There are a series of questions and contingencies we need to be considering about the 2020 election campaign. These aren’t about how the Coronavirus outbreak will affect the outcome of the campaign per se – who could be helped or hurt electorally. It’s about the mechanics of the campaign itself.
Let us assume (and hope) that we have a better than worse outcome to this pandemic in the United States. Still, it seems entirely possible that it won’t be advisable to hold big party conventions in the late summer of this year. Consider it: Tens of thousands of people coming together and spending several days in one arena and various parties for four or five days. Also, those two events include most of the senior elected officials in the whole country.
We’re in sprint mode as the few remaining 2020 candidates vie for wins in the 14 states holding primary elections today.
But even after this weekend’s en-masse exodus of top candidates who under-performed in South Carolina on Saturday, Trump seems to be primarily concerned about the rise of the former vice president.
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The state of California wants you to know that if it’s taking a while to count its residents’ votes on Super Tuesday, it’s not because it’s heading into a Iowa-esque debacle.
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TPM Reader RS sends in this dispatch from Kirkland, Washington:
Thought you might be curious to hear from someone who lives about 500 yards from the nursing care facility and down the street from the hospital at ground zero. Read More
Here’s a very important article from Science. On February 28th, a WHO-organized mission to China published a detailed report about the situation in China. It was led by a Canadian WHO epidemiologist named Bruce Aylward. The actual report is here. The article I’m recommending is an article summarizing the key findings of the report by two highly respected health policy and infectious disease journalists.
Let me briefly address some of the emails in response to this post below about the seasonal flu. First, all your feedback is helpful and appreciated. For reasons I don’t fully I understand some readers have interpreted that post as saying either that the flu is worse or comparable or that COVID-19 infection isn’t that bad. One reader even said it played into President Trump’s efforts to downplay the problem. I strongly disagree, for reasons I’ll explain below. But before I do, for clarity, I’m definitely not saying any of those things. I say quite clearly that even at the low bound, COVID-19 infection appears to be dramatically more lethal than the flu and that all human populations have little to no immune resistance to it, which is also dramatically different from the flu.
The point to me is numeracy.
News is just out that former Majority Leader Harry Reid is endorsing Joe Biden. Notable point here. Reid went out of his way not to endorse before the Nevada Caucuses, where he obviously would have carried a lot of sway. But while not ‘endorsing’ he made statements more or less constantly about how great Elizabeth Warren is.
So his refusal to endorse was fairly nominal to anyone who was paying attention. This endorsement of Biden seems as much his saying that he thinks Warren’s window has closed as it is an endorsement of Joe Biden.
As we enter into a period in which the United States seems likely to at least see localized outbreaks of the novel Coronavirus, here is some important perspective. The U.S. is already in the midst of a fairly bad flu season. Probably mostly without your even being aware of it, 32 million Americans (roughly a 10th of the population) have gotten the flu. That has resulted in 310,000 hospitalizations. And 18,000 people have died from the flu. Details and charts here at the CDC flu surveillance page.
I had a whole long post written about this. I can summarize it as follows. Buttigieg dropping out, along with a slew of other developments over the last week, sets us up for a hugely unpredictable set of results on Tuesday. Buttigieg only had about 10% support nationally. Some polls showed his voters spreading surprisingly evenly to the other candidates as their second choice — belying any simple calculus that his voters automatically migrate to Biden. Commentators are having debates about different candidates’ “lanes” such.
But those analyses miss this greater uncertainty.
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From TPM Reader RB …
JoinI just have to say that in regard to your first two comments today Mar. 1 on a possible Bernie-Biden race, both your readers NL and JE are far too pessimistic, looking only for the worst possible outcomes.