Welcome to Ballot Watch, our weekly have a look at polling information and survey analysis on the candidates, voters and points that may form the 2
Welcome to Ballot Watch, our weekly have a look at polling information and survey analysis on the candidates, voters and points that may form the 2020 election.
Two months after the coronavirus shuttered a lot of america financial system, the outbreak’s affect — on jobs, well being care, meals entry and rather more — is rising solely extra extreme, in accordance with a rising physique of polling and social science information.
However right here’s what else the polls are telling us: People are typically tired of returning to regular, and so they are likely to imagine federal well being consultants, who proceed to warn towards a swift reopening of the financial system.
Polling can tell us about more than what people think: It can offer insights into their day-to-day lives. In this regard, a quickly accruing body of data suggests that — even as the days pass into weeks, and many people have settled into something resembling a quarantine routine — the livelihoods of those at the margins have grown much more threatened.
Researchers at the Economic Policy Institute used a nonscientific survey to estimate that in addition to those already on the unemployment rolls, eight to 12 million people could have applied for joblessness benefits since the start of the pandemic but did not. Most of those people, the study determined, reported that they had sought to file for unemployment but had been unable to make it through the application; others simply did not make an attempt.
“We unfortunately in the United States have pretty fragile social support systems,” Ben Zipperer, an economist at the institute, said in an interview. “We’re dealing with systems that were not necessarily in great shape before the crisis, and now we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and they’re stretched to their limits.”
The implications of such staggering job losses carry over into other facets of life, including health care access and food security. According to a separate analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, as of last week nearly 13 million people had lost access to employer-provided health care.
So perhaps it is unsurprising that in the A.P./NORC poll from late April, 56 percent of respondents said that if they received a stimulus check, they would use it to cover regular expenses or to pay back debt.
It has now been over a month since Congress voted to send $1,200 checks to most Americans, and legislators have not yet taken meaningful steps toward another infusion of cash for workers.
The virus’s effects are being felt most acutely in states with a high concentration of people in cities, and the six most-infected states per capita all trend Democratic politically. Black people and Latinos are showing some of the highest rates of infection: More than a quarter of all confirmed cases have been among Latinos, according to C.D.C. statistics, and even more have been among African-Americans.
In the tristate area, the virus’s epicenter, about four in five respondents to a Quinnipiac University poll released this week said they worried that a family member might become seriously ill from the virus. And more than six in 10 in the poll said they personally knew someone who had tested positive for it.
Medical experts — and the experiences of other countries that have been relatively successful at containing the virus — indicate that short of a vaccine, the best hope for a healthy return to economic activity lies in widespread access to testing. But 75 percent of respondents in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut said in the Quinnipiac poll that they thought more testing would be needed in order for it to become safe for their state to begin lifting stay-at-home orders.
Reflective of national polling, 71 percent of those respondents said they wanted their state government to focus on controlling the virus, not on reopening.