michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

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Today: For the past decade, governors have been relegated to the sidelines of American politics. Alex Burns on how the pandemic is changing that. It’s Friday, April 3. So Alex, up until the past few months, how would you describe the role of governors in the United States?

alex burns

Look, I think that they were very much the supporting cast of American politics. They perform a function that I think people in their states recognize is super important. But they have not been seen for a decade or more now as the kind of people who the great mass of American voters look to for inspiration, direction, national leadership in any kind of crisis.

michael barbaro

You said a decade or more. So that’s a change.

alex burns

Right. Now for most of that three or four decades prior to that, governors were seen as the most capable leaders in the country. Between 1976 and 2008, the country was exclusively led in the White House by former governors, except for a four-year period.

archived recording (jimmy carter) I remember when I announced for president in December of 1974.

alex burns

Jimmy Carter.

archived recording (jimmy carter) There was a major headline on the editorial page of The Atlanta Constitution that said, Jimmy Carter’s running for what? And the what — the what was about this big.

alex burns

Followed by Ronald Reagan.

archived recording (ronald reagan) Good evening to all of you from California. Tonight I’d like to talk to you about issues.

alex burns

A little interregnum there for George HW Bush. Then back to Bill Clinton.

archived recording (bill clinton) Welcome to one of my favorite places. The Old State House is an important building to all Arkansans, but it’s particularly special to me.

alex burns

Then George W. Bush.

archived recording (george w. bu.s.h) I come from Texas. I’ve got a record as a governor. I’ve been setting agendas.

alex burns

It was a country led for decades by governors.

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And starting with Barack Obama, and now obviously President Trump, that pattern has been totally broken.

michael barbaro

And why do you think that was during that 30- or 40-year that we all looked to governors?

alex burns

You know, for decades governors would run for president on a narrative of getting stuff done. And so many of the issues that were at the forefront of American politics — relating to the size and function of government, relating to the budget and education and health care, issues like abortion rights — these were issues that governors could deal with at the state level and then take that narrative to the national level. Starting in 2008, and really, the years before that, all politics become so heavily nationalized. The media environment is totally different, where people are learning about the political scene more from cable news and the internet than from their local paper. And the issues facing the country are so much bigger, or seem so much bigger, than the issues facing any one state. The Iraq war, the financial crisis, and the Great Recession. These are not challenges that a governor necessarily has a good story to tell about confronting.

michael barbaro

So the nationalization of American politics is kind of the death knell for the governor as the go to figure in our politics. So how does this crisis change that dynamic?

alex burns

You know, I think it didn’t need to change that dynamic. But because you have had such absent or inconsistent leadership from the federal level for months now, it has really fallen to leaders on the state level to deal one by one with this crisis that has completely consumed everything else going on in public life.

michael barbaro

And when do you think you started to see that, when it came to the governors?

archived recording (jay inslee) I want to welcome everyone to the state of Washington, a place where people are very much united and active and confident in our ability to take strong measures to slow down the spread of this epidemic.

alex burns

So this really starts in Washington State, which is the first place in the country with a large cluster of coronavirus cases.

archived recording (jay inslee) I’m very pleased that the seven million people in Washington, I think, are united themselves as being leaders in acting responsibly right now. And I want to —

alex burns

Jay Inslee, he’s a respected longtime figure in Democratic politics. He ran for president last year for a couple months on a platform of mainly confronting climate change. And he became sort of a popular figure in the party, but didn’t make it very far in the Democratic race.

archived recording (jay inslee) So starting today, I am ordering, pursuant to my emergency powers, that certain events in Kings, Snohomish and Pierce County with more than 250 people, are prohibited by order of the governor.

alex burns

Early in March, he takes steps to lock down big sections of his state, especially in the Seattle area, which has the most severe early outbreak of the coronavirus.

archived recording (jay inslee) Go ahead. archived recording What are the penalties, exactly, for not abiding by the ban? archived recording (jay inslee) The penalties are you might be killing your granddad if you don’t do it. And I’m serious about this. The principle reason this is going to work is for people to understand the consequences of lack of community responsibility.

alex burns

Not far from Washington State, you have other outbreaks in California.

archived recording (gavin newsom) The fact is, the experience we’re having on the ground throughout the state of California require us to adjust our thinking and to adjust our activities.

alex burns

Where governor Gavin Newsom, a guy who has been talked about in Democratic politics for a long time as a future presidential candidate, decides by the middle of the month that he is going to need to take much more aggressive steps than the federal government.

archived recording (gavin newsom) And there’s a recognition of our interdependence that requires of this moment that we direct a statewide order for people to stay at home.

alex burns

He is one of the first big state governors to issue what we now think of as a lockdown order.

archived recording (gavin newsom) We are confident that the people of the state of California will abide by it. They’ll do the right thing. They’ll meet this moment. They’ll step up, and they have. archived recording (mike dewine We’re now at a critical time here in Ohio in regard to the coronavirus.

alex burns

But it’s not just Democrats, and it’s not just heavily coastal urban states taking these kinds of steps in March.

archived recording (mike dewine The decisions that we make as individuals in the next few days, the next several weeks will really determine how many lives are going to be lost in Ohio.

alex burns

Pretty early in the month, you also have Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, taking some of the most aggressive measures to close schools, ban large public gatherings, even at a point when Ohio has a tiny number of confirmed cases. But at the time that Mike DeWine essentially shuts down Ohio, you don’t have any kind of message like that coming from the leader of his own party, President Trump.

archived recording (mike dewine And here is the truth. With or without a test, the virus is here. It lives among us. And we must be at war with it. This enemy is dangerous, it is relentless, and we must stop it from surviving, multiplying and thriving.

alex burns

But at this point in the middle of March, most governors are not taking steps like these at all, and many governors are not even speaking publicly about the coronavirus as a looming threat to their own states.

archived recording (andrew cuomo) It is deep breath time.

alex burns

That’s why, all of a sudden, Andrew Cuomo comes to the forefront.

archived recording (andrew cuomo) This — first of all, this is not our first rodeo with this type of situation in New York. 1968 we had the Hong Kong flu. 2009 we had the swine flu. Avian flu. Ebola. SARS. MERS.

michael barbaro

And what strikes you about the way Cuomo is handling this?

alex burns

Look, when you have a national scale crisis, typically it is the president who people hear from every day about the threat that is coming into their homes and into their neighborhoods and what their government is going to be doing to help protect them. That’s not happening here from the White House. Where it does start to happen is Albany, where Andrew Cuomo, who is one of the longest serving, most prominent governors in the country in the state that is home to much of the national media, uses that platform to speak to an audience across his state, but well beyond his state, about the dilemma confronting governors like him.

archived recording (andrew cuomo) This is a dramatic time and an unprecedented time. And great challenges require great leaders and great solutions. And that’s what this is.

alex burns

Every single day now, the country hears from Andrew Cuomo about the nature of the threat confronting New York, in many cases, the really specific resourcing issues facing the state.

archived recording (andrew cuomo) We have 53,000 hospital beds in the state of New York. We have 3,000 ICU beds.

alex burns

This is the kind of nitty gritty of governing that most Americans have not paid a whole lot of attention to over the last decade, at least as it pertains to government at the state level. He mixes it together with these sort of philosophizing pep talks for the state.

archived recording (andrew cuomo) Sometimes in these positions, you have to make difficult decisions.

alex burns

Talking about the emotional strain and the anxiety that people are facing in a way that I think most people would traditionally expect from a president.

archived recording (andrew cuomo) But my adage in these disasters, emergencies, has always been do everything you can, prepare for the worst, hope for the best.

alex burns

And the most consistent message throughout all this time is that the measures he is taking are an effort to hold back the worst of the problem, but that in order to actually meet the problem and fix the problem, he is going to need a lot more help from the federal government. Each of these governors is experiencing what is probably the most important moment in their political lives. They are all saying quite pointedly that they cannot master this moment on their own, that without the resources and the leadership of the federal government, there is only so much that each state can do piece by piece.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

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Alex, so far we’ve talked about what a handful of early acting governors have been up to. As this pandemic has spread across the country and more and more governors have to decide how to approach this, how are you seeing that breakdown, kind of governor by governor?

alex burns

Well, by late March —

archived recording (larry hogan) This morning I have signed an executive order which institutes a stay at home directive. No Maryland resident should be leaving their home.

alex burns

You have 16 states that are in some form of lockdown.

archived recording (gretchen whitmer) Today I’m issuing a stay home stay safe executive order for all Michiganders.

alex burns

With a population totaling nearly half the country.

archived recording (phil murphy) I signed a second executive order stating clearly that the rules I have laid out supersede all other orders issued by county or municipal officials. They are a sobering reminder of the challenge we are confronting as one New Jersey family, as I’ve said before.

alex burns

Most of these states are pretty blue, pretty urban. There are a couple redder states in there, states with Republican governors. But for the most part, the overarching pattern here is big states with Democratic governors moving fastest.

michael barbaro

But that, of course, creates a pretty messy and inconsistent approach in a state-by-state way.

alex burns

That’s right. And some of the biggest states in the country that don’t have cases detected early, governors who are inclined to act aggressively, go weeks and weeks without taking similar steps. These are states largely with conservative Republican governors who are closely aligned with President Trump. Florida is probably the best example of this. This is a state governed by a Republican named Ron DeSantis. His whole campaign in 2018 was about his support for President Trump, and he doesn’t shut down the state for weeks and weeks.

archived recording (ron desantis) You know, it’s just a different situation. We’re a big, diverse state. If you look at New York State, obviously New York City, surrounding areas, some of the other places, yeah, they’re just in a different situation. But I look forward to the guidelines.

alex burns

And he gets publicly frustrated with people leaving other states that are locked down and coming to Florida, pointing a finger at New York in particular.

archived recording (ron desantis) But yet people are riding the subway in New York City. People fly all over the place from some of the hot zones. I mean, you know, really? How does that make any sense if we’re trying to contain this thing?

alex burns

But this is what happens when you don’t have a uniform response around the country. And it becomes very, very clear, over the course of March and the very beginning of April, that Florida is going to have a huge problem on its hands.

michael barbaro

Alex, you have identified a bunch of contiguous states in the South where the leaders, generally Republicans loyal to President Trump, seem resistant to closing down their states. And I wonder why you think that that is the case.

alex burns

You know, I think some of this is ideological, that Republican governors, and particularly Southern governors, have a different view of whether it’s appropriate and when it’s appropriate for a governor to use his power to halt business, commerce, normal cultural life. Some of these states are more rural states. And in much of the country, I think even to this day, there’s still the perception that the coronavirus is an urban problem. And clearly, that is the case that it is an urban problem, but it’s also clear that it’s not just an urban problem. And you know, in so many of these Southern states, it really does also boil down to loyalty to the president and partisanship. Governor DeSantis in Florida is really the perfect example of this.

archived recording (ron desantis) So I’m in contact with them, and basically, you know, I’ve said, are you guys recommending this?

alex burns

As he, for weeks and weeks, resists taking more aggressive action to mandate social distancing, says pretty much explicitly, if the White House told me to act differently.

archived recording (ron desantis) The task force has not recommended that to me. If they do, you know, obviously, that would be something that would carry a lot of weight with me.

alex burns

That would carry a lot of weight with me. It’s as close as we get to hearing a Republican governor who’s not taking action say to the White House, please tell me what to do. And so it’s not an accident that the Republican governors, for the most part, who do break with the president are people who are so well-established in their home states, like Mike DeWine, or who are leading states that aren’t really that conservative to begin with, like Maryland and Massachusetts, where they may have more political freedom to go their own way than a Republican governor of Georgia in President Trump’s Republican Party.

michael barbaro

I can also imagine how, as a governor of a more rural state where the virus is not really hugely present, there would be a natural inclination not to shut down social and commercial life because many of those states kind of have an institutional social distance. Houses are really far away from each other. There isn’t density. And so it would be natural to wait until the federal government said no, no, no. You need to do this now.

alex burns

I think that’s really right. And I think that sort of magnifying that even further, the governors in these states are largely elected by constituencies who are the most representative of the dynamics that you’re talking about, that the Republican governor of Georgia, which is not an overwhelmingly rural state, is elected with the overwhelming support of the rural parts of the state. So even at the point where you see an outbreak in Atlanta, an outbreak in Miami or Tampa or Jacksonville, the governors of these states still have to worry about pressure from the business community statewide and from voters who may see what’s going on in Miami or Atlanta as largely irrelevant to their own lives. And so these governors are really looking to the White House for leadership and direction on what exactly they should be doing.

archived recording ( donald trump) We will be extending our guidelines to April 30 to slow the spread. On Tuesday we will be finalizing these plans and providing a summary of our findings, supporting data and strategy to the American people.

michael barbaro

Right. And they got it, many of them, in the last couple of days is my sense, when the president disclosed those really scary models that said —

archived recording ( donald trump) They’re shocking numbers. You know, you’re talking about deaths. Even at the low end you were shocked, when you see 100,000 and 120,000 and 200,000 people over, potentially, a very short period of time.

michael barbaro

200,000 could die. And it felt like one by one, the holdout states started to lock themselves down.

archived recording (ron desantis) The president just the other day announced they are going to do a 30-day extension for the current guidelines. I mean, I think it’s clear that that represents, effectively, a national pause.

alex burns

That’s really how you know so much of this was about partisanship and presidential leadership. When the president goes out and says basically, best case scenario, 100,000 people are going to die, you see, one by one, these states flip almost overnight.

archived recording (ron desantis) So given those circumstances and given the unique situation in Florida, I’m going to be doing an executive order today directing all Floridians to limit movements and personal interactions outside the home to only those —

michael barbaro

So in the end, Alex, now that we know that a lot of these holdouts would only act when they got a definitive signal from the president to act — and in some cases, that meant waiting months into this pandemic — do we think that there are going to be meaningful consequences, either good or bad, for the governors who waited, as these governors did, or for the governors who acted very early on behalf of their constituents?

alex burns

You know, right now, the public opinion information we have suggests that governors across the board are enjoying a real surge in confidence and support from their voters. The overwhelming political test going forward is going to be how did you handle this crisis, and how many lives did you save, and how quickly did you bring back the economy? Looking at the trend lines in the states that have moved most slowly to confront this, it’s hard not to anticipate a very, very difficult stretch for these governors as the consequences of their choices become really clear.

michael barbaro

Finally, Alex, I wonder about another aspect of this, the rule of the president, typically, as the source of calm and comfort in moments like this. Thinking, of course, of F.D.R. and his fireside chats. That hasn’t necessarily happened here. It has been, instead, the governors.

alex burns

That’s right. You know, what people have heard from President Trump when he has been attempting to calm the country has been a message that this isn’t so bad, and it might actually be over pretty fast. That’s a message he has moved off of in the last week. What they have been hearing from governors —

archived recording (mike dewine In time of war, we have to make sacrifices. And I thank each and every one of you for all that you are doing every single day.

alex burns

— has been a different kind of candor about just how tough this is going to be and how long it might last.

archived recording (gretchen whitmer) This crisis can take a toll on our mental health. Check in with family. Call your loved ones. Go for a walk. Read those books on your list, or even go outside and put your holiday lights back up.

alex burns

Really a pretty direct message of comfort to people who are understandably really scared right now.

archived recording (andrew cuomo) Practice humanity. We don’t talk about practicing humanity. But now, if ever there’s a time to practice humanity, the time is now. The time is now to show some kindness, show some compassion.

alex burns

You hear them talking with a level of emotional rawness and directness about the difficulty ahead, really telling their states that they are facing many, many long and difficult months, and asking voters to trust them that it will be OK in the end.

michael barbaro

Alex, thank you very much.

alex burns

Thank you.

archived recording (mike dewine I am convinced that we can do this. We can do this. archived recording (gretchen whitmer) We must keep our wits about us. That means all of us. archived recording (andrew cuomo) Yeah, we have a problem. Yes, we will deal with it. Yes, we will overcome it. But let’s find out better selves in doing it.

michael barbaro

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the Department of Labor said that 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week as the pandemic wiped out jobs across the economy. Over the past two weeks, 10 million Americans have filed for such benefits in what economists are describing as a financial catastrophe and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, during a conference call, called a stunning development.

archived recording ( nancy pelosi) More than 6.6 million filing for unemployment last week alone. Doesn’t that just not take your breath away? I mean, the virus does, too. But 2.6 million filing for unemployment.

alex burns