Harris Policy Forum Asks "Where Do We Go From Here?" Following Contentious 2020 Election

Days after a U.S. election that magnified divisions in a nation reeling from the COVID-19 crisis, the Harris School of Public Policy turned to three experts — Dean Katherine Baicker, Professor William Howell and Distinguished Senior Fellow David Axelrod — for insight about the road ahead.

“Election 2020: Where Do We Go From Here?,” a Harris Policy Forum held remotely Nov. 12, came as President Donald Trump was refusing to concede to President-elect Joe Biden and as cases of COVID-19 were surging.

Chuck Lewis, chairman of the Lewis-Sebring Family Foundation and Managing Partner of Coach House Capital – former Vice Chairman, Investment Banking, of Merrill Lynch & Co. and a former trustee of the University of Chicago – gave opening remarks, saying that the results of the election have “brought into sharp focus the polarization that continues to plague our politics.”

“We also saw the highest voter turnout of any election since 1876. Both that 1876 election and this one were protracted affairs and held an unflattering mirror up to our country and its electorate, much like the 1968 election did,” Lewis said.

“It is an anxious moment and a divided moment and a tumultuous moment in many ways for our country,” said Howell, Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics and director of the University of Chicago Harris School’s Center for Effective Government, who moderated the forum.

This most recent Harris Policy Forum aimed to provide the big picture on a range of issues. They included:

COVID-19

“In so many public policy issues, we say the stakes are life and death,” said Baicker, dean and Emmett Dedmon professor at Harris and a leading scholar in the economic analysis of health policy. “But it really is life and death right now.”

Those stakes, she added, “are only getting higher.”

The “out-of-control spread” of the virus, which has killed at least 244,000 Americans, has overwhelmed health care systems and heightened economic peril for many of the same populations disproportionally affected by the pandemic, Baicker said.

Good news has been reported recently about the potential efficacy of vaccines and availability of therapeutics, she said, but any vaccine distribution effort is going to take, “in the best-case scenario, months and months” to reach the general population and must happen at the same time health care workers are trying to control the virus.

Polarization and the pandemic

During what Baicker described as “an era of unprecedented polarization,” opinion about the correct response to the coronavirus “varies wildly across the country.”

“It’s understandable that large swaths of the public throw up their hands when they are hearing so many different things from different people and don’t know where the truth lies in terms of the science – let alone what the best policy is,” she said.

Adding to the confusion is a lack of public messaging about the pandemic, with, as Howell noted, the White House all but going silent on the topic.

Axelrod, a leading political commentator and senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, said that during Trump’s term, “the president chose this peculiar role of being both the president of the government that was trying to offer guidance to the American people about how to deal with the virus and the leader of the resistance to that guidance.”

That discordance, he said, “has been very costly.”

Presidential transition

Despite the presidential election being “very clearly over by all standards that we would normally apply,” the transition process that should have begun after Biden’s apparent victory is not happening, Axelrod said.

“President-elect Biden,” he said, “has tried to downplay the impact of this and indicate that we’re moving forward and that’s probably the right thing to do, because I don’t think you want create a panic.”

“But the honest truth is,” Axelrod said, “this is very damaging.” The General Services Administration had still failed to make an “ascertainment” that Biden had won the 2020 election, which did not allow for him or his team to communicate with vital agencies or health officials until weeks after the election.

Health care beyond COVID-19

While the coronavirus tops health care concerns, “there are still pressing health care needs that have nothing to do with the disease,” Baicker said.

The U.S. health system, she said, needs reform, but there is intense disagreement about what that should look like and big change during a Biden administration is doubtful due to the likely composition of Congress.

“What’s likely to happen is pretty constrained in what looks like a likely outcome of a Republican-controlled Senate, Democratic president-elect and a bare majority for the Democrats in the House,” she said.

That puts the focus on measures that can be done within existing law and on state and local efforts, she said.

Such efforts can go beyond health care, the panel said. “The federal government can play a catalytic role in incentivizing experimentation,” for example, said Axelrod, noting the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, a program that rewarded innovation in education at the state level.

Politics and federal agencies

What impact, the panel explored, will the seep of politics into federal agencies seen during the Trump administration have long term? Will experienced civil servants flee now that they, as Axelrod said, “have been drawn into this conspiracy world that we live in?”

“I hope,” Baicker said, “people keep going into government and that we value those civil servants with experience and expertise as they partner with the political appointees.”

The media

Howell, noting dramatic changes in mass communication and fragmented markets, asked Baicker and Axelrod to weigh in on the media.

“I think we’ve seen the good and the bad,” said Axelrod, a former reporter, adding that he believes the media played an important role in the last four years by shining a light “in those dark corners where we wouldn’t necessarily see without them.”  

“There are a lot of responsible news organizations out there,” he added. “There are also a lot of irresponsible organizations posing as news organizations and … sometimes people don’t discern between the two.”

Baicker described what she called the recent phenomenon of people living in “non-overlapping news and information bubbles,” labeling the trend “both baffling and alarming.”

What Axelrod described as “virtual-reality silos” leads to a situation that, Baicker said, “is no way to run a democracy.”

Reasons to have hope

Amid overwhelming challenges, panelists shared what they see as positive signs.

For Howell, optimism on the democracy front stems from new voices coming forward and getting organized, many of them young people and people who have been traditionally marginalized. “It gives us reason for hope,” he said, “that we can actually see a way forward.”

For Baicker, hope for action on important issues hinges on getting past the pandemic. “It’s grim right now,” she said, “but I’ve been amazed by the advances that we’ve seen in the vaccines and the therapeutics and in the health care workers on the front lines,” where treatments and death rates are improving.

“I can see the light at the end of the very long tunnel of the pandemic,” and once we get there, she said, “we’ll really be much better positioned to wrestle with all of these other issues.”

For Axelrod, it was the election. Nearly “150 million people came out in this election in the midst of a pandemic because they understood that they could grab the wheel of history and turn it in a different direction, or not. There was this belief that it mattered. I found that inspiring and awesome.”

For what else is democracy than that?