Special: How will COVID-19 affect the 2020 election?

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

The 2020 presidential campaign has fundamentally changed amid the coronavirus pandemic, with candidates straining to reach voters virtually and state and federal officials now rethinking how to hold an election during an outbreak. Democrats announced Thursday that they are postponing their convention in Milwaukee until August, underscoring how the virus is upending all parts of American life. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also suggested this week that there could be legislation expanding vote by mail, early voting, and same-day voter registration in the House. But President Trump, he rejected the idea, arguing that could hurt Republicans in an interview with Fox News.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: (From video.) The things they had in there were crazy. They had things – levels of voting that you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.

MR. COSTA: Leading Democratic candidate 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 video.) I think they should be doing that now. I think they should be doing that now, planning on it. I notice, you know, the House talked about some of this and the president said, well, if we did what the House wanted we’d ensure no Republican would ever get elected. That’s ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. And so this is about making sure that we’re able to conduct our democracy while we’re dealing with a pandemic.

MR. COSTA: Joining us to discuss how the election might be shaped by the outbreak or reshaped, Yamiche Alcindor, White House correspondent for the PBS NewsHour; Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; and Jerry Seib, executive Washington editor for The Wall Street Journal.

Yamiche, on Friday at his news conference President Trump again said he would not support voting by mail. What does this mean for the election as we look ahead?

YAMICHE ALCINDOR: What it means is that we’re really in uncharted territory. It’s unclear whether or not things are going to be safe enough for people to go out and leave their houses and form lines and vote. We see that the Democratic National Convention has already postponed their convention for a couple more months to make sure that people can gather, but even then you – as soon as that announcement was made you had Democrats, including some aides from Pete Buttigieg’s campaign, speaking out saying it would be irresponsible to have people gather to nominate a Democratic nominee. So I think this is going to be a really hard 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 whether or not all 50 states are going to say, yes, let’s all vote by mail, whether or not there’s going to be some sort of postponing of the election. Most people that I talk to think that that’s probably not going to happen, but who knows what could really happen.

MR. COSTA: Jerry, to that point about the conventions, what does it mean, one, to have the Democratic Convention and Republican Convention now back to back? And when you talk to your sources in both parties, could we see a summer without any convention at some point?

GERALD SEIB: Well, I think both parties are going to try to have a convention. We may have shorter conventions, different kind of conventions. The first thing it means, by the way, is the Democrats had a plan, you know, to have their convention exceptionally early, 42 days before the Republicans. Why? They wanted to be able to spend money or to have their nominee spend money raised for the general election campaign earlier in the process to make sure they didn’t fall behind the Trump fundraising juggernaut. Well, that’s out the window now. That’s not going to happen. So you’re going to have two conventions, perhaps shortened conventions, jammed together in mid to late August, and we’re probably rolling back to the kind of election you would have seen half a century ago in which the general election campaign between the Democratic nominee and the Republican nominee basically kicks off on Labor Day and it’s a sprint to Election Day from that point on. That’s what we’re looking at here, and what are the consequences, who does it help? I don’t think anybody knows at this point.

MR. COSTA: Peter, Yamiche talked about how we’re in uncharted waters when it comes to the election, if we have a second wave of the virus in the fall right around the November general election. When you look back at history, is there any guide that we could turn to or any moment to give us an example of how this could play out if you have much of the country wanting to stay in their homes 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 through the Civil War. We had elections in 1918 during the great pandemic of the Spanish Flu. We had elections in World War II. The only elections really of any consequence that were delayed because of a national crisis prior to this, really, I think was the New York City elections in 2001 that were supposed to take place on 9/11, got delayed just a short amount of time. Now we see primary after primary state delaying their elections in the spring, including Wisconsin now which was supposed to vote next Tuesday, but the general election for the – at this moment, anyway, does appear to be locked into place. The president cannot delay it by himself, most scholars believe. It’s set in the Constitution. It’s possible Congress could change that, but we don’t have a history of changing general elections. Now, we also don’t have a history of the ability to do something different the way we do now, vote by mail. Technology has changed so much. It’s not that voting by mail is so new – we’ve had absentee voting across the country for years – but the idea of doing it across the board, obviously, is something rather unusual for America. There are some states where that’s become the habit, I think in Oregon and elsewhere. So the president doesn’t like it, in part – he was pretty honest on Fox – because he thinks that that disadvantages Republicans. A higher turnout – if vote by mail were to result in that, a higher turnout does, you know, historically favor Democrats. But it’s not – it’s not clear, you know, that that would necessarily happen if everybody went to a vote-by-mail system, and it’s not clear that there would be the kind of fraud that he’s worried about. But he talked at the briefing today about the tradition of having people show up at the ballot box and actually, you know, in person with an ID, as some of these states are now requiring, to prevent any kind of fraud. We’ll see how this works out. At this point, as you say, we don’t know whether the current wave will be over by then, but you’re right that the real worry is a second wave will be cresting right at the same time we’re thinking about going to the polls in November, and that’s a jump ball.

MR. COSTA: Yamiche, Peter brought up an important point, the claims of fraud by President Trump and Republicans. Based on your reporting, your fact-checking over the years, what backs up those claims, if anything?

MS. ALCINDOR: Based on my reporting there is no sort of evidence, no sort of history or pattern of voter fraud when it comes to people trying to vote for people that are dead or are trying to vote under a different name. None of that, based on evidence, is true. There are maybe a couple instances of that, but nothing that would be widespread. What there is, what we have seen, is voter fraud when it comes to – or, I should say, not voter fraud – but what we have seen is issues in people trying to suppress the vote.

In North Carolina there was a case where African Americans were targeted, a judge said with precision, by Republicans. And they were trying to basically vote them out of districts and draw them out of districts so that they would not be able to have the same amount of voting power. We’ve also seen some absentee fraud in North Carolina that was, again, a Republican candidate. But the president continues to say this. So this is something that the president does. He repeats claims even when they’re not true. So he can probably continue to do that as we look at how the virus impacts elections going forward.

MR. 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 there in the conversation. But has it been a struggle for him as the pandemic is front and center every day?

MR. SEIB: Yeah. I think it has been. You know, the start – the TV star of the pandemic, whether you love him or hate him, is President Trump. He’s put himself out every day for an hour, sometimes two hours, and late in the afternoon from the White House press room. And he has – he dominates the conversation. He jousts with reporters. There’s no way for Vice President Biden right now to compete with that. So what does he do? Well, I think he does want he can. There’s a debate within the Democratic Party about how much that matters. And there’s some school of thought that says it’s not a big problem for him because in the end what can he do about it right now? There’s a long way to go. And it serves him if this election becomes a referendum on Donald Trump. That’s what it needs to be for Joe Biden anyway.

A footnote, I think Democrats are also happy to have a focus on health care because they believe, and all the polling suggests they’re right about this, health care is an issue that works better for them than Republicans. If this is going to be a debate and an election in which health care is the big issue in the background, maybe that’s not so bad for Democrats.

MR. 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. Is there any talk – any seriousness to the talk that you see in some columns about Governor Cuomo being drafted? Or is that just a dream from some of the New York governor’s supporters?

MR. BAKER: Yeah, look, you know, obviously it’s sort of fanciful talk on the part of Democrats who’ve never really been necessarily all that enthralled with the idea of Vice President Biden as their – as their nominee. For months we’ve heard this. Well, only if so-and-so got in. Maybe if so-and-so got in. And every time that’s happened actually and played itself out, it didn’t work out. What if Michael Bloomberg got in? Well, he did get in. It didn’t work out. What if Beto O’Rourke got in? He did get in. It didn’t work out.

So, you know, I think that there’s sort of a buyer’s remorse on the part of some Democrats that Vice President Biden isn’t necessarily the candidate they’re excited about. They all respect him, mainly, but they – you know, he does not inspire the kind of energy and excitement that a different candidate might inspire. And Cuomo has kind of risen to the occasion. You know, he’s had his own problems with the left, which doesn’t particularly like him and mounted a challenge to him in this most recent gubernatorial election.

But today, for Democrats anyway, he looks like, you know, man of the hour, in the same way kind of Rudy Giuliani sort of rose to the occasion after 9/11. Governor Cuomo looks like a man in charge, and somebody who’s, you know, up to the challenge of the moment, and inspired at least people on his side of the aisle. I don’t think there’s any realistic chance that he becomes the nominee at this point. This process is too far gone. But you can see why Democrats – the fact that they’re talking about him is the more important thing. It says something about the mood of the Democrats going into this election.

MR. COSTA: You could see him getting that keynote address, just like Mario Cuomo 1984.

Yamiche, final question. You sent years covering Senator Bernie Sanders. He is still in the presidential race. What’s next for him?

MS. ALCINDOR: It’s hard to say. I mean, when you talk to people who are close to President – I should say – when you talk to people who are close to Bernie Sanders, they say that he is still in the race right now because, one, he doesn’t have to campaign, it’s not like he’s spending a lot of money because he’s – and he’s continuing to have his kind of progressive message. They think he still needs to drag Joe Biden further to the left. They also are talking about the Democratic platform and saying that he wants to influence the party.

But overall, I think what we’re seeing is that Bernie Sanders is likely going to head back into the Senate, and he’s going to, again, still have his kind of progressive voice. He’s going to be able to loudly challenge the president – whether that’s Joe Biden or Donald Trump – because I can imagine that even if Joe Biden becomes the president you can already see that Bernie Sanders has a lot of differences, including his push for Medicare for All, that he could continue to challenge whoever the president is. So it seems like that’s what’s next for Bernie Sanders.

MR. COSTA: That’s it for this edition of the Washington Week Extra. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on our website. While you’re there, check out our Washington Week-ly News Quiz.

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