The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Friday, April 3rd

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

The Democratic National Committee has agreed to push back their nominating convention until mid-August. Mike Bloomberg is facing lawsuits from former campaign staffers who say they were promised jobs through the general election. And the NPR Politics team answers listener questions about the coronavirus outbreak. This episode: congressional correspondent Susan Davis, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, demographics and culture reporter Juana Summers, and voting and election security reporter Miles Parks.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, before we start the show, I need to ask a favor. It's a tough time for a lot of people right now, and MBR is here every day with the news, whenever you're ready to hear it. In fact, some of our stations have even canceled their fundraising drives to make sure you can get the latest news you need to keep safe and informed. But those fundraising drives are the main source of money for many stations, and I was hoping that our listeners might be able to help them fill the gap. Helping local stations helps us make the NPR Politics podcast.

So if you're able, please head to donate.npr.org slash politics to give what you can. Thanks. Hi, this is Kevin Collins from San Antonio, Texas. I just went through the drive-thru at Starbucks and the person in front of me paid for my drink. The person in front of them had paid for their drink, and so no one was behind me at first, so I had a conversation with the cashier, and lo and behold, somebody drove up and I paid for their drink. So let's all pass on some kindness to somebody today. Social distancing, of course. This podcast was recorded at... 1.12 p.m. on Friday, April 3rd. Things may have changed by the time you listen to this. All right, enjoy the show.

That was incredibly kind. I'm trying to bring that energy into my weekend. Yeah, that was really nice. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Juana Summers. I cover demographics and culture. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And the coronavirus has delayed another major event, at least a major event in our lives, the Democratic National Convention. It had been scheduled for the week of July 13th in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It is now scheduled to take place the week of August 17th. Mara, I think this

is a sign of how much the coronavirus is impacting the 2020 election cycle. Absolutely. You know, the DNC has been thinking about this for quite some time. They took their cue from Joe Biden, who said it looks like we're going to have to move this to August. One thing the Democratic National Committee members have told me is now at least they're on a level playing field with the Republicans because they're going one week before them in August. If they have to cancel because the virus is still raging, the Republicans probably will too. So they're in the same boat now. One of the, you know, we were asking Tom Perez, the DNC chairman about this a lot,

especially in special coverage of the early primaries. This doesn't really feel like a surprising decision. I mean, I don't think Democrats and candidates are shocked that this is happening. No, I don't think that they are at all. I mean, between what we're seeing change and be delayed in every single facet of American life right now, and the signals that Tom Perez was sending in conversations with us and other news organizations. It seemed like it was a matter of when, not if, this decision would be made. I think the question is, frankly, what things will look like in August, the new date that they've put out. We don't know what course this coronavirus pandemic will take yet. We've seen some projections, obviously, from the federal government and healthcare officials. But I think that raises the question

of whether the convention can actually happen then and what in what form it actually will take place when it does happen. Right? Like, do we want to have thousands of people gathering for days in one enclosed space? Even if things are better, it feels like the country is still going to probably be a little bit wary of that for some time going forward. Right. It's possible that neither of these conventions in the end will happen in their traditional forms. But I can tell you one thing. The Democrats did not want to give up three days of earned media if they didn't have to. I mean, these are big, big opportunities. But are they, Mara? I mean, I think there's a sense that is the political convention still necessary in the modern world? Yes, this is the question I've been asking. And conventions have shrunk, less actual business gets done at a convention. But for the challenger to an incumbent to give up, you know, three nights of coverage, even if people are less glued to their TV sets for a political

convention, it's still worth it. Yeah, I guess there's a sense that the quote unquote convention bump that you always get kind of a lift coming out of your convention, which a candidate is never going to want to turn down. No, even if it's smaller than it has been in the past, they're not going to give it up if they don't have to. What about the Trump campaign and the RNC? Are they considering delaying it? What's their sort of public face on this right now? Boy, public face is absolutely not. Why? I mean, they have been pretty determined to do this. The Republican Convention is supposed to start on August 24th in Charlotte, North Carolina. So that would be the following week after the newly rescheduled Democratic convention.

Certainly, they think things will be better by August. But also, this is where Trump lives and breathes in front of a huge, adoring crowd. And they don't want to give it up either. All right. Well, Juana, we also wanted to talk about some of the reporting you did this week on one of the candidates long out of the race, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but who has still promised to play an impactful role in November, but not everything's going so well over there.

Yeah, Sue, that's right. So I talked with a number of former field staffers for Mike Bloomberg's campaign. If you think back to the four months he was in the race, he hired the biggest field staff, the most expensive primary campaign in history. And the staffers told me that when they were hired by Mike Bloomberg's campaign, they were promised a lot of things, incredible benefits packages, technologies, salaries that far outpaced what other candidates were offering. And they were also promised that they would have jobs through November, whether or not Mike Bloomberg was the nominee in service of defeating President Trump. We know now, of course, Mike Bloomberg dropped out of the race. And then after that, there were two rounds of layoffs. So a lot of

these staffers have found themselves out of work. One of the folks I talked to was Matthew Jeuler. He left a job he had for 10 years in IT in Colorado to join Bloomberg's campaign, and now he's been laid off too. The man spent $500 million on ads alone in a four-month period. He could spend 10% of that and give every single one of his field staff their entire salary for the remainder of the year. So clearly the staffers are very frustrated. They are without work. They thought that they were guaranteed that that had been promised to them. They're also without work as hiring is grinding to a halt across America, but particularly in campaigns, field organizing work looks a lot different now. A lot of them are taking legal action against the campaign as well.

What kind of legal action? So there are a couple proposed class action lawsuits that have been filed. One is from a former field worker in Miami who worked for Mike Bloomberg. And the complaint in her case, and I'm paraphrasing a little bit here, essentially makes the case that, you know, she feels that she and her fellow colleagues were misled by the Bloomberg campaign. They were promised this work through November that didn't pan out. And had they not been made that promise, perhaps they wouldn't have taken those jobs. They wouldn't have left their jobs. They would

have gone on to grad school, to other work opportunities. And now they say they're out of work in a time where it will be incredibly challenging to find new opportunities. And they want to see the Bloomberg campaign make good on their word. Mara, it does seem to raise a question about how good is Mike Bloomberg's word, because he's made all kinds of lofty promises about the resources he's willing to put in. But this seems like evidence that maybe all of his word isn't coming true. Well, that is the big question. There are people who are close to the Bloomberg campaign who think this was a stupid decision. Even if he was going to let all these people go, he certainly should have paid them through November. He got himself a whole

ton of bad publicity for nothing, really. But the big question about whether Mike Bloomberg's promise to spend whatever it takes to defeat Donald Trump and elect Democrats in November is still operative. You know, has he taken his marbles and gone home or not? Now, I'm told that he still is planning to spend as much as it takes to fund Democratic campaigns and defeat Trump. The question is, what form does it take? He still has a super PAC that he could use to fund Democratic campaigns and defeat Trump. The question is, what form does it take? He still has a super PAC that he could use to fund ads and other efforts, but he gave $18 million to the DNC. That's chump change for him. The big question is, is he going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions, to funnel it through other Democratic know, we're kind of in a wait and see

mode, stay tuned. In the past, Bloomberg has put his money where his mouth is. He hasn't been fickle. He's been a man of his word. But this debacle with firing all of these people who'd been promised jobs through November, not just firing them, but not giving them severance till November has raised a lot of questions. It seems like such an unforced error because it's such a small fraction of money for his wealth, especially when you look at what he spent in his short-lived campaign. He spent half a billion dollars in like a couple months. So paying out the staffers seems like such an insignificant cost. Such an insignificant cost. And people who were huge supporters of his and believers in him say it was just a stupid decision. such an insignificant cost. And people who were huge supporters of his and believers in him say

it was just a stupid decision. So, Juana, what is the Bloomberg's campaign saying to you about all of this? Yeah, so we actually got a really lengthy on-the-record statement from Bloomberg campaign manager Kevin Sheiky about this. And it says a couple things. He makes the point that the campaign reached out to every single organizing staffer in six battleground states, as well as others, and asked them to consider working with the DNC. He told me that hundreds of former Bloomberg campaign staff have been contacted and are currently in the hiring pipeline to join the DNC's organizing efforts, and he insists that that wouldn't have happened without the campaign's massive donations to the party.

The other thing he points out is that staff worked on average 39 days and were given several weeks of severance in health care through March. And then later, the campaign established a fund that would cover the cost of COBRA for the month of April so that these folks have health insurance, something that Cheeky says no other campaign has done. The campaign hopes that in time, a lot of these staffers will go through the process. They'll be hired by the DNC. And I think the hope is they won't have a huge gap in employment. I talked to some of the staffers that I've been talking to about that statement after we received it.

And the point that they made to me is that these are positive changes, but that's very different than being told that you will have a job until November, a consistent job. And that part doesn't exist, apparently. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break. And Juana, we're going to let you go and start your weekend. Thanks so much. Thanks, guys.

Stay well. And when we get back, we're going to take some listener questions about the coronavirus. When the economy goes haywire, Planet Money is here to make sense of it for you. From the big bailouts to the tiny details of a vaccine stockpile. One of the first thing we did was secure a large number of chicken flocks. So these are like hardworking government chickens? They are hardworking government chickens. That's NPR's Planet Money podcast. Listen now. And we're back and we're joined by the great Miles Parks. Hey, Miles. Hi, Sue.

So we wanted to bring you into the podcast because earlier this week, we asked our listeners to send us their questions about the coronavirus outbreak. And they sent us a ton of questions, many of them about election security and voting. A lot of them are also about the science of the outbreak. And I am going to be the first one to tell our listeners that the three of us are not the people you should be asking about the science. But we have a lot of podcasts that can help you on that. You should go check out NPR's Coronavirus Daily podcast and also NPR's daily science podcast called Shortwave. But we can answer questions about the politics about the coronavirus. So the first question that we're going to share comes from Anne Trenby, who asks,

quote, where's Mara? Hoping she's okay. I miss hearing her on the podcast. Oh, well, here I am. Glad to have you. Excellent day to have Mara on the podcast. I'm sheltering in place in an undisclosed location. We got to keep our Mara safe. We got to keep you healthy through 2020, Mara. Okay, so the first real question comes from Pat Howard Wells. He writes, As a young gay Republican that plays your podcast daily on request from my Democrat husband, I want to know, do you think President Trump's reelection percentage has been increased or decreased since he's become more aggressive on the election. There's no doubt that Donald Trump has gotten a little bump in his approval ratings. And in some polls, not all, he looks like the race between him and Joe Biden has gotten closer. Most polls show Joe Biden a little bit ahead. But what we do know is that the rally around the flag effect, the kind of thing that happens in a crisis when Americans really want their presidents to succeed, he has gotten less of a bump than presidents in the past have gotten, like George W. Bush. He's also gotten less of a bump than governors have gotten or other democratically elected leaders around the world

who are dealing with the pandemic. So we have to wait and see what happens. But right now, yes, he's gotten a little bump, but not as much as you would expect for a president dealing with this kind of a crisis. I was also on a conference call earlier today with Charlie Cook, who's sort of a nonpartisan election analyst, and he was asked this question. And another point that he made is that he thinks that the president is, in his words, flooding the zone right now. Like he's everywhere where people, and a lot of people that normally tune out politics or don't pay attention to cable news are really hungry for information right now. And the president is on television one or two hours every single day in the afternoons talking about this. So he has a really captive audience. And at

least there is some of that anecdotal data would say that the country sees the president taking something very seriously, and it gives them a little bit of a boost. Absolutely. But the other point that other people have made to me is that people have their TVs on, as you say, they're holed up in their houses, they want information, they see the president talking about the virus every night. But then they hear from their local news, that all the things he said are not happening on the ground. Like he says, there's enough ventilators. You see a local nurse being interviewed.

No ventilators in my hospital. So that could be one of the reasons why, even though he is flooding the zone, he's not getting more of a bump. Yeah, and the historical moment I keep coming back to is George H.W. Bush, who saw an approval bump at the beginning of the Gulf War in early 1991. But then you saw the economy go into a nosedive, and that took his

approval rating way down. So I think I'm curious to see, there's kind of two crises happening at the same time. One's medical, one's economic. And if unemployment is still potentially in the double digits in the late summer or fall, that's going to play a huge role as well. So our next question comes from Carol Sustair. I don't have pronouncers for your name. So if I'm saying them wrong, I apologize, Carol. But she writes that she wants to know about the options being discussed for the election. She says, can you discuss the plans for voting delays for the primary in some states? And are we as a country considering the heavy promotion of mail-in ballots for November and how well the candidates are really adapting to this new way of virtual or distance campaigning? So I could jump in on the on the primary, the actual election mechanics part of it.

You know, more than 20 states have already delayed either the primary election or another statewide election in their state to hopefully be in a better place with the medical situation or at least be more prepared. Notably, though, Wisconsin is actually going forward with their primaries on Tuesday and election officials there are scrambling. The governor is trying to mobilize the National Guard because they're worried about not having enough poll workers. And the judge did relax some of the vote by mail rules around that election. I think that's going to be a thing you're going to see a lot of in states that usually require an excuse to vote by mail. You might see some of those states be lenient on what that excuse can be or eliminate it altogether. And then also we're going to see a lot of states just mailing absentee ballot request forms to all registered voters. When it comes to November, though, there's clearly going to be an attempt by Democrats to push for more vote-by-mail efforts that potentially could be fought by Republicans.

I think overall, it's fair to say there will be more vote-by-mail in the 2020 election than we've ever seen before. It just matters where you are, whether that's going to be available to you. And this is going to be a huge partisan fight because even though Republicans in the past have been more responsible vote-by-mailers, there is a sense on the Republican side that anything that makes it easier to vote is bad for them. Democrats are pushing hard for not only more absentee ballots, as Miles said, more lenient rules around them in terms of whether you need a witness. But I think this is going to be a huge battle. The Republicans are going to push back hard against Democratic efforts to make it easier to vote. It's interesting, though, because vote by

mail didn't used to be such a partisan thing. This is a fairly new occurrence. You know, some of the states that have really been on the front of vote by mail have been Washington state, Arizona, places with really high amount of Republicans. It's interesting to see this turning more partisan. She also asked about how this is affecting candidates and campaigns. And the short answer is we don't really know yet. We're only a couple weeks into this. But in some regards, it's still campaign season as usual. One example of that is the Senate Majority Pack. It's the largest Democratic super PAC focused on Senate elections. Announced earlier this week that they have reserved nearly $70 million in ad spending

for races this fall. So that's kind of typical campaign behavior. The things we're not seeing is in-person campaigning. There's no rallies. There's no grassroots. There's no door knocking. And one thing that I think we're all watching to see is what the second quarter, which we're in right now, what those fundraising numbers look like.

I don't get the sense that, I mean, candidates, one, can't be holding fundraisers at the time. It's also not a great time to be asking your donors and your constituents to give you money when so many Americans are worried about their own sort of kitchen table economic issues. So the financial impact on 2020 is something that I think is going to be really interesting to see how it plays out. But we're not going to see those numbers for a couple more months still. You might also see some of these campaigns kind of turn into teaching mode because as all these states are changing their rules so quickly, it's kind of up to the campaigns if they want to have success in all these states to be educating voters on maybe their polling place changed, maybe the vote by mail rules changed. Election officials have not traditionally been

great communicators. You know, they're kind of behind the scenes making everything work. It's been up to the campaigns to make sure those voters get out and know how to vote. That's going to be really important as these rules are changing so quickly. Well, that leads to the next question from Jennifer Christie, who wrote, I'm very concerned about getting out the vote in November. What steps are being taken to ensure that as many people as possible can and will vote? And I would only say I think this is interesting because I know that there was already a lot of expectation that 2020 was going to be potentially a historic turnout year already because of the passionate

enthusiasm and sort of the spectrums of our politics. So I have to think in some ways that if people are already highly motivated to vote, they tend to find ways to make sure that they will vote. Yes, I think so. But that turnout is one of the biggest questions because Democrats need huge turnout to win. And if this if the pandemic depresses turnout, that's a bad thing for them. On the other hand, the last Democratic primary night that we had, certainly the virus was on people's minds and it didn't depress turnout a whole lot. I think you're right. People who care about this election and there are are a lot of people who care about it a lot, are going to crawl over broken glass to vote. Well, it didn't depress turnout a lot in Arizona and Florida, especially because those places already had the infrastructure. A lot of early voting takes place in those places, a lot of vote by mail. But you did see it depress turnout in Illinois, which didn't have the same level of infrastructure, which when I talk to election experts, they specifically point at that primary and say, the states that do this well are probably still going to see historic turnout. The states that have never had huge vote by mail numbers and

are going to somehow find a way to count all of these ballots or get all these mail ballots out to people efficiently, they may have more problems. It also seems like this is going to be one of the unanticipated political fights of 2020 in that these fights over ballot access issues. I mean, the president himself has been pretty candid that he opposes the efforts that Democrats in Congress wanted to try and get into legislation to expand voting access. I mean, Republicans have been pretty candid that they're not as open to the ideas that Democrats have been putting forward to make it as easy to vote as possible. I think sort of cynically and tactically, to Mara's point, that a big turnout election might not

bode well for the president. Oh, we can play them. We can. You should play that Fox and Friends tape. I mean, he came out and just said they had things, levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again. They had things in there about, you know, election days and what you do and all sorts of clawbacks. And they had things that were just totally crazy and had nothing to do with workers that lost their jobs. The thing that's been interesting to me is that Republicans used to argue against these measures talking about voter fraud. They've dropped that pretense completely. They're just coming flat out and say high turnout is bad for us. But Miles, is greater ballot access necessarily a bad thing for Republicans? Because when you think about the voters that are the most likely to vote, older voters, white voters, they tend to skew towards the president.

Yeah, it's interesting because while a lot of people who watch elections for a living have been pretty horrified with President Trump's statement specifically, they also don't really find it necessarily accurate. The data is a little bit more ambiguous on whether vote by mail really helps Democrats because younger voters especially tend to be more transient. They don't have fixed addresses all the time. That makes vote by mail, getting a ballot out to those people and getting the rules out to those people a lot harder. The people who are good at it are older and white voters. Those you would think, you know, tend to vote Republican. So it's not really clear that vote by mail specifically would definitely help Democrats across the country. All right, that's all the time we have for your questions today. But if you want

to ask about the coronavirus and how it's impacting politics, you can join us in our Facebook group. It's a place where we talk civilly about politics and connect with other listeners of the podcast. You can find it at n.pr slash politics group and fill out the questions. And we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, it's time for Can't Let It Go. 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 it's time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go,

the part of the show where we talk about the things from the week we can't stop thinking about, politics or otherwise. Miles, what can't you let go this week? So what I can't let go of is, you know, Sue, you may have seen either people talking about it or watching it, the Netflix show Tiger King. Oh, yeah. I just want to give you the sequel, which is my life currently, as I am becoming the bird king. In my work from home situation, I have become the emperor of the birds. They have started flying up to, I've been tweeting about this all week, basically 15 to 20 times a day as I'm working on an article, calling people.

I have these, what I think are sparrows that keep flying up to my windowsill and bringing supplies. They build the nest outside of my apartment. And this has become a constant source of joy for me. I've become emotionally invested in these birds. I don't know anything about birds, but I'm starting to fall in love with them. Are the birds speaking to you yet, Miles? They're not speaking.

They do look at me as they bring their supplies. Like they'll land on the windowsill, like with cotton, piece of plastic. You can see on the internet all of the different supplies that they're bringing, occasionally straw wrappers, pieces of cotton. And they just stare at me. Sometimes I'll talk to them. I'll say, good stick, you know, nice piece of plastic. But they have not started to communicate verbally yet.

They do chirp. That's a real quarantine story. I'm losing my mind. They're a little bit like your Wilson. Do you remember the Tom Hanks Castaway movie? Like they're your volleyball. They're like your tether to the world

that's keeping you fighting. Yeah. And I... Miles, do you want to promote your Twitter feed so people can follow your Bird King adventures? I'm just at Miles Parks.

I will say it's becoming a little bit more of a psychological thing than really about the birds. So if you want to follow along as I slowly lose my sanity, then you could do that at Miles Parks. Or you could just become an ornithologist. I could. That implies that I am good at this or know anything about it, which I do not. I just talk to the birds. Sue, what's your can't let it go? So the thing I can't let go this week is a press release that hit my inbox on April Fool's Day, which I thought might have been an April Fool's joke, but turns out it's actually a real thing.

It came from the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame Museum, announcing that they are making an Anthony, Dr. Anthony Fauci bobblehead doll. Dr. Fauci is, of course, the infectious disease specialist who's been at the front end of the federal government's response to the coronavirus pandemic. And that shows you when you've really arrived at the highest level of celebrity. That's in certain circles. You can become a bobblehead. I don't think you realize how close to my heart you're getting right now, Sue. I had a bobblehead doll collection.

Of course you did. You're from Florida. And it was huge. I stopped at 50. I felt like 50 was a good round number. I had Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln. I had a Civil War section. It was mostly sports players.

I had a steroids baseball era one with Mark McGuire and Barry Bonds. So I may make an exception and go for number 51 and get the Fauci. And the nice thing that they're doing, if you pre-order an Anthony Fauci bobblehead, they are taking proceeds of every donation and donating it to the American Hospital Association, which seems like a really nice way to honor Dr. Fauci. All right. I guess I'm ordering 50. All right, Mara, what can't you let go this week? Okay. So this goes under great pieces of music that you see on Twitter or on the internet.

You know, we always all loved hearing Italians singing en masse from their balconies while they were quarantined. Well, this one is an isolated vocal track from Marvin Gaye singing I Heard It Through the Grapevine in 1968. So it's acapella. He clearly was recording this, but there's no music, there's no backup, and it's just beautiful.

I know a man ain't supposed to cry But these tears I can't hold inside Losing you would end my life, you see That is the kind of energy I'm trying to bring into the weekend. It makes you wish that every great singer would just release their isolated vocal tracks for every album. I feel like I honestly could listen to an hour of that. That is a wrap for the week. Our executive producer is Shirley Henry. vocal tracks for like every album. I feel like I honestly could listen to an hour of that. That is a wrap for the week. Our executive producer is Shirley Henry. Our editors are Mathoni Matori and Eric McDaniel. Our producers are Barton Girdwood and Chloe Weiner. Thanks to

Lexi Schapittle, Brandon Carter, Maya Gandhi, and Meredith Roten. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening toason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.