The NPR Politics Podcast - Despite Health Risks, In-Person Voting Underway in Wisconsin

Episode Date: April 7, 2020

After a protracted tug-of-war between the state's governor, legislature and Supreme Court, voting is underway in Wisconsin's primary election. Results will not be disclosed until Monday to allow for the counting of absentee ballots. And is Bernie Sanders staying in the presidential race in order to extract concessions in the Democratic Party's platform? This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, campaign correspondent Asma Khalid, senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro, and Shawn Johnson of Wisconsin Public Radio.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hello NPR. Cliche alert. I live in Austin, Texas. I drive a Prius and I've listened to every single NPR politics podcast. But what you didn't expect is that I play the banjo. This podcast was originally recorded at 2 10 p.m. on Tuesday the 7th of April. Things may have changed from the time that you listen to this. Okay, enjoy the show. wild ride of will they or won't they, but there is an election happening today in Wisconsin. The state is holding its primary today. That comes against the objections of the state's governor and in spite of health risks. To get a clearer picture of what is happening on the ground there, we have Sean Johnson from Wisconsin Public Radio on the line. Hey, Sean. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah. So where are you right now?

Right now I'm in Madison, Wisconsin, recording from my home office where I've been spending a lot of time lately. So I did get a chance to go out, though, and talk to voters at polling places today. Before we talk about what you heard from voters, and it seems like there are a lot of people going out and voting despite it all, how did we get here? You know, it seemed like every few hours there was an update of whether this election was happening or not. Yeah, I think it started a few weeks ago when our governor, Tony Evers, started shutting everything down. And at the time, he was pretty reluctant to say that Wisconsin needed to delay its election. He was, at the time, on the same page as Republicans who run the legislature here.

And he's a Democrat, right? Tony Evers is a Democrat, and Republicans have strong majorities in the legislature. Then as the COVID-19 crisis developed, and as this election grew nearer, he changed, and he called for a move to an all-absenteentee ballot or a mail-in election, basically. That call was kind of ignored. Then he moved to call the legislature into special session to delay the election. That was also ignored. And so then this week he took the rare step of using an executive order to try to halt the election by himself. This happened on Monday at about one o'clock. Around four hours later, the Wisconsin Supreme Court had stepped in and said that he couldn't do that, that he lacked the power to stop the election. And so here we are, people are voting. Despite all this back and forth, there are people voting in person today. I mean, I know the campaigns for president, you know, I know that they had been encouraging people to vote by mail, but you've been out there and people are still showing up in person. So what's it been

like? So it's definitely quieter than usual. I can tell you in Madison, most of the poll workers that I saw were wearing masks. Most of the voters that I saw were wearing masks. So this is something that people have kind of taken to pretty quickly here. In other parts of the state, though, where the number of polling places have been decreased, namely Milwaukee, you have very long lines for people to vote. So normally Milwaukee would have 180 polling places. They are down to five polling places for the entire city. And so in Milwaukee, it's a very different situation than it is where I'm at. You have very long lines. People wait in a long time to vote. It's just more of a logistical headache there. And as you say, people are out there.

People are voting. People are working as poll workers. People are literally taking risks, serious risks, to exercise this right to vote and this civic duty. What are people telling you about these calculations that they made? I mean, I think for a lot of them, it is a civic duty. They view it that way. What are people telling you about these calculations that they made? as recently as yesterday that this election would be delayed. But once she found out that it was going to happen, she felt it was her duty to be there, even though she wasn't happy about it. I'm over 60. And that irritates me that, you know, we're putting ourselves at risk to come

and exercise our civic duties. And I just think that's wrong. So everybody who can shows up and does everything they can. But I think it was a very bad decision. Then I also talked to a lot of voters who said similar things. They would like to have seen this election delayed, but if it wasn't, they were going to be there. That included Steve Klavan of Madison. He's 65, and he felt like he had a duty to get out here, given what he's seeing around the state of Wisconsin. I know I'm in the higher risk group, and I felt like it was just really important to be here and exercise my right to vote. So this makes me think of November. Wisconsin is going to be a critical state in November. The thing that we don't know is what will the coronavirus be like

when election time comes? Will there be a resurgence? Some public health officials have been concerned that there could be a recurrence of outbreaks come fall when the seasons change. And this seems like something of a harbinger. Like if there's this much disagreement about vote by mail and all of this now, what's going to look like in November? And to that point, Sean, I mean, I'm also curious about the wide levels of disparity we've seen. I mean, you mentioned earlier that Milwaukee had just a fraction of the polling places open compared to Madison. And Milwaukee, I'm sure, you know, as you know, it's a heavily African American city. And this has been a point of criticism I've seen with voting rights organizations today, that this disparity has, you know, severe

racial implications as well. Yeah, in any election, there's always a struggle to get African-American voters to the polls in Wisconsin, in Milwaukee have come from African-American neighborhoods. It is, as our governor has described it, a crisis within a crisis here. So this is something that the African-American community is dealing with in a unique way. And that's happening at the time of an election when there are fewer places to vote than they would normally have. Wow. Well, one thing we do know is that we are not going to get election results tonight. The Associated Press has said that they are not going to be making any calls in the races in Wisconsin until at least Monday because there are so many vote-by-mail ballots that are waiting to come in. Well, Sean, thank you for talking us through all of this and for

being out there interviewing folks today. Thanks for having me. And we are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we're going to check in on the state of the Democratic primary race nationally. Right now, every household in the country is being asked to fill out the U.S. census. It's the form that helps us determine how voting districts are redrawn, where to build public schools and hospitals, how to spend federal money. So why are some people afraid to fill it out? We're getting into all that this week on NPR's Code Switch podcast. And we're back and we are joined by Domenico Montanaro. Hey, Domenico. Hey, Tam. So, Domenico, we were just talking with Sean Johnson

of Wisconsin Public Radio about how people are voting, but let's narrow in on who they're voting for. Obviously, the two candidates left are Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. In a lot of ways, it has felt like the contest between the two of them has stood still for a month. But at that point, it really did seem like this race was basically over anyway. So what happens now? Well, we know that former Vice President Joe Biden has about 1,217 delegates to Bernie Sanders' 914. So he's got a little bit more than little bit more than a 300 delegate lead. And for people who aren't really familiar with that, what that means is that Biden needs just 46% of the remaining delegates to be the nominee. So in other words, Sanders, to turn this aircraft carrier around,

is going to need to beat Biden with at least 64% of the vote in all the remaining contests. And so far, that's not what's been happening. And momentum is really tough to turn around in a race like this. In fact, going into Wisconsin, where of course, we're not going to have a definitive result for a little bit, Biden was leading pretty substantially in the polls. And Sanders a few weeks ago said that he would be assessing his campaign and seemed to indicate that at least Wisconsin might have some determinative effect on whether or not he stays in or not. You have been talking to folks who are close to the Sanders campaign?

Well, I talked to Larry Cohen, who is the head of Our Revolution, which is an outside group that supports Sanders. He's pretty close to Sanders, you know, certainly a pretty diehard guy when it comes to the movement that he feels the Sanders campaign has created and that Sanders himself has created. And what he's really bored in on, which I was a little surprised by in talking to him, is that they want to have enough of a say at the table, at the rules committee, at the Democratic Convention, within the Democratic Party, to say that they want an absolute continuation of every reform that was adopted

in 2020 that Cohen and Sanders pushed for. You know, we're talking about things like, you know, superdelegates not being able to vote on the first ballot. They want that extended indefinitely or at least through 2024. And what we know is that top people in both campaigns are negotiating. So it certainly looks like the writing is on the wall. And Cohen, in fact, said to me that at the end of the day, we're all in for Biden if he's the nominee. And I think what's going to be interesting to what you were talking about, Domenico, though, is the degree to which this officially shifts into a general election mode.

I would argue both Sanders supporters and Biden supporters are very aware of the fact that that Biden is by all accounts seen as the likely Democratic nominee, given the lead that he has in delegates and the momentum. You know, he is moving ahead in terms of planning out the possibility of selecting a vice presidential candidate. And he has said that he has informed Bernie Sanders about the fact that he's doing it. He wanted Sanders to know that he wasn't trying to be kind of overly presumptuous, but he feels like he needs to move ahead with that process. So something, though, I have to say feels really different about this campaign and how it's wrapping up than the 2016 campaign. The vitriol that existed between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and at least their supporters and staffers is very different than this time around.

Tam, I mean, I know you covered the Clinton campaign. You can certainly speak to some of that. But when it comes to Biden and Sanders, you know, they have this pre-existing relationship. They kind of like each other. They've said it over and over again, even though, frankly, Biden and Clinton's policies aren't a whole heck of a lot different. In so many ways, Biden is acting like he is the nominee and his opponent is Donald J. Trump. And President Trump, in a lot of ways, he's not talking about Bernie Sanders anymore. His focus, when he's not focused on coronavirus, is on Joe Biden. His campaign is focused on Joe Biden and sort of

beating him up while he doesn't have much of a platform. You're right. I mean, and that's why the other day one of his advisors, you know, Kellyanne Conway, said on Fox News that instead of Biden just criticizing the president on the outside, he should actually call him, call the White House and offer some support that way. And then that is how this very strange phone call transpired between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The two men spoke yesterday for about 15 minutes about the coronavirus. And I will say, I just found that fascinating. It would be like a real fly on the wall. I know we got kind of a quick synopsis of it. But you know, I don't feel like we really know what happened in that phone call. You know, you kind of wonder how much of that is politics, you know, one side looking like they can talk to the other. And you know, maybe that's good for them with independence.

All right, well, we are going to leave it there for today. I'm Tamara Keith, I cover the White House. I'm Asma Khalid, I'm covering the presidential campaign. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.