CAMPAIGNING UNDER CORONAVIRUS written by Rebecca Visser
L
ife in America has been upended by Covid-19. Politics has been too. The pandemic has centred this year’s presidential campaign around coronavirus response, putting Trump on the defensive and shifting the narrative dramatically. For some, this created a pressing example of Trump as an unfit leader, playing perfectly into Biden’s argument. The public health emergency further highlights the need for better healthcare – a theme the 2018 House victory already showed was a winning issue for Democrats. However, wild optimism should be tempered; the realities of running make the sunny electoral picture painted significantly more complex. Joe Biden has commendably made strategy decisions in the interest of public health and sees coronavirus as the winning issue, but what it means to be campaigning under coronavirus may yet cost him victory. Practically, field operations and in-person campaigning have been massively disrupted: blockbuster rallies have become a health hazard, and even smaller in-person campaigning or door-knocking carry the risk of transmission. The Biden campaign has taken this into account, with the candidate himself staying in lockdown in spring and making just two trips to battleground states in the whole of July and August. For Democratic advocates, this conveyed Biden’s com-
Photo: Carolyn Kaster, AP, 2020.
North America
mitment to trusting the scientific community and fully understanding the risks of the Covid-19 pandemic. September has seen Biden and recently-nominated running mate Senator Harris ramp up their schedules. Yet, in-person events are still limited. For instance, even when visiting Kenosha in the wake of unrest after a police shooting, the Biden campaign did not advertise the location of his appearance, deliberately preventing crowds from gathering in large numbers. Rather, using funds from record fundraising - including over $310 million in August - the Democratic presidential campaign has focused on virtual events and massive advertising spending especially on TV, including $65 million in battleground states in one September week alone. Most unprecedentedly, rather than run a door-knocking operation, the campaign has chosen to text and call voters in ‘virtual’ door-knocking. Democratic campaign manager O’Malley Dillon argued this is more efficient, and that in August the campaign had had 2.6 million conversations with voters in battleground states. Trump has mostly taken the opposite tactic in brazenly skirting regulations designed to protect Americans against Covid-19, such as by holding a ‘round table’ in September that was a rally in all but name. Such events see little social distancing and even fewer face masks. Although currently being outspent overall in
Autumn 2020 • Dialogue 97
