Politics of pandemic response emerge in Minnesota Senate race
April 13, 2020
While Minnesota plunged
into lockdown to stop the spread of COVID-19, Republican U.S. Senate
candidate Jason Lewis wasted no time disputing the breadth of the
restrictions.
“Open
Minnesota for business,” Lewis’ campaign declared on March 25, the same
day that Gov. Tim Walz implemented a two-week stay-home order that’s
since been extended to May 4.
Lewis
instead urged a scaling back that would have allowed Minnesota
businesses to reopen “for all but the most vulnerable residents” by
April 1, and for schools to reopen by mid-April. In an interview last
week, Lewis said he still believes that would be the better course.
Lewis,
challenging Democratic U.S. Sen. Tina Smith in November, has
increasingly staked his campaign on resistance to the pandemic response
of Minnesota’s DFL leadership, foretelling what’s likely to be the
dominant issue in races up and down the ballot in this pivotal election
year.
The
former talk show host and congressman is not the only Minnesota
Republican to question whether the measures are worth the economic toll,
but his position as GOP standard-bearer in the only statewide campaign
this year is setting up a high-profile test of whether there’s a
political upside to criticizing the strictest safety measures.
“You’ve got these small mom and pops — car dealerships, restaurants, coffee shops in areas, quite frankly remote areas, that have no signs of any outbreak that are suffering from this shutdown,” Lewis said. “I don’t think that’s going to help us fight the virus.”
Walz implemented the
stay-home measures as a means of slowing the virus’ spread, so as not to
overwhelm the state’s medical resources. Smith has echoed the arguments
of the governor — and those of a host of public health officials — that
abandoning the lockdowns could lead to a resurgence of infections and
create greater economic damage.
“We
shouldn’t be looking at this as a choice between our health and our
economy,” said Smith, who was appointed to the Senate at the beginning
of 2018 to serve out the term of former Sen. Al Franken. “Without our
health, we’re going to not have a functioning economy.”
For
her part, Smith’s focus in recent weeks, like most elected officials,
has been on responding to the pandemic’s economic consequences.
On
Feb. 15, she signed a letter from Senate Democrats expressing concern
that Trump administration officials had not yet proposed any additional
federal resources to combat the developing outbreak. She later pushed
for resources for child-care providers to be included in the $2.2
trillion coronavirus relief package and pressed for the release of
Minnesotans who were stranded on cruise ships.
Lewis said that, were he in Congress now, he would have voted in favor of the relief package, which the Senate passed unanimously at the end of March — “based on the premise that this is something that government did to small-businessmen and -women, and therefore had to do something to ease the pain,” he said.
Lewis has been using terms
like “Chinese virus” in reference to COVID-19, echoing President Donald
Trump and many conservative pundits. “I don’t support discrimination
against anyone, but the origin of the virus is an epidemiological fact,”
he said. The outbreak should motivate the U.S. government to vastly
downscale its reliance on resources and goods produced in China, he
said.
Smith
said she, too, has concerns that some U.S. supply chains are
overreliant on Chinese labor. But she said that “to link it with an
ethnic group or nationality is just wrong, and a way of shifting blame.”
The
University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, which rates election
matchups around the country, has Minnesota’s race as “likely
Democratic.” That tracks with Minnesota’s 12-year unbroken string of
supporting Democrats in statewide races.
And
Smith, by the end of last year, had more than seven times the campaign
cash in the bank as Lewis. Fundraising totals for the first three months
of this year are scheduled for release by April 15.
Lewis praises Trump’s handling of the viral pandemic and could benefit from the president’s efforts to put Minnesota in play in the presidential election. He said he hopes to benefit from GOP donors who see Minnesota as a pickup opportunity given imperiled Republican Senate incumbents in a handful of blue states.
“There’s this slate of
Senate candidates who are going to be in the fight of their lives, so we
better find some states we can flip,” Lewis said.
Any serious critique of government response to the pandemic can’t ignore the Trump administration’s role, Smith said.
“I’m
angry they were so slow and ineffective in getting these tests
deployed,” Smith said. “I think that’s really hurt us. And the mess in
the medical supply chain is inexcusable.”
The
coming weeks and months will start to show how both state and federal
government actions to mitigate the coronavirus play out against the
backdrop of the intensifying election cycle. While partisan fissures
erupt over the science, Lewis sees voter sentiment shifting against
lockdowns and other forms of government intervention.
“Politicians
and pundits seem fixated on shelter-in-place policies and yet another
‘stimulus’ plan to save us,” he wrote in a March 25 opinion piece.
“Sooner or later, freedom-loving Americans will rebel.”
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