How Biden Could Use the Soft Powers of the Presidency To Help Kentucky and Other States Deal With COVID-19

America, in my view, is really failing right now. COVID-19 deaths are surging upward, with more than 2,000 people a day dying of the virus, like in April and May. People across the country are flooding food banks, unable to buy food on their own. The incumbent president who clearly lost his reelection bid is refusing to concede, instead trying to force governors and other officials in states to essentially declare him the winner. The Washington Post recently contacted the offices of all of the Republicans in the Senate and the House. 89 percent of the GOP members (all but 27 of the 249) declined to forthrightly declare that Biden won. 

You might argue these are all really examples of the Republican Party failing---Trump’s terrible management of the virus outbreak; Mitch McConnell’s refusal to push through a COVID relief package; Trump and Republicans breaking with democratic values by not acknowledging the election results. But the Republican Party was chosen by the voters in 2016 and 2018 to run the White House, the U.S. Senate and about half of the states. About 47 percent of Americans backed Trump in the 2020 presidential election. So governance choices by the Republican Party very much represent America overall. And if nearly half of American voters dislike the Democratic Party so much that they would rather continue to have Trump manage the COVID-19 outbreak,  as the election results suggest, that’s also an issue about America overall. 

But I wanted to think about these failures in a deeper way. So I reached out to Philip Rocco, who is a political science professor at Marquette University. I talk to Philip a lot for my stories because he looks at political issues from a lot of different lens---the policy and also the electoral politics; local, state and federal; the White House, Congress, and federal agencies; the U.S. government but also governments abroad. He often explains to me that an issue is not quite as simple as I think it is, because I am, for example, only thinking about the issue from a federal government perspective but states might see it differently. In this conversation, for example, Philip explained how the U.S.’s struggles to deal with COVID are exemplified not just by Trump, but also the CDC and the New York Times. And he cited a department in the White House (a department where Louisville’s Jerry Abramson used to work) that Biden could deploy to help manage the COVID-19 outbreak. Here is a lightly-edited transcript of our conversation: 

Are we in a failing state? Like how the U.S has handled the COVID-19 outbreak has been, in my view, terrible. Are we in a country that just can't handle real problems? [Note: Philip and I generally used the term “state” in this discussion to refer to the United States as a country, not the state of Kentucky or any other U.S. state.]

I do think that there is good evidence to suggest that the American state is failing to protect public health at a fairly basic level. Essentially, when I think about state capacity, I feel that it is more than plans on paper. It is the ability of government to make credible commitments, in partnership with civil society, to achieve closure on the goal of defending against (among other things) infectious disease.

While it is clear that the government can still, at some level, induce investment in research and development on vaccines, it cannot encourage employers and consumers to undertake reasonably appropriate measures to stop the mitigation of the disease. And I would regard that as a failure of the state.

So the obvious solution is lots of government aid to basically pay businesses to stay closed and pay workers to stay home, until the virus is contained. Also give states lots of aid. So is the problem actually that the American state is failing or that the Republican Party is failing, since it objects to what I laid out?  And is that opposition about Republican voters or really just the Republican political class? 

I think we can't discount the reality of a deep partisan fissure on the questions of the response to both the public health and economic dimensions of the crisis. The Senate's stalling on the HEROES Act is perhaps the clearest evidence of this. Were the partisan makeup different there, we may not be in the position we are in.

Nevertheless, I do think there are elements of state structure that have to be considered. For example, why is it the case that the issue of state-local aid is framed in exclusively partisan or ideological terms (more versus less spending) rather than in terms of the ability of state and local governments to undertake their constitutional functions? Were our federal system organized differently, were state and local governments to have a formal seat at the national decision-making table as they do in other federations, I wonder whether this would be the case in quite the same way. It is telling to me that not only are we the only major federal system without a fiscal equalization program, we are also the only major federation without a comprehensive approach for policy collaboration between levels of government

So in the system we are in now, isn't the issue fairly simple? Republicans oppose giving lots of money to states, closing businesses and giving people lots of money to stay home. Is it more complicated than that? Like if the problem is basically just Mitch McConnell, we should just say that. 

There is no doubt in my mind that Mitch McConnell, and his drive to build up his own institutional power, is a huge part of this story. But I also see this as a story about the kind of institutional equilibrium in which a Mitch McConnell exists. As a political scientist, the irony is not lost on me that the Senate -- the putatively "territorial" chamber in Congress -- is now the central obstacle to place-based policy. It suggests to me that we need another national venue for setting the agenda and framing intergovernmental issues.

The scientists all say we should wear masks, but many people won’t wear masks. Fiscal policy aside, is the public’s distrust of experts (scientists, the media, etc.) and their recommendations also a sign of failed state? We don't have media institutions that reach everyone, across partisan and demographic lines. Medical experts are distrusted. This is not a liberal-conservative issue---plenty of people are eating indoors at restaurants in liberal areas too, even as the scientists try to discourage that. 

I've been thinking a lot about state failure in terms of how fiscal policy creates perverse incentives for firms and subnational governments. But I also think that the informational and hortatory role of the state matters a great deal. In practice, the state does not have a monopoly on public-health information. Rather, it relies on an implicit partnership with civil society to send a strong and sustained message about what behaviors are necessary to maintain in a pandemic.

But at present, we live in a highly equivocal informational environment. The CDC tells us to avoid traveling for Thanksgiving. But there are exceptions. And then a New York Times columnist tells us that, for him, there are other exceptions. And then of course there is a standard barrage of holiday advertisements and familial norms. If the state is going to protect public health during a pandemic, it has to work overtime -- in league with civil society -- to displace these conflicting messages. And that's really not happening right now.

Let's talk about the election, the other issue where I see America as failing. The certification drama that has been happening in Michigan and Georgia is nuts. Are we too polarized to have an election where both sides can live with a defeat? If so, that is also a sign of a country that is failing. And again for this question, is the problem polarization, the Republican Party or something in between? 

I think you can find plenty of examples where a country is highly ideologically polarized but where it doesn't redound to efforts to quite literally disenfranchise the votes of millions of people. 

So I am not sold on the idea that polarization is doing the work here. To understand this, I think you can't look at the certification drama in isolation. Look at what the Trump administration is trying to do with congressional apportionment, too. In an unprecedented move, they are trying to remove undocumented immigrants from congressional apportionment counts, which would shift representation and resources towards more racially and ethnically homogeneous states.

While this move itself is unprecedented, it has a family resemblance to what we saw in the 1920s, when a rural counter-majoritarian coalition held up re-apportionment for ten years because the census revealed that the country was now largely urban and populated with immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.

So I think the problem is not so much polarization on questions like government spending, or even affirmative action, but is instead a deeply anti-democratic strain in American political culture that has gained a stronger and stronger foothold within the institutions of the Republican Party.

What can a Joe Biden administration, with a GOP Senate, do in terms of helping manage COVID-19 in our complicated system? And related, can he do anything to mitigate this anti-democratic strain in the Republican Party? 

Those are two really separate and huge questions. There are obviously a lot of things the Biden administration can do without congressional approval to manage this crisis better. The first would be to leverage trusted voices like the CDC to a far greater extent in messaging on the pandemic. It's hard to estimate just how much the Trump administration's failure to do that set us back. 

The second is to actually leverage the White House as a locus of intergovernmental coordination. Read the coverage of what it was like for governors to do bilateral or multilateral meetings with the White House. Under Trump, it was a disaster. Pence smoothed over some of the rough edges, in the end, but had no authority to make agreements that the President could stick to. That is a problem.

Arguably the best thing Biden could do with state and local governments is to reorganize the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs from a shop that builds the president's reputation in states and cities to a genuine site of ongoing intergovernmental brokerage. [Abramson was the director of this office from 2014-2016.] Whatever he does, he needs to regularize and formalize interactions with the levels of government that are doing the lion's share of public health work right now.

On the question of what Biden can do with the anti-democratic strain in the GOP, I don't think there is an easy answer. At the elite levels, those motivations will persist regardless of what he does. 

The biggest challenge he's going to face is how, in the current political configuration, he can advance policy initiatives with concrete benefits that can be delivered as quickly as possible for the large numbers of voters who are suffering.

In my view, one of the most important dynamics in politics right is the state of Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan's 2024 presidential campaign. I think it will take a different kind of GOP nominee to move the party from this anti-democratic drift. Do you agree? 

In the absence of a strong counterweight to the fairly explicitly counter-majoritarian trends that have dominated the GOP for the last twenty or so years (or more), I would expect the party to continue following that path.

The challenge, I think, is that the best organized policy demanders in the Republican coalition continue to want policies that fall outside of the majoritarian zone. 

So the challenge for hopefuls like Hogan is to cultivate a set of intermediary organizations that can package him as consistent enough with conservative values and unlock votes in what I can only assume will be a primary with strong nativist themes.

That will be no small feat.

Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to this newsletter here.