#WashWeekPBS Extra: How will COVID-19 affect the 2020 election?

ROBERT COSTA: Welcome to Washington Week Extra. I'm Robert Costa. The

2020

presidential campaign has fundamentally changed amid the coronavirus pandemic: Candidates are scrambling to reach voters virtually and state and federal officials are now reconsidering how to hold an

election

during an outbreak. Democrats announced Thursday that they

will

postpone their convention in Milwaukee until August, underscoring how the virus is upending every aspect of American life. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also suggested this week that there could be legislation expanding mail-in voting, early voting and same-day voter registration in the House. But President Trump rejected the idea, arguing that he could hurt Republicans in an interview with Fox News.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: (From video.) The things they had there were crazy. They had things: levels of voting that you once accepted, you would never elect a Republican in this country again. COSTA: Democratic front-runner and former Vice President Joe Biden criticized the president for his comments during an interview on MSNBC, saying state officials should do everything they can to encourage remote voting. FORMER VICE PRESIDENT JOSEPH BIDEN: (From the video). I think they should do it now. I think they should do it now, plan it. I noticed that the House talked about some of this and the president said, well, if we did what the House wanted, we would make sure that no Republicans were elected.

That's ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. So it's about making sure that we're able to carry out our democracy while we're dealing with a pandemic. COSTA: Joining us to discuss how the

election

could be influenced by the outbreak or reshaped, Yamiche Alcindor, White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour; Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent of The New York Times; and Jerry Seib, Washington executive editor of The Wall Street Journal. Yamiche, on Friday at his press conference, President Trump again said that he would not support mail-in voting. What does this mean for elections going forward? YAMICHE ALCINDOR: What it means is that we really are in uncharted territory.

It's unclear whether things

will

be safe enough for people to get out and about, form lines and vote. We see that the Democratic National Convention has already postponed its convention for a couple more months to ensure that people can gather, but still, as soon as the announcement was made, there were Democrats, including some Pete Buttigieg campaign aides, talking. He said it would be irresponsible for people to gather to nominate a Democratic candidate. So I think this is going to be a really difficult problem and I'm not sure anyone really has the answer because we've never faced anything like this in our country.

It's not clear if all 50 states are going to say yes, let's all vote by mail, whether or not there will be some kind of postponement of the election. Most people I talk to think that's probably not going to happen, but who knows what might actually happen. COSTA: Jerry, to that point about conventions, what does it mean, first of all, to have the Democratic Convention and the Republican Convention now back-to-back? And when he talks to his sources in both parties, could we see a summer without any convention at some point? GERALD SEIB: Well, I think both sides will try to have a convention.

We may have shorter conventions, different types of conventions. The first thing it means, by the way, is that the Democrats had a plan, you know, to hold their convention exceptionally early, 42 days before the Republicans. Because? They wanted to be able to spend money or have their nominee spend money raised for the general election campaign earlier in the process to ensure they didn't fall behind Trump's fundraising juggernaut. Well, that no longer exists. That's not going to happen. So we're going to have two conventions, maybe abbreviated conventions, together in mid-to-late August, and we're probably going to go back to the kind of elections we would have seen half a century ago, where the general election campaign between the Democratic candidate and the Democratic candidate Republicans basically start on Labor Day and from then on it's a sprint until Election Day.

That's what we're seeing here and what the consequences are. Who does it help? I don't think anyone knows at this point. COSTA: Peter, Yamiche talked about we're in uncharted waters when it comes to elections, if we have a second wave of the virus in the fall, right around the general election in November. When we look back in history, is there any guidance we can turn to or any moment that gives us an example of how this could happen if much of the country wanted to stay home during an election? PETER BAKER: Yeah, that's a great question.

In fact, we don't have a tradition of delaying elections in this country. We had elections during the Civil War. We had elections in 1918 during the great Spanish flu pandemic. We had elections in World War II. The only really major election that was delayed because of a national crisis before this, I really think was the New York City election in 2001, which was supposed to take place on 9/11, was delayed only a short period of time. time. . Now we see primary after primary as states delay their elections in the spring, including Wisconsin, which was supposed to vote next Tuesday, but the general election for... at this point, at least, appears to be assured.

Most scholars believe the president cannot delay it alone. He is established in the Constitution. It's possible Congress could change that, but we don't have a history of changing that in general elections. Now, we also don't have a history of being able to do anything different than the way we do it now: vote by mail. Technology has changed a lot. It's not that voting by mail is all that new (we've had absentee voting across the country for years), but the idea of ​​doing it across the board is obviously something quite unusual for the United States. There are some states where that has become a habit, I think Oregon and other places.

So the president doesn't like it, in part - he was quite honest on Fox - because he thinks it hurts Republicans. Higher turnout: If mail-in voting resulted in that, higher turnout, you know, historically favors Democrats. But it's not clear that that would necessarily happen if everyone opted for a vote-by-mail system, and it's not clear that the kind of fraud he's worried about would occur. But he talked at today's briefing about the tradition of people showing up at the polls and actually in person with an ID, as some of these states now require, to prevent any kind of fraud.

We'll see how this works. At this point, as you say, we don't know if the current wave will be over by then, but you're right that the real concern is that a second wave will peak right around the same time we're thinking about going. to the polls in November, and that's a leap. COSTA: Yamiche, Peter brought up an important point: the allegations of fraud by President Trump and the Republicans. Based on his reporting and fact-checking over the years, what, if anything, supports those claims? ALCINDOR: According to my reporting, there is no type of evidence, no type of history or pattern of voter fraud when it comes to people trying to vote for people who are dead or trying to vote under a different name.

None of that, based on the evidence, is true. There may be a couple of cases of that, but nothing that is widespread. What there is, what we've seen, is voter fraud as far as - or, I should say, not voter fraud - but what we've seen is problems with people trying to suppress the vote. In North Carolina there was a case where African Americans were attacked, one judge accurately said, by Republicans. And they were basically trying to get them out of the districts and out of the districts so they couldn't have the same amount of voting power.

We've also seen some absentee fraud in North Carolina who, again, was a Republican candidate. But the president keeps saying this. So this is something the president does. He repeats statements even when they are not true. So he can probably continue to do that as we look at how the virus will

affect

elections in the future. COSTA: Jerry, we played a clip of Vice President Biden. He's making the rounds from his home in Delaware on television. He's trying to stay out of the conversation. But has it been a struggle for him as the pandemic is in the spotlight every day?

SEIB: Yes. I think that's how it has been. You know, the beginning: The TV star of the pandemic, whether you love him or hate him, is President Trump. He has gone out every day for an hour, sometimes two hours, and in the late afternoon he leaves the White House press room. And he has done it: he dominates the conversation. He fights with journalists. There's no way Vice President Biden right now can compete with that. So what does he do? Well, I think he wants to, he can. There is a debate within the Democratic Party about how much that matters.

And there's a school of thought that says it's not a big deal for him because, in the end, what can he do about it right now? There is a long way to go. And it helps if this election becomes a referendum on Donald Trump. That's what it must be for Joe Biden, anyway. As a footnote, I think Democrats are also happy to focus on health care because they believe, and all the polls suggest they are right about this, that health care is an issue that works better for them than it does for Republicans. If this is going to be a debate and election in which health care is going to be the big underlying issue, maybe that won't be such a bad thing for Democrats.

COSTA: Peter, when Jerry said that the star of this moment, this time, is President Trump, I thought he was going to say Governor Cuomo of New York. Are we serious about what we see in some columns about Governor Cuomo's appointment? Or is this just a dream of some of the New York governor's supporters? BAKER: Yeah, look, you know, it's obviously some kind of fantasy talk on the part of Democrats who have never necessarily been as enthralled with the idea of ​​Vice President Biden as he is... as his nominee. For months we have heard this. Well, only if so-and-so came in.

Maybe if so-and-so came in. And every time that happened and developed, it didn't work. What would happen if Michael Bloomberg walked in? Well, he came in. It didn't work. What if Beto O'Rourke came in? He came in. It didn't work. So, you know, I think there's a sort of remorse on the part of some Democrats because Vice President Biden is not necessarily the candidate they're excited about. Everyone respects him, mostly, but... you know, he doesn't inspire the kind of energy and enthusiasm that a different candidate might inspire. And Cuomo has risen to the occasion. You know, he's had his own problems with the left, which he doesn't particularly like and challenged him in the last gubernatorial election.

But today, at least to Democrats, he seems like, you know, the man of the moment, in the same way that Rudy Giuliani rose to the occasion after 9/11. Governor Cuomo seems like a man in charge and someone who, you know, rose to the challenge of the moment and inspired at least the people on his side of the aisle. I don't think there's any realistic chance of him becoming the nominee at this point. This process has gone too far. But you can see why the Democrats: the fact that they are talking about him is the most important thing.

He says something about the mood of Democrats heading into this election. COSTA: He could be seen receiving that opening speech, just like Mario Cuomo in 1984. Yamiche, last question. You spent years covering Senator Bernie Sanders. He is still in the presidential race. What's next for him? ALCINDOR: It's hard to say. I mean, when you talk to people close to the president - I should say - when you talk to people close to Bernie Sanders, they tell you that he's still in the race right now because, first of all, he doesn't have to campaign, it's not that He's spending a lot of money because he has... and he's still putting out his kind of progressive message.

They believe he still needs to drag Joe Biden further to the left. They also talk about the Democratic platform and say that he wants to influence the party. But overall, I think what we're seeing is that Bernie Sanders will probably return to the Senate and, again, continue to have his kind of progressive voice. He will be able to loudly challenge the president, whether it's Joe Biden or Donald Trump, because I imagine that even if Joe Biden becomes president, you can already see that Bernie Sanders has a lot of differences, including his push for Medicare for All, which could continue to challenge whoever the president is.

So it looks like that's what's next for Bernie Sanders. COSTA: That's all for this edition of Washington WeekExtra. You can listen to them wherever you get your podcasts or watch them on our website. While you're there, check out our weekly Washington news quiz. I'm Robert Costa. Thank you for joining us. And until next time.