The Daily - The Pandemic and the Primary

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

Two weeks ago, the biggest story in the country was the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Now, with the dramatic onset of the coronavirus crisis, the primary has largely gone off the radar. Today, we talk to Alexander Burns, a political reporter at The New York Times, about what happened when those two stories collided. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: In a presidential debate without an in-person audience earlier this month, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders clashed over how to handle the coronavirus crisis. With so much news, you may have missed the debate — here are six takeaways to catch you up.Mr. Sanders is now reassessing his campaign as Mr. Biden plans for the nomination, announcing he will pick a woman as his running mate should he be chosen as the candidate.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Two weeks ago, the biggest story in the country was the Democratic presidential primary. Now, with the coronavirus, it's been largely forgotten. Alex Burns on what happened when those two stories collided. It's Monday, March 23rd.

Hello. Hello, Michael. Hey, it's always nice to be heralded by a bing, you know. Is that not your usual entrance into halls and rooms? Usually it's trumpets. I feel like every day, pretty much for two weeks, we would talk on the show and then poof, we have this unplanned hiatus and you go away. And so I kind of miss you a little bit. It's a particularly painful kind of social isolation for me, at least. So bring us up to speed on the Democratic primary. How would you describe the current state of the race?

Well, it's pretty close to over at this point. Joe Biden has emerged as the overwhelming favorite to be the Democratic nominee, clearly has a support from the majority of the party-wide lead in the delegate count. And Bernie Sanders has not conceded the race, but he's acknowledged that he is sort of reassessing his campaign, and that's often the first stage in the process of winding things down. So in effect, it feels like what you just described is more or less where we were a couple of weeks ago.

But with the benefit of some hindsight and some reporting on your part, I wonder if you could tell us how exactly that happened. Because I don't think we've properly accounted for the whiplash and the speed with which the Sanders campaign came kind of crashing down.

No, I don't think we have. And I think really you have to rewind the tape almost exactly a month ago to what was the high point. And now I'm delighted to bring you some pretty good news. I think all of you know we won the popular vote in Iowa. We won the New Hampshire primary.

We won the New Hampshire primary. And according to three networks in the AP, we have now won the Nevada caucus. He wins the Nevada caucuses, and he wins them by just an enormous margin. He crushes Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg. He wins young voters. he wins older voters, he wins folks who have participated in caucuses in the past and people who are participating for the first time. It's in Nevada where we see him go from winning,

you know, about a quarter of the vote to winning nearly half the vote. No campaign has a grassroots movement like we do, which is another reason why we're going to win this election. And that sends a really powerful signal across the Democratic Party. And what is that signal? I think what most of us thought at the time was that it was sending a signal that Bernie Sanders was broadening his appeal and that he was building a more diverse and more muscular political coalition than he had been able to demonstrate so far. It's also clear now that another message it sent to the rest of the Democratic Party was that Sanders was becoming a real freight nominee and to make a more explicit case about his own electability and to address himself more clearly to moderate voters who have been, you know, beyond wary of his campaign, just terrified of the idea of nominating him. Or he can stick with the approach that got him there to begin with, right? And that's to run as this anti-establishment progressive populist who is taking on his own party in addition to taking on the Republican Party. And the question then, I think,

is, well, which version are we going to hear over the coming week and the coming months from Bernie Sanders? And what happens? The day after he wins the Nevada caucuses, a 60 Minutes interview airs. Back in the 1980s, Sanders had some positive things to say about the former Soviet Union and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. And everybody was totally convinced. Here he is explaining why the Cuban people didn't rise up and help the U.S. overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro. He educated the kids, gave them health care. The piece of it that really pops out to a lot of Democrats is when Anderson Cooper asks Bernie Sanders about his past praise for the Castro regime in Cuba.

We're very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba. But, you know, it's unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know, when Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing, even though Fidel Castro— And it just sends a shockwave through Democrats. Bernie Sanders has the lead in total votes and delegates, but it's comments he made Sunday night on 60 Minutes that are causing fresh panic for some Democrats. It's absolutely inconceivable that any American as old as him, knowing everything we know about Fidel Castro and the people that he's murdered over the years, that anybody could support him in any way. The blowback is emblematic of broader uncertainty

about how nominating a self-described Democratic socialist could impact Democrats' chances in the general election. I like Bernie. How do you feel about him praising the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro? Yeah, I don't like that part. So to hear that from Sanders and to hear him essentially be unapologetic about it, I think was a real sign to people that, you know,

if you thought this guy was going to start moving to the middle now, that is not happening. His response infuriated Democratic lawmakers from South Florida, a key swing state where public support for the Castro regime is a non-starter. More specifically and in a more localized but really no less important way, this is terrifying to Democrats in Florida. Freshman Congresswomen Debbie Mookersell-Powell, she called Sanders' comment, quote, absolutely unacceptable. He made more than a mistake. It's what he believes. And it's unacceptable to our community. And Congresswoman Donna Shalala, who suggested that Sanders talk to her constituents before, quote,

singing the praises of a murderous tyrant, unquote. And you see just a unified, almost unified, wall of criticism of Sanders coming from Democrats in that state saying you were imperiling the general election in one of the biggest swing states on the map. After the 60 Minutes interview, you then start to hear prominent national Democrats say something that many of them haven't said so far, which is, we just can't nominate this guy. Let me thank all of you for joining us here this morning. And that's the point where you see Joe Biden get a major, major endorsement from Jim Clyburn, popular congressman from South Carolina, highest ranking African-American member of Congress.

But I want the public to know that I'm voting for Joe Biden. South Carolinians should be voting for Joe Biden. And here's why. I know Joe. We know Joe. We know Joe. But most importantly, Joe knows us. That's right. That's important.

So we head into the South Carolina primary, which Joe Biden was always favored to win. NBC News is now projecting that former Vice President Joe Biden has won a decisive victory in the South Carolina Democratic primary. And he wins it by 30 points. And he has done so by a substantial margin, potentially changing the dynamics of a race dominated so far by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. That is beyond what even the Biden campaign was expecting. That is beyond what even the Biden campaign was expecting. Biden just coalesces the overwhelming majority of Democrats who are not for Bernie Sanders behind his campaign. And so why in that moment did we not see Biden's win in South Carolina, which, as you just said, was kind of mathematically quite significant as the beginning of a turning point kind of comeback.

So on the night of South Carolina, we can look at Biden's 30-point margin and say, wow, that was impressive. And this guy is clearly more resilient than even some of his supporters, even some of his inner circle believed he was. What we didn't know is that the next day. So tonight, I am making the difficult decision to suspend my campaign for the presidency. Pete Buttigieg would drop out of the race. And then on Monday morning, Amy Klobuchar would drop out of the race. Today, I am ending my campaign and endorsing Joe Biden for president. And by the end of Monday... That I'm delighted to endorse and support Joe Biden for presidency.

Both of them would endorse Joe Biden. I will be casting my ballot for Joe Biden. And by the way, so would Beto O'Rourke, who dropped out of the race a couple months earlier. Right. We saw a transformation of voters' preferences within this field at a speed that I don't think it's an overstatement to call it totally unprecedented. I want to understand this phenomenon. Let me just begin with those endorsements that you just described. Why did Buttigieg, did Klobuchar drop out and endorse him so quickly? What's your understanding now

of how that happened? There are a couple of things going on here. Pete Buttigieg was on track to get totally waxed on Super Tuesday, which is just three days after South Carolina. So he is staring at the possibility of not just defeat and not just a setback, but something like political humiliation to go in a month from essentially winning Iowa, basically splitting the win with Bernie Sanders, to winning absolutely nothing on Super Tuesday. And so there is a logic of self-interest that says, you know, maybe you should take your winnings and walk away from the table at this point. Amy Klobuchar faces a somewhat different situation because she does look like she will win her home state of Minnesota.

But she is clear eyed enough at that point to recognize there's really no path forward for her in the race beyond Super Tuesday. Beyond the self-interest, though, these are two of the candidates who have been the bluntest and most pointed all along about their concern for the implications of nominating Sanders. They have been talking about the idea of nominating Sanders as deeply, deeply politically risky. And there are people who can do the math for themselves and see that after Nevada and South Carolina, there are really only two candidates in this race who are putting up big numbers on the national level in the way that it would take to go the distance. And between those two candidates, there's no question about whether they're closer to Biden or Sanders. Okay, so at this point, post-South Carolina and post-Super Tuesday, Biden is the frontrunner. But there's a ton of primaries

and delegates left, and still, theoretically, time for a Sanders comeback, right? Right. And it turns out to be very much a theoretical exercise, the Sanders comeback. You see, starting right after Super Tuesday, he points the way to the next round of primaries, most importantly, Michigan. Well, the jumentum continues. Former Vice President Biden sweeping to victory overnight in a pivotal primary contest. Sanders ends up totally flopping in Michigan. It's a blowout in the state. Biden sweeping every county in Michigan, Missouri and Mississippi. He also won Idaho. The wins giving him a commanding 160 delegate lead over Sanders.

And what happens essentially the night that Biden wins in Michigan and in a number of other important states is that the campaign is essentially frozen in place by a force that hits the campaign and hits the entire country in a way that nobody could have anticipated. And of course, that's the coronavirus. We'll be right back alex how exactly does the coronavirus epidemic eventually becomes a pandemic. How does that hurt Sanders and help Biden? That's not entirely intuitive to me. Well, what it does is it essentially ends the active portion of the campaign on the night of the March 10th primaries. Both of them are supposed to hold election night events where they address a roaring crowd of supporters. Both of those events get canceled.

There have been no campaign rallies since then. Bernie Sanders cannot hit the road and gather tens of thousands of people in stadiums and deliver a forceful plea to the Democratic Party to not go ahead and nominate Joe Biden. The window to make that argument has essentially closed. What's also going on is that the terms of debate go from being about ideological differences and policy differences to the reality of a terrifying national crisis. crisis. And what we see consistently in public polling for months and in exit polls taken around the March primaries is that on the question of which candidate you trust to handle a major crisis, Joe Biden is overwhelmingly favored, not just over Bernie Sanders, but over every alternative that Democratic voters had in the race.

So in a sense, the coronavirus doesn't just freeze the campaign and freeze Joe Biden's advantages electorally, it amplifies them because many Democratic voters see him as a crisis-style leader. Exactly. Biden's biggest strengths from the beginning have involved his experience and his perceived steadiness and the fact that voters basically find him trustworthy and reassuring. on Americans from this pandemic, the healthcare shortcomings, the thin financial cushion on which so many Americans are living, that's the stuff that Bernie Sanders has been saying forever. So I could also imagine a version of this where the pandemic strengthens Sanders' candidacy, not weakens it. I think that's really, really sharply put. But I do think people are processing this differently than they would process, for instance, a crash just of the financial sector. That if you saw an economic collapse in which people felt like the government was racing to contain a contagion from the financial industry and that their lives were basically safe. I suspect that we might be having a different political debate right now and that you would see Bernie Sanders holding these enormous rallies and making exactly the case you just laid out. And I think that things are so turbulent and unpredictable right now that we can't totally

rule out the possibility that maybe that happens at some point once people see the scale of economic damage in the kind of vividness that we certainly and unfortunately will. What we have right now, though, is people are experiencing a terrifying disruption in their daily lives. They're experiencing it, yes, as an economic crisis, but also as a public health crisis and something that probably feels to a lot of people like a national security crisis. And while a lot of Sanders' themes and ideas about the economy will probably be a bigger part of the conversation in the coming months, I don't know that the country has reached that point yet. So I want to turn now to the practical question of how the rest of the Democratic primary unfolds, because the situation we're in hasn't just frozen the dynamics of the race. It also seems to have

actually frozen the mechanics of the campaign, which feels pretty tricky because people have to leave their homes and go vote in order for there to ever be a nominee. So how is that going to work? Well, the short answer is we still don't really know. Almost every day now we hear from another state that is delaying its primary well into May or even into June. Now, some of the relevance of those changes is going to depend on what Bernie Sanders does next. If Sanders does stick around and if Biden is not able to functionally unify the Democratic Party with or without Bernie Sanders support, then we could see this really weird, long period of dormancy in the campaign, followed by a sudden frenzy of activity again in the late spring when

maybe the virus will be more under control and maybe people will start voting again. Personally, right now, I think that that is an unlikely scenario. Alex, what's your understanding of how Bernie Sanders is thinking of the big and difficult question of how long to stay in the race if it doesn't really seem as a practical path to the nomination. He's certainly hearing lots of calls to step aside in a moment of crisis, kind of let the party coalesce around a nominee and prepare itself for a general election. itself for a general election. I think there are a couple things about the mindset of the Sanders camp right now that are really worth emphasizing here. One is that this is a group that, you know, not that long ago thought that they were on not a glide path, but a pretty convincing course to the nomination. And they saw it fall away with astonishing speed. So there's a level, I think, still of kind of shell shock at feeling like they had this or they were close to having this.

And then it was yanked away from them. That's a hard thing for a campaign and especially for a candidate to process. I think the conditions of the pandemic also make it harder for, well, anybody involved in the race at this point to think through what is the right thing to do next. What we know about Bernie Sanders is that he cares a great deal about his agenda. And we also know that as a personal matter, he likes Joe Biden. This is not the Sanders-Clinton rivalry. He doesn't feel that the party really conspired to kneecap him in this race in the way that he did with some justification in 2016.

So what you see here is a candidate, Sanders, who I think understands what an underdog he is right now, and an opponent in Biden who is a negotiator. And I think that's why you're seeing Biden make such explicit overtures to Sanders supporters. Tonight, in keeping with the latest guidance from the CDC, I'm speaking to you from my home in Wilmington, Delaware. That in the last two primary nights that we'll have for a while, he has, in his election night remarks, addressed himself to Sanders supporters. So let me say, especially to the young voters who have been inspired by Senator Sanders,

I hear you. I know what's at stake. I know what we have to do. Saying that he admires their enthusiasm and their ideas. Senator Sanders and his supporters have brought a remarkable passion and tenacity to all of these issues. Together, they have shifted the fundamental conversation in this country. He gave them credit for having fundamentally changed the framework of American politics,

and he, specifically addressing young people, said... Senator Sanders and I may disagree on tactics, but we share a common vision for the need to provide affordable health care for all Americans, reducing income and equity that has risen so drastically to tackling the existential threat of our time, climate change. He understands the gravity of the challenges that they feel in their lives. When Biden takes those steps, it's a clear signal that he's trying to show Bernie Sanders that he has respect for the movement that he's built.

We have to step up and care for one another. Thank you all. Thank you all for listening. Finally, Alex, if Joe Biden is becoming a kind of de facto nominee over the next few weeks during this dormancy in the campaign. And if it starts to feel like a general election is getting underway between Biden and President Trump, I wonder what this really unique set of circumstances, which has meant so much for the Democratic primary, is going to mean for Biden's potential challenger, the sitting

president, Donald Trump. We know that the president is not going to be able to run for reelection on a message that happy days are here again and there's nothing but prosperity as far as we can see. That message is gone. What we don't know is what kind of story he will be able to tell about managing this crisis. We just don't know what the conditions on the ground are going to be like in a couple of months, let alone in the general election. When this crisis hit, Joe Biden had a pretty solid advantage over the president in general election polls.

pretty solid advantage over the president in general election polls. The map just feels to me like it's really up for grabs right now because we've never conducted an election under these kinds of conditions. And even 2008, the election in the middle of the financial crisis, we hadn't had the kind of time that we are going to have now to process the meaning of the setbacks that the country is currently experiencing. It's interesting you mentioned 2008 because it feels to me that that race might be the proper analogy, a crisis. And as you said throughout this conversation, Democrats are starting to view Joe Biden as the candidate of crisis. I'm sure Republicans view President Trump as the candidate of crisis. I'm sure Republicans view President Trump as the candidate of crisis.

And the question will become, once this crisis is over, what the general electorate views as the candidate of the crisis, who handled the crisis well, and who would get us out of the crisis best. And is there a candidate they blame for the crisis? If people ultimately see the president as having let them down in this, that feels awfully hard to escape. As it is, we can't say that that's how the country is going to feel, but we can say that he was an unpopular president on the day this crisis started. And that it's certainly not, based on what we know now, changing that picture in his favor. based on what we know now, changing that picture in his favor. Alex, thank you very much. Thank you.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Over the weekend, global efforts to contain the coronavirus by restricting people's movements intensified. Australia ordered most public spaces closed. India said it was shutting down all but essential services in its capital, Delhi. Germany limited gatherings to no more than two people. Britain ordered 1.5 million people with serious medical problems to self-quarantine. And Lebanon called in the army to endorse a lockdown.

We are certainly at war. In a time of war, we have to make sacrifices. And I certainly, in the last week or so, have asked the people of Ohio to make many sacrifices. In the United States, Ohio and Louisiana became the latest states to instruct residents to stay at home as infections in each state surged. Other states have referred to this as shelter in place. We prefer stay at home. Either one, it's pretty much the same thing. In Washington, negotiations over a $2 trillion stimulus package designed to protect businesses and workers hurt by the pandemic reached an impasse in the Senate. The proposal

that Leader McConnell from the Republican side has put forth is absolutely, totally worried about Wall Street at this time. I'm worried about the people in Little Royal, West Virginia and all over Main Street. That's the people we're worried about. saying it favors big business and does not contain enough protections for workers by allowing companies to fire workers even after receiving federal bailouts. And Wall Street's going to do just fine. It's always rebounded real well. They've always come back strong. Several Senate Republicans failed to cast votes because they are self-quarantining over fears that they may have been exposed to the

coronavirus. And at least one senator, Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, has now tested positive for the virus. The Times is providing free access to our most important updates on the pandemic. To read it, go to nytimes.com slash coronavirus. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.