Yes. Jason good evening, everyone. It is a pleasure to welcome you to the Bipartisan Policy Center for our virtual conversation about our nations elections, sitting exactly six feet away from me charlie cook. I think charlie is known to just about everyone as the editor and publisher of the cook political report. I is understood by everyone know to be really the most reliable protector and analyst of our nations political culture and our election outcomes. You know, we often find that we have a society in which you have democrats facts and republican facts, and then there are charlie facts. I just want to take a moment to acknowledge that we are in it hasl crisis, and created tremendous anxiety and uncertainty for all aspects of our lives. I think charlie and i are fortunate enough not to be struggling with Immediate Health crises or economic crises, and we have the ability to be able to step back and talk about the basic fabric. Leadership matters a whole lot, so we will spend the next 35 minutes or so talking about what we will be the leadership of our country when this crisis will still very much be upon us, so i will just note that we are taking questions via twitter and hope we have a bit of audience interaction as we move forward. So, charlie, start off by reminding us both, when we asked you to join us a couple of months ago, i think we created the title careening towards milwaukee, and we were quite proud of that. Charlie i am not sure we are going to get to milwaukee or if there will be conventions as you and i know of them. Race. A horse a contested convention. It looked like senator sanders was going to have the plurality. Is there still a horse race . Fact, a still, in contest for the democratic nomination . Charlie i do not think so. When you watched senator sanders the other night in the debate, he seemed to signal resignation. I think he knows there is no longer a path to winning. He would need to be winning 60 of the vote in the remaining primaries, whenever they are held. That is not going to happen, and he seemed to see that, and i think you saw his supporters, when you saw them taper off and turn out, michigan, places like that. There is a sign that this is probably not going to happen. I would also say that senator sanders, his candidacy was always an inspirational one. I am not sure how many of his supporters expected to see him walking across the white house lawn, getting on marine one, or, you know, with a military officer carrying the football next to him or sitting at a nato summit or something. They were trying to signal what they wanted, what they were unhappy with, and i think they did a good job of communicating that, but, no, i think the nomination is effectively over. Jason senator sanders has dramatically changed the arc of the democratic policy debate, but how did this happen so quickly . Again, a few weeks ago, it was sanders revolution. Saidthe Vice President that it was a revolution for me . Charlie this is ending up the way i thought but not when or how. We were talking. Senator sanders got in the race late february of last year. Biden got in in late april. If someone on may 1 last year said it is going to come down to biden and sanders, and at the end of the day, biden will come out on top, you would yawn and say, ok, that is pretty much what we expected. What was unusual was, first, having 28 candidates. We thought 17 was a lot with republicans in 2016. And what normally happens, iowa narrows it down to three people. Every democratic nominee from jimmy kratt jimmy carter came in first or second in new hampshire, so three coming out of iowa, two coming out, and the rest of the 48 states get to pick between the final two. That is how it has always worked, and with the 28 candidates, it did not narrow down, and i think with the chaos in iowa, the count got all of the attention rather than who came in fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and as a result, it did not cull the herd, and at the same time, sanders was eclipsing warren, who last fall looked like had a great chance of winning the nomination, so he was consolidating the left lane, and the right lane, the centerleft lane was split four ways between biden, bloomberg, buttigieg, and amy klobuchar, and, you know, nobody was getting a critical mass, and it was not until it looked like sanders was on the verge of could really nail it down, then the pressure was on these other people to get out, and it coalesced behind biden. Is unlike coalescing anything i have seen before. Your thoughts on two things. First of all, endorsing. They were thought to not make a difference, but biden seems to have a different kind of superpower than most endorsers. Theree i think, first, was just an enormous reservoir of goodwill within the Africanamerican Community because of his tenure as president obamas Vice President. Where clyburn sort of turbocharged that within the group, so it did. You are right. Endorsements do not normally make a lot of difference, and with put a judge and klobuchar and eventually with pete buttigieg, klobuchar, and eventually with bloomberg, them getting out of the race and allowing the centerleft to consolidate, because that is andt 60 of the party, about 40 is left left, and this ought to be dominant unless it is split four ways, and it was, and then suddenly, it was not. Couple of other reflections of where we are. Help us unpack the math. Delegates, sanders 711. Apart, and00 and 50 why is the math so profoundly challenging for sanders . Sanders because the democratic rules are different than republican rules. Republicans have winner take all primaries, and that is explosive. It ishe democratic rules, hard to build up a real lead, but it is really, really hard to overtake one, as Hillary Clinton found in 2008, so when it is down to two people running effectively, Tulsi Gabbard is , a getting much, you know Congressional District with eight delegates in it is probably going to split four five three, so it is hard to make up a big gap, and that is why it is, you know it is not there is not a possible path forward for him, and, boy, it sure did look like one heading into super tuesday. You thinkwhen president ial elections, two states tend to come up. One is florida, the other is ohio. Florida is having their primary. Ohio is not having a primary, at least not at the moment. What do we think about tonight . What do we understand to be the implications of these primaries at this moment of uncertainty . Charlie you know, i think a lot of it had to do with optics. If a state is trying to discourage big groups of people, people congregating, situations where the contagion could be really, really strong, they want to discourage that. Now, the fact is if you wanted to have a primary day and have, you know, space people out, not have them bunching up, having people sitting at the desk, checking names off, a bit further apart, there is a way to do that, so i do not think i think it had more to do with how does it look, and mike dewine made one decision in ohio, and to santos had a different decision in florida. Desantis had a different decision in florida. With my expectations, we will have a president ial campaign between Vice President biden and President Trump. Lets talk a little about the president and his base of support. The president s Approval Ratings have been you described them as both historically low and astoundingly stable. Charlie exactly. You know, people would keep asking me, when is the president s Approval Rating going to drop . Had, the president has different dynamic all along. He did not have a honeymoon they normally get. You start with this reservoir of goodwill, and then over time, it erodes, and after time, it goes up and down with events. President trump never had that, numbers ult, his the people who strongly approve of the job President Trump is doing right now is basically the same people who strongly approved the first month in office, those strongly disapproved the same ones, and they have not moved much. In most of the polling we have seen, the trading range between his highest job Approval Rating yet and his lowest job approval theng yet, age points in nbc wall street journal poll. I think it was 10 points in fox and cnn. It was 11 at gallup but went up to 14. To 14pointe eight range. Normally, it is 20 to 23 points, so when good things have happened to the president , his numbers did not go up much. Go downgs, they did not much, so positive or negative. Six consecutive months of 50yearlow unemployment, and his numbers did not go up, but you can have these stories that seem devastating, and his numbers do not go down. Scenario, particular his approval has been pretty much, as you say, locked in, but we could have an economic unraveling, the likes of which we have not seen maybe since the Great Depression. About a million jobs anticipated going to be lost this month. 80 of americans are basically living paycheck to paycheck, which means our economy basically lives paychecktopaycheck, and a whole lot of us are not going to be getting paychecks. You have any sense of how that plays out over time . Charlie i guess, two things. One, we use to say that americans vote their pocketbooks, whether they feel good or bad, and James Carvilles famous statement, it is the economy, stupid, and there was some Research Done that found that from John Kennedys administration all of the way to george w. Bush, there was a direct relationship between consumer confidence, how people felt about the economy, and the president s job Approval Rating, and it stopped under obama, and never restarted under trump. Are voting culture. They are voting demographics. People in small town, rule america, whites rural america, whites with less than a Fouryear College degree, they are voting it is identity politics, just as you are seeing on the other site. They are voting identity politics, who speaks to us, who speaks for us, so i am not saying the economy does not matter, but it matters less than it ever has. The really growing economy did not help him as much as one would think, and i do not think those people are going to abandon him. I mean, the people who have stuck with him for 38 months, i do not think this is going to shave many of them out of his column at all. Jason the dynamic has switched. It used to be the views of the economy affected their view of the president , and now their views on the president affects their views of the economy. Charlie we are seeing 50, 55 points of a difference in how democrats and republicans look at the economy, and it all matters who has got the white house right then, and what we are seeing is this kind of partisanship in so many things, and whether it is does Climate Change exist, is it manmade, how to address it to the gaps in the nbc wall street journal poll that just came out about whether people are no longer trying to stay away from large gatherings or affecting their travel plans, so things like that. We are seeing 20, 25point gaps between both sides. It is like two parallel universes out there. People who are republicans or leaning republican look at almost everything differently than people who are democrats and leaning democratic. It is astonishing. So that is why it was not as nutty when we have seen the last couple of polls come out in the showed thers that president s job Approval Rating the trial heats between President Trump and joe biden are basically the same, within one point. Jason it is the same with the trumpbiden matter. Race, it has 2020 been seven points, nine points, 11 points. I mean, that has kind of been the range with Vice President biden having an electoral advantage. These are mostly national, popular votes. We do not have a popularly elected president , but how do you understand that range . Something people should be paying attention to . Charlie well, i think the president who are the people who are with the president , as i set a few minutes ago, are going to stay with him. I think biden pulls together most people who are inclined to vote democratic. I think sanders would ultimately have underperformed that number, but biden basically collects, and republicans, they were salivating over the idea of having Bernie Sanders as an opponent. They were terrified about mike bloomberg, that bloomberg would grab some of the few republicans that do not love President Trump and a fair number of those swing voters. They were terrified of that, and biden pretty much gets the core andgraphic democratic, about 40 who will be with President Trump no matter what, 50 popular vote, against a no matter what, and 10 are up in the air, and nationally speaking, and there is not a lot that is going to change that, but President Trump showed it 2016 that he can she does not need to win the popular vote. He can win without it. Jason we will talk about this kind of quirky system of electing a president. Some people say eight, some say maybe up to 12 states, that have a potential to determine the outcome. Does a 10 lead in the National Polls dictate outcome in those battleground states . Charlie the guy who works with us, our house editor, david wasserman, a really, really smart guy, and Hillary Clinton one about 2. 9 million votes. He believes that a democrat could conceivably win the popular vote by as many as we percent to 4 and still lose the electoral college, four to 5 million votes, because it is inefficient. Democrats win by millions of votes, new york by one million, illinois by 700,000, while republican votes, as i said, are more efficiently allocated around the country, and a democrat this time could biden could very well when california, new york, illinois by bigger margins than Hillary Clinton did, but President Trump will carry texas but probably with less of a margin than before, so i think those are probably ballpark numbers that are there, but i think a lot of the attention, obviously, has gone through michigan, pennsylvania, and wisconsin. Restates, 78,000 votes. States, 78,000e votes. I mean, wiow. It is not so much how many votes you get but where do you get them. I do not think we would see that in wisconsin and pennsylvania, but there we were. I was talking to a republican pollster today who is saying the fact that President Trump pulled inside straight, the question is can he do that two hands in a row. Well, maybe he can. It is not going to be easy, but the six states that we are focused on right now are the michigan, pennsylvania, wisconsin, but also the frost belt division, and the sunbelt, arizona, florida, North Carolina. I think those are the six. Now, there is a bigger footprint of about 12 states that are in play but six that are much closer. Those six are much closer to the edge. Jason the down ballot races, whenever i am thinking of the inefficiency of the voter allocation, i am reminded of sarah silverman, a comedian, who tried to convince those in the Upper West Side to take buses down to florida to get their grandparents to vote. Charlie usually, Popular Culture with me does not work very well. Jason so lets think a little bit together though about what happens in the senate and the house. I think i heard you say probably a couple of months ago that you thought the chance of democrats retaking the senate was about one in three. Charlie right. Jason how do you feel about that today . Charlie i am not sure we would get to 50 50, but it is a lot closer to 50 50. The democrats would need a threeset win three seat next game. Almost certainty that democrats are going to lose the seat of doug jones in alabama, 46 at thatlly 54 point. There are three republican seats that are extremely, extremely vulnerable. Martha mcsally, what in colorado, Susan Collins in maine, one in colorado. Emma kratz win one out of those or three out of three, just having a good night. I could get democrats to 48 or 49. Pretty easily. It was going to be 50 or 51 that was going to be hard. We were watching tom to listen North Carolina. We were watching the special election in georgia, kelly leffler, appointed to the senate. Watching those particularly. There are like five different republican seats, and each one percents a 20, 25, 30 chance of going democratic, but there are five of them. Addition to North Carolina and georgia, where there is the other georgia. There is john cornyn in texas. There is an open seat in kansas that is looking a little troublesome. There is one in iowa, and last week, Steve Bullock against steve daines. You can see there are multiple paths to 50 to 51 for the democrats that did not seem terribly obvious before, so i would say 50 50, but it is pretty close to 50 50, and one thing about the senate is when you get down to the very closest races, they rarely just split down the middle. They tend to break one way or the other overwhelmingly. Mattershis is where it a little bit. Charlie and that environment of where did that last with of wind kill those just teetering wind killwift of those just teetering on the edge. It means it could be more explosive one way or another than you might expect. Think, a likelihood that the democrats maintain the house, 70 , 80 . Charlie yes, we look at the races individually, sort of a micro political approach and then a macro, topdown. When you do the macro, you can get democrats losing about six seats. Republicans need eight team. From nothat anywhere net change to republicans picked up 10 or 12. Not outget 18, that is of question, but it is fairly unlikely. I think when republicans had their hopes up, when it looked like Bernie Sanders had a really ,ood chance of the nomination and now sort of down some, but i know, 70,s, you Something Like that. That is what david is saying. But it is who turns out. I think were going to see it will either be the highest voter turnout in history, president ial, or it is going to be pretty close. It has two top 1940 and 1960, but i think it would be a massive turnout, and with the massive turnout, it means the differences between the groups is less. Jason bigger. Charlie yes. Jason lets go back to this massive crisis the country is facing. None of us knows how this plays out, but there is a possibility we will still be in the throes of social distance thing in november. Or it isrolling along, possible we have a break in the summer, and then it comes back potentially with a vengeance in the fall. Impossible, of course, to predict, but that is your job. Up having more absentee ballots, more people voting by mail, there is obviously legislative proposals to switch this to a male based one,ail a mail based but nonetheless, if there is a movement away from winning a minor in voting, charlie i think we are ultimately headed that way, but given when legislatures meet and how state governments work, the odds of this happening on a widespread basis, as your post suggests, it is pretty unlikely, and we do not know how that affects things. What we found from early voting, just traditional, early voting, is that it does not seem to traditionally advantage either party, and more typically, the people who early vote are those who are so into it that they cannot wait to vote. They cannot wait until election day. You cannot stand themselves to do that. So it is a matter of getting in and voting early. Now, we also see though that some parties, and in some races, one party simply does a better job of using the system that is there, the apparatus, so one side can take advantage of it more than the other, but that just depends more on the organizational abilities of the two sides and the creativity and how much their resources. The rhythmoes change of campaigning. It is not just a charge before the polls open. I think it was fascinating to see how much voting had happened before primary day in these states. Charlie and what that does is reduces the volatility. Once you have voted, you voted, so sanders probably benefited, because there were a lot of sanders votes that were cast before super tuesday. I mean in california, people started voting on iowa caucus day. The rule dynamic,exactly. The historically, you would try to peek on election day or the weekend before the election. Today, with people voting over the course of a month, it is almost like you have to ramp up earlier, and then like an opera singer, hold that high note for three or four weeks, which just creates a different dynamic, and again, it means anything that happens late in the race does not mean as much, because of bunch of votes are already in the bank. Jason a couple of questions coming in from the twitter. Think, basically, the assumption that the virus is going to have significant Economic Impacts changes the way the economy changes the way some regions in the country are more dependent on certain aspects of tourism any sense of how a general economic slowdown can affect the regional outlook, competition . Charlie the region, no, but a lot of people are searching for, well, what is the historic precedent for this, and a lot of people will say, well, 9 11. Just happened. In my generation, you knew where whenere on november 23 president kennedy was assassinated or where you were when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. This is something that was sort of gradual, and a lot of people still do not one in a recession or not, i do not know who would want to be in the latter. Jason that this crisis is undermining the republicans. That could also change. They are considering writing 1000 checks to americans. These are opportunities for leaders, and the response has been less than efficient, but they are getting their game together. Charlie i think in the early and middle stages, maybe you can say that the president did not cover himself in glory, but we have got several months to go. Going, andamily text that reelects trump, doesnt it . Maybe. First, there was mitt romney. The idea goes back to richard nixon, president nixon. Jason we have andrew yang, mitt romney, others. Charlie who gets credit . If people are hurting and scared, to me, one thing about this, as i said a little while ago, the trump base is going to be there. The democrat base is going to be there. There are not many people in the middle. There really are not, but this group in the middle, they are conflicted. They do not love President Trump. They do not loathe him, but there has been some research that shows that while they have appreciated, they recognized and appreciated a Strong Economy for the last three years, they have been giving them credit, but on the other hand, this same little, narrow 5 , 67 size, they do have questions about his character, about him as a and so far, there has been an if therium there, but credit for three strong years, if we get a headwind, does that enable questions about him as a person . Does that rise up, maybe . Jason all we can do is speculate. In theled with pollsters past few hours, and nobody knows what is going to happen. There is no precedent for this. Think one of the questions here is about the craft. Believe why should we what happened in 2016 . How are people thinking about the 2016 experience . Nobody is like that. You probably should have called him. He wouldve appreciated knowing. All the way through 1996 with none. Truman dewey,. Next in humphrey, wallace. Carter ford, 92. George h w bush, bill clinton. They all went the same way. Then we had 2000 and people thought, that is just a fluke that appreciating dynamics had happened and changed things in 2016. People do remember when you were wrong. We tend to look more at the National Polls. This time, that is not going to happen. There is going to be a couple more polling in individual states and poland from International Organizations and states. They are going to pull over way up to the sunday and monday for the election. In the case of 2016, it was smalltown role voters turning out in disproportionate numbers. People with less than a fouryear degree turning out an extra narrow numbers. How do you count on that happening . But in 2018, we were not talking males andollege white smalltime rural. We were in the senate. It was about the suburbs. Was one of the most predictable elections i ever some. They were all as easy as that one was. But we all get a little smarter, a little more humble as we go along. But that was i had never had a surprise election, general election of that magnitude before. It did cause a lot of soul searching about how to we do this, how do we approach this, and looking at probabilities. You know, there are two ways of looking at it. Money vault on the quantitative said like in baseball, there is not a team in Major League Baseball that does not have statisticians doing mathematics. But there are oldfashioned scouts. So the best is a blending. I come from a tradition of the scouting site. Anydy reads the nates closer than i do, because there are really smart people with smart techniques. Got a lot ofer grief on election day leading to the election in 2016, where they said there was a 29 chance that donald trump would win. And all these people that were saying no, no, it is like 1 , 2 , it is like nothing. Path he said there was a to 270 electoral votes for donald trump. There was a path there. And guess what it was . Here are a lot of ways exactly. But i think we all have to look at probabilities a little differently maybe then we did. The polls weret more the sister with brexit the bulls were not off that much, but the interpretation of the polls. Remainedhem showed it , but they wereve very, very close. In close elections, it can go either way. To come back to the challenges Vice President pence is grappling with, you are going to have to unite the democratic base. Said,nders voters, as you are an aspirational crowd. They were quite disappointed in 2016. The sense that they had been wronged by the machine and having the this amazing coalition of the environment. You look at the crazy internet, and they are not jumping down joe biden. There is a lot of anger out there. The bighe cces, academic study after the 2016 election showed that 12 of the people that voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries voted for donald trump. And you know, we dont know how many just did not vote at all or voted for jill stein or whatever, so that is very real. Goes, howng this senator sanders handles it, if he does come up short, that will make a big difference. But i would not underestimate the power of who loves and who really does not like President Trump. And that i am not sure that President Trump will get told percent of the people that voted for Bernie Sanders 12 of the people that voted for Bernie Sanders. Im not sure that is going to happen. You know, you do have a slice of they like where the economy has been, they like their tax cut, they like their less regulation, they really like their conservative judges, but they dont like his style. They are kind of bought in. They decided to stick with it. Do they turn out in as high a number of these other folks for a day or are they ambivalent . That election was as much about people that were never, ever going to vote for donald trump, but boy, they really did not want to vote for Hillary Clinton. They were going to hold their noses and do it. It looked like there was no way donald trump can win, particularly after billy bush, and you we are. But and here we are. But there are a lot of theories. There is usually a bunch of explanations. Time check, do we have another 15 minutes for q a . I just want to make sure we were interacting. Im having a good time. Let me follow that line of questioning a little more. The last debate between Vice President biden and senator sanders was kind of a remarkable instance. He described how senator sanders was essentially laying out his policy, ambition. The Vice President saying i will nominate a woman and i have embraced elizabeth warrens bankruptcy loss, this was a dramatic rendering as much as it was his of a contest. It was, and it is kind of in the old days when you had criminologists trying to parse out what did something mean . And to say i am absolutely going to pick an africanamerican woman for the supreme court, and i am absolutely going to pick a woman running mate, does that mean anything . Like it is more likely to be a nonafricanamerican woman . The thing that hit me in that debate aside the fact that sanders looked to be somewhat resigned to where things were, was at one point, senator biden kind of went after sanders a bit seemed to bait sanders to be more aggressive from that point on. It is always easy to be in the chiefs seat and secondguess the people in the arena and on the stage, but i was watching joe thinking, wow, there is a distinction when you are in that kind of setting. Exactly. We all have to be careful about monday morning quarterbacking, because it is different when you are there. Thank you. When you think about the primary states ahead, some people imagine that senator sanders was going to announce that he was suspending his campaign at the debates. There are some people who assume it was going to happen tomorrow. As you look at the and is at the inability of the math what you think is there . The thing is when you come it commit the better part of four years of your life to do you are allg and in, to expect someone to drop out at the turn of a that is amy was so remarkable about klobuchar and pete buttigieg, for example. Nobody expected him to do anything in south carolina. But it is unrealistic to expect somebody to drop out until they are ready to do it. If i were joe biden, i would give him some space and i would be very it is a lot easier to be magnanimous in victory. Folks, i the biden would be exceedingly generous and complementary of him and his porters, and i would sound advice that im sure the Vice President is getting every morning. We were thinking about this as a premise leading towards the convention. You said there might not be a convention. Do you think we may see a different approach to nominating candidates . Yes. I think right now the people at the Democratic National committee and the republican National Committee are going through the rulebooks and trying to figure out ok, what do we have to do, and how can we modify it . And clearly, things happen. I mean, when senator eagleton stepped off the democratic ticket shortly after the 1972 democratic convention, you know, the democrats had to pull back together and come up with a replacement, it ended up being sergeant schreiber. There are ways to do it, but we dont know what. I imagine they are scrambling right now, but the idea of having my you know, 10,000 not counting the media people on the floor of the convention hall, thats not going to happen. And i feel badly for the people in the host cities like milwaukee and charlotte, where they are not going to get the boom they thought they were going to get. , was in atlanta that was going to get the final four . You know, there are a lot of you know, there are a lot of cruise ships not parked in the bahamas or. This is affecting the entire economy. The think you did not ask that i find very interesting is, inthe democratic party, 1972, all the way through 36 years in the senate, eight years as obamas Vice President , joe biden had an anonymous reservoir for the wheel. Genial guy, wellliked, had very, very few enemies of the democratic partys, but the thing is, the new him, they liked him. Sort of the 60 conventional establishment weighing in the party. And yet, there was a resistance that was there. A resistance that was pretty strong. And for someone that they genuinely liked. And then at the end, it kind of came back together, but you know, i think i had a lot of people that think the world of him, but they had doubts about whether he could get it done, and those doubts kept them on the sidelines until they thought ,hat well, and then suddenly it is a campaign. A need it done who was helping to run his campaign. I heard on a podcast talking about what they spend on advertising on supertex spent on advertising on super tuesday was likely congressional was like a congressional race. Bloomberg had 5 million. Discuss. The higher you go, the more important the free media is, that is true. The ironic thing is bloombergs campaign, i dont know anybody that knows anything about campaigns that does not think they did an amazing job. And you know, had he not really messed up in that first debate, you kind of wonder what might have happened. But we forget that there were six people on that stage, and five of them had been this was their ninth debate. And he had not been in one in 11 years. And what, three of the last four president s that ran for reelection lost their first debates . Andknow, overconfidence, maybe nobody is pulling uss is your head. I can see where pulling you as fast as your head. I can see where a billionaire may not have accepted that maybe you needed to do more. And rehearsals, that is not the same as being on it. Buttigieg,ar, pete it is a funny business we are in , but i do not think any of us will have ever seen anything like the collapsing of that four to one as immediate as that was. Know, i wouldnt say an immaculate conception, but you mentioned fear of sanders and how he was matching up with trump. Does that momentum now Carry Forward . Does it become the kind of enthusiasm that . It was work of the democratic process that made it look, appear, if not likely, that Bernie Sanders was going to do extremely well on super tuesday. Because the 15 threshold in each Congressional District statewide with the atlarge delegates, that eliminates a lot of votes. It was incredibly plausible that sanders could get 20 , 25 of the popular vote on super tuesday but end up with 40 , 45 of the delegates. It somebody in a multicandidate field has that many delegates, they are not going to get stopped. Well, at what point is a Tipping Point . If sanders was at what point can you not deny him the nomination . It a 40 , was a 45 was 40 , was a 45 was it 45 . To me, at that stage, didnt look like anybody was going to get a majority. But lets he had 45 of the delegates, would you stop him there . At what point is the anticipated blood in the floor level to the we cant, we shouldnt, it is not worth trying to stop him. And you know, that is what those are the calculations that democrats were going through. It was going to be very, very challenging process. Relieved the, Coronavirus Process did not interrupt the primary process three weeks ago when things were so up in the air. Are some political scientists that you know very well who have done a lot of work on continuity of government and what happens if there are tragic things that happen. You know, i never really quite thought of that apply to president ial nominations. The first senate race i ever worked in, there were two major candidates, one minor candidate. The two major candidates, and incumbent, passed away three weeks before the primary, but it was too late. The names were going to be on the ballot. What you do . In politics, you can get some very, very strange things happen. That was 48 years ago, but man, i still remember it well. Think that if you look at the average age of congress, around 55 years old, if they are listening to the cdc, they are being told to go home and stop talking to each other as we try to figure out this next. Back anden you come the house coming back for votes, and how do you get back . There are all kinds of things will the airport to be running shuttles and things . 9 11, theer, after australian Prime Minister was here in washington, and they do not have an air force one, they fly commercially. The Prime Minister of australia went back to australia in a u. S. Air force jet. We are going to see some really might father is in an assisted living community. In 2018 brought the balance right to the residence. The residents. How do you make sure the franchise is accessible . Nobody knows how bad this is going to be, but it is going to really penetrate every county, every community in this country. And, you know, the American People, we tend to rise to the occasion that we have been through so much and we are going to persevere and get through ofs, but when you think revolution and slavery and civil war and the Great Depression and two world wars in vietnam and , thegate, all these things American People have a way of coming back together. To me, 9 11 should have been that event. When you had the members of congress in both sides singing God Bless America on the steps of the capitol building, i was driving back from michigan, because her were no planes flying. And listening to it, and thinking, well, maybe something good can come out of this horrible tragedy. But then the fight breaks out. The war in iraq. Should we invade . Should we invade iraq, yes or no . And not blaming either side, but that pulled the partisan roles apart. People in these ideological silos, and fighting seriousith thoughtful, policy proposals that are not anathema to either side. How do you build consensus . It is a hard place. Optimistically, the intellectual flurry agents free agents in congress the last five days as unlike anything we have seen. Asking questions that you would swear that number would never have asked. The openness to their own ignorance has also been refreshing. We have a way of rising to know, thisn, and you is boys and girls, this is a really the time to rise. Bolust we are seeing altogether is that we are Understanding Community in a different way than we have ever had before. It is a challenge we are grappling with. How do we enable the most fundamental aspect of our democracy . Elect a, the ability to democratic leader in a way that is accessible, easy, secure, confront fundamental obligation to keep ourselves and each other healthy . Being able to have a dialogue. My wife and i were talking today about a very liberal democratic oh bumps rom 1988 who bumps in, i was at the republican convention, they end up insisting we sit down. It turns out one of them, my friend alan baron, was in a poker game with him. You would have these two people from opposite places on the political spectrum who would meet once a week when congress was in session for a poker game. Sometimes y how can you bring that sense of Community Back to congress that we used to have . That you had relationships transcended ideology and party and region, and how do we get back there . It is a really good question. Most of our elected officials are really good people with really bad incentives. Crisis changes those incentives. And social media, cable creates thist incentives for anyone, whether ory are a republican democrat, to even talk to anyone on the other side or work with them. That is why we are here, that is why you come by every once in a while and share your wisdom, which i greatly appreciate. I want to thank everyone from tuning in. My announcement is we have a lot of experts working on continuity with government, what is happening with tax provisions, paid family leave requirements so i encourage folks with hop on bipartisanpolicy. Org, and continue to be engaged and be safe. Thank you for joining us. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] announcer it is easy to follow the federal response to the coronavirus outbreak at cspan. Org coronavirus. Track the spread throughout the u. S. And the world with interactive maps and charts. Watch briefings and hearings with Public Health specialists attime, unfiltered, cspan. Org coronavirus. Another tuesday and another set of president ial primaries in three states. Florida, arizona, and illinois. In ohio, the governor has postponed the primary due to the coronavirus. Movemove into june it to june 2. Biden and senders are not doing any Public Events to to the outbreak. We will have coverage this evening of the results on cspan. Org campaign2020. Cspans washington journal, live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. Coming up wednesday morning, we will discuss the latest on the coronavirus and the response to the outbreak with the University Director oncenter the state and local response. Then efforts to slow down the spread of the virus with Population Health program director, jew harris drew harris. Watch washington journal