Election day in the era of COVID-19 Welcome to the Maclean's Politics Insider: America 2020, launched for readers who crave U.S. political news during primary season. If you want to receive this new newsletter, take no action, it will arrive in your inbox every weekday at noon. If you'd rather not receive it, please unsubscribe here. Election day in a transformed country: One week after several U.S. states held their primaries just the way they always do, everything had already changed. One state, Ohio, cancelled its primary at the last minute, moving it to June at the earliest, due to the inherent health risk of an election. Florida, Illinois and Arizona went ahead with in-person voting. But they struggled with the challenge of holding large public gatherings in an era when everyone is being asked to avoid gathering in public. In Illinois, officials "scrambled to find alternate locations" to replace nursing homes and other high-risk locations that had been expected to act as polling places. Not all the votes were cast on the day, though; some of them were entered during early voting or vote-by-mail programs, which may become standard practice for all elections in the COVID-19 era. Biden wins low-turnout primaries: In the primaries that were held, Joe Biden continued his winning streak, taking all three states up for grabs — Illinois, Florida and Arizona — soon after the polls closed. The results weren't surprising; Florida in particular had been considered out of reach for Sanders due to his defence of Fidel Castro's literacy programs , which had him underwater with the state's large Cuban-American community. In his victory speech, Biden continued his ongoing strategy of trying to reach out to Sanders voters who will be disappointed by a now-inevitable Biden nomination: "Let me say, especially to the young voters who have been inspired by Senator Sanders: I hear you. I know what’s at stake. I know what we have to do. Our goal as a campaign, and my goal as a candidate for president, is to unify this party and then to unify the nation." No more get-out-the-vote: On an election day, the candidates' teams usually urge people to get out and vote. On Tuesday, that was not really feasible. So a spokesman for Bernie Sanders said the candidate would not be doing any of the usual "get out the vote" activities. However, both Sanders and Joe Biden stopped short of actually asking voters not to show up in person. Sanders tweeted that "going to the polls amid the coronavirus outbreak is a personal decision and we respect whichever choice voters make." Biden wrote that his campaign was encouraging people "to vote by mail or curbside vote" if possible, but merely told in-person voters to be careful about washing their hands and not touching their faces. Biden moving left?: Though Joe Biden is often considered a moderate, centrist Democrat, that's not necessarily true of the platform he's been running on. "For months, Biden has unveiled far-reaching plans that would make him a more progressive nominee than Hillary Clinton or his 2008 running mate, former President Barack Obama," writes Christopher Cadelago in Politico, who notes that Republicans are eager to run negative ads about Biden's newly-progressive positions on issues like fracking and deportations. Even as he becomes more likely to win the nomination, Biden may need to continue to run to the left of Obama because the progressive wing of the Democratic party is so much more powerful now than it was then. Charles Pierce of Esquire argues that progressives may be able to trust Biden, essentially, because he has no clear principles other than party loyalty: The main question going forward... is how sincere do you believe Joe Biden is in his newfound adoption of positions that would have been unthinkable 20 years—or 20 months—before. If he thinks that’s where the party’s headed, he will go along. His history proves that he will, and that he likely will do it with gusto. — Jaime Weinman | 
