The COVID-19 pandemic has brought America to a screeching standstill, with most non-essential businesses shutting down, events being cancelled and postponed, school systems going virtual, and skyrocketing unemployment. And on top of it all, we’re technically in the midst of an election season, which has also been severely disrupted by the shelter-in-place measures implemented across the country. 

In this Q&A-style episode of Talk Policy To Me reporter Reem Rayef interviews former Labor Secretary and economic inequality scholar Robert B Reich on the subject of democracy in the era of COVID-19. 

In other episodes for this series on democracy, we discuss barriers to the voting booth and distortions in our electoral system that suppress the will of the people -- particularly black and brown people, and young people. In this episode, we dive deep into what happens when a pandemic is layered over these persistent issues. What happens when candidates can’t campaign? When polling places are shut down due to a lack of volunteers willing to risk their health on election day? When governors cancel primaries in the interest of discouraging big gatherings? When the sitting president demonstrates flagrant disregard for public health, and a single-minded goal of securing a second term? What happens if a candidate dies of COVID-19? 

Can we even call what remains a democratic election? 

This episode was made possible by the curiosity and generosity of members of the GSPP community, who contributed their questions and/or voices to this project. A heartfelt thanks to you all! Voices heard on this episode are: Larry Rosenthal, Molly McGregor, Lily Nienstedt, Mai Sistla, Justin Lam, and Maiya Zwerling.

For more on inequality, democracy, and Twitter beef with Elon Musk, tune into Professor Reich’s Youtube series, The Common Good.

Transcript

Reem: [00:00:01] You'd hardly know it from reading the news and listening to the radio. But we've got an important election coming up in November. The 2020 general election is significant for a few different reasons. The Democratic Party looks like it might swing hard to the left due to the impact of progressive candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. We're going to get a referendum vote on the Trump administration, not to mention the hundreds of down ballot, state and local electoral battles that are going to be fought. But instead, we're dealing with a pandemic that has completely upset this election season. The Democratic primary in particular has been a chaotic story, to say the least. It started with a historically crowded field of candidates that very quickly collapsed, leaving us with Joe Biden as the unlikely Democratic nominee well before many Americans even got a chance to cast their primary votes. The coronavirus, or COVID 19, serves as a crucial backdrop to this story about the frailty of our democracy. I'm Reem Rayef and today on Talk Policy To Me, I'm interviewing Robert Reich. He's a professor of public policy here at the Goldman School. Former labor secretary under President Clinton and our resident expert on elections. In this episode, I'm speaking with Professor Reich about democracy in the era of COVID 19 as a part of our broader series on democracy, here on the podcast. But first, let's do a quick election cycle recap for some context. The primary timeline begins on February 3rd with the mess that was the Iowa caucus. After enormous technical and logistical difficulties due to the failure of the mobile app that the party was using to count votes, we had a really close race between Bernie Sanders and Pete Woodard Edge. It feels like centuries ago, right then South Carolina, Nevada, and New Hampshire had their primaries and caucuses in which we again saw a pretty strong showing for Bernie. And then on March 3rd, Super Tuesday, California and 14 other states had their primaries. At this point, many of the Dems were still in the race. We had Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden, Tom Steyer, Mike Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang, and of course, Bernie Sanders on our ballots. Bernie pretty handily won California, but for the rest of the country, Super Tuesday marked the first emergence of Joe Biden as a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination. At this point, COVID 19 was still a distant piece of international news. One week later, another handful of states voted, and Biden emerged as the front running candidate after picking up some big battleground states like Missouri and Michigan. This was a devastating blow to Bernie. So much has happened since then. The coronavirus has effectively shut down the country. Thousands have died. And we've seen the fissures in our health care system and our latent socioeconomic inequality laid bare. But election wise, things have been much quieter. Biden is going to be the nominee, and Bernie Sanders has suspended all campaign activity, though he's still on most ballots and collecting delegates. Primaries that were supposed to happen over the course of the last month have largely been postponed or they've switched to mandatory vote by mail, with the famous exception of Wisconsin, which had its Democratic primary exactly as planned on April 7th. There, we witnessed the worst of the pandemic's impact on democracy, really unsafe voting conditions, widespread closures of polling stations in predominantly black and brown precincts, and tremendous overcrowding and long lines and the remaining open ones. Over 40 COVID 19 cases have since been linked to the Wisconsin primary. As of this recording, at the end of April, around 20 states, including Guam, the Virgin Islands and D.C. still need to vote because a lot of those primaries are happening well into July and August. And because of bans on large gatherings, the Democratic National Convention had to be pushed deeper into the summer from mid-July to mid-August, inching closer and closer to November 3rd. We've already had a pretty unconventional and crisis ridden primary season in which many of the pillars of our democracy like door to door canvassing campaign events and in-person voting have become unsafe or forbidden. That's on top of existing voter suppression and gerrymandering and unequal access to the voting booth. Can we even call what remains a democratic process? I'm in the middle of finals. So instead of coming up with my own questions for this interview, I asked the GSPP community, what would you ask Robert Reich about the upcoming election and democracy in the era of COVID 19? So I have a bunch of questions that I have that have crowdsourced, and I'm just going to pose them to you. But first, you are our resident election elections expert at GSPP, and so why do you know so much about how elections work?

Robert: [00:05:02] I'm sure I do. You're the one who said I was the resident election expert. Well, I've been around a long time and I've I've certainly been involved in in politics and served in Washington. And I know a lot about elections. And I've even run for governor, or at least the Democratic primary in Massachusetts in the gubernatorial election. So I've certainly absorbed a lot over the years. But having said that, I also want to caution you that things have changed. Times have changed. The world looks very different in terms of politics and elections from what it did a few years ago. Certainly hugely different from what it was ten or 12 or 15 or 16 or 24 or dare I say it, 52 years ago. All I can say is that we still have not only constitutional safeguards, we still have a court system, a judicial system that pays attention to the Constitution, justices and judges who, by and large, notwithstanding some pretty awful cases like Bush vs. Gore and cases that have run roughshod over the First Amendment, such as Citizens United and Voting rights. Still, by and large, I have confidence in our judiciary system. So if Donald Trump pulls anything like delays the election or does anything that is obviously unconstitutional, there may be a long drawn out fight, but he's going to lose. I don't think that's really at issue. I think what's more troubling to me is the possibility that there may be foreign interference, the Russians or other powers may try to do what they already obviously clearly tried to do in 2016 with some success. And I don't see the administration guarding against that. I don't see Congress providing states enough money to guard against that. There are not enough paper ballots that can be counted and checked. We are living in a fairly fragile democracy. There's also a lot of voter suppression going on. The Republican Party is really the problem here. I'm not saying that Democrats are without fault, but in terms of violations of voting rights and fairly blatant voter suppression, it is Republicans, just Republican states, Republican governors. That's what I frankly worry about. We need to have vote by mail. We need more people to be comfortable with voting outside the necessity of going to voting booths and polling places, because let's face it, the coronavirus may still be with us in November. So I don't want to paint an overly rosy picture, but I think that the most flagrant violations of constitutional norms and rights probably we don't have to worry about. It's everything below that that we do.

Reem: [00:08:08] Got it. Okay. That's comforting from the start. So I have a bunch of questions from our GSPP community specifically about states and best practices. So maybe I'll pitch those to you. This one is from Larry Rosenthal, a professor of public policy. He asks,

Larry: [00:08:24] What are the most promising strategies being considered toward maximizing vote by mail turnout?

Robert: [00:08:31] Well, first of all, you've got to have vote by mail. It's got to be there. Either the state has got to permit it or there's going to be a federal statute. There are there have been proposed federal laws requiring states to permit voting by mail. But the federal government, the Congress, has not yet enacted such a statute. If you do have and are fortunate enough to be in a state that does permit voting by mail, then obviously the next question is how easy it is to get a a ballot by mail. How much leeway you have in terms of how early you can get that ballot. How many loopholes and loops and hurdles you have to go through to get that vote by mail ballot and how much how secure that the system is. Not so much against voter fraud because there's almost no evidence of voter fraud in terms of voting by mail. But there is some concern in certain quarters that people may not actually get their vote by mail delivered. Remember, we did have some problems with some absentee votes in certain states that were collected and then never actually remitted or deposited where they should have been. So all of that system needs to be very, very carefully managed.

Reem: [00:09:57] What is the philosophical wisdom behind giving states this high degree of autonomy over how they run their elections? And is it possible that we get more centralized federal regulation of voting processes because of this pandemic?

Robert: [00:10:09] Well, the Constitution does give to the states a great deal of authority in terms of how they run elections. But having said that, the federal government could preempt the states with some minimal standards for voting. And I think that that may be the next stage of voting rights. You know, every state has got to provide at least X, Y, and Z. The Voting Rights Act took a step in this direction. But as you know, in the Shelby case, the Voting Rights Act was basically gutted by the Supreme Court. So it's time to revisit all of that, not just the Voting Rights Act, but also minimum voting standards.

Reem: [00:10:50] On the legal front, from Justin Lam, who is a joint JD MPP student.

Justin: [00:10:55] What could the states do if they want to halt elections or invoke emergency powers?

Robert: [00:11:01] States cannot halt general elections. Constitution does actually determine when there will be elections, and it would be very, very difficult to change any of that constitutionally. As to primaries, though, there is a great deal of leeway and governors do have and the states do have a great deal of leeway as to and the political parties as to when and how primary elections are held. The Republican Party basically decided not to hold a bunch of primary elections this year. The Democratic Party decided not to hold an election in New York State. And also, as you know, postponed or delayed elections, primary elections elsewhere. And the governors have some discretion in terms of unilaterally deciding that. And the state parties have some discretion in terms of unilaterally deciding that. And again, it varies from state to state. And it would make kind of interesting litigation, but we're not going to see litigation over this before November 3rd.

Reem: [00:12:12] Hmm, A follow up from Molly McGregor, who is a first year MPP, she says,

Molly: [00:12:16] She says two state of emergency declarations at the state and national levels Alter, who has the legal authority to change election rules.

Robert: [00:12:25] The Constitution says nothing about states of emergency. Constitution does not give a president or governors power to declare states of emergency and suspend the Constitution. And if that were the case, we would be in trouble. I mean, one of the reasons that the Constitution, George, is because there is no such provision. But having said that, yes, states and the federal government, the president, they do have some power to declare states of emergency, obviously, but not when it comes to suspending constitutional provisions. The real question legally has to do with state statutes governing primary elections. And any litigation about what governors or legislatures do will probably be based upon any state statutes, any legislation that states have already passed governing their individual state elections or primary elections.

Reem: [00:13:24] Okay. Next question is from Vanessa Quintana, second year MPP. How are county clerks and secretaries of state going to overcome voter suppression in the age of COVID 19?

Robert: [00:13:36] Well, a number of states have tried to tackle gerrymandering. California, for example, has put the design of voting districts under an independent commission. Other states have followed California's example. I think it's a pretty good idea because as long as politicians design those voting districts, you're going to have partisan districts, you're going to have districts that are not likely to reflect the genuine sentiments in a state in terms of other forms of voter suppression if they are racially motivated. The Constitution, the United States Constitution does have a very major role to play, and there is litigation will continue to be litigation even without the Voting Rights Act. The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment does come into play and the Supreme Court has struck down certain kinds of suppression purges that are clearly racially motivated and certainly with a racial effect. So and we'll probably see more of that in the future. I guess I wish we were having this discussion a year ago or months ago because we're having this discussion right at the start of May or at the end of April. And the election is six months away now. Six months may feel like a long time, but given that we're trying to cope with a pandemic and also an economic crisis, it's very difficult to summon the political will and energy in in Congress where you have such deep divisions and in states where particularly in the states that we're talking about, where there are you know, there are swing states, there are very, very strong entrenched interests in those swing states to keep them from responding to the wishes of minorities for the needs of minorities, the votes of minorities. I don't want to be pessimistic, but it just seems to me unrealistic to think that much of this is going to be cured within the next six months.

Reem: [00:15:52] Okay. I have a couple of questions that are about kind of local elections and political campaigns. Of course, in November, there will be an if down ballot elections for states and local offices and also before then, and we'll also have ballot initiatives to vote on in California. And the reason that work is so powerful is because it happens kind of interpersonally in a kind of community centric way. So this question is from Nick Draper, who is a second year MPP.

Nick: [00:16:17] How will the normal work of campaigning, including holding rallies, canvassing and phone banking, happen if social distancing orders remain in effect through November?

Robert: [00:16:30] Well with difficulty. My real concern is that so many poor people, disproportionately people of color, don't have access to the Internet, don't have easy access to the kinds of technology that we take for granted, and so that they are disenfranchised in a situation where, as now there is sheltering in place or where most people have to shelter in place or where it's a public health necessity. Now, I don't know how long this is going to last. And I do think that public health has got to take prominence over almost everything else. But the question is important and it needs to be addressed.

Reem: [00:17:16] This is another one from Vanessa, second year MPP. What are alternative methods of voter outreach for candidates to collect the necessary signatures to make the ballot? So again, she's talking about local elections here.

Robert: [00:17:27] Well, there are ways to collect signatures. And again, my knowledge is a little bit limited here, but I know that different counties have different procedures and different states allow different ways of collecting signatures by digital technology. It's not impossible. But you see, the coronavirus has come on us so suddenly and so unexpectedly that a lot of the questions that you are raising and other students are raising really have not been addressed yet. And it's a kind of Catch 22 or a chicken and egg problem because you've got to have enough political will and enough political mobilization. But of course, you don't have that. If everybody is separated and locked down and locked out. You know, I think we will be better prepared next time around. And hopefully we'll learn a lot from all of this. But there's just no easy answer because there's no political response to many of these very important questions.

Reem: [00:18:36] Right. Yeah. And under your chicken and egg point, it feels like if we were to move all like primaries and elections online so we could all do them from our computers, one that assumes that everybody has access to a computer and Internet, but also to to your earlier point about security, it makes us it leaves no paper trail and makes us very vulnerable to foreign interference.

Robert: [00:18:56] Exactly. So, you know, we are doubly vulnerable and democracy is going to be tested. One of my biggest fears is that people become cynical to the point where they don't even bother, where they say, why should I even try to vote or be an active citizen? Because the deck is so stacked against me. And of course, that's what many of those who are abusing their wealth and power would would like to see. They'd like everybody else to give up. They'd like those without power and influence to conclude that there is no hope. Then they win everything and they win it all. So I hope that this point is heard very, very clearly and is very important, especially for young people, for people who are getting involved for the first time in politics or for whom politics is a little bit intimidating. It is important not to be discouraged. It's important not to succumb to cynicism and despair because that's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Reem: [00:20:14] That's very resonant with me. But then it's also we just like sat through this week when New York canceled its primary. And I imagine that there are a lot of New Yorkers who are eager to cast their ballot for Bernie Sanders and at least support him in collecting a few more delegates. I know that Bernie collected like 31 delegates in Ohio, which is great, but you can see it how these kind of two messages of wanting to be hopeful and wanting to continue to to exercise your right to vote while also feeling very demoralized as elections become canceled.

Robert: [00:20:45] Well, I totally get that. And I can assure you that over my 50 years of active political life, there have been times when I have felt despairing and discouraged.

Reem: [00:20:59] Yeah.

Robert: [00:21:00] Listen, what choice do we really have? If we want a democracy that works, we have to continuously fight for it. There's no luxury of sitting around and feeling cynical or sorry for ourselves or being in some form of grief. We just don't have the time and the I use the word luxury. We don't have the ability in this country to indulge in that kind of cynicism. It's too dangerous. [00:21:31][31.8]

Reem: [00:21:33] I want to close on a hopeful note, but first, I do have a couple of doomsday scenarios from our classmates. If you don't mind. So Lily Nienstedt, who is a first year MPP, asked,

Lily: [00:21:45] Can Donald Trump use the COVID epidemic to fully cancel elections? How worried should I be that I might not be able to vote?

Robert: [00:21:52] Well, you should be appropriately worried, given that Donald Trump has displayed no boundaries, no limits in terms of what he will say or do to get a second term. He doesn't seem at all concerned, and he has not since he ran for office. About institutional. Responsibilities. Constitutional constraints. His role as president. As a man, as somebody who's in charge of maintaining our democracy. I mean, he just does it just doesn't seem to dawn on him or he doesn't care. So will he try to do postpone the election? Will he try to do quite nefarious things? I think the answer is probably yes. But will he get away with it? I don't think so, for all the reasons I've mentioned before. You know, if he if the if the election is close, he will probably claim fraud and he will demand recounts and he will. He may even refuse to leave the White House until X, Y, and Z are done. The Supreme Court will probably have to get involved in that case. But I have very little doubt, even with the Republican majority, the majority of Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, that he will that Donald Trump would not get away with it.

Reem: [00:23:22] Do you have a sense of how other democracies are handling their elections right now?

Robert: [00:23:27] Some of them are doing very well. South Korea just had an election with very, very high voter turnout. And this is in the midst of the coronavirus epidemic in South Korea. Started out to be quite bad, but they distinguished themselves by having a lot of testing and tracing. They did extremely well in terms of flattening the curve, as the saying goes, and they also did extremely well in terms of maintaining their democracy. So if they can do it, I would assume we can do it.

Reem: [00:24:01] So we have a lot of things to learn from South Korea it turns out.

Robert: [00:24:04] We have a lot of things to learn from a lot of other countries. I hope that one big lesson we learn from this is that American exceptionalism is not always positive. We are exceptional in some other ways as well in terms of inequality and corruption and big money in politics and stagnant wages and a democracy that in many ways is not working terribly well. So and other countries, other advanced two so-called advanced countries are in many respects doing some of this much better than we are and maybe looking for silver linings. One lesson that can come out of all of this is a new appreciation of what we can learn from other countries.

Reem: [00:24:48] This next question is from Maiya Zwerling, second year MPP and the GSI for your inequality class.

Maiya: [00:24:55] A lot of experts are talking about how U.S. democracy could be threatened by COVID 19. And even this week we're seeing that New York State has canceled their primary and that this could even be precedent for further issues in November. Could you help us understand the different scenarios of what could happen when it comes to COVID 19 November? And are elections potentially being threatened?

Robert: [00:25:22] Well, I think we've talked about some of this already, and that is not just the ability to vote, but the ways in which voter suppression can be organized subtly so that people don't recognize it as voter suppression. It looks like a public health initiative, for example. I think, though, that it is important for all of us, not just those of us who call ourselves Democrats or or Republicans or independents or whatever we call ourselves, but all of us as citizens in a democracy to talk about democracy and to talk about how it doesn't work and how it does work and what we expect and what we demand over the next six months. I think that part of being a citizen and being an activist is is making a noise and being loud and and sometimes a pain in the ass.

Reem: [00:26:28] What do you think is keeping Tom Perez up at night right now besides the very serious sexual assault allegation against Biden?

Robert: [00:26:37] I think that Tom Perez, like Biden himself, is probably worried about what happens to young people, young Democrats, Capital D, progressives, how to get them into the fold. Will they vote? Will they vote for Biden? You know, in 2016, 25% of Bernie Sanders voters in the primaries did not vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election. 25%. That's a lot of votes right there, particularly when you consider that she lost by a slim margin. She won the popular election, obviously by 3 million, but those 25% of Bernie voters could have easily put her over the top, notwithstanding the Electoral College. So that must be keeping Tom Perez up at night a bit. It comes down to Joe Biden's need to get people out to the polls, particularly young people and progressives. If Joe Biden and his political advisers look at the data and say, you know, we really do need to have young people and progressives to get out on November 3rd or before November 3rd in terms of absentee ballots, that's critical. That's going to have a big effect on how Joe Biden campaigns and the promises he makes and how he organizes his staff and his campaign and even his cabinet. But if they make a different decision, if they say, you know, I think we don't need progressives or young people, we we can do this with, let's say, for the sake of the argument, Republican women who will destroy Trump, if that's what they decide, then the progressives and and also young people may not have much of a voice at all.

Reem: [00:28:29] This one is from Mai Sistla, who is a second year MPP. She said, Seriously, what happens if Joe passes away from COVID? But I think the question is what happens if Joe or Trump passes from COVID now or after November?

Robert: [00:28:44] Let's let's hope that nothing happens. I mean, you know, we can't assume that it won't. But let's hope and pray that neither of them succumbs. But again, the Constitution says nothing about political parties. It would be up to each party to decide what it is going to do.

Reem: [00:29:09] Okay. I'm ready for the hopeful and positive segment of our conversation, which you've heard a little bit of already. But a couple more questions. Is it possible that we come out of this with stronger and more resilient electoral processes? Maybe we just become much better at having elections in the midst of a disaster? And what would that more resistant electoral process look like if you were designing it, for example?

Robert: [00:29:33] There are obvious answers in terms of paper ballots and better policing of elections and ensuring that there are no techniques of voter suppression being utilized and that we get rid of gerrymandering. That is partisan in nature. I mean, the list is lengthy, but it's pretty clear what's on that list. But I don't think it's an interesting question. I think the more interesting question is summoning political will. You see, it's easy to come up with policy fixes to elections. It's very, very hard and complicated to come up with the political will to make those policy fixes, to get people excited about these kinds of details about democracy, to get people excited about democracy, for that matter. The policies are not that difficult to come up with. The difficult part is implementing it is mobilizing and organizing, getting people behind the policies, getting people to understand the policies. And this is what we're leadership comes in. Leadership is not simply a matter of running for office or becoming authorized officially with the cloak of some of, you know, some authority. No leadership is about mobilizing people to do what is in their interest, to recognize their interest and to engage in collective action when it would be much easier for people to get on with our own lives, to not bother leaders, get us out of our selfishness. That's what it is all about. Ultimately, policy is not hard. Leadership, mobilization, organization, implementation. Those are really hard. Those are difficult. Those are the big challenges. And finally, I'm optimistic that the pandemic as awful and as horrible and as and as frightening as it has been, has opened people's eyes to several fundamental truths. And that is, number one, that we do need a universal health care. We can't rely on employer provided health care. Everybody needs health care. And it's in everybody else's interests that everybody else have health care. Number two, we need to take public health seriously. We don't really have a public health system in this country. And number three, we have got to have a system of income supports for people who don't have a job, cannot have a job, or are unemployed temporarily. Everybody now knows that times can turn very, very bad through no fault of any individuals or any families. And for all those reasons, I'm optimistic that people in this country have experienced something directly that could change their views about government. We need government and we also need competent government. That should have been obvious beforehand. It wasn't. Now it is time.

Reem: [00:32:58] For more optimism as well as some outrage, check out Professor Reich's weekly online show titled The Common Good on YouTube. He is recording episodes from his home right now, and it's completely delightful. Talk Policy To Me is a production of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans. Our executive producers are Sarah Swanbeck and Bora Lee Reed. Michael Quiroz As our sound engineer, the music heard on today's episode is by Pat Mesiti-Miller and Blue Dot Sessions. I'm Reem Rayef. Be well.

Reem: [00:33:31] I'll probably end it on that note, but I have one kind of addendum question, which is what is Bernie Sanders' pathway to the White House at this point?

Robert: [00:33:57] I'm not sure Bernie has a pathway to the presidency and-

Reem: [00:34:01] There has to be something.

Robert: [00:34:04] Well, you know, he's he he amazes me with his energy. I've known him for many, many years. I never thought he'd run again. Quite frankly, after 2016, he surprised me. And then I was surprised by his his tenacity, his just sheer will. I mean, he did not stop. He's like the Energizer bunny. He is extraordinary. And he's not young. But I was also impressed by Elizabeth Warren. Honestly, I, I, I have got to know her pretty well over the years. And she is also somebody who is quite special and quite powerful. I've also been impressed by other politicians who are certainly within range of the presidency. Maybe not this time around, but certainly in the next few years. Stacey Abrams, for example, strikes me as somebody who is very, very, very talented and capable and a very smart politician, and I expect a lot from her. I have got to know some of the new members of Congress who came in 2018, and they are also many of them are very impressive group of people. So looking to the not the far off future but to the medium term future, I'm very optimistic.