Special: How is COVID-19 affecting the 2020 primary?

ROBERT COSTA: Welcome to the Washington Week Extra. I’m Robert Costa.

Let’s continue that conversation about the 2020 campaign. Candidates are now deciding how to protect themselves and their supporters from the coronavirus and state governments are taking precautions to ease voters’ anxieties. Former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders, as well as President Trump, canceled campaign rallies this week.

Joining us right here at the table to discuss it all is Kimberly Atkins, senior Washington news correspondent for WBUR, Boston’s NPR News Station; Toluse Olorunnipa, White House reporter for The Washington Post; Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for USA Today; and Heidi Przybyla, correspondent for NBC News.

So, Heidi, we come to this Extra tonight after hearing Vice President Joe Biden had some technical difficulties in his first tele-townhall during this whole coronavirus period in American life. It does upend the entire campaign, does it not?

MS. PRZYBYLA: Get used to it because we’re going to have to dramatically alter, potentially, the way that these candidates campaign going into November. This is corresponding with a historically aging, old candidate – field of candidates here, and I’m not just talking about Sanders and Biden but also the president. And what is the highest-risk possible thing that somebody over the age of 70 could be doing right now, I mean just any person over the age of 70? Going out into large crowds, shaking hands, posing for selfies, getting in other people’s airspace. These candidates, it’s a real health risk for them, so they’re going to have to figure this out not just for the public but for the safety of the candidates themselves as well.

MS. ATKINS: In the primaries themselves, the primaries that have happened before this pandemic took over, we saw this influx of turnout. In state after state after state there were records being broken. So there was this democratic momentum moving into it that’s going to get stifled. We are already seeing some primaries being delayed. And this doesn’t just affect the presidential race, of course; you have a lot of down-ballot races where the candidates are also suspending campaign(s). I think it will be a lot harder for them to keep up their momentum. It’s really completely – in a week’s time completely changed the political landscape.

MR. COSTA: Louisiana announced on Friday it will postpone its April 4th Democratic primary.

MS. ATKINS: Right, it’s going to put that off until June. So I mean, the dominoes are falling politically.

MS. PAGE: One thing that makes it less important, though, is that inexplicably and unexpectedly Joe Biden has basically gotten the Democratic nomination with the votes that he got this Tuesday in primaries, and that we think will get sealed with the big primaries that we’re going to see next Tuesday. But if this was still a field of six people and, you know, we were heading toward a brokered convention, this would be much more dramatic moment than it’s – than it looks like right now.

MR. COSTA: Well, Senator Sanders isn’t quitting. He’s going to be at the debate on Sunday in a studio, no audience.

MS. PAGE: Yeah, well, and he doesn’t – he doesn’t have to quit. You know, he’s still mathematically – it’s mathematically possible that he would get the nomination. It is politically unlikely that he would do so. But the tone that Bernie Sanders took this week when he talked about the race was reasonably conciliatory toward Joe Biden, so it doesn’t look like we’re heading toward the kind of pitched battle that we might have had.

MR. OLORUNNIPA: When you think of the types of campaigns that have been run so far, I think Bernie Sanders and President Trump are most impacted by the fact that you can’t have these big rallies, these big crowds. They’ve both said that they are movement candidates that have big rallies that show the enthusiasm behind them. Right now Joe Biden has not really had that as much. It started to pick up as he started winning primaries. But I think he probably benefits the most from the fact that he doesn’t have to go out in front of these big crowds, and maybe people won’t ask why don’t you have as big of a crowd as President Trump. But I do think Bernie Sanders and especially President Trump, who feeds off of these rallies, are going to have to figure out a new way to campaign in the age of the coronavirus.

MS. PRZYBYLA: And going into the general, even if we say it’s unlikely to change in the primary, in the general election look at President Trump for instance. That is his marquee, are these huge MAGA rallies. He doesn’t like debates and hasn’t actually even committed to them yet in the general election context. So where does that leave us in terms of campaigning in these conventional ways with these aging candidates if the, you know, virus doesn’t peak and come down to a very, you know, low number such that they feel safe holding these big events again?

MR. COSTA: Heidi, you were in Michigan earlier this week. Let’s not forget there was a Michigan primary along with several other states this week.

MS. PRZYBYLA: So long ago.

MR. COSTA: What did your reporting tell you from being on the ground in Michigan about where this race is?

MS. PRZYBYLA: Michigan was so critical in the last cycle, both in the primary and – because there was, you know, Sanders upset there in the primary, and then the general because it was part of the blue wall that Trump breached. And in speaking to state officials as well as groups that have literally sprung up within the past several – few years in the ashes of Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign there, they are much more organized than they were in the last cycle, and actually a lot of them felt a little bit burned because they felt that, you know, there really wasn’t the organizing from the – at the national level and the prioritization of Michigan that there should have been, and so they kind of took things into their own hands both in terms of the state party and these new groups that have organically sprung up. I interviewed one of them called Fems for Dems, which is these suburban moms who had never been involved in politics before, and they are actually the best-organized group in all of southeast Michigan, more so than some of the more national groups like Indivisible.

MS. ATKINS: Yeah, I mean, Michigan is and will continue to be an important state. You have a lot of – in 2016, look at what happened. The union leaders got behind Hillary Clinton but the rank-and-file voted for Donald Trump, and that helped him win that state by a margin of just over 10,000 votes. I mean, remember, Jill Stein got 40,000 votes. It was a – it was a razor-thin margin. So going into the general, that’s going to be a crucial state moving forward. You have – you have some of everything. You have – you have diversity there, you have a lot of people of color, you have black suburbanites, you know, you have women – like, the Venn circles are overlapping.

MS. PRZYBYLA: You’re selling the state better than I did. (Laughter.)

MS. ATKINS: Trying to – trying to rep my home state. But it is a crucial – it is a crucial place. And seeing the differences in the way people vote and what’s happening there tells you clues about how 2020 is going to –

MS. PRZYBYLA: The rural part was fascinating.

MS. ATKINS: Yes.

MS. PRZYBYLA: The turnout in the rural areas where Trump had won previously. I’m told that a lot of those farmers are not happy up in that I-75 corridor and there’s actually, in some of them, cherries rotting on the ground. There’s farms that have gone under just since the last election.

MS. PAGE: You know, Biden showed a pretty good – put together a pretty good coalition in his support in Michigan. That’s reassuring to, I think, Democrats. The one element that he didn’t get were young people. He continues to really struggle to get voters under 35, and if he’s going to win the presidency he’s going to need to do better there. That’s one reason he needs to have good relations with Bernie Sanders, who does very well with that group.

MR. COSTA: How does he do it, Susan? How does he make sure the Sanders wing, if Biden becomes the nominee – he’s not there yet, but if he becomes the nominee how does he bring that Sanders wing in?

MS. PAGE: Well, that’s a – that’s a good question. I think it’ll be a factor in his choice of a vice president. I think it’ll be a factor in his efforts to court Bernie Sanders because Joe Biden is kind of a natural candidate for union workers and for folks from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan. He is not kind of, in his personal manner and his history, a natural candidate for newer generations.

MS. ATKINS: And there are a lot of progressives who are very angry and who don’t want to give up on their ideals in this election and say, well, it’s just, you know, any blue will do. They are very – they are very passionate about that, and so he’s going to really have to make a pitch. I think one thing we might see him is get pushed a little bit on his policies in an effort to bring people onboard. I think that is important, even if it’s not in the form of an endorsement, if he can get some sort of help from people like Elizabeth Warren, who is very popular among progressives but also among more moderates in the party. He’s going to have to make an actual effort to get those onboard or at least not have them fighting against him the way we saw in 2016.

MR. COSTA: And we did see in 2016 he had a long, protracted negotiation with Secretary Clinton before he threw her his endorsement. Any final thoughts before we say goodnight?

MR. OLORUNNIPA: Well, I thought it was important that Joe Biden earlier this week called himself a bridge to the next generation. I think rhetorically he’s starting to make the argument that he’s not going to be there forever, that he’s not trying to sort of be the leader of the party for the long term; he’s trying to be a bridge, get Donald Trump out of office, and then allow some of these more progressive younger leaders to take over. He’s going to have to do more to get their vote, but I think he’s starting to do it with his rhetorical shift towards saying that he’s a bridge to the next generation.

MR. COSTA: We will leave it there for this Washington Week Extra. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on our website. While you’re there, check out our weekly news quiz.

I’m Robert Costa. Thanks for joining us and see you next time.