There goes the crowd
South by Southwest has been canceled due to the coronavirus spread. The NBA is reportedly discussing the possibility of playing games with no fans in attendance. This raises the question of whether there could end up being a point at which the 2020 presidential candidates could or should stop holding political rallies.
If we do end up reaching the point where large public gatherings become frowned upon in general, there are two ways this could impact the election. Candidates generally hold political rallies so their most enthusiastic fans will attend and become fired up, in the hope that they’ll then go out into the real world and try to win over other people for that candidate.
Of course there’s a lot of hit and miss with this. The candidates who have historically held the largest presidential campaign rallies – Eugene Debs in 1912, Wendell Wilkie in 1940, Bernie Sanders in 2016, Donald Trump in 2016 – have generally ended up getting several million fewer votes than their opponents who drew smaller crowds. That’s because the candidates who draw massive crowds tend to attract the kind of people who don’t understand how politics works, and these people don’t do any actual followup work after attending. It’s the candidate who draws the moderate but politically savvy crowd who generally ends up getting the most votes.
That said, what would a presidential race look like with no one showing up to rallies? There would certainly be reduced turnout, but it’s difficult to say by how much. In general, lower turnout tends to be good for the Republicans, but that’s due to apathy. In an election where turnout is reduced across the board due to a crisis, one could expect that the more-motivated side would prevail. And has there ever been any broader motivation in modern American politics than ousting Donald Trump?
There’s also the reality that while a reasonable Democratic nominee like Joe Biden would probably start pulling back on campaign rallies if medical experts asked him to, the ever narcissistic and delusional Donald Trump would probably keep holding rallies – and his braindead supporters would probably keep showing up – even though we learned today that Trump has potentially been exposed to the virus. Of course this could backfire on Trump due to the negative publicity involved. And this is morbid but worth considering: Trump would be spreading the virus among his supporters heading into election day, leaving many of them possibly too unwell to vote.
The bottom line is that, as with so many other aspects of society, we don’t yet know what kind of an impact the coronavirus will or won’t have on the 2020 election process. All we can do is keep working hard to drive turnout, and to educate voters on the importance of voting wisely. It’s the only way we were going to win anyway.
