The Morning Dispatch: The Coronavirus Continues to Spread

Happy Tuesday! To quote both President Trump talking about Mike Bloomberg’s campaign advisers and Declan’s friends watching him indulge his newfound addiction to The Bachelor: “They led you down a very dark and lonely path! Your reputation will never be the same!”

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Amy Klobuchar suspended her campaign for president and joined Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, and Harry Reid in endorsing Joe Biden’s candidacy, as the Democratic establishment consolidated around the former vice president in an effort to stop Bernie Sanders from becoming the party’s standard bearer.

• A day after Biden’s victory in South Carolina, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson sent a letter to his Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee colleagues letting them know he planned to force a vote on subpoenaing a witness in their Burisma probe. Johnson denied the timing of his decision was related to Biden’s resurgence in the Democratic race.

• There are now more than 100 COVID-19 cases across the United States, with the virus’s American death toll rising to six. Washington state has been among the hardest hit thus far, while Texas braces for the worst after a coronavirus patient was mistakenly released from quarantine for 12 hours.

• The Supreme Court agreed to hear a legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate next term.

• The Trump administration announced new restrictions on Chinese journalists in the United States following the Chinese government’s expulsion of three Wall Street Journal reporters last month.

• Stocks rebounded from their worst week since the fiscal crisis on Monday with their best day since 2009. The Dow surged 5.1 percent and the S&P 500 rose 4.6 percent.

• Several government agencies—including the Department of Justice and FBI—issued a joint statement ahead of Super Tuesday voting saying, “foreign actors continue to try to influence public sentiment and shape voter perceptions.” 

• Exit polls show Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a significant lead over his opponent, Benny Gantz, but he looks to be short of an outright parliamentary majority.

• Jack Welch, the legendary former chairman and CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001, died on Monday at the age of 84.

The Latest on COVID-19

The last few days have marked a period of contrasts for the novel coronavirus, as the press has begun to call it. From a financial standpoint, the news has been reassuring: markets saw a remarkable rebound Monday from last week from last week’s steep slump, offering at least a temporary reassurance that the disease would not precipitate a worldwide economic meltdown. 

But the medical news keeps growing more alarming, with more cases in more places around the world each day, as authorities struggle to contain a virus whose distinguishing characteristic is stealth: a long incubation period and, in many patients, symptoms suggesting nothing worse is afoot than a cold. Four more Americans died of the virus Monday, bringing the total number of fatalities to six.

The U.S. is moving to place new restrictions on international travel, banning “any foreign national who has visited Iran within the last 14 days” from flying to America and recommending that Americans not fly to South Korea and Italy, where sizable pockets of the virus have been discovered. At a White House press briefing Monday afternoon, Vice President Mike Pence told reporters that the administration will also begin screening at airports in those nations and others “within the next 12 hours” to prevent more carriers from coming to the United States.

“The action the president authorized this weekend, raising the travel advisory, the American people should know that we are saying you should not travel to certain sections of Italy or South Korea,” Pence said. “Those advisories may expand, but we’ll allow the caseload in those countries to define that.”

Flanked by the administration’s top health officials, Pence described Monday’s deaths as a tragedy, but hastened to add that the present risk to the American public at large remains low. He advised that citizens should remain alert but generally go about their business as usual, and that the top minds of the government and health care industry were working hard to contain the threat. Pence’s words of reassurance—delivered in his trademark monotone—made it obvious why the White House picked him to be the public face of its virus response. Or at least a public face: President Trump continues to carry out his own one-man coronavirus messaging effort, laying into Democrats on Twitter and at a Monday night rally in Charlotte for “politicizing” the outbreak.

In one respect, Trump is right. A lot of people have been politicizing the coronavirus (although certainly not just the Democrats). It’s not hard to see why this is the case: We’re currently at a moment of maximum uncertainty, which means the field is still wide open for any number of spectrum-spanning, priors-confirming coronavirus hot takes.

Essentially the only thing we know for sure about the coronavirus in America is that it’s here. Paradoxically, the fact that it is less deadly than previous pandemics like MERS and Ebola actually makes it harder for authorities to track and contain: At least early on, plenty of carriers went about their business for days, unaware they had the bug that the whole world is struggling to silo off. And a substantial incubation period—anywhere between two days and two weeks—means the disease can, in theory, spread widely before anyone knows it’s spread at all. This can lead to unpleasant surprises: Last Friday, Italy had only three confirmed cases of coronavirus; by yesterday, the nation had 1,128.

Compounding the knowledge problem is the fact that the U.S. has lagged far behind other countries in producing a workable test kit for identifying virus carriers. The meager testing the U.S. has done has been beset by problems: According to an Axios report Monday, the Trump administration is currently investigating a contamination at an Atlanta lab that led to the production of faulty kits.

What the U.S. coronavirus scene will look like a week from today is unknowable now, but in a sense already foreordained. The actions America takes now will be instrumental in curtailing the wave of infection after that. For now, we’ve got no advice better than the White House’s: Good luck out there, and keep washing those hands!

The Biggest Day of the Democratic Race Thus Far

More than 1,300 delegates are up for grabs today in 14 states and American Samoa. That’s more than a third of the total pledged delegates for the entire primary season. Just California, for example, has 415 pledged delegates in a race where the winner—at least to win on the first ballot—needs 1,991. 

All eyes will be on Joe Biden, as it became clear that the Democratic establishment is rallying around the former vice president and trying to fend off Bernie Sadners. Pete Buttigieg dropped out Sunday night, and Amy Klobuchar yesterday. Both endorsed Biden, and Klobuchar spoke enthusiastically at a Biden rally in Dallas on Monday night. “We do not in our party want to just eke by a victory,” she said. “We want to win big. And Joe Biden can do that.”

Beto O’Rourke also endorsed Biden on Monday.

Turnout: There’s every indication based on early voting numbers that turnout today will be high across the board. In 2008 and 2016, just more than 5 million people voted in California’s Democratic primary, but already more than 3 million ballots have been returned in that state. In Texas, the Houston Chronicle described Democratic early voting “numbers that eclipsed a sky-high showing in 2016 for the party.” 

But then there’s this: Of the 2 million or so votes cast so far in Texas, more than 1 million of those were actually cast in the Republican primary, which may be an indicator of high enthusiasm across the board heading into November. 

The threshold: Remember there’s a 15 percent threshold for a Democratic candidate to get any delegates. BUT it’s not as simple as it sounds. There are statewide delegates and congressional district delegates, and the 15 percent threshold applies separately to both—meaning that a candidate who gets only 14 percent in the state could still pick up a few delegates if they get 15 percent in some congressional districts and vice versa. 

This is why candidates like Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Steyer leaving the race could actually make a brokered convention MORE likely. Unless their voters all go to one candidate—and there’s very little evidence for that in the polls—it makes it somewhat more likely that Warren and Bloomberg will now get above the 15 percent threshold in more states further fracturing the delegate allocations. 

Early voting: This year’s rough-and-tumble primary process certainly raises questions about early voting in primaries. Nearly everyone who early-voted in a Super Tuesday this year state did so without knowing that Steyer, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar were no longer candidates, meaning hundreds of thousands of voters cast their ballot for a now-nonviable candidate. This raises questions about whether the lengthy amount of time for early voting in general elections should be winnowed down for primary season. (Although it’s worth noting, it wouldn’t have mattered this time around. All three candidates dropped out within 72 hours of election day. Any amount of early voting would have had the same problem.)

What we’re watching: 

• The Northern Virginia and Houston/Dallas suburbs, which are a decent bellwether for Sanders support among the white college-educated voters he’s been struggling to gain traction with and the reason for handwringing among so many Democratic officials. 

• The Latino vote in Texas and California. After his drubbing in Nevada—where Sanders won over 50 percent of Latino voters—Biden needs to show he can make inroads with the nation’s largest minority voting bloc today. 

• North Carolina and Colorado turnout numbers. These are two states with big senate races in November. Republicans currently hold a 3 seat majority—plus the vice presidency. Democratic enthusiasm will play a big role in whether Democrats even have a chance of taking back the upper chamber.

• Alabama’s Republican Senate primary. It looks unlikely that any candidate will get over the 50 percent mark needed to avoid a runoff but the margin matters. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions needs a strong showing to ward off the insurgent candidacy of former Auburn football coach, Tommy Tuberville. 

Bottom Line: If no candidate can win 1,991 pledged delegates, currently the most likely outcome, the question becomes, a) how large is the delegate gap between Sanders and Biden and, b) whether Biden has done enough to convince the delegates that they can and should change their votes on the later ballots.

The State of Conservatism Is…Weird

Over the weekend, three separate gatherings here in D.C. attempted to lay claim to the mantle of True Conservatism™ and the best path forward. The more mainstream—dare we say “establishment?”—Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was far and away the largest, but two smaller renegades (which could not be in more stark disagreement)—the America First Political Action Conference and the Summit on Principled Conservatism—attempted to carve out their own right-wing niches. Your Morning Dispatchers attended (or streamed) all three forums, and have pieces up on the site detailing what we found.

After spending a few days soaking in the Trump-happy sights at CPAC, Andrew turned his attention to a gathering of extremely online young radicals who gathered across the river in Arlington Friday night for an anti-CPAC conference, in which the participants spent much of their time insisting that the larger gathering wasn’t true Trumpism at all.

Each of the America First PAC organizers were former CPAC attendees who had become, for one reason or another, too toxic to associate with, even for others on the right. For Fuentes, it was his long history of half-ironic xenophobic agitation, including sneering jokes about the Holocaust and the El Paso mass shooting. For former Daily Caller writer Scott Greer, it was his history of writing pseudonymously for the alt-right website Radix. For Patrick Casey, it was his leadership of out-and-out white nationalist group Identity Evropa.

In their speeches, which were streamed by tens of thousands of others online, they sneered at what they described as the cooptation of Trump’s movement by the same conservatives Trump defeated.

“When Donald Trump came down the escalator five years ago, his core message wasn’t that America needed a child tax credit or a better industrial policy subsidy. It was immigration,” Greer said.

“But you would never know this if you listen to the people who call themselves Trumpists today. Depending on the source, you will hear that Trump just wanted to focus on jobs, regulations, tax cuts, or on some petty social issue. Their imagined Trumpism looks nothing like the agenda Trump won on.”

And Declan filed a dispatch from the Summit on Principled Conservatism, a comparatively anti-Trump bunch gathered at the National Press Club, hosted by Evan McMullin’s Stand Up Republic and Heath Mayo’s Principles First organizations.

The crowd of nearly 300 was a self-selected group. Plenty hailed from D.C., Virginia, or Maryland, but Mayo said nearly half traveled from across the country to join the conversation—South Carolina, Oregon, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, California, and Utah were all represented. Attendees were largely politically engaged (McMullin’s running mate in 2016—Mindy Finn—was brought to the stage as “needing no introduction”), and they were largely white (Shermichael Singleton—one of only two black panelists at the summit*—said “I’m looking in this room, I’ve only counted three African Americans. I’m just being very honest.”). Some said they recognized each other from Twitter profile pictures. Joseph Reynolds—a Marine engineer challenging Sen. Lindsey Graham for the Republican nomination in South Carolina—went table to table introducing himself and giving anyone who’d listen a pitch for his candidacy.

…

Bubbling beneath the surface of the high-mindedness and magnanimity was a slew of deep-seated resentments and personal grievances. The day’s speakers—at one time vice presidential chiefs of staff, acting attorneys general of the United States, high-level campaign operatives, and some of the most influential writers in the country—have been all but cast aside in Donald Trump’s GOP. And on several occasions, those frustrations came to the fore.

…

When Will Chamberlain—the pro-Trump agitator and editor-in-chief of Human Events—reached the front of the question line to ask a panel if they agreed with Wilson’s past remarks referring Donald Trump’s supporters as the president’s “credulous rube, ten-toothed base,” Tim Miller, who used to work for Jeb Bush, said he didn’t, referencing his old boss’ views on the dignity, meaning, and purpose of all human life. But Wilson took the bait anyways, giving Chamberlain exactly the soundbite he wanted. “I’m sorry that the f***-your-feelings crowd can’t take the fact that I’m a pirate, and that I talk the way I do. And I’m sorry their delicate little feels are hurt when they get called out.”

Stuart Gerson—assistant attorney general for the Civil Division in the George H.W. Bush administration and acting attorney general under Bill Clinton—introduced the discussion he was a part of as “the Human Scum panel,” proudly owning President Trump’s moniker for Never Trump conservatives the way the president’s own supporters embraced Hillary Clinton’s “deplorable” label. “As much as any of you, I’d like to see [Trump] extricated from American politics and put on the new NASA one-way trip space program,” he said.

Worth Your Time

• Critics of the president often lament his attacks on “our institutions,” but what does that really mean? George Packer attempts to answer that question in his latest essay for The Atlantic, arguing Trump is “destroying the civil service and bending the government to his will.” He concludes: “Four years is an emergency. Eight years is a permanent condition.”

• When Rep. Mark Meadows announced he’d be retiring from Congress in December, it set off a scramble in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District over who would succeed him. National Review’s John McCormack tells the story of Dan Driscoll, a young Iraq War veteran and Yale Law School grad looking to fill the seat.

• “We’re eating at street-corner stalls and food trucks, in front of the TV and at the grocery—everywhere but restaurants,” Karen Stabiner writes. Her excellent essay in The Counter details how changes in technology and venture capital are warping the food industry. 

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Something Fun

Anthony Rizzo—Chicago Cubs first baseman and Declan’s favorite player—was mic’d up for Monday’s spring training game against the Angels, and he made sure to sneak in a well-deserved shot at the Astros.

Toeing the Company Line

• The latest Advisory Opinions podcast is filled to the brim. Sarah and David break down the likelihood of a contested convention on the Democratic side, the Court of Appeals’ Don McGahn decision, the Supreme Court and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Katie Hill’s place at the intersection of #MeToo and revenge porn. Be sure to subscribe and give it a listen here!

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Corrections, March 3: The piece originally referred to Shermichael Singleton as the “lone black panelist” at the conference. He was one of two. Also, the piece originally referred to former California Rep. Katie Hill as California Rep. Katie Porter.