Coronavirus and the Politics of Pandemics

Why don’t we prepare better for crises we know are coming? What effect will the coronavirus pandemic have on Trump’s 2020 chances? Should we even be having an election in the midst of a viral outbreak? On this episode, we turn to the best political science research to answer these questions and more about the politics behind COVID-19.

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Transcript

Anthony Fowler:

I am Anthony Fowler.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I'm Wioletta Dziuda.

William Howell:

And I am Will Howell, and this is Not Another Politics Podcast.

Anthony Fowler:

This is not a normal Not Another Politics Podcasts. Why is that, Will?

William Howell:

Well, we're not together. We're hiding out in our homes, in our pajamas and connecting via Zoom, which seems to be... that along with Purell seems to be what's saving all of civilization just now.

Anthony Fowler:

The other thing that's different about this episode is that we are going to talk today about the coronavirus. Normally we spend time talking about a paper, about a broad long-lasting question in politics, but we've decided that our listeners probably are mostly thinking about the coronavirus right now. We're going to ask, what does political science research have to say, if anything, about the coronavirus.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I think for me this is a moment of enormous humility. You open the news and then you feel like, well, what can I do with my own political science or political economy papers? Everything seems shallow, in the grand scheme of things. But it's maybe my isolation speaking.

William Howell:

I don't know. To me it doesn't... It underscores the importance of politics, this moment. Yes, this is a crisis moment. Yes, we need to be hearing from physicians and scientists and people who study pandemics. But the response that we're able to marshal is a function of how we organize ourselves politically and how we understand our obligations to one another. And those are at their core political questions. To my mind, this crisis sort of reaffirmed the importance of what political scientists are trying to grapple with and political economists.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So the first question that is bothering me, why aren't we prepared? We knew this was coming.

Tape:

Overseas now and the epicenter of the outbreak in Europe. Italy decimated by the coronavirus.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Epidemiologists warned us about this a long time ago.

Tape (Bill Gates):

I think an epidemic either naturally caused or intentionally caused is the most likely thing to cause, say 10 million excess deaths.

Wioletta Dziuda:

We even have a movie, I don't know whether you've watched the movie, I think it's called Contagion.

Tape:

So we have a novel virus with the mortality rate in the low twenties, no treatment protocol and no vaccine at this time.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I haven't watched it, but we have the movie. So we've been warned, why aren't we prepared?

William Howell:

If I could even put an additional spin on the question, which is that in the lead up to this crisis – of this pandemic – our leaders did very little. They didn't get out in front on this. Our lack of preparedness brings us right up to the brink.

Anthony Fowler:

And we in fact had a pandemic task force, I forget the exact name of it, within the White House up until something like 2017, 2018. The current administration disbanded it. They said, we're not going to spend any money on this anymore. One piece of political science research that I think is really interesting and helpful to think about at this time is a paper by Andrew Healy and Neil Malhotra in ASPR from 2009. It's called "Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy".

The basic idea of the paper is that voters, for whatever reason, don't reward politicians for disaster prevention, but they do reward politicians for disaster response. They have some evidence, they have some empirical evidence suggesting that indeed when, say, a governor spends more money to try to better prepare ourselves for an upcoming flood or hurricane or something like that, that doesn't really benefit the politician. But when the governor spends a lot of money after a hurricane has taken place, that does benefit them, even though we might think there are a lot of situations where we'd actually prefer to spend more money on prevention. Therefore this creates the incentive for politicians to spend less money on prevention, worry about it a little bit less, and then once the disaster happens, then you can really react strongly to it and get credit with the voters.

They also interpret this as voter myopia. They say because the voters are somewhat irrational and myopic, this is why this happens. The voters don't think about the fact that there might be a pandemic in the future, and so they fail to reward politicians for effective prevention. It's because of the limitations of voters that we get this outcome. All of that I think is pretty interesting evidence and an interesting argument anyway.

William Howell:

Part of the reason why I think that they are prone to criticize voters here is because they see the returns from prevention spending as being really high. It isn't just that by investing in prevention you can avoid the catastrophe. It's that the returns from a dollar spent on prevention are much higher than the returns from a dollar spent on attending to a crisis after it has actually occurred.

Now what they have in mind as their counterfactual is that money will be responsibly spent and part of the problem is that when money is spent on prevention, it's much harder to monitor and to see the benefits from. That's why presumably voters are less prone to reward politicians for that kind of spending, but there is in the background that concern that, well, a world in which we create new found incentives ... if we could somehow do that for more spending to happen on the prevention side, would it be spent responsibly? Would it actually be spent in attending to the problem at hand? I think that's just sort of an open question.

Anthony Fowler:

I think the story you just gave, Will, is one where you've basically explained their result but in a model of rational voters, right? It could be the case that don't reward politicians for prevention, but for a perfectly rational reason, which is I have no way of knowing if Donald Trump did a good job with prevention efforts before a pandemic hits. It's only after a pandemic kits that I actually find out did they seem prepared for this or not? It's very hard to know before. Also prevention efforts are often more susceptible to corruption or something like that. You end up hiring –

William Howell:

Yeah, exactly. You could see politicians diverting all kinds of money to their preferred pet causes and engaging in all kinds of corruption in a world in which they're able to spend money freely in the name of prevention. That said, I actually find that their evidence is pretty compelling and a real concern because I mean, as Wioletta raised, it's sort of maddening that we weren't ready when all the signs around the globe were that something really bad is about to hit our shores and we're caught on our heels and now we're paying a huge cost for it.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So here I'm going to backtrack on my question a little bit. When I think about myself and when I think about people in general and evidence that we have, it tells us that the people underprepare, they are not safe for the rainy day. So I wonder whether it's the politicians that somehow have little incentives to actually prepare us for a pandemic or for some other crisis, or is it that we voters do not really want to provide incentives for the politician to prepare because we ourselves don't prepare. This is how we want to spend our money and this is how we want to spend our resources. So I wonder, Anthony said that they actually have some evidence for the myopia of the voter and for voters not providing correct incentives, but do they have any particular evidence? Like what do they say?

Anthony Fowler:

Well, I think the evidence, the evidence is simply that the electoral returns to prevention are not nearly as large as one would expect if voters were perfectly informed and perfectly forward-looking at everything. That's essentially their argument.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Or voters don't believe that disasters will happen or they are very likely and then they actually don't want politicians to divert money towards preparedness. That's also possible. I would like to believe that that's not the case, but it's possible that there's nothing sinister or wrong or we shouldn't somehow be upset with the politicians or the political system that it doesn't provide incentives for politicians to prepare us. Maybe it's actually the voters that demand the lack of preparedness.

William Howell:

It could be, although one of the pathologies of disaster preparedness is hoarding on the part of individuals, right? They run off when we buy all the Purell at the local Walgreens and load up on toilet paper, but what is that?

Wioletta Dziuda:

I'm putting my mask on now.

William Howell:

Yeah, exactly. What is that if not voters or citizens thinking about the longer haul and what's in store for them? I think the idea that what politicians are doing is simply mimicking myopia on the part of voters is curious. I think, I mean if what we're trying to explain is why Trump in particular put off things, that's not a story about delayed gratification. I think that's a story about him – what? – only thinking about the stock market and being worried that anything that required people to stay home would lead to a devaluing of his single greatest accomplishment, which is the drop of unemployment and the escalation of wealth in this country and just not being willing to come to terms with the very real threat that's before us.

William Howell:

What Trump has done by not leaning into this very real crisis that's now before us and calling it a hoax and doing almost zero by way of planning and exercising meaningful leadership for a long time, when we could have done something, that strikes me as a huge political liability for him. It makes him really vulnerable to all kinds of critiques. We could say, we can recognize the pathologies, explain it by reference to rational voters, but also that strikes me as a mistake on his part, that he should have been out in front, not just in terms of being right, that it was the right thing to do for public health, but the right thing to do politically. And he's vulnerable now, not just because the economy has gone down, but because if this crisis takes hold and you have scientists saying we didn't do the kind of planning that we needed to do, he's going to take it on the chin. And he should.

Anthony Fowler:

That brings us to another interesting question, which is suppose you're a leader and you have not done a good job preparing, and you now find yourself in one of these crises, how should you respond to that? And obviously that you could think about, there's just the purely pragmatic, "What's the best thing for the future of the country?" let's say. But we also might want to think about how do your electoral incentives affect how you respond? And do those lead you to respond in suboptimal ways?

William Howell:

Yeah, so Andrew Reeves, who is a political scientist at Washington University, wrote a paper that came out in 2011 in the Journal of Politics called "Political Disaster: Unilateral Powers, Electoral Incentives, and Presidential Disaster Declarations," in which he tries to think about when and whether presidents declare disasters, which has lots of implications for the amount of monies that flow to the areas affected by the disaster, when and whether they declare a disaster in the aftermath of various crises emerging. And he presents some pretty compelling evidence that if a disaster or a crisis occurs in what he calls "a competitive state," think about here, the Electoral College, states like Ohio and Pennsylvania and Florida, ones that could go either way, presidents, he shows, are more likely to declare natural disasters, and then therefore direct additional federal aid and federal resources to those states that are ones that are not competitive.

William Howell:

And so this is something which he shows not just in the aftermath of a failure to demonstrate leadership; it's sort of in the whole. Right? Presidents have real incentives to shore up their electoral returns. This is a finding too, that's in the Healy-Malhotra paper. Andrew Reeves also presents evidence that when you declare disasters, or you direct aid to particular areas, you get an electoral return for that. You're more likely to get more votes in the upcoming election. And the votes count more if you're trying to win the presidency, if you're in a competitive state than if you're in Texas or California.

William Howell:

So this matters a whole lot at this present moment, where Congress is debating and has yet to settle on a potentially multi-trillion dollar stimulus package that's going to include a lot of discretionary funds to the president to figure out how to respond to this pandemic. If Andrew Reeves is correct with this evidence ... I mean, if this evidence speaks to this present moment, it would suggest that we can expect Trump to direct it a disproportionate amount of that aid to states that are going to matter more in the upcoming election, and that he'll be rewarded for it.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So this is very interesting, but also very depressing. Because if you think about the areas that are the most affected by the crisis, and maybe this is going to change, but it's unlikely to change completely, those are not the areas that are competitive. So New York State is affected, Illinois, California, Washington State, but it's unlikely that Minnesota or Pennsylvania are going to be the most affected. So what they're saying is that the funds are actually going to be misdirected. They are going to not go to the industries, or to the areas that are the most severely affected by this crisis, but they're going to go to places that are just electorally more rewarding.

Anthony Fowler:

So do we want to speculate about the electoral implications for Donald Trump of coronavirus? On net, do we think this is going to help him or hurt him? There is a lot of political science research, obviously not on coronavirus, but there's research on the effects of natural disasters in general on elections. There are some mixed results. I think some studies show that, "Oh, this particular flood seemed to help this particular politician, this ..." et cetera, et cetera.

On net, I would say most of the evidence seems to suggest that disasters are bad for politicians. And usually there's an argument made that this is because the voters are somewhat irrational, and they don't realize that the reason things are bad is because of the tornado and they just blame the governor or something like that, which I think is-

William Howell:

Or they blame the governor for the tornado, is the story that we sometimes hear, right? "My God, he's summoned that thing," and "How could he do that to us?"

Wioletta Dziuda:

So two of our colleagues, Scott Ashworth and Ethan Bueno de Mesquita together with Amanda Friedenberg from University of Arizona, have a paper where they tell the following story:

Suppose that actually voters are rationale and they don't blame the politician for something that's outside of their control. Coronavirus arrives, a tornado arrives, they understand that this was an act of God and this is not the responsibility of the incumbent. But imagine a situation in which during the crisis it's easier for the voters to learn what kind of politician, what kind of incumbent, they have in power. When the times are good, little actions by the president or the governor affect our lives very little. But when the crisis comes, the decisions that they make actually have huge consequences. So during the tornado, during that earthquake, during the pandemic, that's when we learn, "Do we have a good president? Do we have a president who understands science, who can react quickly and make good decisions? Or do we have someone who actually just cares about himself, and that doesn't take responsibility, and is reversing himself at every press conference?"

If we live in a situation like this, and I think it's actually a very reasonable description of reality, what we are going to see is that during the good times most of the incumbents are reelected because after all, that's why they got into power: they intend to be better than an average politician. But when a disaster strikes, the bad incumbents, those that actually are of low quality are going to be voted out of power.

So if you just look at the data broadly, you're going to see that the disaster strikes and there's a high probability that the incumbent is voted out of power. But it's not because people are irrational, but it's because people finally learned that those incumbents are not as good as they believed them to be.

William Howell:

Yeah, I think that the argument really resonates. It's smart, but it also speaks to this moment. We see his cheerleading, and his lies, and his disinvestment in administrative competence, and his interest in marginalizing science. These were all features that were features of his presidency well before this pandemic, but they're put in stark relief. And we see the consequences of them, and I think our tolerance for the kind of showmanship that he presents has gone down. And the mettle of the man is being tested, and it's not impressive.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah. I think one paradox that's worth pointing out is that a lot of these political scientists who often criticize the voters, they write the papers or they read the papers and say, "Oh look, can you believe that this hurricane hurt this politician's chances of reelection? Aren't the voters stupid?" Those are often the same people who are on Twitter right now saying, "Look at how stupid Donald Trump is. Look at what an idiot he is in the way he's responding to this. Surely this is going to hurt him." And they don't see –

William Howell:

They're undermining their former argument.

Anthony Fowler:

Yes, yes. Even though Donald Trump is not to blame for coronavirus, we learn different things about him as a result of coronavirus that could have important electoral implications. It's still not obvious to me whether those electoral implications are positive or negative. Part of it is because Donald Trump was already starting off at a pretty weak electoral position to begin with. And so new information, even if in expectation it's not good or bad, he only had one way to go: up.

And so if it turns out that coronavirus actually is not as big of a problem as we think at the moment, and the response is good from here no, that could actually turn out to be good for Donald Trump. So I'm still not sure whether or not this is good or bad for him. But the general story stands, that on average these things matter, and on average they might hurt incumbents more often than not because the incumbents are already positively selected for. In Trump's case, it's not so clear, partly because he was starting from a weak position and his response has been pretty lackluster so far.

William Howell:

Again though, a key difference ... We'll see whether or not it takes but, to my mind, a key difference between this moment and the kinds of moments that animate Ethan and Scott's paper is that what they want to show is that even when there are crises, there's no story to tell, that the leader, him or herself, is responsible for the incidents of the crisis, nonetheless, there are reasons for voters to vote him or her out of office once that leader is revealed to be a low quality type. But a difference between this moment is that there are reasons to point the finger at Trump, that his is failure of leadership in the lead up to this pandemic domestically, and not getting us prepared as citizens, not getting us prepared in terms of the economy, not in terms of supplies of ventilators, there are all kinds of things that we could have been doing that we didn't do, and he had the information, there's not a story here that says, "Well, gee, how was he to know." Experts were telling him, "Get ready," and this was playing out around the globe in a very serious way. The case that he has to make is harder, because he's got to say, "Look, I delivered you from a catastrophe that I'm also partially responsible for."

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah, and what Scott, Ethan, and Amanda say is that if we see Trump losing in November, assuming that the election will take place in November, if we see Trump losing in November, it's not going to be the simplistic story that some people in political science put forward that is, "Oh, coronavirus came and there was nothing that could have been done, and voters are just blaming him unjustly for that." But more likely, it's going to be this more rational and actually reasonable story that, no, he indeed revealed himself not to be fit for office.

There's a different argument that one could make that would make Donald Trump happy about his future electoral prospects. We are not going to talk about this today, because this will be the topic of our next podcast in two weeks. But there is research out there that suggests that it's during the time of crisis, both economic crisis or some security crisis, and coronavirus will be both types of this crisis. During the time of crisis, people elect populists, they elect demagogues, they elect strong men, they elect politicians that are not mainstream politicians, politicians that make promises that cannot be met. You can argue whether Trump is this kind of politician; but for some of us, I think he is.

One would worry that once the dust settles down and we are learning about the negative economic outcome of this entire pandemic, that's going to be actually the moment where people will turn to Trump, because they will be fooled by his simplistic solutions and simplistic promises. So, I would worry a little bit that actually this pandemic might help him win the election.

Anthony Fowler:

And you should listen to our next episode –

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yes. It's good.

Anthony Fowler:

– to hear more about demagogues.

William Howell:

There is one curious fact. I mean, this is playing out in real time, which is that Trump has come out and hinted that he may want to scale back our response, that the cure shouldn't be, as he put it, "More damaging than the disease." And he sees –

Wioletta Dziuda:

"Don't let the cure be worse than the problem itself."

Tape (Donald Trump):

Don't let the cure be worse than the problem itself. We're not going to let the cure be worse than the problem.

William Howell:

Right. I guess to my mind, like politically, that is incredibly risky. He's already really vulnerable having not acted, because I think there are plenty of voices that can and have cause to blame him for the rise of this pandemic domestically in ways that it's hard to blame somebody.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I actually am interested in what you think about this tweet. Why do you think he is saying that? I have some thoughts on that, but I would be interested in hearing yours. What's his end game?

William Howell:

Well, his end game is being reelected and the greatness and glory that is himself. It has to be, to my mind, that simple. But how this is a part of a larger strategy is not so clear. What I think he's trying to do is to resuscitate the economy. He sees his crown jewel being stolen away from him just as the election is rapidly approaching, where the crown jewel is this roaring economy, and that's just completely fallen apart.

By relaxing these measures, presumably, he's going to hope that he can bring it back to life. It's not clear that relaxing these measures will first of all bring it back to life, particularly if the pandemic continues, one. And two, if the pandemic continues and he's counseling us to not be something less than vigilant, then, politically, to my mind, he's that much more vulnerable to criticisms that he has shown a total lack of leadership.

Anthony Fowler:

My internet cut out for a minute, so I missed some of what you just said.

William Howell:

It was brilliant.

Anthony Fowler:

I'm sure it was. I will say one interesting thing to say about Trump right now is you could argue that he's kind of gambling for resurrection. If coronavirus had never come about, he was looking likely to lose, right? Things were not going great for him. His approval ratings were pretty low. When you're in that situation and you're looking to take some risks and hope that you can restore your reputation and coronavirus comes along and maybe he's thinking to himself, "If I do the standard thing that every other world leader is doing, then my reputation's probably is not going to be high enough to get me reelected. So what I need to do is I need to take a risk." And one risk that he decided to take was, "What if I argue that it's not so bad? And then if it turns out that it isn't so bad and everything is fine, then I can declare victory and say all those Democrats were just complaining and trying to make too big a thing about this coronavirus." So that's one explanation for why Trump's response has been disappointing to many public health officials.

William Howell:

Yes. But, but then he pivots and says, "Oh, we've got to do all these things." And he's in front of the cameras every day, and he's declaring himself a wartime President.

Tape (Donald Trump):

I view it as a, in a sense, a wartime President. I mean, that's what we're fighting,

William Howell:

It's too soon to tell, but he is hinting at the suggestion that he's going to back off again.

Tape (Donald Trump):

I'd love to have it open by Easter. Okay?

Tape:

Oh, wow!

Tape (Donald Trump):

I would love to have it open by Easter. I will tell you that right now.

William Howell:

To say, "Well, maybe we're coming on a little too strong now." At some point, this kind of moving back and forth that, "I want to be the wartime leader," but who suggests that what? The war isn't all that bad. And yet, the pandemic continues and all the experts say what we have to be is vigilant. It becomes incoherent, and trust in this president falls even lower, and more and more he looks like a political catastrophe.

When he came out and refused to take responsibility rather publicly, it struck me as one of the most unpresidential actions that he's taken. Because what presidents do is assume responsibility over all manner of things, even things that they can't actually attend to materially. This though is something which the government response, I think, most people would recognize this is something that decidedly does matter.

Wioletta Dziuda:

I'm a little bit sympathetic to what Anthony said, and I want to follow up on that. So I was wondering whether Trump's political game is as follows. He knows that governors now took over. They introduced measures that hopefully are going to curb the spread of coronavirus, but at the same time are going to destroy the economy or weaken the economy substantially. So perhaps he is thinking, "Well, all those measures are going to work and three, four weeks, five weeks, two months from now, we are going to come out of that unscratched in terms of health, but we are going to have a economy that leaves a lot to be desired. And at that time I want to say, "Look, all those governors, what they did is they destroy the economy. The virus wasn't as bad as we were projecting it to be. Only X number of people died despite the projections that were dire. And I told you so. I told you to introduce those measures only for two weeks and then keep the economy going. You didn't do that. That was your responsibility. You should take responsibility for that."

And what's convenient for him is that the governors that will be blamed for that will be the governors that actually are not from his party. So I'm just wondering whether this is the political game that he is trying to play right now.

Anthony Fowler:

I think it's possible. This is going to be my view. This is not informed by any political science research, but we might be giving him too much credit.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Oh no, I think he has actually very good political instincts. So yeah, I'm giving him credit where credit is due.

Anthony Fowler:

I'll throw out one story that doesn't give him a whole lot of credit, but might explain a lot of his behavior, which is our President has a very childlike view of the stock market, and he thinks that if he says everything is great that that will keep the stock prices high and that will be good for his reelection chances. When in reality, what would probably be good for the stock market is a President that was responding competently to a crisis. And the cat's out of the bag there. But I think that partly explains why he was kind of hesitant early on to even admit that there was a problem and admit that we –

Wioletta Dziuda:

It's possible.

Anthony Fowler:

–needed to do something drastic.

Wioletta Dziuda:

It's possible. It's sad, but it's possible.

Anthony Fowler:

We're not legal scholars, and maybe this is a topic we should ask our legal scholar friends. But Wiola did make a joke earlier about if we have an election in November, I think it's fair to say there's going to be an election in November. There have been concerns about that.

We're seeing lower voter turnout in primary elections, arguably as a result of the coronavirus and people not feeling comfortable going outside and even having a hard time getting poll workers and so forth. If this continues through to November, then I think we would want to think seriously about our voting technology and think about how can we run a healthy election in a world in which people are afraid to go outside and afraid to have close contact with one another in something like a polling location. So I have done some research on mobile voting, partly because the state of West Virginia in 2018 did a pilot with mobile voting. So they allowed, if you were an overseas resident with your permanent residence in West Virginia and if you were from one of a certain number of counties in West Virginia, so it's somewhat limited, then you were able to cast a vote in 2018 using a mobile app. And I showed that having that option did indeed increase voter turnout among overseas residents from those counties. So mobile voting does increase participation, which is arguably a good thing. On the other hand, mobile voting does carry with it all kinds of additional security concerns that raise all kinds of risks for our electoral system. And so it's not obvious whether or not we would want to implement something like mobile voting nationwide.

William Howell:

And particularly when we have a short period of time to get it up and running.

Anthony Fowler:

Yes. I think that's fair. So it's conceivable that we could have more vote by mail. It's conceivable that we'll have more early voting and things like that. I think mobile voting is probably not going to be a viable solution for voter turnout in 2020 because of the security risks and because it's still a relatively new thing. But we certainly need to think a lot about that. How can we have a healthy, robust election in a world in which some workers may not want to go do all that? And so I think voting technology is going to be very interesting and important and various Secretaries of State and County Election Clerks are going to have to think very seriously about this. And maybe this is the silver lining of the coronavirus as well. Maybe a silver lining is that all of these election officials will have to work harder to figure out how to make voting more accessible to people. We'll see how all this carries out.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Can I throw in a slightly crazy idea out there? Is it actually completely obvious that whenever a crisis like this one strikes, we should not have some mechanism that would allow us to postpone elections in a fair and not nonpolitical way? So what I'm thinking about is that during the crisis you have a lot of information flowing. You have a lot of actually blockages of information. So for example, Trump has now a lot of time on TV where he can talk where he can present himself. Biden and Sanders don't get so much attention because people are focused on their health and not on political competition. So I guess there's an argument to be made that this is not the moment during which we should be electing the President for the next four years. Perhaps if we were to run an election today the outcome would be different than if we run the election tomorrow or in two days and we don't want the election to be run.

So is there a possibility to have a mechanism where a crisis actually leads to some postponement of the election in a transparent way that cannot be easily abused by someone who wants to usurp power?

William Howell:

Boy, it's like imagining how you would do that is really hard particularly again given that leaders have say over when and whether a crisis actually exists and they can take actions that can incite a crisis or can exacerbate a crisis. And so the idea that we could solve one problem without incurring another here doesn't seem to apply.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah, I agree. This might be the theory of the second best at work, right? Maybe there is in fact an argument to be made that in some rare cases we should reschedule elections, but thinking about how we would do so in a principled nonpolitical way seems almost impossible. And so deciding that we're going to settle for the second best, and we're just always going to have Presidential elections in November of the scheduled years might be in fact the best we can do within the constraints that we face.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah, but one can envision something of a sort that, let's say, we have a chance of postponing the election once for three months. If you think about that three months, it's not something that would really necessarily provide incentives to create a crisis. But at least this would give us this three month period where we can see, okay, perhaps today the situation is much, much more volatile but we can see that three months later it's going to be more stable, so let's just wait three more months. Because we all value elections a lot and we don't want anyone to manipulate when they are taking place and whether they're taking place. But, on the other hand, we value elections because we think they actually reflect the will of the society, of the voters, and they provide useful information and they actually elect the most capable politicians. So we don't want them to take place during the time where actually these mechanisms don't work.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah, I'm interested in the argument. I understand the benefits. I just don't know how you would ever capture it. I mean, we have had elections in the middle of major wars in the United States and you might argue that seems suboptimal from the perspective of the very first best world, but how you would get to that first best world, how you'd come up with a principled way of deciding this is the time we should delay the election, that seems really fraught.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah, but the elections that we had in the past, the wars that we had in the past, I think they were very different in nature than the current situation. They were not on American soil. People were not bombarded.

Anthony Fowler:

We had a civil war. We had an election in the middle of a civil war.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah.

Anthony Fowler:

And I think that was probably good that we did.

Wioletta Dziuda:

The best. Yeah, I don't know. I'm just throwing it out there and perhaps as you're saying, this is the second best and there's nothing we can do, but perhaps it's something. If we are thinking about research that we might want to think about moving forward, perhaps this is one question that one could ponder for a little bit longer than just this podcast.

William Howell:

Yeah. One thing I that is not unrelated to what you're suggesting here, Wiola, that has me worried about the November election, assuming we are going to go forward with it, is that if turnout is remarkably low and/or there are additional charges of voter fraud of one sort or another, that the perceived legitimacy of the election, whatever the outcome might be, by at least some important segments of the American public might be quite low, and it's not that then that will lead to Trump saying, "I'm not going to relinquish office." Maybe that will happen; I think that that's highly unlikely. But what could well happen is that people who support him refuse to recognize whoever is elected as being the legitimate President and that there will be political fallout associated with that going forward. All else equal, having a robust November election, the benefits of it isn't just that we choose the right person or that we see a peaceful transfer of power, that there may be political costs associated with certain segments of the American public scene in recognizing the legitimacy of who the next President is.

That may have implications for all manner of political outcomes and future political engagement. I worry about all of that.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Absolutely.

William Howell:

Okay. Right. I mean, there's not a whole lot that's lighthearted here, but I think that's where we're at too.

Thanks for listening to Not Another Politics Podcast.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Our show is a podcast from the Harris School of Public Policy and is produced by Matt Hodapp. Thanks for listening.