(gentle dramatic music) - [Narrator] Thank you for joining us for "Washington State of the Pandemic" with Stuart Elway and Donna Blankenship, moderated by Mark Baumgarten.

Before we begin, thank you to our founding sponsor, the Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation.

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

I'm Mark Baumgarten, the Managing Editor at Crosscut and this morning, I'm speaking with a couple of my colleagues about the pandemic, the toll it's taken on the state of Washington, what people think about the job that their leaders are doing and whether we'll ever feel comfortable shaking each other's hands again.

This subject doesn't need much of an introduction.

We all know this story.

We've been living through it for the last year and that year has been filled with twists and turns.

All along the way, our pollster here at Crosscut has been asking Washington residents what they think about it all.

Late last month, we fielded the latest poll of this pandemic asking many of the same questions we asked when we fielded our first pandemic poll exactly a year ago and today I'm speaking with pollster Stuart Elway and Crosscut News and Politics Editor, Donna Blankenship, about those polls and what they tell us about the pandemic and the Washingtonians who have lived through it.

Donna, Stuart, thanks for being here.

- Good morning.

- Morning.

- So Stuart, I wanna start with you.

You've been collaborating with Crosscut on quarterly polls for the last few years, but your history of collecting public opinion in Washington state goes back decades.

So I just wanna know what's been most remarkable about the results of these polls?

Are you seeing things that you have not seen before?

- Well, one of the things that struck us was, of course, the pandemic seemingly affected everyone, globally, but it affected people in Washington differently we'll get into the some of these differences, but I was thinking back to... 9/11, another event that took place, that everybody came together initially and then kinda drifted apart over time and became more politicized.

One of the things that struck us was the pandemic, it's a global pandemic for crying out loud and it's been politicized from the start and it has affected people differently and they've reacted differently over the course of the last year and some months.

- Donna, what about you?

What have you seen here that's been surprising?

I mean, you haven't been polling the Washington public for the last number of decades, but what was remarkable for you?

- Really, nothing about the results of this poll were all that remarkable.

They're maybe remarkable in the fact that they were what we expected to find out.

A lot of people have been affected.

Around the same number of percentage of people have gotten the vaccine.

They're similar, some vaccine hesitancy that we were expecting to see.

There were some interesting, lots of interesting data points, but nothing really that stood out to me as one big thing in this poll.

- Mm, so one area where we have seen some movement in the polling that we've done over the last year and we have done a number of polls asking people about pandemic response in a number of different ways, but one of the things that we have seen change is the exposure that people have had to really the worst side of the pandemic which is actually having someone fall ill or perhaps die who is in their household or who they know and so that is something that we've seen change over the course of the last year and I wanted to start here because I think that it is maybe one of the most interesting parts of the poll.

Donna, in your reporting, what are we seeing as far as how exposure, direct exposure to the worst of the pandemic has impacted the people that we poll?

- Well, we did see that a year ago, probably 60% or so said they had been impacted in some way from getting Covid to losing their job, to seeing their hours cut at work and now that number has increased to more like 70%.

It seemed like lots more people had now know someone who has gotten Covid or knew someone who died from Covid or was related to it, but...

Still not everyone and as Stuart can tell you, it plays out in the numbers around vaccines and masking up and other things have changed in the poll, like everyone said, almost everyone, that they wear a mask at least some of the time in public and when we polled earlier, there was a little bit more hesitancy or refusal to wear a mask.

- So Stuart, are we seeing that exposure to, of the worst of the pandemic has changed people's minds or are people pretty much in the same spot as they were when they started the poll?

When we started the poll?

- Well, people, as Donna mentioned, more people are following the protocols now, some reluctantly, but doing it in this poll, everyone wears it, 99% said they wear a mask at least some of the time and that was quite a bit less a year ago.

There are some who, about close to half who only wear it when they're required to, to go in to a place.

Others, another half, wear it all the time or every time they go out there, they're wearing their mask, so those sorts of precautionary behaviors have become routine, more or less and people expect that and are following those.

Surprisingly, I thought that the difference between people who have been affected personally, even very... What?

Severely and they've lost people that they know, the difference between those people and people who have not been affected that...

Intimately hasn't been that great in terms of following the protocols.

I mean, people are just doing it.

That's sort of life now.

So that was somewhat of a surprise.

You would expect people who had Covid in their household or among their friendship group would be more cautious, but statistically, they weren't significantly more so than people who... Are working from home or had other sorts of impacts on their lives.

- Hmm.

- Which was more of a determinant in some of these behaviors?

- Pardon?

- Didn't we find age was more of a determinant some of-- - Yes, there were demographic differences.

The wearing of masks, the willingness to get vaccinated, the vaccination, all of those things were different by various demographic categories that went up with age, went up with education level and as we can talk about later, there were partisan differences.

As I mentioned earlier, I mean, this thing has been a political issue from the beginning and it showed up here in our poll.

- So Stuart, I wanted to get into that cause I know we talk about partisanship a lot and it's something that I know that you're keeping an eye on always with our polls.

It seems that any topic that we touch on within our polling, there is a story of partisanship.

- Right.

- Has partisanship always been a part of the polling story going back to when you started or... Is this a more emergent kind of demographic divide than what we've seen in the past?

- Yeah, it is more emergent.

When I started doing this, which was Washington was just barely a state then, but...

I literally could do a poll on a statewide race and name the names and not name the party of the candidate and get an accurate poll.

Now I think I could name the party and not the name of the candidate and get an accurate poll.

It has just changed enormously and as I said, a global medical pandemic has the same partisan lines that you might expect over any, over healthcare or any of those other issues.

There are strong party lines that people just start there in their corner.

- It does not reflect how Washington has changed even in the-- - Well, Washington particularly because we don't register by party here.

We historically have been one of the least partisan states in the country, but over the last generation or so, we have become more partisan and Washington has become more of a democratic state as recently as 2000, Washington was on the early list, at least, the long list of battleground states for the presidential election in 2000 and now we're just solid blue.

Kim Wyman, our Secretary of State, is the only Republican elected official.

Actually, she's the only one on the West Coast.

- On the West Coast, right.

We've written about.

- And we haven't elected a Republican governor in two generations and we haven't voted for a president, a Republican president since Ronald Reagan.

We voted for Ronald Reagan once and then we voted for Michael Dukakis in the next election and have never looked back.

- Well and Stuart, over the last year as we're looking at these polls that we've been doing during the pandemic, has partisanship been deepening or just holding steady?

- It's been deepening somewhat.

Again, back in 2000, I track, of course we don't do party registration, so I ask everybody at every poll I do, if you had to register as a Republican or Democrat or independent, how would you register?

In 2000, Republicans and Democrats were even.

In our last few polls, Democrats outnumber Republicans by about two to one and most of what has happened is the Republican identification has drifted down over the last 20 years while Democrat and independent sort of switch places back and forth at north of 40%.

Republicans are down to around 20% for the last couple of polls we've done.

- Donna, so asking someone if they identify Republican or Democrat is one thing, but actually talking to them about their personal politics, about how the issues are impacting them and how that affects the way they think about partisanship is another thing.

You... As part of this polling, we call back a number of the respondents and we talk to them.

We try to figure out what the story is behind the multiple choice answer.

How has your understanding, I mean, what are we not seeing in these hard numbers of the poll results that you're hearing in your reporting about how Washingtonians regard their political identification and in particular, in the context of this pandemic?

- Well, the beauty of polls is that you hear from a wider variety of people, especially a wider variety of people than we normally reach as just journalists reaching out to people, but this time around, it was harder to get conservative people on the phone, so I don't know why.

It's just sort of the luck of the draw sometimes when you're making phone calls and the people I talked to were more middle of the road/ progressive liberal, but their feelings about Covid were not liberal.

They were mostly people who weren't ready to get out there and eat inside at restaurants and have big parties and go to bars.

- Yeah, I wanted to get into that too.

This was probably like one of the more revealing parts of this latest poll and it's something that we have not done before because we really haven't been polling at the time where it felt like we were...

Looking at the potential return to some kind of normalcy and so we asked a number of questions surrounding, we listed out a lot of activities that we generally would take for granted in pre-pandemic times, riding the bus, shaking people's hands, going to concerts and we asked people whether they had returned to those things, if they had ever stopped doing those things and when they thought that they might return to them and there's some really interesting answers in here.

I think that I'd like to just spend a little bit of time on this and just ask you what was the most striking result from this part of the poll?

What's something that you were not expecting to see?

Donna, let's start with you and then we'll get Stuart's opinion on this.

- Well, I'm gonna steal Stuart's something that he would have said, cause we all find this amusing was the shaking of hands question.

Total of about 40% said, "I'm not sure if I'll ever shake hands again," or "I'm not gonna ever shake hands again" and there was a strong partisan divide on this question that it's, who knows, sociologists are gonna have a field day with this one.

Republicans were much more likely to shake hands again and Democrats were much more likely to say, "I'm never shaking hands again."

So some of us might wonder if someone shakes your hand, if that tells you something about their politics or not, but the other questions were very interesting.

The numbers around using public transportation again, people are not ready yet to get back on the bus.

Maybe it's because they're not ready yet to go back to the office.

It's not entirely clear to me, but when we asked about going out to eat, people were already eating out inside restaurants and they were already getting together with friends and family at home, but they're kind of nervous about going out to sporting events and hearing live music and other things like that.

People are vaccinated and not willing to expose themselves yet is what it seemed like to me.

- So Donna stole all your thunder, Stuart.

(Stuart, Donna and Mark giggling) So I do have another question for you.

- Oh, good.

- You can answer the primary question, but I wonder, when we look at these numbers and we see numbers, like a quarter of people not planning to ever use mass transit again, a quarter of people who had used it before or plan on not using it or don't know when they'll use again.

Similar numbers around going to concerts.

Do you as a pollster expect to see these numbers soften?

Cause public opinion changes.

- Yeah.

- Is there anything that you're seeing that makes you think that these numbers stay solid and then these industries are going to need to learn how to operate with a quarter less customers and riders or what does the future hold?

- Well, if these numbers do hold, then there are several industries as you mentioned that would be happy doing some serious thinking and planning and I'm sure they're and of course, you don't wanna...

Put too much stake on one question in one poll in one corner of the country, but...

If people are going, but it is an indicator, so you can't ignore it either, so if people are going to be reluctant to get back on mass transit or go to a concert or a sporting event, it doesn't take a huge number of such people to have a pretty serious impact on the operation of those enterprises.

If people really aren't getting back on the bus, then how are we gonna pay for mass transit?

And we're building all this transit out and people are saying, "I'm not sure I'm going to get back on there" and of course, part of it, we always say, the poll's a snapshot in time and part of it is gonna change as the conditions on the ground change.

What we see in the survey is people are, they're following the protocols by and large, most and willing to get their shots and eager to get back to normal life, but they're not in a great hurry, most people.

So... As new developments occur, another vaccine or another variant, I mean, now the last wave of news, everybody gets their vaccine and they're all feeling gleeful and then, oh no, there's this variant and we're not sure about the vaccines.

You might have to get a booster shot, so there's still a lot of uncertainty which I think is what's reflected here and I think as that uncertainty in the medical world reduces, then we'll see these numbers, these kind of numbers start to gel too, but it looks like it's not going to be this year.

I mean, I think people are going to, I mean, the politicians certainly want everybody to get back in there, we're gonna have 4th of July and...

I just can't see big crowds gathering for fireworks on the 4th of July.

I mean, you might have a backyard barbecue with some other vaccinated friends, but I don't think we're getting back to the traditional 4th of July, this year.

So...

I think the public is sort of wisely in my opinion, following the curve of the events out there and people, other question we asked was, is the opening going too fast or too slow or about right?

And the plurality said, "About right" and if you add them together, we had about in our poll, 75% of the people said it was either about right or too fast, whereas-- - And that's a change from before, right?

- Yeah, yeah.

- That's changed there.

- Right and then there was about 36% who said, "Too slow" and those folks have other attitudes and behaviors in this poll that would be predictable from that question and we think it's going to slow, but that's about 36% and so if you added about right and too slow, it's about two out of three.

If you add about right to it's going too fast, then it's three out of four.

So... For most people, I'm waiting to see still.

I'm going to a restaurant now cause I'm vaccinated and so is my next door neighbor.

Well, I'm wearing my mask in there and I'm not going as often as I used to and I'm probably not gonna go to a baseball game if they pack the stand.

- So Stuart, you brought up the 4th of July, which President Biden has targeted that as a time where he is pushing for 70% of Americans of adults to be vaccinated.

We've asked questions about the vaccine obviously here and what people plan on doing in regards to getting vaccinated based on what we've been seeing in the last couple of polls, when we've been asking this question in Washington state at least, do you think that we can hit that 70% or are our results telling us something different?

- Our results really would get us right at about that 70%, we have about 30% who say they're not gonna get vaccinated or they don't know which means, they're not gonna get vaccinated, at least not by 4th of July.

Well, in one sense, our poll maps pretty well to national polls, but we're a pretty progressive state by and large and...

If we're just gonna get to 70%, it's gonna be tougher in other parts of the country and so I think that's a real aspirational goal.

At this point, we're to the point as we've seen that the vaccinations are slowing down or where just about anybody who wants to be vaccinated, almost all have been vaccinated now or are there on their way, so to the resistors now and that number seems to be around 30% or so, both here and nationwide.

- But here's where it relates to what you said earlier about Republicans versus Democrats in our state by population because we know from other polling, national polling that most reluctant vaccinators are Republican men.

- Right.

- It's showing up here as well.

- And we actually asked about specifically why people were were hesitant.

What are we learning about hesitancy from this point, Donna?

- Most people said they are concerned about side effects from the vaccine.

They were waiting to see if the vaccine is safe, remember this poll was done at the end of April.

Now, every day more people are getting vaccinated.

So those numbers could change, but then there were a group that said, they don't trust the government.

The non vaccor said they don't trust the government.

Some people said they don't trust vaccines in general and then there was like another category, I don't know what that involves, Stuart do you have more-- - Well... And those reasons indicate how difficult that's going to be cause the people who are not, they're still waiting to see.

Well, we don't know for sure is what they're waiting to see.

I mean, how much, what proof, what what's gonna tip them to say, "Okay, I guess I'll go get it" and it's hard to imagine that it's gonna be anything but time.

I mean, it's gonna be weeks and months before they think they've seen it's safe enough, they don't have another little incident like that.

I think that Johnson and Johnson pause probably put back vaccinations by a large amount of time and large amount of people cause it just gave anybody who was even slightly hesitant enough rationale, to say, "Well, see, they're not safe".

- And we should note that actually this polling took place, I think in the days immediately preceding that pause, right?

When that pause was at the very tail end of the polling here.

I mean, so attitude, public attitude may have changed since this poll even.

- Yeah, right.

- But there was an interesting story on NPR this morning about vaccine hesitancy among parents because we're soon gonna hear that the vaccine is available for younger people, I think it's 11 to 16 or 12 to 16 and parents were polled and the scientists have been studying vaccine reluctance and among moms, the reluctance is much higher apparently than among dads and it fully changes by age.

So the scientist was asked, well, why do you think young moms are less likely to want to get their kids vaccinated?

And they did a little speculating about social media and some other things, but the main takeaway from that story was it's real easy to get people who are desperate to get the vaccine, to get their vaccine and now the government is gonna have to just work a little harder, a lot harder maybe and if they didn't expect that, then that would be kind of surprising to me.

So I think we're gonna start seeing more advertising around this, more events around this, maybe they're gonna start giving people gifts for getting vaccines, I don't know.

- And Donna, this is a place where we're all doing, continuing to do reporting.

I know that one of our reporters, David Chromin had a piece earlier this week about vaccine hesitancy with the incarcerated population in Washington state, but what are we seeing there?

What did that report reveal?

- Well, it revealed that there was a very high reluctance to get vaccines among people who were in our jails, but the reasons they gave and the reasons that their attorneys gave is lack of information.

These folks needed to be informed about the vaccine and what to expect and why it's safe and they felt like they weren't being given that information and so I'm sure the same thing is gonna be true of regular, anyone who is reluctant to get vaccine, some of the problem is lack of information.

I think we said earlier that people are concerned about what the efficacy of the vaccines are, what the long-term impact, will we have to get another shot?

And the more people are getting the vaccines, the more information our scientists are able to get about how effective they are and it's like, I mean, this is gonna increase vaccine hesitancy, but in a way we're in a giant science experiment.

The whole world is right now, but the benefit of that is we're getting a lot more information about Covid by being in that experiment which I am happily involved in that experiment.

- So I just wanted to remind our audience that we are gonna be having a Q and A session here in just a few minutes.

So please get your questions in and we'll get Donna and Stuart to answer them.

Donna, I wanted to stay with you here, just building on sort of the conversation around the reporting that we've been doing.

What is the reporting from Crosscut going to look like moving through the summer as we enter into this period of... Reopening and...

Continued mass vaccination.

What are some of the storylines maybe drawing from the poll, but in general, that the newsroom is looking at?

- Well, one of the next stories that I expect to come in that I've assigned is about transit and what impact are two things, the reluctance that we saw in this poll to get back on the bus, but also the reluctance of people to go back into the office.

Are we gonna become a place where people work from home a lot more than they ever did before?

It seems to be an experiment that's working for a lot of people.

We're gonna be continuing to look at inequities around vaccines and around Covid.

These inequities have been seen in the data from the government and also from advocacy groups.

Summer, we're gonna be getting together with our friends, are we gonna see spikes in Covid because of barbecues on the 4th of July, for example?

Or are we suddenly going to have a holiday?

Will the 4th of July would be the first holiday where we don't see spikes in Covid?

That's still to be seen.

- All right.

So that's what the near future holds.

Stuart, past is prologue, you as a pollster, I'm always interested in where you think things are going because you know where they've been and in particular, I think it would be good to maybe round out this portion of the conversation by maybe looking for some kind of uplift and I know that's asking a lot of you, but are there any silver linings in the polling that you've been seeing, that give you a sense, a hopeful sense about where we as a state and as a society are headed?

- Well, we asked people in the poll, have there been any positives from this?

And it was an open-ended question and so what positive things have come from this?

And 60% of our respondents named at least one, 20% said, "No, nothing good has come from this," but 60% named one and most of them had to do with... Science or the healthcare system really coming through, as Donna said, "We're in this experiment" and it seems to be working and it's renewed faith in the healthcare system and in science for some people, more time with family and friends was the other thing that was the large outcome.

So people felt that there were a significant number of people who sort of took another look at how they're living their life and say, this isn't so bad being at home, a little bit slower pace, working at home, spending more time with the family and the neighbors.

So there's that, we'll see if that... holds up as normality returns, whatever that's going to be.

The question we'll have is as we get to the point where we're down to the hardcore resistors and we haven't yet hit herd immunity, does that become a harder edged political issue at that point?

I mean, does that start to create conflict in communities across the country and that's something we don't know, but we'll be watching.

- All right, thanks, Stuart.

Let's move in to audience questions and we've got a bunch of them here and they're good and they're things that I should have asked you in the first place, so that's good.

They've been doing my job for me.

Are most Washingtonians pleased with the response by the state to the pandemic?

Does the public feel the state is doing all it can to vaccinate the public or could they be doing more?

We had a question on this poll about leadership.

We've asked about leadership on the pandemic at the local state and national level throughout the pandemic.

What are we seeing?

What are we seeing there?

Stuart.

- In general, yeah, we don't have the answer to that specific question, but how are these following doing in response to the pandemic?

Governor Inslee, Congress, your local government and your neighbors and the president.

Well, the president is different and the ratings are much different.

Governor Inslee still gets positive ratings.

Majority said, "He's doing a good or satisfactory job," but it's not as good as he got a year ago when we were just going into this.

I think that and that the same was true for your local government and your neighbors.

Majority say, "We're doing fine or we're doing a good "or satisfactory job," but the numbers weren't as high as a year ago and I think that reflects a bit of the fatigue as much as an actual evaluation of how people are doing.

- And it doesn't also reflect that we all get negative on our neighbors after a while, spending too much time we can-- - Always saying is our neighbors now, we're sick of them.

- We're sick of them and they're having parties and they're not inviting us.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And what about the presidential numbers?

Stuart, you said that that changed pretty vertically, what could we see?

- Yeah, a year ago, Donald Trump was getting 65% on unsatisfactory or poor, including 40% said, "Poor" at the end of the scale.

President Biden, 40% said, "Good" and another 21% said, "Satisfactory".

So he's at he's at 60% positive whereas Donald Trump, a year ago was at 65% negative.

So it's just a mirror image.

- Okay, next question.

Does vaccine hesitancy differ between Western and Eastern Washington?

- There were some regional differences that we found and I'm gonna scramble through my papers here.

There was a lot of urban and rural difference between people in small towns and rural areas versus urban and suburban.

Eastern Washington were most likely, interestingly, they were most likely to report that they themselves had Covid.

We had 31% of our respondents in Eastern Washington said that they had Covid, which is 10 points higher than the next highest, which was North Puget sound.

The hesitancy was not...

Significantly different by region.

The partisan differences were, but the regional differences were not statistically significant although there were some differences, as I said in reporting of Covid and... Likely to be having an impact.

I mean, people in urban areas were much more likely to be working at home, for example, which is understandable.

- Donna, are you seeing anything in your reporting that sheds light on this question at all?

- No.

(Mark and Donna giggling) - Thank you for being honest.

(Mark, Stuart and Donna giggling) All right, here's a good one that we talk about quite a bit amongst ourselves, but how are you getting polls done in this era of texting and the internet and robocalls when a lot of people don't answer their phone, if they don't recognize the phone number.

I would like to participate in polls, but I tried to avoid robocalls, so I am never polled.

So yeah, Stuart, how has your methodology changed?

And I'd like to just tack onto this, has the nature of the pandemic itself changed the way we go about polling?

Since we have a lot of people who are just sitting at home, looking for something to do, are they inside when they get polled?

- Yeah, the results aren't in yet about whether the response rates have popped up during the pandemic when people are home and bored.

Overall, response rates have been going down for a long time.

The biggest damage to response rates was caller ID.

I think our... Should show up on your caller ID as research, but everybody can say that, so...

The short answer to the question is we're making more calls.

We're having to make a lot more calls to get the responses that we need.

We do 400 for the Crosscut-Elway Poll.

So we're having to dial a phone a lot more times.

Our methodology is, we dial with live interviewers to landlines and also half of the cell phone numbers that we have and then the other half of the cell phone numbers, we text, we send them a text with a link to an online poll.

So we are trying two or three different ways.

In other surveys that I do, we also incorporate a mailer.

So if we don't have your phone number, we will mail you a letter and send you a link and do that, but we draw a random sample, we use live interviewers and we're dialing the phone, but we're having to make a lot more calls than we did 10 or 20 years ago.

- And what's the, oh, go ahead Donna.

- Last time when I followed up with the people that they're generally answering the phone these days, I think people were like, "Oh, someone's calling me".

I mean, that's not how I am, but apparently other people are, although I had a funny experience this time with this one person who answered the phone and pretended she wasn't the person that I was calling cause there's no phone and so she said, "Well, maybe she'll be available tomorrow.

"Can you call back at 10 o'clock?"

And so I did and of course she didn't answer the phone, never called me back, it's kind of sad, but... (Stuart and Mark giggling) - All right, well, I wanna finish off with this question cause I think this is a good one and the answer, will maybe help us out in our future work, so this person asks, you mentioned asking new questions in recent polls about transit riding, shaking hands, are there any more new things you expect to ask in future polls that you haven't so far?

So I know we've talked about this a little bit, are we going to continue to poll on the pandemic as much as we have?

So maybe Stuart, if you can answer that question and then on top of that, what questions have we not asked that we want to or that we wish we would have, I guess?

- Well, I think that there may be generally the same answer to both those questions and one of the things that as we've talked about is going to become maybe more of an issue is the resistors.

People who will not get the vaccine and...

It may be a useful and informative to drill into that a little more, to find out more about what goes into that thought process and also among people who have already got the vaccine and their attitudes about the resistors.

I mean, we talked about, is this gonna become a political conflict?

So that's a couple of things I think that we could look at in... Pursuing this and I think we're all hopeful that there will come a time and we don't have to be doing polls about the pandemic anymore, but we don't know when that's likely to be.

- And then we'll just focus on the partisan divide.

- Yeah, that's gonna be here for a while and then also too, we'll be coming up to another legislative session and I think we usually do a poll leading into the legislative session about what the issues will be and so I think we might do some, if this is still going on at this level, what are the policy implications and what are the policy options that the legislature might consider next January to deal with this if we're still still in pandemic mode then?

- Well, I mean, we're certainly going to see fallout continue, right?

In a number of different sectors.

Donna, what areas are you hoping that we really keep an eye on as our communities recover from the pandemic?

- Well, I'm really interested in the economy and small businesses and what we're doing to help them survive and whether I've had a couple people ask me about our community is gonna become all, restaurants that are part of chains.

It's super hard to keep a restaurant alive and with us, most of us still not going out to eat, I can't even imagine how they're doing.

- All right.

Well, our time is up, Donna, Stewart, thank you both for an enlightening conversation.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- And thanks to all of you for joining us today and to the folks running the Crosscut Festival for making this all happen.

I hope you've had the chance to see some of the other festivals sessions this week and that you'll continue to watch through today and tomorrow when we wrap up the festivities and just to note that if you missed any of the sessions, you can go and watch recordings.

Okay, have a great rest of your week.

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