Columbia’s Lincoln Mitchell on democracy and the coronavirus
“The 2020 election is the last stand for American democracy.”
The following is a transcript of the interview conducted between GovSight Vice President Miguel Pineda with Editor Anna Repp and Columbia Professor Lincoln Mitchell on COVID-19 response efforts, strategies for the 2020 election and international relations. The interview has been edited lightly for clarity.
Miguel Pineda: All right guys sitting down with me today is Professor Lincoln Mitchell. Professor Mitchell, welcome to the show.
Lincoln Mitchell: Thank you for having me. It’s good to be chatting this afternoon.
MP: Of course. Yeah, of course we really appreciate your time. So Professor Mitchell, I just want to start with the coronavirus. There have been a lot of mixed reviews toward the federal government’s response toward the coronavirus. What would you say that we have done well — and what have we not done well?
LM: Well, there is a lot of real expertise in and around the federal government: Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job of getting their views out there. There is some important information that is being communicated to the American public.
Until about two weeks ago, the federal government response to the coronavirus was, essentially, not to save American lives, but not to hurt Donald Trump’s feelings. I’m putting that as nicely as possible. That’s not a way that you respond to this.
Since then, we did get to the social distancing — and there has been some good messaging around that. But now we’re having this discussion: Should we try to lift the social distancing? Ultimately, we’re not going to stay in our houses forever. So we have to lift the social distancing eventually.
But what strikes me is that a macro failing of the federal government here has been that they haven’t used the time well. Right? So we saw this was happening in China. It wasn’t hitting us here yet. But we knew it might and we didn’t really do anything about it. And even in the social distancing, right now, Trump is talking about a task force to get us back. But that should have been something that we were thinking about very early on. Because this all takes time.
For example, one thing you want to do during this period is to begin to take testing very seriously. We need to have data so you can make decisions. We see these projections and they ebb and they flow and they look pretty good today and yesterday — relatively speaking — but you know, almost two to three times as high a week ago. So to get the data to keep those projections on the low end for fatalities, which is where we want to be, we need to know: Is the social distancing working? How many new infections are there? Not how many people are calling the hospital when they feel very sick, because that’s not a measure of how many infections we have. So it’s not been a strong response.
Anna Repp: Absolutely. So when it comes to containment and government response, are there countries that are doing things better? Like I know Germany specifically and Russia and China have different responses. Is there anything that they’re doing that’s working better?
LM: Well, I’m hesitant to say China is doing better. My view is that a lot of the news — and I use that word loosely — that we get out of China is a triumph of a repression of freedom of speech over reality. So I don’t know that we’ll get the real numbers on China for quite a while. South Korea comes to mind as an example of a country that has done better.
I was talking to a colleague in Sweden yesterday who is not Swedish, but is a grad student there. So she lives there. It was [about] an academic project that she was working on. She was telling me what’s going on in Sweden. It was fascinating to me because on the one hand, it was very much, “oh we’re European, we’re doing it this way.” But on the other hand, they didn’t seem to be taking the social distancing seriously. It is gonna take some time to see which countries did better and worse, you know.
And there’s two other points. One: As it moves towards the poorer countries, it will become a much more difficult challenge. How do you socially distance in Bangladesh? I don’t know if you’ve been to Bangladesh, but Bangladesh … 140 million people in a place about the size of Colorado. How do you socially distance there? And the other thing is, in general, what’s striking about the American response is we had so many strengths going into this. We have the best medical researchers, more or less, in the world. We have fantastic research universities, with really smart people working on this from a whole lot of different angles. We have the ability to produce, I don’t know, tens of millions of masks or ventilators because we have, even now, a pretty strong industrial base. So we started out at a better position than some countries, which underscores — and makes it more unfortunate — where we are today.
MP: Right, definitely. That’s a great point. When it comes to countries like China and Russia specifically, these are both big players on the world stage — and both nations that the U.S. has had mixed relations with over the last few years. With Russia, how does the U.S. navigate possible Russian interference in the 2020 election? Just given how countries are now communicating with each other with the coronavirus.
LM: I don’t know that the coronavirus changes that question specifically, other than that it’s a different kind of a playing field. Now, in other words, the American voters’ minds are in a different place. The partisan dynamic in our country is different than it was two months ago just because of this crisis. Our economy, of course, is in very different shape. Americans go into this election in a different mindset.
I mean, what strikes me about your question about Russia is that you raised this the right way, which is it’s not just about Russia. Right? A lot of countries can become involved in our elections in damaging ways. People say, “well, Americans should know when they’re a Russian bot or not,” but that’s not a helpful piece of analysis. Certainly China can have its own social media campaign in the United States through its own clever ways, if it really wants to. So one thing that strikes me is that we knew about this in 2015 and 2016. And what should have happened going into 2017 is that a heavyweight bipartisan panel should have been assembled. Kind of the usual suspects. So you know, Condoleezza Rice is a respected Republican foreign policy mind. I mean, she and I don’t agree on everything, but she’s well respected. And you bring in a similar Democrat — not Hillary Clinton because of her position in this — but [rather] Madeleine Albright or someone like that from the Democratic side. You bring in the kind of elder states, people of American foreign policy and politics to address this in a bipartisan commission that makes recommendations by June of 2017. Then you put it to Congress: This is not a partisan issue. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
And we have to be honest, right? The main reason that didn’t happen is because the president probably wouldn’t have been there if not for Russian interference. Over these last few years, what we’ve seen is that the president and his supporters, which are the Republican Party today, don’t have a problem with this. And this is a complicated thing to say, because on the one hand, as an academic, I have my own partisan opinions. But I’ve been able to separate them better in the past than now. Because if I tell you something else, I’m not being honest with you. So the notion that Russia should not involve themselves in our election is one which the Democrats are willing to back up with action — and the Republicans, not so much.
Russia — and I see this in other countries too — what Russia has done is they’ve played it so well that they’ve gotten inside many people’s heads. Right? So just think of your own experience. If you’re just perusing Twitter, for example, you’ll watch a Twitter fight between two people — not you, but two other people. One will accuse the other of being a Russian bot. Maybe they are and maybe they’re not, that’s the fun thing about Twitter — I use “fun” loosely — is that you never know. They’re already inside our heads which is, you know, a quarter of the battle. So I am very concerned about 2020.
With regards to potential foreign interference, with regards to voter suppression — which I think we’re entering a new phase of that — coronavirus will be leveraged. What we saw in Wisconsin this week is really just a preview. The answer to your question is that we don’t have a real strategy, because we don’t want a real strategy. And by we, I mean the Republican Party. We saw that with the House of Representatives bill, their house bill one, which would have put emphasis on looking into foreign intervention and also on stopping voter suppression through federal actions — and the Republican Party didn’t want to deal with that. So we are at a crossroads here. We’ve been at this crossroads for a while of what we want American elections to look like. If — and this is a question — but if we think it is important that American elections meet international standards for what defines a free fair and democratic election — and I want to be clear and clarify something — when I say international standards, I’m not saying something that the French and the Italians and the Danish cooked up: These are often documents that we’ve signed on to, always that we’ve signed on to [and] often that we’ve helped craft — but if we want our elections to meet those standards, we have a lot of work to do. And I don’t see it getting done before 2020.
MP: It’s funny, you kind of beat me to it a little bit. We have a question about elections coming up in a little bit. Just kind of going back to more of the foreign policy side of things, specifically with China. We are still technically in the midst of a trade conflict with China. A phase one deal was signed, but Iran happened and the coronavirus happened and we didn’t really get to phase two. Given that, once the virus has subsided and the 2020 election is over, what approach does the U.S. need to have with China?
LM: The bilateral relationship between China and the U.S. is, you could safely say, the most important in the world. These are the two most powerful countries. We have had a complicated relationship with China forever. I like to say that our bilateral relationship is too big to fail. China and the U.S. moving towards greater conflict trade, the worst case scenario for the military is a disaster for the world. We have to keep that in mind. I also think that both countries are coming into periods of domestic instability that are going to inform their foreign policy.
One thing that has changed in the last few months — and I’ve heard this from people who are on the right and on the left — is that there is some rancor towards China. There is a feeling that this crisis is worse because of the dishonesty of the Chinese government. The crisis is also worse because of the dishonesty of the American government. There are many people around the world who are probably angry at the American government for their dishonesty because it didn’t address the problem fast enough. But related to trade specifically, there was also a sense that having the trade supply chains so long and reaching so far into countries like China, that we shouldn’t be as dependent on those countries. So that will also inform our trade policy with regards to China specifically. More generally, going forward we need to have the capacity to manufacture; and I’m not talking about, you know, masks and ventilators, but also the parts that go into the medicines and the vaccines. Those supply chains are gonna need to be short.
What strikes me about this pandemic, when I talk to people who are with a stronger scientific background, which is a lot of people, what they tend to say is that is we may have more of these [crises] going forward. The way globalization works, 20 years ago, a pandemic in China would have stayed in China. 50 years ago, we would have read about it a few years after it happened, you know what I mean? And for most of human history, a pandemic couldn’t exist. It would wipe out a village, right? It would wipe out 300 people in a village in Asia or Europe or the Americas somewhere and it would be lost to history. Maybe an archaeologist would try to figure it out thousands of years later. But [with] globalization, things move around so fast, this may not be the first time. And we need to be able to prepare our defenses against that.
I don’t know where in the United States you are — I’m assuming the United States — sheltering right now. But I have a lot of friends and colleagues and family in California, and California has fires every summer. That is a new reality due to climate change. The Caribbean and the Southeastern part of the coast of the United States has hurricanes every summer — and big ones, much bigger than in the past. The confluence of climate change, enhanced national natural disasters and coronavirus — or a pandemic — creates enormous, enormous problems. And we need to be prepared for that in advance.
Now, the current administration took the principal position that we shouldn’t be prepared for anything in advance. And we’re seeing the consequences of that. Once we get through this stain on American democracy, that is the Trump experience, the next administration will understand the need for preparation, so that will influence our bilateral relationship with China as well.
MP: So I just kind of wanted to talk a little bit about oil. We’ve recently seen historic oil production cuts and an attempt to help markets rebound during this economic downturn. How will the average consumer be affected by these changes we’ve seen in the crude oil sphere?
LM: There’s a couple things. One, people aren’t going into anywhere right now, right? I mean, I might take my car to the grocery store this week. Maybe. I live in New York, Manhattan, I happen to own a car. But I know that my friends in California haven’t put the key in the ignition in a long time. And this is California. So the fact that oil will be cheaper for a while doesn’t really matter, you know, it’s the time you don’t want it. And secondly, no one has any money.
So there are millions of Americans and of course, we’ve got other countries too, but particularly here, choosing as we speak (or maybe it’s a little bit later in the month now), but going into May, do I pay my rent? Do I negotiate with my landlord? In my locality, where I’m located, what does the law say I can do because I have to choose between rent and food? And yes, in many parts of the country, sheltering in place involves driving more than it does in California. In fairness, when my friends in San Francisco go to the grocery store, some of them may drive. Here, we don’t as much. No one’s thinking, “oh, good, when I drive over to my friend’s house two hours away for this party, gas will be cheaper,” right? Or even, you know, we’re now heading into what would be if this were a normal year, the end of the semester, many colleges and universities in America, so no one is thinking, “oh, I gotta load up my car with gas to drive home, they’ve already gotten home,” you know? Or they’re living on a campus somewhere. So the demand is down and the ability to buy is down.
So there’s some sense, I guess it’s good that this has happened. Now, where it is important is because our food supply is still based on trucking. Which is unusual, even for a country this size. There’s going to be a lot of other problems in the food supply. I mean, in challenges, but, if gas prices were skyrocketing, it would make every head of lettuce that you get in the grocery store [more expensive]. These are both more expensive and that wouldn’t be good.
AR: Absolutely. So this oil deal, I know you said you know about it indirectly. But this is a little different: This deal is coming right as Russia and Saudi Arabia were getting into a price war. Do you think there’s going to be any notable impact from that going forward between those two countries?
LM: Well, Russia is definitely expanding, over the last five years or so, its position in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is in the thick of its own kind of domestic concerns right now, including the extent to which COVID-19 has run through the royal family in Saudi Arabia. We don’t know the end of that story yet either. But Saudi Arabia is one of the major powers in the Middle East. So this is a conflict kind of waiting to happen anyway, especially because of our own country’s close relationship with Saudi Arabia. So it is good that they were able to make a deal, because we just don’t need more conflict right now.
But you can see how these countries could end up in conflict with each other going forward. Not just because of the oil, but on issues, you know, like around around Yemen, Iran — issues all throughout the region. So Syria obviously is a big one. For a long time, in the immediate post Cold War years, Russia was not a big player in the Middle East. And that allowed the U.S. to have a bigger presence, which we did not necessarily use wisely. That is changing. Saudi Arabia is one of our major allies in the Middle East. This is a complicated relationship.
MP: Yeah, definitely. So we just want to switch gears here a little bit and talk about the 2020 election. You know, Bernie Sanders has just formally dropped out of the race. The president is currently tackling the coronavirus and all of the political firefights that come with that. Right now, it seems like the best possible outcome for Joe Biden. But why does it still feel like he doesn’t have any momentum going into the rest of this race?
LM: Can I make a baseball analogy?
MP: Yeah, please.
LM: I used to coach little league baseball for many years. And as the kids got a little bit older and were playing in a more serious way — they’re now 9,10, 11 — one of the hardest things to tell kids is that sometimes the smartest thing to do is to not swing the bat. Balls out of the strike zone, don’t swing the bat. Sometimes, when you can make a nice play at shortstop, the smart thing to do is not throw the ball. The guy is gonna beat the throw to first base and you don’t wanna throw it away. I think Joe Biden’s in a little bit of that situation now.
I mean, Bernie’s dropped out of the race. The large majority of Bernie supporters are gonna grumble a little bit and vote for Biden. This is what the data shows. My “Bernie bro” friends, most of them are saying, “we gotta vote for Joe Biden, don’t want to hear it. I don’t like that guy, but we got kids.” There are going to be some Bernie supporters who won’t. And those people are Trump supporters, de facto. I mean, if you’re paying enough attention now that you’ve made the decision that, “I’m not going to vote for Biden, because I was supporting Bernie,” you’re a Trump supporter. So that’s unfortunate. And most of the oxygen in the media is taken up by the virus — and then by Trump. Who is not smart enough politically speaking, to keep his mouth shut.
So the question for Biden is, how does he break through here? And is it worth it? The American people are going to largely make their decision based on how Trump handles the next few months of this crisis. Now this is alarming in some respects. On the one hand, whenever an elected sitting president runs for re-election, everything they’ve done before being president, no one pays attention to anymore. That was litigated the first time they ran. So all of the “Trump University” and the kind of, you know, the language that he used and the sexual abuse and the rape allegations, all of that stuff. The mishandling of money, the racism that when he was in the real estate business, that’s done. That’s history. Right? Then you judge the president based on their first term in office.
What happened here is that [with] the coronavirus pandemic, no one’s even paying attention to anything that happened before February 1. So even the impeachment, the Mueller scandal, the children in cages, the attempts to take away protections for pre-existing conditions — all of that stuff — the racism. They’re all gonna be focusing on this. And in that context, what can Joe Biden do?
This is always the problem when you nominate someone who doesn’t have a job. I don’t mean that like it as a backhanded way, but he’s the former vice president. So he’s not the governor, right? He’s not Jay Inslee, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Andrew Cuomo — even Mike DeWine in Ohio is a Republican, really out there being a leader. He’s not a senator. Senator Warren, Sanders, Harris pushing for the different provisions as we put money to help the American people. All he can do is be on the sidelines and kibitz. And that’s a tough position. So there’s this sense that we want him out, he’s got to be out there saying stuff. But, you know, I think the quieter approach here makes some sense, even though it’s frustrating.
What I don’t understand is, why? If I were Joe Biden, what I’d be doing now is a lot of small virtual town halls and group meetings. So I’d be, for example, on Tuesday night, a town hall with 40 Michigan moms. Just women in Michigan who are kind of swing voters, because Biden’s political strength: he’s not a great speech maker, but he’s great one on one. And that can especially [be beneficial] for younger voters who are used to living more their lives online. For someone Biden’s age, It’s difficult. I mean, my mother’s Joe Biden’s age and we FaceTime every day — and she’s getting used to it, but she wasn’t used to it months ago. But for voters, that would be good. You take that, you record it, and you put it on the site and you get it out. So you do that in Michigan one day and then you do Wisconsin — and then you do maybe, you know, pensioners in Pennsylvania, whatever. That’s that’s the kind of thing you could be doing.
He has periodically made it clear how he might be addressing this. But no one cares what the hypothetical is. Everyone knows that if Joe Biden were elected president and this and he was faced with this pandemic, he would make somber statements and let the professionals handle it. That’s what Joe Biden would do. That’s what Barack Obama would have done. Everyone knows that. So how many times do you have to say that? There are so many people pointing out just the outrageous behavior, the dishonesty of Donald Trump, that there’s no reason why Biden himself needs to do that. I get this is the macro strategy behind downplaying his presence, but it’s frustrating, right
There’s more to talk about these elections, but in general, elections are a zero-sum game. You win or you lose. And that’s all that matters about your strategy — it it’ll get you across the finish line or not. And that’s how so it’s hard to know now, but I get the thinking.
AR: [Do you have] anything else to say about how to run an active campaign or successful campaign, how to get over that finish line?
LM: We don’t know what the campaign environment looks like in September, October. This isn’t to say we don’t know what the social distancing policy is. As we don’t know what the devastation of the pandemic will be. If I were Donald Trump, if I were advising Donald Trump, what I would say is, you’ve got to limit the deaths here. That’s the most important thing — then, no matter how many people die, declare victory, right? But you got to commit to the fall Labor Day — or so declaring victory, what you say is, “hey, they thought there’d be 2 million” and you get the clips of, you know, “we only had X” and you make up whatever the number is.
Now, I don’t like to say “only,” you know, “we only had.” I mean, right now, we’re losing about as many Americans a day as who died during the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11. That’s now, more or less, the daily toll — a little bit less. That’s pretty daunting.
But you still say, you know, “it wasn’t half a million: It was 200” — whatever that number is. Then you say, “and the economy’s in the toilet. The economy is in the toilet. The economy is bad now, because Democrats overreacted. They shut down the economy.” Of course in reality, these Democratic governors, like Newsom and Cuomo in the two of the biggest Democratic states, are saving lives. But that’s the presentation that Trump has to make.
And Biden has to break that up. Right? He’s got to show that these death numbers should have been a lot lower. And he’s got to show that [as] the economy began to go downhill, it was the Republicans that were trying to just make sure the rich friends got richer. But ultimately, remember that Trump’s popularity has never been at 50% — his approvals never been at 50%, except for a few exceptions. And a number of people think he’s handling this well as declining. I suspect if that continues to decline, the issue here is not who wins the fight. Biden will win the election. Now, whether we have a free and fair democratic election, whether Trump leaves office when he loses, whether people believe in the outcome of the election: those are essential questions.
But, you know, so much of the 2020 election has been baked in since January 21 of 2017. I mean, probably four out of five Americans have known since that day who they were voting for. What we’ve learned, I think, during this pandemic period, is the resilience of Trump’s support. You know, we’ve heard that this is the end of Trump. No, this isn’t the end of Trump. His floor is very high. His ceiling may be very low, but his floor is very high — and what that means is it’s going to be a close election. But there were a lot of supporters in January and in 2019 who said as long as my retirement funds are doing well, I don’t care.
Now, I don’t really support it. I think that’s a very insensitive view of the world. But if that’s still your view of the world, the stock market isn’t so strong now and it’s not going to get miraculously stronger over the next six months.
AR: Do you think the cause of that discrepancy — and you know Joe Biden, you know, being a little bit quieter — do you think there is room for another candidate to enter the race at this point?
LM: No. The only caveat is if something happens to Biden’s health. Given that both he and Trump are in their 70s, anybody, you know, in their 70s, you’re worried about now. Biden is actually not a Baby Boomer because he’s older. He’s part of what’s known as the “Forgotten Generation,” because he was born during World War II, not after World War II. I was talking to a colleague in his 80s — and he’s been through a lot in his life — and he was shot at one point, you know, all this kind of thing. He’s social distancing, but he’s also got like, “if I made it this far” — you begin to feel invincible again. If Biden’s health holds up, I think he’ll be fine. Then, there’s no scenario.
Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo: they’re not riding on a “white horse.” Biden worked hard for this nomination. He’s not giving it up, right? There’s no third-party candidate, either in the sense of a rational Republican who’s going to run and say like, “Mitt Romney type, or, you know, Bernie Sanders.” I mean, Bernie Sanders is never going to run as a third-party candidate. It would destroy what’s left of his reputation. He has an opportunity now — not only to restore and really improve his reputation, but really, to help move the party to the left, not just by giving speeches. There’s an opportunity for work to be done.
I certainly understand the Sanders economic argument; the Sanders health care argument, pardon me, Sanders foreign policy argument, the Sanders education argument. I may not agree 100%, but it resonates and I understand that it resonates with a lot of voters. I’m gonna put this in “Rated G” language because President Johnson used more vulgar language: The Sanders supporters are in a much more influential position — and Sanders too — if they are inside the Biden coalition looking out. Rather than outside looking in. And that should be Bernie’s goal right there. Joe Biden needs to win in November and look around and say, “hm, I don’t know if I could have done this without Bernie and his supporters.” And if that happens, we’re a different world.
MP: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Um, well, you know, Professor Mitchell, we just want to end the conversation here. A little bit about voting with the coronavirus — you know, we’ve had voting purges into 2019. Obviously, gerrymandering, the issue of voting rights has really become much more prevalent, much more talked about, especially recently. How will the 2020 election change voting rights in this country moving forward?
LM: The 2020 election, I’m going to maybe expand this a little bit, is the last stand for American democracy.
In the last few weeks, the Republican Party has flat out said if we allow everyone to vote, we will lose. I guess they get points for honesty. Right?
The coronavirus pandemic has given them the opportunity to, in the name of health, make it harder for people to vote. And I expect that’s what they will do in key states. Moreover, if you go and look at the state-by-state polling data, not the overall but the state-by-state polling data, you will see the following trend. If you pick your blue states, California, New York, Massachusetts — you know, the blue states, the deep blue states, the numbers look pretty much, if you change Biden’s name to Clinton — it looks like the 2016 results. If you look at what we expect to be the swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina — those states, it’s neck and neck. Which again, you would expect. That makes sense.
If you look at many of the solid red states, it’s a much closer margin. It’s not enough that Trump needs to be worried. But it’s a closer margin. What that it means is that we could see a scenario where Biden wins by six points in the popular vote and loses the Electoral College and a similar kind of number gap for the Senate. If that happens, minority rule will be institutionalized in the United States. That deepens the threat to democracy that our Constitution has created from the get go in the 1780s. That will be a real threat to American democracy.
But there’s another piece of this as well. And I’ve been saying this since the week after he got elected. When Trump talks about voter fraud, he’s doing two things: He’s building support for the idea that we should not do “vote by mail;” that we should make it harder for people to vote, right? I was on Fox News on some bizarre talk show there. And one of the correspondents was Tomi Lahren — I don’t know if I’m pronouncing it correctly. [She] was in California, she loves to say how terrible California is. (Parenthetically, no one’s making fun of San Francisco now.) She said the way they do voter fraud in California — and she gave us an example of the motor voter law — do you know what the motor voter law is in California?
MP: Heard of it, but not super aware.
LM: The motor voter law, which was passed years ago, is that in every county when you go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get your license or whatever it is, is that you can have a voter registration form. You can register to vote. It doesn’t mean anything beyond that. It’s not that you automatically register, but they give you a form and if you want to fill it out, you know, it’s there in the box. So they’re planting the seed not just to build up support for the idea that there’s election fraud, but this is the foundation for him claiming if he loses that the election was stolen.
And what concerns me more than anything is I am very confident that will happen. I am very confident the Republican Party will support him when that happens — and I don’t see a strategy in place. I don’t see what we talk about when that happens.
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