What California’s COVID approach could teach the country if Joe Biden wins
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom share the same basic COVID-19 philosophy: The government must focus on fighting the virus before the economy can recover.
“You can shout from the rooftops that we’re open for business, but the economy will not get back to full strength if the number of new cases is still rising,” Biden wrote in a May Washington Post op-ed. “Without measures in place to prevent the spread of the virus, many Americans won’t want to shop in stores, eat in restaurants or travel.”
Like Newsom, Biden wants clear guidance on when and how businesses can safely operate.
Biden, who says Trump’s approach has been to hang an “open for business” sign on America and see what happens, has said he would direct the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, to set temporary standards around COVID-19 exposure, and pursue tough fines on corporations that don’t abide by the rules. Local and state governments could opt into federal funding to monitor businesses’ testing and safety measures. Businesses meeting best practices would get a “Safer for Shoppers” sign to help consumers make decisions about where to shop.
The Democratic presidential nominee says his plan would allow businesses to reopen safely by giving them the protective equipment and testing they need, which would be paid for by the federal government. Newsom has similarly stressed the need for testing, striking some of his own deals to obtain both tests and equipment.
Newsom issued a statewide order in June requiring masks in public. Biden said at the Democratic National Convention that he would institute “a national mandate to wear a mask.” On Thursday, he walked back that statement at a CNN town hall, saying that constitutionally he could only mandate the masks on federal land. He says he will instead set an example himself and encourage governors to implement mask mandates.
The similarities in California offer a window into some of what America might expect if Biden is elected. Some who have watched Newsom closely also say the state offers Biden a case study in what not to do.
“I think there’s as much to learn from what the governor did wrong as opposed to what he did right,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant based in California campaigning against Trump.
Health and the economy
Political and economic experts mostly agree that fighting the coronavirus and restoring consumer confidence are essential to an economic recovery.
“This is a case where health and economics are intertwined,” said Leila Bengali, a UCLA economist who studies California’s economy. “How people feel and their emotional response to feeling safe, not feeling safe (from the virus) is going to be an important factor in economic recovery.”
Although Newsom has maintained that his strategy has always been to first deal with the virus, some California political observers say he strayed from that plan under political pressure and that his strategy has been inconsistent. He reopened the economy too soon under demands from businesses and local governments, critics say, then had to shut back down after cases surged.
Newsom has called criticisms that he bowed to political pressure untrue. He says his new color-tiered reopening strategy unveiled last month reflects “lessons learned from our previous experience” with reopening. This time, his administration says changes will be “simple, slow and stringent,” insisting that counties demonstrate better control of the virus for at least two weeks before moving to a less restrictive reopening tier.
“One thing we’ve learned from the previous reopening experience... is making sure that we really hold strongly to these buffers in terms of criteria and data, and holding that criteria and data in line for an extended period of time,” Newsom said in late August when announcing the new guidelines.
Importance of consistency
After a spike in infections over the summer, Newsom has overseen a successful effort to bring coronavirus infection rates back down. Hospitalizations in California are now decreasing consistently. The state has seen 3.3% of tests come back positive over the last two weeks, a level below the 5% that the World Health Organization says makes loosening restrictions possible.
But in the meantime, Newsom’s policies have “inflicted significant cost on economic growth and jobs in California,” said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Despite being one of the first states to impose coronavirus restrictions, California’s economic recovery is lagging. The state’s unemployment rate remains in the double digits, even as the national economy begins to rebound. A recent report from the Public Policy Institute of California found three in 10 adults say the state is in a serious recession. Most Californians, about 60%, think the nation will have bad times economically over the next year.
Determining how much of California’s economic fallout can be attributed to Newsom’s policies is still up for debate and will likely take years of research to settle, Bengali said.
Moreover, it’s not possible to extrapolate how a similar strategy would work nationwide just by looking at what’s happened in California, Bengali said. California’s economy depends on a unique mix of industries, including technology, agriculture, port activity and tourism, and doesn’t represent a microcosm of the broader U.S. economy, she said.
But political experts see lessons for Biden in Newsom’s strategy, particularly because Biden’s approach mirrors Newsom’s in many ways: urging mask use, ramping up testing and steering aid money to businesses in the meantime.
California’s June mask requirement has proven hard to enforce.
Newsom has dramatically increased testing through more than a billion dollars in state contracts with providers and labs, but he still acknowledges that the state has more work to do.
California also has approved hundreds of millions of aid dollars for small businesses, including tax breaks for those that hire more workers, but has been constrained by budget deficits.
Containing coronavirus to boost economic growth is the right approach, Sohn said, but other governments have done a better job, including in South Korea and Germany. Those countries never fully shut down their economies, he said, but still found ways to curtail viral transmission.
Sohn also pointed to New York, which initially inflicted heavy economic costs with a tight lockdown, but then made significant progress on fighting the virus and reopening.
“New York is a success story,” Sohn said. “They were able to control coronavirus but at the same time were able to let the economy grow.”
The difference between New York and California has been consistency, Sohn said. New York “stuck to a game plan,” while California shut down the economy, reopened partially, then shut down again.
Madrid said Newsom started with an “A+” on handling the coronavirus, but bowed to pressure to reopen too early.
“I think that caving to political pressure was a very, very big mistake,” Madrid said. “I think that’s what the message needs to be for Biden. People want life to go back to normal, they’re willing to sacrifice, and we can’t fall prey to the idea that you can somehow skirt around the clear science on this.”
California-based Democratic strategist Steve Maviglio said Newsom is “back on track,” relying on data and science to inform a reopening strategy, rather than political pressure.
The governor has learned a lesson that Biden is likely to keep in mind: mixed messages don’t work when it comes to reopening the economy, Maviglio said. Biden should look to states like Michigan, New York and Illinois, whose leaders took strong action to slow the spread of the virus in the early days of the pandemic, Maviglio said, and are now reopening more facilities than California.
“It’s paid off in their states,” he said. “And I think it pays off politically in the long run.”
Better coordination between governments
Even though Democrats dominate state government in California, they still find themselves battling with local elected Republicans.
San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond said he’s been frustrated by what he sees as the state’s “moving goalposts” for reopening, and said it’s been difficult for local businesses to know what to aim for.
Many businesses in the state see Newsom’s health-first approach as really “health only,” said Rob Lapsley of the California Business Roundtable. Lapsley argues that California’s countywide restrictions are too broad and advocates for more “surgical” restrictions on neighborhoods or specific businesses.
“This health-first policy is not providing in California a real balance in how to move forward the economy. The rest of the country, they’re way ahead of us in reopening,” he said. “Frustration right now is running rampant throughout the business community.”
While Newsom has dealt with pressure from some vocal, conservative enclaves, a Biden administration could potentially face opposition from a GOP-controlled Senate and Republican governors.
Madrid said the population of people who want to reopen the economy before the virus is contained is a minority, and neither Biden nor Newsom should bow to their pressures. A new poll from the Public Policy of Institute of California found that just 26% of respondents want looser restrictions on public activity during the pandemic.
“That’s the shame of what happened with California’s leadership,” Madrid said. “We allowed a very small, fringe group of critics to jeopardize the health of millions of Californians.”
Better coordination among different levels of government is an area where Biden could steer the country in a better direction, Sohn said. But he said shutting down the economy if the virus worsens, as Biden has suggested, would be the wrong approach.
Biden, for his part, has said he believes it is the responsibility of the president to lead a unified and aggressive COVID-19 response, which includes directing the Centers for Disease Control to issue guidelines around levels of reopening. His plan leans heavily on directing manufacturers to produce protective equipment like masks, implementing widespread testing and contact tracing, and providing business, schools and governments with the tools they need to reopen safely.
Biden argues that Newsom and other governors need federal help to succeed. He’s proposed a nationwide testing strategy, an idea Trump has rejected. He’s also said he supports sending more aid money to states, something Newsom says California desperately needs.
Recent polling from FiveThirtyEight.com shows about 40% of Americans, most of them Republicans, approve of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
An August Gallup poll asked people to choose between two paths for people who do not have symptoms of coronavirus and are otherwise healthy: “to stay home as much as possible to avoid contracting or spreading the coronavirus or to lead their normal lives as much as possible and avoid interruptions to work and business?” Some 65% of Americans said it’s best for asymptomatic people to stay home.
“If there’s a big, giant Republican resistance to what (Biden) does, we’ll be in the same predicament,” Maviglio said.
But if Biden wins, he said, “I think there’s enough consensus... (Republicans) will be more focused on getting things done.”
This story was originally published September 20, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "What California’s COVID approach could teach the country if Joe Biden wins."