The NPR Politics Podcast - Half Of Households Financially Impacted By Coronavirus. It Could Get Worse.

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

Fifty percent of Americans said they or someone in their household has either lost hours or a job because of the coronavirus, as the economy rapidly shrinks. Also, Delaware is set to allow voters with disabilities to vote online in November, renewing debates over election security. This episode: congressional correspondent Susan Davis, senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro, political reporter Miles Parks, and chief economics correspondent Scott Horsley.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Leo from Maryland. My dad is trying to secure loans from the Paycheck Protection Program while my two-year-old brother is climbing on him. This broadcast is recorded at 1 55 p.m. on Wednesday, April 29th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. One thing I can absolutely relate to is having a toddler crawl on you when you're trying to get something done these days. I feel that. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Scott Horsley. I cover the economy. And I'm Domenica Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And half of Americans now say they've taken a financial hit because of the coronavirus pandemic. And the economy shrank at an annual rate

of almost 5% in the last three months. Domenico, that half of American stat that comes from our latest NPR PBS Mayor's Poll, that's a huge number. Put this in perspective. It's a huge number. 50% of Americans now say that they have been financially affected by coronavirus. Either they or someone in their household has either lost hours at their job or lost their job entirely. And that's up from 18% when we asked that question a month ago, which really just shows you how deep this is starting to go and what could happen if this continues. Not everyone has been affected equally though, right? I mean, non-whites have been affected harder. Who else? Yeah. 60% of non-whites said they or someone in their household has lost hours or a job compared with 43% of whites. In addition, 55% of those

without a college degree say that they've been affected as opposed to about 45% of those with a college degree, people under 45 more affected and people who make less than $50,000 a year. So really the most vulnerable in society taking the hardest hit here. Scott, this doesn't really seem like a surprise when you think about everything that we're already feeling and the unemployment numbers that have gone up and up. I think there are well over 20 million now. So an economic slowdown, no big surprise. That's right, Sue. I mean, 50% of Americans may be dialing back their spending because they have lost jobs or hours, but 100% of Americans are dialing back their spending because the places they would ordinarily spend money have closed their doors. As you pointed out, the Commerce

Department has just given us its assessment of the economy during the first three months of the year, and personal spending suffered its sharpest drop in 40 years. That's what's driving that slowdown in the broader economy. But I'm sorry to say that the current quarter, the second quarter, is going to have an even bigger slowdown. Right, because first quarter, January, February, March, it was just sort of the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic effects. April, May, June don't feel like they're going to be great months for this. The forecasts are for the economy to contract in this quarter at a rate of 30 to 40 percent.

We haven't seen anything like that kind of cliff dive since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But one thing, though, I think is so fascinating, and our poll has some more data on this, but one, Americans are taking a huge financial hit. The economy is contracting by historic proportions, but yet people are still saying they're comfortable staying at home. Like there isn't this push to get the economy up and running, at least not right in this very moment. I think they're more uncomfortable going out rather than comfortable staying staying home. The lesser of two evils, right. But we asked, do you think it's a good idea or a bad idea to do each of the following without further testing, you know, widespread testing for coronavirus? And 80% or more said they would, they think it's a bad idea to allow large groups of people to attend sporting events,

to have students return to school, to open restaurants for people to eat in them. The only place we saw a little bit of a decrease here, and it's mostly because of Republicans, you had two-thirds of people saying that they think it's a bad idea to have people return to work physically, but you had a majority of Republicans

saying they think it is a good idea. So that's where a lot of the tension is happening right now, especially with this red state, blue state divide in some places. How's the country viewing the president's handling of it? You know, 44% of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing handling coronavirus, which sounds a whole lot like his regular job approval rating. Day to day, day to day approval, yeah. Which is what we've seen. Now, his disapproval rating jumped six points on handling of coronavirus in the last

month. You know, if there's any wiggle room, that's where it's at. And we saw about a third of people saying that coronavirus is going to be a major or a minor factor in their vote. Two-thirds of people saying that they've already made up their mind no matter what happens. So you have a slice of people who are saying that they could be swayable based on coronavirus, and they very well could be determinative in the election. I know you've been hearing from strategists who've been saying they're already preparing for this to be the main issue. Yeah, I mean, one thing that I've heard that strategists say, and I think this is true, because we've talked about this, this theoretical voter a lot in the podcast is the voter who's not the base voter, who's the swing voter, who would say something like, you know, I don't like the way Trump tweets, I don't like his

behavior all the time, but look at the economy and look how great it's doing. And if that voter no longer feels confident about the economy, which way do they fall? You certainly can't point to the economy anymore and say, look how great it's doing. Yeah. And one thing we did see in this poll is huge gender divide, huge educational divide. If you're a man, majority of men approve of the job Trump is doing on coronavirus. A huge number of women overwhelmingly disapproving of the job he's doing. 63% of women disapprove of the job he's doing. And on education, even among whites, white non-college graduates, a majority of them, people without a degree, 58% say that they approve of the job Trump is doing. White college graduates,

62% disapprove of the job he's doing. And when we looked overall, when we asked people about 2020, and we asked people about Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, people said that they would rather have Joe Biden handle coronavirus, and not just coronavirus, but to Scott's point about the economy, they'd rather have Biden handle the economy as well. And that's a big breakthrough. It's not necessarily surprising that you'd prefer the Democrat on a healthcare issue, but to have the Democrat leading on the economy question is a change, especially since Joe Biden's been largely invisible in recent weeks. All right. Let's take a quick break. Scott, we're going to let you go. I know you've got more work to do. Thanks for joining the pod today. Great to be with you all.

And when we get back, we'll talk about a new group of Americans who will get to cast their ballots online. The biggest story in the world is a science story. And keeping up with all the latest coronavirus research, it's a lot. So on Shortwave, we translate the science you need to know into short daily episodes. Listen and subscribe to Shortwave from NPR. And we're back and we've got Miles Parks who covers voting for us. Hey, Miles. Hi, Sue. How are your bird friends hanging out at your apartment doing these days? You know, they're pretty good. They're still having a great time building their nest. I will say we've kind of had a little bit of a falling out lately just because they're really loud.

Welcome to spring, Miles. But one piece of good news for you this week, Miles, you had a little scoop this week on the elections beat. I did indeed. Yeah. Talking a little bit online voting. So in your story, you reported that Delaware is going to become just the second state to allow some of its voters to return their ballots electronically in November. Why did they make that decision? Yeah, so they're basically going to be piloting this program in their June primary for this very small chunk of their voters, their overseas and military voters, and their voters with disabilities, which that second part

is a really important distinction because a lot of overseas and military voters already do vote electronically. We don't talk about it very much, but across the country, a lot of this subset of voters are sending in their ballots via email sometimes. But voters with disabilities, this is big news. West Virginia announced earlier this year that they were going to allow voters with disabilities to electronically return ballots, and now Delaware will do it. How's that worked in the past with this electronic voting? I think a lot of people definitely didn't realize that there was a percentage of people that were allowed to do it.

Did they say it goes smoothly? Do they have the capacity to expand? I mean, there's the potential, it feels like for a real logjam here, if you don't have enough people or bandwidth to literally to do this. Yeah, so the technology, to be completely honest, hasn't really been broadly tested very much in the election space. Basically, they're going to access a web portal through their computer, through their phone, through their tablet,

and they're basically going to fill it out and then hit a button and it's going to get sent in. On the election administrator side, the election administrator will basically access the ballot through a cloud, print it out, and then count it alongside all of the other ballots that they're receiving. Sounds about as easy as the Iowa caucuses. That's what I was gonna say. I mean, so on the one hand, right, online voting seems to make a lot of sense. It seems like why can't we just have an app for that? It would expand voting rights access. I mean, making sure people with

disabilities can vote is a great thing. It's something that a value that everyone shares. But then I think about things like the Iowa caucus, like the chances for new technology, new app technology, new voting technology to go completely haywire and undermine trust in an election seems like such a high risk. Well, and that's the argument that the people who are in favor of this technology say is that these are really, really small population blocks that they're still, these are, they're calling them pilot programs. The amount of voters who are going to vote using this technology in November, when I talked to the company's CEO, he said it's probably less than 10,000 voters, which if you consider the many millions of people who are going to vote in this country,

doesn't, you know, it's not an Iowa situation where you're relying basically the entire election, probably on this technology. But you know, we still have to pay attention to it because the advocates say, these are situations where we're going to test it, and then ideally continue building that amount of population, moving the future voting toward this way in the next few years. Miles, you also wrote this week about some new polling on mail-in voting, which I guess if online voting is the third rail of election security, mail-in voting, I don't know what the opposite of the third rail is, but mail-in is the first rail. It is increasingly popular in this country. Yeah, it's the least scary rail, I would say. You know, 70% of voters in this new Pew Research Center poll are in support

of all voters being able to vote by mail. You think about that. What else in this country has 70% support? It's really hard to think of the things that can get that broad support. And vote by mail is just really popular. Most of that is, I mean, a huge part of that is Democrats. Virtually every Democrat wants every registered voter to be able to vote by mail. But half of Republicans say the same thing. Forty nine percent of Republicans think all registered voters should be able to cast their ballots via mail. And then the other interesting tidbit here I want to mention on this is that Republicans in states where more than a third of voters cast their ballots by mail, 68% of Republicans in states like that think all registered voters should be able to cast their ballots by mail.

What that means is that when people are allowed to do it and see how it works, then they become even more supportive of it, which I think is really interesting. You know, one of the things that Miles has reported on before is that, you know, while there's not much voter fraud in the country overall, that vote by mail is happens to be a little bit more susceptible to potential voter fraud. And I just wonder, we've already heard President Trump say that he doesn't like vote by mail, even though he cast a ballot in Florida by mail, how much some on the conservative side, if President Trump doesn't win, are going to try to say that there was potential broad fraud in the country? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really valid point, because we have seen when you talk to election

experts who focus on this stuff, that there are slightly more instances of fraud when it comes to mail balloting than when it comes to in-person. But the other thing here is that the states that do vote by mail, like have virtually all vote by mail or almost all vote by mail, actually have less fraud than the states that kind of do it irregularly. The states that are doing it more and as states get more comfortable with it and as voters understand the rules, you actually see the fraud numbers go down, not up as states get better at it. It also suggests there's a real disconnect between where the public's attitude is on mail-in voting and what the debate is in Washington right now about it, which seems much more divisive in

between the parties. But the country is kind of like, yeah, OK, let's do this. Yeah. And the other point is that I think there's this kind of political science, a very simplistic political science take that vote by mail is going to benefit Democrats because it will increase turnout. But a lot of the data actually says that's not true. There was a new Stanford study out a month or two ago that basically said there's no partisan effect of increasing vote by mail. So when you look at the polling that says there's bipartisan support for this thing, and then you look at the other data that says it doesn't really swing elections. It's kind of, I think, over the next couple years, it might be hard to imagine the arguments against expanding it. All right, I think we'll leave it there for today. But before we go, we want to remind you that

tomorrow we're going to be holding a live Q&A on Facebook, all about the effort to reopen the economy. We'll be live at 3.30 p.m. Eastern on the NPR Politics Facebook page. You can send us your questions about policy and politics to nprpolitics at npr.org. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.