>ERIC WEISSMANN:   Good morning and good afternoon, everybody.  There are I guess almost 400 of you on the call so far, and we're going to be up to about 800 people today, so hello to all of our University of Rochester alumni and friends.  My name is Eric Weissmann, class of 2010.  I'm a member of the alumni board.  Which is a group made up of 25 members, representing each of the university's schools.  With the purpose of engaging all alumni
and students in a lifelong connection with one another and with the university.  Today is our second webinar, in a new series called experience Rochester.  And it will everyonely FIE the university's commitment to lifelong learning.  We will feature topics and speakers unique to the university, and for now, these experiences will take place virtually.  But eventually, we hope you'll be able to join us for live, in person events.
Before today's webinar begins, I'd like to share a few Zoom webinar tips to those new to the platform, although I suspect by this point, most of you are quite experienced with Zoom.
If you would like to ask a panelist a question, please submit it through the Q & A function at the bottom of the screen.  Professor Primo will answer questions at the end of the presentation.  If you would like to view this session with closed captions, click the CC button on the bottom tool bar and select turn on subtitles.
If you're having trouble viewing the webinar, you can call in and listen using the phone number that was included on your confirmation e-mail.  And now, it is my absolute pleasure to introduce today's speaker, who was one of my favorite professors when I was a student and also my advisor and my political science major, ten years ago, at the reunion year.  So professor David Primo is the Ani and Mark Gabrellian professor and political science and business
professor at the University of Rochester.  He's the author or coauthor of four books, op-eds in the New York Times, the Wall Street journal and other national news outlets and in 2014, he created the politics and markets project, which fosters education, research, and debate about the appropriate relationship between business and Government in the 21st century.
Philippe Maass's today's moderator is a 2020 take 5 scholar.  He is majoring in economics and political science and is currently conducting research on the emergence of social media based journalistic sources in east Africa.  Thank you again for joining us and now, my pleasure to turn it over to professor Primo.
>DAVID PRIMO:  Well, hello, everyone, thank you very much, Eric for that very kind introduction, and thanks to all of you who are joining us today from around the country, around the world, and I was really heartened when I saw so many people registered for this event.  And I took a look and in fact, we have such a wide range of University of Rochester friends and alums represented, going back to the class of 1955.  Up to and including current students.
And I think that's just a wonderful testament to the community we've built here at the U of R, and it's my hope that we will be able to get over to the other side on this crisis.  And we will emerge actually as a stronger university as a result of this.  But one way in which we can get to that point, is to ensure that we maintain an open and free society here in the United States.  And that's the focus of my talk today, which is will American democracy survive COVID-19.  I wanted to start
be a poll before we get into simple -- how concerned are you about the state of the American democracy and whether that level off concern has changed since the coronavirus crisis began?  So I'll give you a few seconds to answer that poll.  And then report on the results.
When you're doing a poll on Zoom and you don't have any real faces in front of you, you almost feel like you need to be playing the jeopardy music or something to pass the time.  But in a few seconds, we'll wrap up the poll, give you a chance no answer, and then I will return to my remarks.  We are all Zoom experts now, we answered this in record time.  So 58% of you are very concerned about American democracy and over three-quarters of you are concerned -- have had that concern grow.
You know, any consolation, you're not alone, there's a reason why so many people turned out for this and despite that Eric said about how you you liked me as a professor.  I'm going to try in the next 20 minutes during my prepared reMarks to put expect -- how American democracy will evolve in the coming months and put into context what we've seen in the past.
I'm frankly, not very concerned about the state of American democracy in the United States as a result of COVID-19.  I am concerned, I think it's something that we need to have internal individual lens with regard to, but I don't think that the sky is falling, and I'm going to tell you why I think that the sky isn't falling, as part of my conversation today.
So I'm going to go ahead and share my presentation now.  So again, the topic of today Will American Democracy Survive COVID-19 in and I'm going to play on talking for about 20 minutes today.  Then we're going to open it up to questions that Philippe Maass, my current student, has so kindly agreed to moderate, looking forward to my conversation with him in a few minutes.
The, you know, registration process for this event allowed you to ask questions and I was impressed with the great questions we received.  I'm going to try to address some of them during my talk, others we'll address during the Q & A and if you have questions that come up during the talk, please don't hesitate to type them in, Philippe will be monitoring those questions, and we'll try to get to as many of them as we can by the end of the session.
Really, this could be an entire course.  Right?  We could do a course on American democracy and COVID-19.  I'm going to try to FE cuss your attention on -- focus your attention on three big pictures in the coming months and the coming years.  Let me start with
you know, why everybody answered two-thirds of you, if not more, answered that you were very concerned about the state of the American democracy.  If you read anything in the news today, you could be -- you can't be blamed for having that assessment.  These are a smattering of the headlines and a small sampling of the headlines I've been able to find in the coming -- in recent weeks regarding attitudes towards democracy, so American democracy may be dying.  Each accusing the other party of try
I should also emphasize, this is not just pundits talking heads making these claims, experts in political science have raised concerns about American democracy since President Trump was elected, we saw experts becoming concerned about American democracy, that's the subject for another talk.
But if you look at this map I've just put on the screen, you'll see that a recent ranking by a group called the VDEM institute, that rates DE democracy, they did a study looking at what's called pandemic backsliding.  So what we see a retrenchment of democracy in countries as a result of the pandemic.  And one of the features that stuck out to me, the countries in yellow are medium risk for having a problem with the pandemic backsliding.
The United States is on par with Russia in terms of fears about pandemic backsliding.  My assessment is that that's -- that's a harsh, too harsh an assessment of where we are in the United States.  I think that we're at low risk, if the I had to, you know, color this map myself, I would put us in the low risk category.
But low risk doesn't mean no risk.  And sort of one of the messages of this talk is the idea of eternal individual lens we hear when we think about democracy, we can't take for granted that our rights aren't going to be eroded, elections are going to be run fairly and freely.  But at the same time, we shouldn't immediately rush to the conclusion that there's a crisis, politicians are acting like politicians and therefore, democracy is crumbling.
It's more subtle than that and I'm going to talk about that today.
Three main pointed I wanted to cover today in my discussion.  The upcoming election, election 2020, the issue of civil liberties, and the national debt.
So those are three broad topics, again, there are others I could have talked about, but we are constrained on time and I will to limit my focus, and hopefully we can get to the other topics during Q & A, I see a lot of questions coming in, that's fantastic.  Philippe is moderating, please keep the questions coming.
So as we turn to a discussion of election 2020, in the back of your minds, I want you to keep this idea of what politics is, consider this idea of what politics is.  Right?  Politicians always have incentives to try to engage in what we might call political opportunityism, there is a situation in a time of crisis to use the emergency powers that elected officials disposal to try to increase the level of power that elected official has.
This is a bipartisan phenomenon.  We want to be on the lookout for the use of power grabs or political opportunityism in the times of democracy.  There's the concern that we as a public, may leave our guards down a bit during a pandemic.  So we may be more likely to let our civil liberties be erode because we need to have the country be protected.  We saw that in the wake of 9/11 and we're seeing it today.  One political scientists calls the siren song of strong men that may be at work here
That we look to autocratic countries like China and see that they, after initial missteps, sort of were able to use the power of the state to deal with the crisis in an effective way, many people argued, that's obviously for for dispute T. Concern is that the public might say, well, we need to give up our liberties in the interest of solving this pandemic or dealing with this pandemic more effectively.
So that should be in the back of your minds here as we -- as we move forward.  So the 2020 election.
So let me start with what won't happen as a result of coronavirus.  Donald Trump is not going to cancel the 2020 election.  That is one of those claims that's out there, that's been made, it's just not true.  So this is a headline from POLITICO that you're looking at titled the nightmare scenario, how coronavirus could make the 2020 vote a disaster.
And even under this nightmare scenario, there isn't a fear that we're going to have the president cancel the presidential election.  That said, the nightmare scenario laid out in this article that interviews an election law scholar who's concerned about the election isn't pretty.  There are things that can go wrong in the election.  And we do need to be aware of those
Of those considerations.  So this is a picture from the Wisconsin primary election from a couple of weeks back.  Highly disputed election, in terms of the timing of the election, the use of absentee ballot, made its way through the Courts, and raises the question of whether or not the 2020 election is going to be disrupted in other ways.
And we're already seeing jockeying between the democrats and the republicans over exactly what the parameters of the election are going to look like.
President Trump has enreingauged what I call the rigged rhetoric during the 2016 campaign, vote by mail, proposed as a solution for having lots of people congregating in voting places, that that vote by mail procedure is ripe with fraud and lead to the election being fixed against him.  The best evidence is that vote by mail will not lead to a marked significant amount of fraud in elections.
But as a social scientists, I sort of wonder, though, we've run the vote by mail experiment on a very limited basis in the states.  Will those results we get when we look at those states, very low fraud, will we actually see that if we were to roll out vote by mail on a broader scale, across the country, open to everybody?  That is I think an open question, but I'm not terribly concerned about the voter fraud problem.  I think that could be managed.  You might say, well, the bigger problem
And I don't want to put those claims into context for you.  So the chart on the lower left, which I don't expect you to look through the numbers, that's a chart from my forthcoming book on campaign finance and the American democracy.  The pew center from a couple of weeks back.  After the 2016 elections, my coauthor asked whether they were confident in the election.  Two-thirds of Donald Trump voters, whose candidate was victorious, thought the election was dandy, integrity and honesty.  On
The upper right hand side of the screen, you'll see that again, you see a huge partisan split in terms of beliefs about whether the election will be conducted fairly.  What does this tell us?  So O if you're a democrat, it tells us that the democrats know more than republicans about elections, if you're a republican, see the democrats, they DOBLTHS know what they're talking about.  What it tells me is that a lot of what constitutes faith in American Government and democracy and electi hinge
Well, what does that tell us?  We need to look at the public opinion data very cautiously, so looking at this data, and saying, you know, oh, my God, the sky is falling because people are concerned about whether elections are going to run fairly, we need to always keep in mind, right, that there are these partisan considerations at play.  I'm happy to talk more about that in the Q & A.
So what else could go wrong in the 2020 election?  Massive voter fraud, due to vote by mail.  Again, I'm not terribly concerned about that.  Though, I do think we need to have safe guards in place.
Another concern, will the president -- will governors use their emergency powers in an attempt to suppress turnout?  Or to meddle with how the electoral college does its business?  It's possible that a legislature could vote to allocate electoral votes.  Based on its own preferences rather than those of the citizens of the state.  Are those scenarios likely?  I just -- again, I don't think so.
My sense is that there would be too much push back from the American people if it were clear that these results were being manipulated in ways that simply weren't justifyable in any reasonable way.
The third concern is the one that I think is potentially the most realistic.  And that is that we end up in a situation where the election is contested for some reason.  It could be that there's a delay in reporting results, which creates opportunities to claim there was due to fraud due to the delay in the results.  Disputes in one state over how the election was run and that state is pivotal in the electoral college.
And the country is sort of fragile now, as a result of the COVID-19, and there's a fear, right, that this is -- this would be a significant problem.  That, to me is the biggest risk we face in the 2020 election.  I'm not, again, sort of, we've been here before is the message I would have for everybody in the audience.  We've been here before, and, you know, we got through the 2000 election as difficult as it was.  And I think we'll get through this one again.
One message that I want to make sure I get in now, just to ensure that we don't -- in case we run low on time, I want to make sure I get this point in.  Is that, you know, the key is that we abide by court decisions.
So once we start seeing politicians ignore court decisions, that's when I personally will start to get really nervous about the future of American democracy.
Okay.  So now, let's turn to the second set of issues I want to discuss, and that's civil liberties.  Again, keep those questions coming.  Happy to discuss them during Q & A.
So civil liberties, I'm taking a bunch of rights here and mashing them up into one topic in the interest of time.  In general, right, the state will attempt to use its powers during a crisis to make the situation better, but in doing so, we run the risk that we allow the state to infringe on our civil liberties.  And again, our guard down.  We're so desperate to see coronavirus eliminated, we're so desperate to see the COVID-19 infections dissipate.
That we tend to be willing to allow our rights to be eroded.  And again, here's where the message of eternal individual lens comes back in.  So we're started to see limits on protests, limits on the press and social media due to COVID-19 and that is of concern to me because many of these restrictions are not in my view justified on criminal health grounds.  Oil development, for instance, that does seem to be to be the lease restrictive way to ensure public safety
If you believe in the first amendment.  Weave seen three states in the past month, or two, enact laws that restrict protests with regards to oil development in an effort to -- I would argue, stifle speech.  We're starting to see states putting pressure on the press or social media in some cases, regarding what information they put out about coronavirus.
That, to me is also a problematic trend, and we need to guard against that.  The bigger fear, I have, is that some of these restrictions that are put in place now, if they aren't challenged, will stay in place once the crisis is over.  And our results -- our rights, excuse me, will be eroded to some degree.
So that's something that I think is important for us to all be aware of and to watch carefully in the coming months.
The second piece of the civil liberties nix here that I wanted to discuss is privacy rights and health.  So this is a QR code that's on the screen.  And in China, in the past couple of weeks, they've rolled out a color coded QR codes for citizens based on the data that the Government has on the citizens and the model they run regarding whether or not an individual in China is at high, low or medium risk for coronavirus.
So you walk around with these color coded QR codes.  And one of the questions that we received in advance of the talk was about whether we're entering a brave new world in American democracy where our rights and our privacy is going to be eroded complete any in the name of dealing with public health?
It's something that I think we need to be aware of and pay attention to.  Because especially now that we have amazing life changing technologies around the world, those technologies, we all know, can be misused.  And so it needs to be the case that any public health measures that are taken don't begin to infringe on civil liberties so fundamentally that they challenge what it means to live in a democracy.
So, you know, the QR code, I think is a nice visual for thinking about what again public health sort of protecting public health, how that's -- there's a trade off there with civil liberties and we need to be careful about erring on the side of public health and in doing so, damaging civil liberties so fundamentally that we can't resurrect them once the crisis abated.  And keep in mind, this is a repeated game.  Right?  This isn't the last pandemic that we're going to see.  Hopefully, it's
for many of us, but it's not the last pandemic that we're going to see in American history.  Or in the American future, if you will.  Right?  We need to be paying attention to these sorts of things.
Last point I want to make, and then I want to leave plenty of time for questions, I want to talk a little bit about the national debt.
This is a topic that until last few days, was not getting a ton of attention during coronavirus.  And in fact, it was almost politically incorrect to say, hey, you notice we're running up a massive amount of debt to deal with this crisis?  Because what kind of ghoul would you be to make that argument?  We need to solve the problem.  Well, now, Jay Powell is jumping into if mix, only February, when he was testifying that we need to do something about the deficit.
He's changed his tune as well now, so this is a press conference he gave yesterday, excuse me, where he said this is not the time to act on national debt concerns.
This is the time for the Government to spend.
My response to that is to just how do you think about what happened when the bill comes due?  And this is a chart from a report from the congressional budget office that shows over time, debt to GDP ratio, basically how much debt does the Government hold as a function of the economy?  And we sort of are seeing to the right of that projected line
a runup in debt, the likes of which we have never seen in our history.  And that is going to come from the debt we're taking on now due to coronavirus, plus issues with entitlements.
So it is reasonable, I think, to say now is not the time, today is not the time to say let's put in budget cuts tax increases to deal with the debt.  But I would ask the question, when is a good time to deal with the debt?  I've been telling politicians for the last decade, you should be able to do something about the debt.  And, you know, not that they're going to listen to me, but, you know, they are not going to listen to me, they're dismissive.  We don't need to worry about the debt.
This is the democrats and the republicans, a bipartisan problem.  In good times, we had a strong economy, now is not the time to deal with the debt and deficits and during a crisis, it's not the time to deal with the debt and deficits, when is it?  My fear is that we're going to get into a fiscal crisis. Another sort of crisis before Congress acts.
Why is that a concern?  Well, that's a concern for the very reason that we're having this talk today.  That crisis are precisely the time when we need to be careful about losing our democratic rights.
So I worry about the national debt because that is another crisis that's coming.  And I don't see enough of attention being given to that issue from those that actually make the decisions.  So Jay Powell can say all he wants, whether in February or yesterday, he doesn't control fiscal policy.  I can go and testify before Congress on budget rules, I don't get to make the rules.  Until elected officials decide that this is a priority
this is not going to be something that gets attention, and I do worry about the implications of that for the country's future.
So with that, I want to wrap up, and just say thank you for attending the talk, we have plenty of time for Q & A, I'm going to stop sharing my screen.  I'm back now in my full HD, and Philippe Maass is going to join us, Philippe is somebody I've known basically since he started at the U of R.  He is a
2020 take 5 student, he's about to graduate with having done the take 5 program, doing some really interesting work, looking at the use of social media in journalism in Africa.  And he's been a student in several of my classes and I'm so glad that he could join us to moderate, Philippe, I'm going to turn the floor over to you.
>PHILIPPE MAASS:  Thank you, processor.  Before we get started, I wanted to thank everyone who submitted a question during the registration or in realtime during the Zoom Q & A function.  We're doing that through -- by consolidating the questions in similar themes.  I wanted to start with the question that was asked a few minutes ago.
So considering the fact that we might have some, you know, mail in ballots and things like that, how would you factor in the risk of increasing external interference into our democracy.
>DAVID PRIMO:  There's always -- by external, you're sort of thinking foreign powers?  My -- the best evidence I've seen is that the -- the mail is actually probably less of a risk in terms of manipulation by external powers than something like online voting would be, where you run a risk of a hack that would be harder to detect.  So will foreign powers try to influence the 2020 election?
Absolutely.
Again, trying to put this into context for everybody, foreign powers have tied to influence U.S. elections for time and memorial.  It's just that now that they have better technical tools to do so.  On the other hand, I think that U.S. Government, social media companies, and others, are much more a tune to what these problems might look like.
The X factor here, and I think it's a legitimate question to be asked by the audience, is, you know, will our guard be down a little bit because we're so distracted and busy dealing with COVID and coronavirus?  That, you know, I don't know.  That's hard to assess.  If hi to bet, I don't -- I had to bet, if we're going to have a problem with the 2020 election, it bond foreign interference.
>PHILIPPE MAASS:  Okay.  Is and so how is the pandemic presenting a window of innovation in the election administration how durable are these innovations likely to be?
>DAVID PRIMO:  There's going to be a partisan push and pull here, a tug of war, if you will, over whether or not the reforms we put in place to deal with COVID-19 in elections will be temporary or permanent.  And it's tempting to argue that, again, these rules are being manipulated or used for partisan advantage.  The underlying point there, though, the underlying reason why there's some truth to that, is that rules are not
neutral.  So these rules like vote by mail, it's possible that they could advantage one party or the other.  So the battle over the rule is often a battle over how that will end up shaping out comes.  The best evidence we have to date is that vote by mail doesn't advantage either party actually.  But a recent stud KI DI looking at Wisconsin seemed to suggest that democrats, democrats did a little bit better.  As a result of vote by mail.
We'll have to see whether or not that holds up, I'm sure there will be a lot of political scientists trying to study the vote by mail and its effects.  You'll watch as we observe these electoral innovations, in the coming election, you're going to start to see debates over whether or not to make these changes permanent.
Where I do think we have the possibility to enact nonpartisan types of innovations, is with regards to infrastructure of voting.  So, you know, put aside, let's say we have a fight over vote by mail and we resolve that fight.  What's the most safe way to print ballots, distribute them and count them?  Right, so that's sort of if mechanics of the election.  And there, I think we do have the potential for more innovation because we're going to have now 50 states
potentially changing how it is that they run elections, and hopefully we'll be able to learn a lot from the different approaches that they use.
>PHILIPPE MAASS:  Okay.  Great.  As we've been talking a lot about the possibility that the post office might go into bankruptcy, and if we do vote by mail, how will that affect, you know -- how the election will be run or is it likely that it will -- that it will be bankrupt?  And so, you know -- and could we possibly see private take over of some public resources?
>DAVID PRIMO:  I'm not a gambler, but if I had to bet, we're not letting the postal service go under.  It's politically a hot potato, we'll see a lot of jawboning about it.  The post office has been the perfect whipping boy of politicians for decades.  You know, will it lead to restructuring of the post office?  Sort of might be an opportunity, sort of to modernize the postal service.
So for instance, one of the proposals that's been out there for years is that we don't need to get mail service six days a week.  So maybe that can be reduced down.  There can be ways to introduce efficiency.  So I don't think that the postal service is going to go bankrupt.  Without a doubt, right, mail service is not going to be interrupted before the November election.  So I'm -- you know, that I put
like way, way, way, wherever the floor is here, the bottom on my list of things to worry about with regards to the election.
>PHILIPPE MAASS:  All right.  Sounds good.  And so we have one question that was asked during registration by Christian groves.  What are your thoughts about the attempts to delay the census count?  And the redistricting time lines.
>DAVID PRIMO:  Hello, Christian, I hope you're out there in the audience, so Christian is a Ph.D. from our department who is now a professor at USC, what's likely to happen with the census?  And with specifically with regards to elections, what does that mean for redrawing of congressional district lines that are supposed to happen in 2021?  Clearly, there are issues with counting the number of Americans at a time like this.
Looking at the numbers, there's enough of a window there between when census counts should start arriving, even if the process is delayed and when redistricting needs to occur.  That the state also have the chance to draw legislative lines.  Also my sense that we're going to see perhaps more lawsuits than normal and we see a lot of lawsuits to begin with, we'll see more lawsuits next year with regards to how those lines are drawn due to the fact that the census is delayed and some states
might be late getting their lines drawn.  A lot of this is going to depend on the Courts, always watch those court decisions, and make sure that those court decisions are followed by politicians and by elected officials.
So I think that we'll have redistricting next year.  I think that it will be a little messier than normal because some of the census results may be delayed.  Ultimately, though, I think by the end of next year, you know, we'll have seen many of those court cases play out, we'll have seen much of the redistricting occur, and so again, I'm not terribly concerned about, that with an asterisk.  If they are delayed by a clear, that's a completely different ball game.  The Courts then will makes
the decisions, this is why the Courts are so is important.  All of these deadlines missed underthe law, a lot of decisions get made by the Courts with regards to what exceptions to rules are permissible.  It's a great question.
>PHILIPPE MAASS:  And I'm going to shift gears towards questions that are related to the class that I took, so as you mentioned, I was part of your democratic society class, and so we have a question from Kate who's I hope I'm pronouncing that right, who asked a question about the public erosion of trust in our scientific and journalistic TUGS -- not just the scientific facts, but just any facts.
>DAVID PRIMO:  Gosh, that's a great question.  And, you know, so I created a new seminar course called disagreement in a democratic society.  We as a society, as a free society, can disagree in a more productive and effective way.  One of the concerns is, well, is that if we can't have a common set of values over with XH we're having discussions, it becomes difficult to move forward as a society.
You know, with regards to coronavirus, I'm seeing two sets of concerns -- two sets of issues with regards to disagreement.  One is that there -- there's unfortunately a conflation of concerns about out right hoaxes being put out there.  And about questioning science.  So I think there's a -- there's a distinction that needs to be made there.  So I worry that to introduce a phrase
the idea of cancel culture that we hear about, is being introduced to science where those who question sort of what the dominant view is in science, are running the risk of career -- of hurting their careers tremendously.
An example, Johnny and -- professor at Stanford published a paper a few weeks ago arguing infection rates or concerns about coronavirus in the United States were excessive.  And that paper, there was a lot of scientific back and forth, which is exactly what we ought to have in science.  But he also was attacked by many scientists, other on Twitter and on social media, sort of questioning sort of his well-being
mental well-being for writing such a paper.  And so I worry that in an attempt to sort of focus on getting truth, and worrying about facts, we lose sight of the fact, that science is a process.  Right?  And there are going to be disagreements along the way and in what we think are facts are change.  Again, there are of course out right hoaxes out there.  But I go back to John Stewart mill, who famously sort of wrote the reason
why we need to have as many voices as possible in public debate is because there's a chance, just a chance, but there is a chance we're wrong, right, the conventional wisdom could be wrong.  And we need to hear from those voices, as uncomfortable as it might make us.  Of course, we do want to rule out out right hoaxes and it's hard to know, how can we say something is a hoax if there are no facts.  We need to be aware
that sign is constantly evolving and we don't want to have a cancel culture in science, whether in hard science, political science, where you can't challenge the conventional wisdom without fear of your career being and your reputation being tarnished.  So that is sort of a big concern that I have that's come out of this crisis, nothing to do with in this case, with the Government infringing on our ability to
speak, my concern here is about self-censorship, or mob rule, when it comes to democratic disagreement.
>PHILIPPE MAASS:  And so a followup to that, about civil society, still within the themes of the course, so we have a question from -- asking, what will be the impact on civil society, so will citizen participation increase or decrease?  And I want to add, now that we're all in quarantine, a lot of these conversations are happening online.  Right?  And so how does the change of medium affect this?
>DAVID PRIMO:  That's right, so in 1918, when we had the flu pandemic, right, there was no ability to go on to Twitter and say, you know, to attack other scientists and so on.  Yeah, this is a great -- this is a great question.
You know, there are going to be two effects in terms of like turnout, two effects in November, we'll see the effect that people might be fearful of going to the polls, if there aren't alternatives to vote because of concerns about becoming infected.  On the other hand, we'll see probably more -- we see more attention being paid to day to day politics, I think, than we've seen in a long time.
I'm curious, actually, to go and look at hard data on that, but the sense, I get, at least, is that people are at least aware of what the president is saying, aware of what Congress is doing.  In a way that they might have just been tuning out politics on a normal times.
The concern about social media is right, that people don't have their filters on in quite the same way they do in face-to-face interaction, so a lot of the debates and the dialogues are costic, and problematic.  But I would sort of put -- I would try to look at the glass is half full perspective on this.  And think about the amazing resource that social media has been in terms of allowing for individuals to XUN Kate
and connect -- communicate and connect during a time of crisis.  So my -- my hope is that we're going to use social media in the coming months to in fact educate and inform and we'll come out of this on the other side a stronger society.  On the other hand, I go back to that figure I put up a few minutes ago, showing, right that Americans are still polarized, still divided on lots of issues.
There's still a lot of what we call affective polarization in society, we dislike somebody because they're a democrat or republican.  And I don't think that's going to go away as a result of COVID-19. I think that once the crisis abates, we're going to see that come back again.
>PHILIPPE MAASS:  All right.  Sounds good.  I think that was our last question.  Do you have any final remarks, Professor Primo?
>DAVID PRIMO:  I just wanted to do a -- say a couple of things, one is that, you know, a lot of -- I hope that you don't feel like your 40 minutes has been wasted because I haven't given you a lot of definitive answers, but I sort of think that's the point, right, we don't have a lot of the answers yet.
A set of ideas to think about here, and watch and observe over the coming months, and you can be a scientist in that sense, and thinking about what the future for democracy looks like in the United States.  I'm actually optimistic about the future of the democracy in the United States because we are as a country, I actually would argue very resilient.  More resilient than experts in and scientists give us for being a country.
The research I've done in my book, coming outs later this year, campaign finance in American democracy, what the public thinks and what it matters, delves into the question in more detail about, you know, the fact that Americans might be cynical PB politics, there's no doubt about that, but at the end of the day, right, there is a strength of our institutions that will get us through what we're dealing with right now.
And I wanted to thank you, Philippe, for moderating. I also wanted to thank a couple of students, Jonah and -- who helped put together that slide show that you saw.  You know, the alums in the audience, I think you should look to students like Philippe and they're not on camera, students like Jonah and feel real pride for which a they have done here at the University of Rochester over the past couple of months.
They had to go from being students on spring break to students who had to move their entire lives, right, from Rochester, to their homes or potentially a friend's house, or a basement, I've seen some students taking classes from their basements.
And they have done it with between you and me, and the other people, 500 people here, without as much complaining as the faculty.  Right?  The opportunities have been fantastic and amazing throughout this process.  And I think they have really deserved a virtual pat on the back that.  They have demonstrated a resilience that we can all be proud of.  I'm proud of my students and I wanted to make sure that everybody heard that message, who is in the audience because I think
they're hearing a lot from the news media, they may not be hearing from a lot from the professors and I wanted to make sure that that mess AJ got out.  The students have been a credit to TUGS and the resilience they've demonstrated.  So hats off, virtual hats off to the students.
And with that, I don't want to run over on time, studentses in the audience, have had me many class know, I start class on time, and I end class on time.  So we're going to turn -- I'm going to turn the floor over no Eric Weissmann is going to -- after he gets over the flash back of hearing that from when he was in my class over a decade ago, will close the event for today.  Thankser, everyone, for attending.
>ERIC WEISSMANN:   Thank you very much, Professor Primo, I feel transported back to Rochester after that.  And thank you, Philippe for moderating this fantastic session today.  Thank you all for joining us and for your engagement and the great questions that you asked.  We hope you enjoyed the program and we'd like to hear your fee back.  Take a moment to share your thoughts about the session through a brief anonymous survey that will appear on your screen.
Please plan to join us next week on Thursday, may 7th, at noon eastern time.  For our next experience Rochester lecture featuring Susan Blackmon, how to stay healthy during a crisis.  You see that on the screen now.  Thank you, have a great afternoon, everyone, stay safe.  And of course --
