The NPR Politics Podcast - Joe Biden, Retail Politician, Tries His Hand At Virtual Campaigning

Episode Date: March 26, 2020

Joe Biden has held a number of web-based campaign events and fundraisers now that the coronavirus outbreak has grounded his campaign. Early efforts were plagued with problems, though there are signs things are improving. And congressional candidates are also facing challenges, even with the most essential of campaign tasks — like getting enough signatures to appear on the ballot. This episode: political correspondent Scott Detrow, campaign correspondent Asma Khalid, and demographics and culture reporter Juana Summers.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hello, this is Peter from San Lorenzo, California. I'm currently waiting to go into work for the first time in nearly two weeks. The preschool I work for shut down normal operations, but quickly opened up again to care for the children of our brave first responders. And that's who I'm going to get to hang out with today. This podcast was recorded at... It is 2.20 Eastern on Thursday, March 26th. Things may have changed by the time you hear

it, but our first responders will still need our support. So take care of each other and stay healthy. I'm sure that's really helpful to people in a very scary and serious situation right now that they appreciate. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover politics. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the presidential campaign. I'm Juana Summers. I also cover the campaign. So last night, the Senate voted unanimously to pass that $2 trillion emergency relief bill. The House will likely vote on that tomorrow. President Trump is now hinting in a letter to governors that the White House will soon provide new guidelines to states to help them decide whether they want to relax or increase rules about social distancing.

We have been covering all of these developments in our last few podcasts. There's also a ton about them on NPR.org. But amid all of this, the presidential campaign is still going on, kind of, in a kind of weird at times way. So today we want to pause on all this major news coming out of D.C. to just talk about the presidential campaign and what it looks like. So Asma, let's start with you. You've been covering Joe Biden, and even though he is not someone who has massive rallies, he loves interacting with people, shaking hands, having personal conversations. So how is he adapting to this?

Well, he can't do any rallies at the moment. His campaign, like all campaigns, is grounded, which means no in-person contact, no travel. And so he has, like pretty much any other campaign at this moment, had to figure out how to move this all onto a virtual platform. You know, I think that this, in some ways, I would say has been a challenge for Biden, because he has been outdone by some of his rivals in this space. You know, I talked to his campaign, they see Facebook, for example, as a particularly friendly platform from a space where Biden could do well, where some they think of his more empathetic moments may come across really well. Well, that's a fair point. But then you got to look at the fact that someone like Donald Trump already has like 20 million followers on Facebook. And that's a pretty preferred platform for him.

So he's just coming into this at a sort of disadvantaged space where he has not had live streaming capabilities really extensively before. He hasn't been as active of a force that, you know, compared to say, I'm thinking like Bernie Sanders, who you've covered, and you've done reporting on this, Scott, like he's just been in this space a lot more than Joe Biden has leading up to this moment. Yeah, Bernie Sanders had a whole TV studio set up at his campaign headquarters for him and for other members of the campaign they've been using for more than a year. Joe Biden seems to have cobbled together a TV studio in like his living room or something over the past week. How's that been going? He did. And he talked about the challenges

of having to virtually campaign in a press conference yesterday that he held over Zoom. He's done before sort of like these phone teleconferences with reporters. This was the first one where we could actually sort of physically see him and reporters could ask questions over the teleconferencing platform Zoom. And he was asked specifically about just sort of the challenges of being in this moment. I'm at home. They had to set up. It took about four days to be able to have the power and the capacity to set up in my recreation room where I'm sitting now the ability to communicate like I am now. Before we turn to Sanders, Asma, what's it like on the reporter end of a Zoom press conference?

Well, I will say it was sort of weird to realize that your picture, if you ask a question, would pop up for all the other journalists to see. And, you know, I think some of us tend to wear like sweats, leggings and whatnot when we work from home. So I have a Post-it sticker over my camera so that if I was called on, no one could peer into my house. But I will say, you know, on a serious note, Scott, this is challenging for everybody. You know, I spoke to Barack Obama's digital director in 2012. This is a guy, Teddy Goff. And he said that really, however long this goes on for, whether it's weeks or months, it's going to be challenging for any campaign. But in his view, it could also be an opportunity because you've got almost every American, you know, unless you are, say, a first responder in this moment, who is largely sitting in

front of their device all day and all night. You have a potentially captive audience if you can figure out what time they're paying attention to, what channels they want, the tactics to get people to tune in. So Juana, Bernie Sanders is still very much in the race, despite some hints last week that he may be ending his campaign. That seems to not be the case for the moment. What has he been doing over the past week or so? Well, Scott, it's so interesting because I think that Bernie Sanders' campaign in the

era of coronavirus in many ways looks a lot like what Bernie Sanders' campaign normally looked like. As you and I have both reported, it's a campaign that's been very online on places like Facebook and YouTube, but also on newer platforms like Twitch, which I better know because I watch video game streams on it. He has been using his digital reach to talk about the solutions he thinks all Americans need as we all kind of try to grapple with this pandemic and figure out what's going to happen next. He's holding live streamed events and they're're getting 10s of 1000s of supporters who are tuning in. He's also raising money for first responders and for charities and for folks who are impacted by this. And I think that for him, a candidate whose candidacy has centrally been focused on the issue of healthcare and particularly Medicare for all, he and his aides see this as a moment to show some leadership.

Yeah, and he's been focusing exclusively on coronavirus and the bill that just passed the Senate, especially pushing for monthly $2,000 payments to everyone, among other things. So was he happy with the final product that passed the Senate last night unanimously? I think he's made clear that he has some issues with that final product that passed the Senate last night unanimously. And I think he's made clear that he has some issues with that final product. He came out to the Senate floor and the speech that went viral, and he talked about his frustrations with some Republican lawmakers who were focused on the amount of money that some folks would receive in this really powerful speech.

And now I find that some of my Republican colleagues are very distressed. They're very upset that somebody who's making 10, 12 bucks an hour now, like the rest of us, faces an unprecedented economic crisis with the 600 bucks on top of their normal, their regular unemployment check, might be making a few bucks more for four months. Oh, my word. Will the universe survive? And just to clarify, he was he was he was frustrated that Republicans were pushing back on this aspect of the bill. It did end up staying in the bill. But he was certainly had a big moment pushing back on that criticism. Yeah, that's a moment that got millions of views online and has certainly energized his

supporter base. So while Bernie Sanders and no other candidate can be out there knocking on doors and rallying their supporters, I think it does show the importance for candidates in the absence of all of that to be able to go out and reach people where they're at. And right now, most of us, like all of us, are at home with our computers and our phones. What we saw from Bernie Sanders wasn't just the viral nature of that message and the way that it spread on digital platforms. It was just the fact that Bernie that message and the way that it spread on digital platforms. It was just the fact that Bernie Sanders has a platform in the Senate. And this is a very unusual moment for Joe Biden. I mean, he has been in political office for decades of his life, for frankly, most of his adult life. And here he is in this moment where he's not in

the executive branch, he's not, you know, a member of Congress either. And he was asked about this also in the press conference he held yesterday. I find, I guess, like anybody who cares about this, I'm chomping at the bit. I wish I were still in the Senate, you know, being able to impact on some of these things. But I am where I am. And I hope to be the nominee of the Democratic Party. And I hope I'm able to get my message across as we go forward. And we don't know when they'll actually be able to start campaigning, right? I mean, there is something to be said when I talk to some Biden volunteers about that in-person connection you get when you knock on doors that you can't have in this particular moment. And I think that the Biden campaign is trying to figure out how they can recreate some of the strengths of retail

politics when you're not able to do that all in person. And, you know, we just got word that he's planning to launch a podcast. So he too will be in the podcast space soon. Welcome, welcome to the podcast space, Joe Biden. All right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about how this affects non-presidential campaigns, races for House and Senate and local office. Support for this podcast and the following message come from YouStudio. races for House and Senate and local office. businesses. Companies can send important updates to remote workforces and clients, provide on-demand training and more securely on any device. Request a free 30-day trial for your company at theletterustudio.com. The coronavirus pandemic is changing everything really fast. So we have created a podcast where you can hear conversations and stories from NPR journalists who are covering the pandemic,

the public health fight against it, and how the world is coping. I'm your host, Kelly McEvers. Listen and subscribe to Coronavirus Daily from NPR. And we are back. And let's talk about those campaigns for offices besides president. The entire House of Representatives, a third of the Senate are on the ballot this year. And of course, there are thousands of state and local races as well. Juana, you've done some reporting on how all these other candidates are dealing with this weird situation. Yeah, I mean, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and President Trump all have a lot of name recognition there. And we know who they

are. But if you're a candidate running for some of these other races, this is a really critical time. I talked to a number of candidates who are running for Congress. And one of the challenges that kept coming up is the fact that there are deadlines coming up soon for them to get on the ballot. One of the candidates that I talked to is Brianna Wu. She is a Democrat. She's challenging Stephen Lynch, the congressman from Massachusetts. And she told me that soon she has to turn in 2000 signatures to get on the ballot for September's primary. She doesn't know how she can do that because it's not safe to send volunteers to knock on doors. They aren't able to go stand in busy places because everyone is in their homes. So just that

reality feels impossible. So she and a lot of other candidates in Massachusetts are asking the state to push back that deadline to file those signatures. So far, at least they haven't heard if that's going to change. The other thing that kept coming up in my conversations is the fact of how challenging it is to ask people for money right now, with so many people out of work, nearly 3.3 million people filed for unemployment last week alone. I talked to Brianna Wu about that as well. I had three different people just yesterday that had pledged to donate to my campaign. And then we got in touch with them. And they're like, I just lost my job.

One question I have is that we often think that there's a lot of power in being an incumbent. Is there a sense that that's particularly true now? Because it's hard to just get your name out in this moment. That's a really great point. And it's something that came up when I talked to Brianna Wu in particular. She told me that she felt like people who are challenging incumbents like her, that it's much harder, if not impossible, for them to win without the power of canvassing. She pointed to the example of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, who

was really just an expert at doing that well, and kind of something that she had seen maybe modeling her efforts after. But now with everyone home, that door knocking, that canvassing, that person to person contact that we were talking about earlier, it just doesn't exist anymore. So it makes challenging an incumbent really difficult from what I was told by candidates. And one of the last question I had is how much has this changed just what the candidates are even talking about and making the campaigns about? It's changed it a lot. I had a really long conversation with Illinois State

Senator Jim Oberweiss. He won a crowded Republican primary to face Democratic Representative Lauren Underwood in November. And this is one of Republicans' top targeted seats. And Oberweiss told me he's not even really thinking about winning in November right now. We're not really focusing right now on trying to win the election in November. We're focusing on how do we help people stay safe. And one thing that I took away is that all of these candidates, they're working through keeping their families safe and healthy, just like we are. Jim Oberweiss told me when we had our conversation that his daughter who lives across the country in California was experiencing some mild symptoms that could be coronavirus, but hadn't been tested. And that's something that's been weighing heavily on his mind, even as he's campaigning for the seat that's been such a priority for the National Party.

It's just such a reminder that like every single person in the country in one way or another is just having to rethink every single thing they do right now and just has no answers about when that's going to end. All right, that is it for today. We'll be back in your feed tomorrow with our weekly roundup. Until then, you can head to n.pr slash politics group to join our Facebook group. It is a place for you to connect with other listeners of the podcast and have real human, even pleasant conversations about politics. Just make sure you answer all of the questions you're prompted with when you request to join. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover politics. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the presidential campaign. And I'm Juana Summers. I also cover the campaign. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.