won't have primaries as a mobilization tool for your base. And that could come back to haunt them in November.

DAN RICHARDS: Hmm. Yeah, so maybe that could be from the Democratic side a reason for Sanders, even if it was continued a little bit more as I think some people have been describing it as a campaign more focused on issues and trying to reframe the debate, it could be something worth continuing on with.

WENDY SCHILLER: Yeah, I think for a mobilization tool, we saw very, very high turnout in the election that elected Barack Obama in Two Thousand and Eight among Democrats. And part of the reason for that was that of a very highly contested primary typically between two contestants when the loser backs the winner yields good things for the party.

In Twenty-Sixteen, the problem with the Bernie Sanders contingent was that Bernie didn't really support Hillary. Didn't do it actively, anyway. And many of his supporters said that they would stay home. We don't know exactly how many stayed home. But she lost the election for a lot of reasons. So they're worried that the same thing will happen if this goes on too long and if Bernie doesn't get behind Biden.

So to me, it's not the length of how long this goes. It's really what Bernie Sanders' reaction is once he sort of decides I can't win this thing. Do I get behind Joe Biden? He said on Sunday night in Sunday's debate, I will get behind you, Joe, if you're the nominee. And that was something he didn't say to Hillary Clinton that early in the process. So I think the Democrats are hopeful. But there's no guarantee with Bernie Sanders that that will be his reaction.

DAN RICHARDS: And that his supporters will follow suit.

WENDY SCHILLER: Yeah, although I think the strategic balancing act for the Democrats, which is not an easy thing, is that Bernie pushed Joe Biden successfully, I think, on Sunday night to accept some of the provisions of the progressive wing of the party, things that had been sponsored by Elizabeth Warren as we know, the bankruptcy bill, bankruptcy protection, consumer protection.

And on health care, I don't think it's going to be a very tough sell to the American people that we need a better health care system after this crisis has abated. Whether it's Medicare for all or it's something else, it's pushing Joe Biden to commit to revamping and reforming the health care system, which is something Bernie can go back to his supporters and say, see, I got him to do this. We're going to move forward. We just have to defeat Donald Trump. And that's sort of the ideal scenario for the Democratic Party going into November.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, and so that brings up what I kind of want us to turn to now, which is just about every issue you can think of at the moment, whether it's inequality or the health care system or immigration or national security, is, of course, being swallowed up by coronavirus and how we're trying to deal with it as a country and throughout the world.

And I guess I'm wondering-- you touched on this a little. But how do you think this crisis might affect just the types of debates and issues and concerns that are going to take center stage, whether it's in a continued primary or whether there's soon a pivot to a general election?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, you're asking such a great question because we've come to believe that polarization and partisanship rules the day or xenophobia or racism or misogyny or sexism and all these kinds of things that we think are so determined, predetermined really in the voting population, that campaigns don't matter as much as they used to. But I don't think that that's-- I think that's not going to hold for Twenty-Twenty. And here's why.

I think that Trump has a base that is very solid. 36%, 38% of the country loves him. And they don't care what he does. They will vote for him. It's not his policies. It's him. And what the Democrats have to do is turn that on its head by saying, this guy did not lead us properly or competently when we had such an enormous crisis.

You can't have somebody who doesn't tell you the truth. You can't have somebody who isn't giving you factual information and somebody won't listen to really smart advisors. And that's the crux of it is do you want this guy to be running the country in time of crisis?

It was one thing when the economy was good and everything was calm. But now we really have know as big a crisis as we've faced probably at least in the 21st century and possibly in the second half of the 20th century. So how do you get that assessment to people in a campaign? It's about the person.

And that's why Joe Biden seems to be such an appealing candidate for the Democrats because people like Joe Biden. They think he can run the country. And will that be enough for the enthusiasm to get people out the door? We're going to have to wait and see.

But the idea of particular issues, I think Trump will have no choice but to embrace things like better paid sick leave or a higher minimum wage, for example, so people can save up some money in some of these hard-hit sectors that are really disappearing on us.

And so when you think about what Trump will pivot to, it will be some of the policies that the Democrats want. But in the end of the day, the voter will simply say when things are really difficult and scary, which person do I want at the helm? And that's going to be interesting terrain to navigate in November Twenty-Twenty.

DAN RICHARDS: In some ways, it's more about maybe just leadership at this moment than about the particular types of policies.

WENDY SCHILLER: I think it's both. I think it's about leadership and being willing to be flexible and compromise and help people. The people who love Trump, as I say, they're not going to go away from Trump. But they're expecting him to help them in this crisis. And if he doesn't come through, they probably won't vote.

It's not that they'll vote for Joe Biden necessarily per se, although we're seeing some signs in the primary turnout, which so interesting, that white men who didn't vote who either voted for Bernie Sanders the last time or voted for Trump in the general, white men are coming back a little bit to the Democrat Party through the vehicle of Joe Biden. So you are seeing some people who have been attached to Trump saying, well, he hasn't really delivered. Joe Biden might be better.

And right now, it's such a crisis that it's just six months from now, things are calmer, you could argue Trump could survive it. The question is what's the impact in those six months? How badly are people hurt?

DAN RICHARDS: Yeah, no, and the level of uncertainty is just unbelievable. I think even imagining thinking about the logistics of a general election in November. Based on different predictions, it's hard to imagine even what that might look like physically.

WENDY SCHILLER: It's again, an excellent point because I tweeted about this yesterday just because it drives me a little bit crazy when elected incumbent officials tell us they have to make voting harder for some made-up fantasy reason.

There's no reason Americans should have to have such a stringent voting procedure. We should do it by mail. Washington state does it. Oregon does it. Certainly, a lot of absentee balloting is going on through mail. Arizona does it. California does it.

There isn't any reason not to do it to make sure that everybody can vote and everybody can vote safely. You're going to see a lot of pressure on state legislatures. It's not the federal government, by the way, that decides this. It's each individual state. State legislature is going to find a lot of people clamoring for vote by mail this November. So you could see a lot more states going to vote by mail even by November Twenty-Twenty.

DAN RICHARDS: Wow. Yeah, I actually wasn't aware that it was a statewide decision in that way.

WENDY SCHILLER: Yeah, most people don't know that, Dan. In fact, the Constitution says states shall regulate the time, manner, and place of elections. And so that manner is how you vote. And that's why you don't have uniform voting procedures across the country. You have them all run by states. And I think you're going to see just an overwhelming demand.

And remember, most state legislators are up for re-election in November as well. And politicians don't like vote by mail. And they don't like it in most cases because there's more uncertainty as who's going to vote. If more people who've never voted before who don't vote regularly, if they all vote, politicians have no way predicting what they're going to do and who they're going to choose.

They don't like that uncertainty. So they prefer to keep it more restrictive, make us go through these hoops, make us go out the door to vote because then they can figure out predictably election to election who is going to vote. And it makes their campaigning easier.

DAN RICHARDS: Yeah, no, you can imagine if there was some big demographic change just a result of doing votes by mail.

WENDY SCHILLER: Exactly. And there could be. There's a loss of life. And it's tragic. And we want to minimize it. We want to make sure that we don't have the sort of saga and tragedy of Italy, for example, such a huge loss of life. We're just really praying that doesn't happen.

But for whatever the loss of life and loss of economic health that we endure, we will come out of it at some point. And I think it will change people's minds. We are in Twenty-Twenty. We are well into the 21st century. Why are we stilling using procedures and techniques that are stuck from 50 years ago in how we vote? It just doesn't make any sense.

DAN RICHARDS: It also made me think of another aspect, which is the census. And I'm wondering if you imagine there could be any sort of effects on the census.

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, I actually will tell you that I filled out my census form yesterday online. It didn't take me very long. It was quite easy to access. It was quite easy to do.

DAN RICHARDS: That's good to hear.

WENDY SCHILLER: And I think it's extremely easy to do online. So hopefully, when you get that letter in the mail, everybody will open it up. It's kind of a green form from the census. Open up the envelope. Look at the instructions. It's super easy. It's just about as easy as literally ordering things on Amazon.

And they will fill it out online as opposed to waiting for the longer document that they'd have to fill out in person and mail back. So hopefully-- there'll be some issues-- but hopefully a lot more people will, in fact, go to online forums for the census.

DAN RICHARDS: It may not actually be as disrupted as other things.

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, we certainly hope that it's not disrupted because it's crucial, particularly, by the way, if you live in Rhode Island. Because Rhode Island is poised to lose a congressional seat because of a population decline, every Rhode Islander has to fill out the census. On the other hand, when you're doing the census online, it will make you think, wait a minute if I'm doing the census online, why can't I vote online?

And so I think this is exactly how things will change in America. People will say, wait a minute. If you're asking us to live in our house and not go anywhere for weeks at a time, and we can actually survive mostly online, why wouldn't we now change these institutions-- and I call elections institutions-- why not change them so that we can actually do this online? I just think there'll be a lot of pressure to do that across states.

DAN RICHARDS: Although isn't there some concern, though, with voter security doing it online?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, we never found any actual interference in voting results. That's a big difference. Interference in Twitter, interference with bots and interference with Facebook and spreading false information-- that's interfering in an election.

But nobody saw the election was so close. If the Russians really wanted to elect Donald Trump, and they could do it electronically by manipulating voting data, that thing would have been a blowout. But it wasn't. It was super close. It was too tight. So most people don't believe that they actually managed to electronically change votes.

A lot of places actually vote in machines where in Rhode Island, for example, you'll vote and you'll punch a actual physical card which gets tallied in a machine. So yeah, there could be. And then the other argument is if you really believe it's a privilege to vote, you want to make it a little bit harder because you think it's a privilege. But it's a right. It's not a privilege.

And it should be-- even if we risk interference, having that many more people engaged in the process would then encourage them to hold their elected officials more accountable while they're in office. In other words, after the election, if you vote, you have a stake in the game. And having more people have a stake in the game means that more people are paying attention to what politicians do.

DAN RICHARDS: Now, turning back again briefly to Donald Trump, I wonder we have these two overlapping at this point crises. We have this pandemic. And we have the economic crisis. And I wonder how you see those two issues as relating for Donald Trump and if there are like different considerations he might need to be doing both practically for running the government and also as he's looking for re-election, how those two are related.

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, the president, you can argue-- and I've been public about this, I think-- was irresponsible in downplaying the threat early on as going as far as calling it a hoax and saying we have it under control. It's not a big deal. Most people won't get sick. But he has upped his game. He's figured out this is a massive problem.

And he is starting to listen or he's already started to listen to the people with the most experience about infectious diseases. Dr. Fauci was at the front lines of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early nineteen-eighties, '85, '86. And he was working with Ronald Reagan, a Republican president. And he persuaded Reagan that this was really serious, that we have to get-- put measures in place and really take it seriously. So he's apparently managed to do that with Trump as well.

And I think the country benefits by giving the president the benefit of the doubt right now so long as he continues to do what seems to be the most responsible things to handle the crisis. And that will come back to reward him. In other words, his voters won't desert him if he looks like, OK, you know what? I underestimated this thing. Not that he admits that. He said something different.

However, he's doing what he has to do now. And he seems to be fully focused on it at press conferences every single day, on the weekend. He's 100% paying attention to it. And I think that will mitigate some of the damage that otherwise might be done to his re-election chances.

DAN RICHARDS: Yeah, no, I saw a little bit of his press conference maybe it was two days ago, maybe on Monday. But I was really just struck even by the imagery of it. I felt like there was a seriousness on his face. And maybe I was just projecting. But I felt like this is registering for you. This is different than anything else you've had to talk about.

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, we hope. At the same time, he's still tweeting about other things. So there'll be a temptation. I think the president-- and any president would want to change the subject. There'll be a temptation for this president, even though he just said the other day that it could go along until July or August, there'll be a temptation for him to take good news and oversell it.

I think the good news for those people on the other side of the political aisle is that he's really pressuring Republicans, particularly in the Senate, to take very, very significant steps to help people, in other words, sending money, giving paid sick leave, maybe not permanently and certainly not to businesses under 50 employees, which is kind of being criticized now.

But nonetheless, the president is putting pressure on Republicans who would never otherwise vote for these measures. They certainly didn't vote for the stimulus when President Obama asked for it in Two Thousand and Nine. None of them did. And they've been holding up the first coronavirus emergency bill from the House even this week whereas Trump is calling them and saying let's get this done. Let's do it.

So in that way, I think people who might vote democratic who might not believe Trump is looking out for them, his electoral concerns are going to push him to push the Republicans to pass things the Republicans would never otherwise do.

And that's the good thing about having separate elections for the presidency versus the Senate versus the House. 23 Senate Republican seats are at stake. There are about five-- four, there are four people who've retired, so only about 19 incumbents running. But that's way more than the Democrats have.

And so the Republicans are going to take Trump's lead. He's taking over the party. Their base listens to Trump. And Trump will push them to do things that he thinks will help. And that's a pretty extraordinary level of power that the president seems to be trying to exert over his Republican Senate colleagues when sometimes they wouldn't necessarily listen to him.

DAN RICHARDS: Do you expect that there will be in the near future and if so how near a large stimulus package? I know Trump administration's request is now something in the $1 trillion range. Do you see something like that happening in the near future?

WENDY SCHILLER: Yeah, I think if they don't, they're going to have to bail out the airlines and the hospitality industry. And of course, they should bail out bus lines, small franchise owners, for a lot of these hotels who aren't part of these big companies. This industry is effectively dead for the next month to maybe three months.

And restaurants all across America, which are very small businesses, which operate on extremely tight margins, they're essentially dead for the next month to two months with the exception of takeout. That's an enormous number of people who will not have a steady income.

And I think that they have to do something, or those people literally run out of money. Then they go on food stamps. Then they go on Medicaid. Then they go on unemployment. You're going to tax the system, meaning not collect taxes but strain the financial sector. One way or the other, the public financial sector gets strained. But then the private sector will go under because people won't have any money to consume goods.

It could literally-- I don't think we're just limited to the potential of a recession. I think we are certainly vulnerable to a depression. And that is something Trump is-- and all Republicans and Democrats also. But they certainly desperately want to avoid. And they've seen that they're willing to live with deficits. They did a big tax cut in Twenty-Seventeen. We have a $1.1 trillion deficit right now.

So the idea that they'd be willing to take on a $1 trillion deficit to give a tax cut to the rich, but they wouldn't be willing to take on a $1 trillion deficit to give money so people can eat and pay their rent, I think it's politically totally unacceptable, not acceptable to me, but unpalatable to almost every voter.

DAN RICHARDS: I must wonder if part of this process could be easier that there's a Republican president and a Republican senator. I imagine if a Democrat was proposing $1 trillion in relief right now. Of course, everything is so scrambled because of this virus. But I wonder if it might be a little easier to find a common ground and a common message about it.

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, you don't have to wonder. Just look at the dialogue in Two Thousand and Nine and Twenty-Ten. There was significant, as I said, almost uniform Republican opposition to the stimulus bill in both the House and the Senate. They didn't vote for it. And they tried to filibuster it to the point where they finally compromised in terms of about an $800-plus billion.

But many economists at the time said it was too small and that it would not get the economy back on track as quickly as it should. And that's exactly what happened. And then the Republicans blamed by Obama for a slow recovery. That's what Trump said. That's what a lot of other people said.

So you can see now where the Republicans know that if they don't do enough, it will be a recession, if not a depression. And it will be slow to recover because they've seen this movie before.

So you're absolutely right. Having a Republican president right now who's open to this, who's willing to do it, who sees the writing on the wall-- that makes all the difference in the world in the willingness. And we saw this in the House. You had a number of Republicans, about 90, I think, give or take, Republicans voted for this bailout-- this stimulus package the other day. So you're seeing a lot of Republicans willing to cross the aisle on it already.

DAN RICHARDS: So I wanted to end with a thought that just actually popped into my brain yesterday, which was that it was just in December that Donald Trump was impeached. It feels like that was years ago or like small news or old news, at least to me, a consumer of news.

And it just made me realize how much everything has changed so quickly with regards to our politics. And I wonder, as someone who follows this world so closely and so deeply, how are you thinking about politics right now? And how would you recommend other people think about this moment?

WENDY SCHILLER: In trying to grapple with it, it's such a-- it's so fast. It just feels like wow. 9/11 was just a tremendous shock. And the country changed so much. Let's not forget. There used to be a day when you didn't have security lines the way you do now. You could bring anything you wanted on a plane. There's all sorts of ways in which the country adapts. And we've gone through massive crises before. And we'll get through this one again.

I think the political fallout will be what kind of society do we want to live in, not what kind of country, but what kind of society? Do we want to make sure that people are taken care of when there is an emergency? Or do we want to make sure that we take care of our most infirm, our elderly?

Do we want a better public health system, better investment? Is that the kind of country we want to be so that this doesn't happen again, or if it does, it happens in a much less severe way? And that will in turn affect our politics.

So it's not going to be that politics changes people's minds about these things. It's about people's lived experiences over the next couple of months and whether that changes what they expect from government and what they're willing to pay for or give up to get that from government on behalf of their own families and their neighbors.

And we're not going to know that for a couple of months. But certainly, that will change. And how uniformly that changes across the country and how quickly that changes across the country is something we're just going to have to keep watching for.

DAN RICHARDS: Wendy, thank you so much for talking with us today. This was a fascinating conversation.

WENDY SCHILLER: I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks very much.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode of Trending Globally was produced by me, Dan Richards. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions. We'll be releasing more episodes soon focused on the coronavirus pandemic and the world's response to it as well as episodes focusing on work and research being done at Watson more broadly. You can catch them all by subscribing to us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And if you haven't yet, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show. For more information about this and other podcasts produced at Watson, go to watson.brown.edu. Thanks for listening. And tune in next week for another episode of Trending Globally.

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