The NPR Politics Podcast - Despite Protests, Most Americans Still Support Coronavirus Restrictions

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

Demonstrations supported by national conservative groups have begun to spring up across the country. They are protesting the severe restrictions that public health experts say are necessary to prevent thousands of additional deaths from the coronavirus outbreak. This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, and WITF health reporter Brett Sholtis.Email the show at [e-mail] Join the Facebook group at n.pr/politicsgroup Subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org/politicsnewsletter Find and support your local public radio station at donate.npr.orgLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, I'm Marty at the University of Southern Maine campus in Gorham, Maine Coming in to the School of Music because someone still has to come in to water the pianos What? This politics podcast was recorded at It is 2.06 Eastern on Wednesday, April 22nd Things are gonna change Hopefully, everyone will be coming back to the School of Music real soon Enjoy the show! the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I'm covering the White House. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent.

Hey, Mara. Hey, Scott. So with support from national conservative groups, there are these protests springing up across the country to challenge restrictive orders. You're seeing them at state capitals in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Washington State, North Dakota, California. Shutdown. Shutdown. The shutdown. You can't close America. We can't let you work.

Now, health care experts say the stay-at-home measures are necessary to prevent tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of additional deaths. That's on top of the 44,000 people who have already died from the coronavirus. And despite President Trump's sympathy for these protests, which we're going to talk about, the White House still has stay-at-home guidelines in place. So we're going to walk through all of this and what it means today. And Mara, let's start with some context here, because these protests are getting a lot of attention. How representative is this view of how Americans are generally feeling? It's not representative of how Americans are feeling in general. What we know from a Quinnipiac poll that was taken in the beginning of April,

seven out of 10 voters, 70% said that the coronavirus crisis in the U.S. was getting worse. Only 8% saw it getting better. And a whopping 81% of voters said they would support a stay-at-home order on a national level. The protesters are definitely in the minority, but they represent something real, which is people are worried about the economy. People want to open up and go back to work because they're suffering. Half of voters, 55%, say they think the United States is now in a recession. And of that number, more than half of them expect expected to be worse than the recession that started in 2008. So, you know, 22 million people applying for unemployment,

four in 10 Americans have lost jobs or wages. I mean, the economic pain is real. But the support for what the protesters say they want, which seems to be an immediate across the board opening, that is very small. Yeah, and that stat about four in ten Americans having lost jobs or wages, I saw it. At first, it felt stunning to me, and then I realized, well, just think about it. You know, in every single place I look in my own life, I see effects of this, and so does everybody across the country. This is a very real thing, but at the same time, yes, most Americans are on board with continuing to be cautious here. Because Americans know that two things can be true at the same time.

People are smart. They want the economy to open up as fast as possible, but not at the risk of getting sick. They want to do it in a safe, in a speedy way and a safe way. But that is not the overall message of some of these protests that we've been seeing. And we're going to walk through one particular protest that happened recently in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And we're going to bring in Brett Schultes of member station WITF. Hey, Brett.

Hey, Scott. It is nice to have you on the podcast. We are doing a tour of every single station I used to work for in the last week or so, and I'm not even the one lining up the guests, but it's great to have you on. Yeah, it's great to be here. So you went to one of these protests this week. Tell us about what it was like, how many people were there, and what it felt like. So the protest was at Pennsylvania's state capital. And I live in Harrisburg, a few blocks north of there. And almost as soon as I got out of my house, almost as soon as I walked out

the door, it felt like I was already in the protest. Car horns were honking, motorcycle engines were revving as packs of motorcycles went up and down Second Street. And people were actually starting to shout things from their vehicles even before I got to the state capitol and kind of before I was even able to park. So it was really a protest that had really two components to it. It had people who were sort of staying in their vehicles. And then it had a lot of people who were just packed into pockets. With masks on? Some people were wearing masks, but a lot of people weren't wearing masks. And people were close together. They were really shoulder to shoulder. All right. So when you did get there, what were you hearing from people? I started talking to people before I

even got exactly to the state capitol because traffic was so sort of jammed up and people were yelling out of their cars. So I talked to a man named Keir Maloney who says he worked in the home remodeling and construction industry, and his message was, hey, we need to get back to work. We can do this safely, but if people like him don't get back to work soon, they're not going to be able to feed their families and they're really going to go broke. We want to be able to work. We can do this safely. We're not dumb. We can be responsible, but give us that right. Give us that opportunity. Stop making it political. This doesn't need to be political anymore. His response was to stop making it political.

But, you know, realistically, I mean, it was very political. It looked like an election year rally. Mara, one thing we've talked about is just the overlap in terms of the images that we're seeing between these crowds and Trump rallies. Right. A lot of MAGA hats in the pictures from the protests, lots of Trump signs, lots of Tea Party symbology, and a lot of the same professional organizations that back the Tea Party are also helping organize and back and fund these protests, too. Yeah, and the comparison to the Tea Party, it's really striking to me because, Brett, as you describe, walking to cover this rally, even the part of Harrisburg you live in, this to me sounds exactly like the Tea Party rallies that I covered in that exact same location in 2009 and

2010. Wow. And I think just one of the key points that I would take away from it myself was that while I talked to people who were there because they were concerned with jobs and with their business, with losing business, there were just as many people who I talked to who were employed and who were there for reasons that were a little bit harder to articulate. For example, I met Kathy Zimmerman. She's a retired business owner. She ran a dairy that made ice cream in central Pennsylvania. She had this to say about Pennsylvania's governor, Tom Wolf. I don't think he's behaving the way he is because he is naive. I believe it is all calculated. I believe that he and the governors of New York and New Jersey have such hatred for Trump that they are willing to

tank our economy just to try to make Trump not be reelected. And Mara, that point jumps out to me because Tom Wolf is a Democrat. And we saw, especially the first wave of these protests all across the country, they just so happened to be focused in states where Democrats were governors. Yeah, look, we have seen protesters in the state capitol in Austin, Texas, but most of them have been aimed at Democratic governors of battleground states, and Tom Wolf is one of them. But what's interesting is that argument that the economy is being kept shut down by Democrats just to hurt the reelection chances of Donald Trump, that's something that Trump was tweeting about long before these protests started. He said, you know, people who want the economy to stay closed are doing it just to hurt me. And so that's clearly, it's a very Trump-centric kind of protest. All right, so Brett, we have all of these people on the front steps of the Capitol calling for a reopening. Looking at the actual policy, what the governor and other officials are saying, what does reopening look like for

Pennsylvania right now? The governor wants to have a phased reopening based on certain parts of the state that have been less affected reopening first and based on certain businesses. So he his reopening plan is much like the way that he approached closing down parts of the state, which was phased, gradual, incremental and kind of controlled. And I think that that's been something that has made some people a bit impatient. This sample of people isn't representative of Republicans as a whole in Pennsylvania, or Trump voters as a whole. I think a lot of people were commenting on just how unsafe the particular means of protest is. But I also don't think it's worth dismissing some of the points that they're making about their industries

and really just valid long-term economic concerns that are in there. And I think you spoke to this earlier, this narrative becomes between the Republicans who want you to succeed in your business and you to have a job and the Democrats who want to keep you locked down, you know, and that's the narrative that's beginning to brew in places like Harrisburg. Yeah, and Mara, that's something that you and I are going to talk a lot about in the next section. But first, we're going to take a quick break and say goodbye to Brett. Brett Schultes from my favorite member station, WITF in Harrisburg. Thanks so much for coming on to the podcast. Thanks, Scott. Great talking with you. All right, we'll be right back.

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Subscribe or listen now to How I Built This. All right, and now we're back. And Mara, before we get into the politics of all of this, and maybe it's not that separate after all, we should say the White House has actually issued this guidance about how states should reopen this cautious three-phase plan that they put forward. But a couple states are now moving ahead with their own plans that do not seem to be in line with what the White House is saying. Right. You know, South Carolina is moving to open retail.

Georgia's governor said he's going to allow gyms and hair salons and nail salons and bowling alleys to begin operating maybe as soon as this Friday. Restaurants and movie theaters could start next week. So there are states that are moving forward, mostly red states. And then there are some states where the president has criticized the governors for being too harsh. According to the criteria, they're not ready to reopen. And it's been so interesting to me to watch these briefings where you have the White House officials say, here is this plan. We want it to be driven by the data. We want states to move safely.

Do this very slowly, right? And then you have President Trump at the lectern, but much more bluntly on Twitter with a totally different message, basically agreeing in many ways with these protesters and saying, open it as quickly as possible. Right. Well, he's tweeted, liberate Michigan, liberate Minnesota, liberate Virginia. That's real Tea Party language. You know, and as we mentioned, even before these protests started,

he had tweeted that people who want the economy to stay shut down are doing it because they don't want him to win reelection. So the president's North Star is his political base, the hardcore conservative supporters that are going to stick with him through thick and thin. And he really moved quickly to align himself with those people who are the ones in a lot of states who are out there protesting. And earlier last week, before the president has tweeted out, liberate Minnesota, liberate Michigan, liberate Virginia, I talked to a source of mine who works with the group supporting these Tea Party style protests. And he said,

there's going to be this big ideological battle between blue states and red states, blue states will hunker down, red states will open up and the president will foment this battle by browbeating blue state cities, you know, by saying, hey, Houston opened, why not New York City? And if you just contrast that to I think it's fair to say that Vice President Pence, when he does get to speak at these briefings, he is the one kind of sticking to the exact written down guidelines and planning. That does not really sound anything like what President Trump's saying. It seems very hard to kind of rally the base with that message and also coordinate a national

strategy to get over this. Yeah. And, you know, there are deep splits inside the Republican Party. I mean, you see the kind of Tea Party grassroots people out there protesting, albeit not in very large numbers. But then you have someone like the head of the National Association of Manufacturers, Jay Timmons, who wrote a Facebook post after he was invited to attend one of these rallies and rejected the invitation. He wrote a post that the headline said, idiots in all caps, and said, look, you know, we want his factories and manufacturers to open as fast as possible, but he wants the factory workers to be safe. And he said that if you open too fast and risk a wave of infections and deaths,

that's going to force these companies to shut down all over again, and they can't go through this. All right, that is it for today. Thanks again to Brett Schultes of WITF in Harrisburg. Before we go, last week we tried something new in the Weekly Roundup. We asked you to send us a recording about what you couldn't let go of from the week, politics or otherwise. We really loved hearing from you. We're going to do it again this week. So here about what you couldn't let go of from the week, politics or otherwise. We really loved hearing from you.

We're going to do it again this week. So here's what you do. Record it on your phone. Keep it at about 30 seconds or so. And then send that file to nprpolitics at npr.org. Look forward to hearing it. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House.

I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.