DNC makes drastic changes to March 15th presidential debate due to COVID-19 fears

In the wake of COVID-19’s dra­mat­ic spread across the Unit­ed States, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee announced on Tues­day that the eleventh Demo­c­ra­t­ic debate – sched­uled to be held on the evening of Sun­day 15th March – will be moved from Phoenix, Ari­zona, to CNN’s stu­dio in Wash­ing­ton D.C.

This comes after a pre­vi­ous deci­sion to host the debate with no audi­ence, to pre­vent the risk of infec­tion that comes with such a large crowd.

The DNC’s deci­sions were made out of “an abun­dance of cau­tion,” accord­ing to Xochitl Hino­josa, the DNC’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor, who empha­sized the health risks that would come from mak­ing the can­di­dates, their cam­paign teams, the CNN mod­er­a­tors and atten­dees trav­el across the coun­try to get to Arizona.

The net­works host­ing the debate, CNN and Uni­vi­sion, have already had a scare in con­nec­tion to the coro­n­avirus. Accord­ing to Hino­josa, Univision’s anchor Jorge Ramos was recent­ly exposed to some­body with the virus.

Ramos had been set to mod­er­ate the debate, but has stepped back from the role (he will be replaced by Ilia Calderón). While he has dis­played no symp­toms of the infec­tion, he clear­ly did not want to risk the pos­si­bil­i­ty that he might acci­den­tal­ly expose for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden and Sen­a­tor Bernie Sanders to the virus.

The changes made to the debate for­mat reflect the wide­spread impact that the spread of COVID-19 has had on the 2020 election.

Both Sanders and Biden have been forced to can­cel mul­ti­ple cam­paign events, due to the risks asso­ci­at­ed with large crowds.

This real­i­ty is like­ly to fur­ther dam­age Bernie Sanders’ strug­gling cam­paign, which relies heav­i­ly on such events to gal­va­nize his sup­port­ers’ enthusiasm.

In con­trast to the Democ­rats, Repub­li­cans’ response to the coro­n­avirus cri­sis mir­rors that of the Trump regime’s: incom­pe­tence, mixed with out­right denial.

To give just one exam­ple, a large num­ber of the regime’s coro­n­avirus task force mem­bers (includ­ing Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence) attend­ed the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence (CPAC) at the end of Feb­ru­ary, where they down­played the threat of the dis­ease while min­gling with thou­sands of atten­dees from across the Unit­ed States. Pre­dictably, the event led to an out­break of the coro­n­avirus.

Even recent­ly, with the threat of COVID-19 now impos­si­ble to ignore, the reac­tion of Don­ald Trump’s re-elec­­tion cam­paign is notably less coher­ent than those of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates. As Biden and Sanders and their staffs were can­cel­ing events out of con­cern for atten­dees’ health, the Trump cam­paign announced a ral­ly in Wis­con­sin, only to pull the plug on it a day later.

COVID-19 is now spread­ing across the globe in a way not seen since the Span­ish flu epi­dem­ic a cen­tu­ry ago. There is no end in sight to the pan­dem­ic, and with the out­break already wreak­ing hav­oc in the elec­toral process of coun­tries as far apart as the Unit­ed King­dom and South Korea, Amer­i­cans have one more rea­son to expect 2020 to be an elec­tion like no oth­er in liv­ing memory.