COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 10/03/2020
Jon Allsop
ELEVEN DAYS AGO, Politico’s David Siders imagined the ways in which the spread of the coronavirus might curtail routine campaigning activities at the height of the 2020 election cycle. “Think sickly field organizers, restrictions on staff travel… and rallies no one wants to attend,” he wrote. In electoral terms, the article already feels like a relic of a bygone age—it quotes Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, and Michael Bloomberg, who have since dropped out of the race, and notes that a mass cancellation of rallies might help Bloomberg, given his prodigious ad presence on TV and online. (So much for that.) But in virus terms, it’s starting to feel prescient.