Consider This from NPR - From Online Conventions To Teen Poll Workers, The Virus Is Transforming Election 2020

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

States are scrambling to replace older poll workers with younger ones. The two major political parties will hold their conventions mostly online. And in one big battleground state, the pandemic is shifting the political geography. NPR's latest battleground state map is here. Find and support your local public radio station.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. Before all this happened, the Republican National Convention was supposed to be in Charlotte, North Carolina. Then things got messy. In early June, President Trump tweeted that North Carolina's

Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, wouldn't let it happen, quote, as originally anticipated and promised. The governor said Republicans wanted to pack an arena to capacity, full restaurants, hotels and bars. So the president ordered the party to move some events to Jacksonville, Florida, where there were fewer restrictions. Party officials spent time and money trying to make that happen. But then... This current configuration I have, I cannot work with, I cannot, in good conscience, say that we are ready to handle this event. Mike Williams, the Republican sheriff in Jacksonville, told reporters the communication with the Republican Party just wasn't good.

And there wasn't enough time or money to make the convention happen safely. We're inside of 40 days away. I mean, we should be fine-tuning this event, and we really don't have a solid plan as of yet. Days later, the president said he decided to pull the plug. The timing for this event is not right. It's just not right with what's happened recently, the flare up in Florida. Now the Republican convention will be mostly online.

This week, Joe Biden announced the same thing. So canceled conventions, campaigns and fundraising, mostly online too. And for voters, this huge issue that did not exist six months ago, coming up, what else the virus is changing about the election and where the race stands with fewer than 90 days to go. This is Consider This from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Thursday, August 6th.

Elena Fusen is not old enough to vote in Tennessee. But now, because of a new law that was passed during the pandemic, she is old enough to help other people do it. I just thought it would be a good opportunity to learn about it because I really didn't know anything about it. In Tennessee, 16-year-olds can now sign up to be poll workers. So I thought that would be a good opportunity. Usually, people who work the

polls are much older, but this year some of those older workers will need to stay home. Oh, you cannot even imagine. With COVID, it has been a very challenging election. Delaina Green is the elections administrator in Henry, a rural county northwest of Nashville. She's been recruiting local teenagers to work the polls in the state's primary this week. Kids she's known a long time. Not only am I getting them involved, but I'm actually seeing these kids, most of them, since they were kindergarten up to this point. But that comes with its own issues, she says. Teenagers can be flaky, especially in the summer. They do get paid, and that does help.

When you show up at your neighborhood polling location, somebody's going to be there behind the table to greet you, to check your ID, to hand you your ballot. That doesn't happen by magic. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose is also trying to get younger people to work the polls in his state. He says, look at what happened in the Wisconsin primary this year. In Milwaukee alone, there were supposed to be 182 polling sites. Officials closed all of them but five because there weren't enough workers to staff the rest. My heart goes out to them,

but our friends in Milwaukee that had a lastminute massive consolidation of polling locations just because they didn't have enough poll workers. We can't have that type of thing occur here in Ohio. So yeah, if you do vote in person at polling places on Election Day, things could look pretty different. The virus could also change results in a few very important states. For instance, the old assumption about Florida is that presidential elections are basically fought in the middle of the state, around Orlando and Tampa.

That's because Democrats usually win the South and Republicans win the North. But this year, it looks like there might be more toss-up votes in Duval County, where Jacksonville is. It hasn't gone Democrat since Jimmy Carter. Here's NPR's Asma Khalid. Monique Sampson has lived most of her 23 years in Duval County. It can be very backwards politically. You have the Hemming Park that's named after a Confederate. You have Confederate Park, which is named after the Confederacy.

But Sampson says she feels like something is changing. Earlier this summer, she organized a protest for racial justice. She says about 10,000 people showed up. She was floored. And it got her rethinking her own politics. Before this, before COVID, before George Floyd, I thought that Joe Biden and Trump were different wings on the same bird. She doesn't like a lot of Biden's policies, but she's decided to vote for it. I'm not thrilled to be voting for Joe Biden. I'm not thrilled about it at all. And for a very long time, I wasn't going to vote for him.

And then COVID happened, and I was like, you know what? He sucks, for lack of a better term. But he's not criminal. Like, his actions aren't criminal in the sense of he wouldn't view 150,000 deaths as progress. Samson's story is part of a much bigger trend in Duval County. The area has become more democratic in recent years. Pollsters, political scientists and party leaders all agree that's in part because of stronger turnout among its relatively large Black population. But the shift is also because of newcomers.

When I was born here, it was a town that was predominantly a military town and a manufacturing town. That's Lisa King. She's 57 and heavily involved in Democratic politics. Nowadays, she says, the area has developed into a hub for the medical, financial, and insurance industries. Those companies bring their workforce from all over the country. So I think we have a lot of professionals that have moved here for work. And as we know, Donald Trump does worse with college educated people. Data from the Florida Chamber of Commerce shows the two states where most Duval transplants have arrived from are New York and Pennsylvania. Mitt Romney and Donald Trump both won the county, though Romney performed better here. But in 2018,

the Democratic candidate for governor won Duvall, a first since the 1980s. Republicans and Democrats agree this November will be tight. Matt Corrigan is a political science professor at Jacksonville University. If Democrats could win Duvall, I think it'd be really important, a symbolic victory. But he says all the surrounding counties are conservative, and Democrats are going to lose a lot of votes there. Anybody need to register? This is Ponte Vitre, a wealthy, white, conservative community on the ocean. It's just southeast of Jacksonville in neighboring St. John's County. Republicans with no masks on are selling Trump face masks and T-shirts outside a grocery store.

It's a red county. I went over 60 percent for President Trump in 2016. Brandon Patty is the local GOP chair. Like most Republicans, he thinks the president deserves re-election. From a policy perspective, economically he's done very well with deregulation, tax cut. St. John's is one of the most college-educated counties in the state. Many people, some fleeing Duval, have been moving here. The secret started getting out about the great schools, and hey, it only adds five minutes to your commute.

It's safe. The sheriff's office is real good. Next thing you know, St. John's develops into a conservative heavyweight. When the president speaks about law and order, it's meant for a place like St. John's. Fewer people live in the surrounding counties around Jacksonville, but both Republicans and Democrats are convinced there are secret Trump voters you don't see in the polls. And who wins, Florida, they say, is not just about who's up in a poll on a given day. It's about which party is better at getting their voters out to actually vote. NPR's Asma Khalid.

All right, so we know that Florida, along with a few other battleground states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, will decide this presidential election. NPR has some new analysis of those states and what their voters are focused on from senior political editor Domenico Montanaro. He talked to my colleague Ari Shapiro. Hi, Domenico. Hey, Ari. So you've been looking at the Electoral College map and the battleground states that could tip things one way or the other in November. Right now, what does the big picture look like? Well, right now, Biden has the clear advantage.

I mean, and it's expanded since we first did an analysis of the battleground states at the end of June. You know, reelections are always referenda on the sitting president. President Trump has really suffered politically in the last several months because he's gotten low marks from Americans on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and race relations. And that's really shifted things. And what we see is that the states leaning in Biden's direction with those states, he is now over 270 electoral votes that you would need to win a majority of the electoral college. With states likely are leaning in Biden's direction, the former vice president is at 297 electoral votes. That's up from 238 at the end of June. Trump is at 170, down from 186. And we should say that this is based on the current environment, not intended to be predictive of where things will be. So as I was looking at the map today and seeing the changes you made state by state, it doesn't look like anything shifted towards the Republicans, but several states shifted either

lean Democratic or toss up. Tell us state by state what you changed. Several changes. First, we took Colorado out of lean Democratic column and to the likely Democratic column because of how the polls have changed and Biden's strength in the suburbs. We've also moved four states from toss up to lean Democrat, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and the big one, Florida. We've also moved four states from toss-up to lean Democrat, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and the big one, Florida. We also moved Georgia from lean Republican to toss-up. So you can see all those moves, like you said, are toward Biden. And we should say our analysis is not just based on polls. It's based on conversations with the campaigns, on-the-ground reporting, and historical voting and demographic trends. It certainly can change. And by the way,

both campaigns expect things to tighten. Each one of those shifts could tell an interesting story. But broadly, what's the Trump campaign doing to respond? Well, look, the Trump campaign, first of all, will claim publicly that the polls are undersampling Republicans, that they're registering lots of voters. And we see some evidence in polling in some places where Biden's doing well, like Pennsylvania, where voters say that they expect their neighbors are Trump voters, but they're not quite willing to say so. But even if they won't admit it publicly, the Trump campaign, just look at their actions. You know, they see the problem that they're facing. They switched campaign managers. They changed out some

of their advertising. And those ads are being run in places that really should lean toward a Republican like Arizona and Georgia. And it's not a run in places that really should lean toward a Republican like Arizona and Georgia. And it's not a campaign really on offense right now. So how different is this from what we saw at this point in the race in 2016 in terms of Trump's ability to persuade voters? Well, Biden in a lot of places is near or at 50% in more swing states than Hillary Clinton was. And there are some other key differences as well. Perhaps most important, the Democrats are not underestimating President Trump's chances to win reelection. And there's probably less likelihood of people voting third party because

they think Biden will win in sort of the same way they did with Hillary Clinton. Also, Biden's doing better with suburban voters and seniors than Clinton was at this point. And Trump's campaign is focused on fear, telling suburban voters that if Biden is elected, crime will be rampant. But a lot of suburban voters just are saying that doesn't reflect what the current reality is for them. And more top of mind is the coronavirus pandemic, the economy and race relations. And if Trump isn't seen as handling any of those better than he is now, then it's going to be tough for him. NPR's Domenico Montanaro. Additional reporting in this episode from our colleagues at All Things Considered and from NPR's Barbara Sprunt and Sirio Martinez Beltran at member station WPLN in Nashville. For more news, download the NPR One app or listen to your local public radio station.

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