How Will COVID-19 Shape the Election? DNC Chair Weighs In

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: This idea that the Democratic Party is now really united, how is that going to play out in a situation where campaigning, fund-raising, all of that is so difficult to achieve in a quarantined world?

TOM PEREZ, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: I really believe, Christiane, that our unity has always been our greatest strength and Donald Trump’s worst nightmare. And look at where we are right now in the presidential race. We had roughly two dozen candidates get in the race. Every single one of them said, I’m in it to win it, and, if I don’t win it, I will support the nominee. And that’s exactly what has happened now, everybody coming together around our presumptive front-runner nominee, Joe Biden. And the unity of values that we are showing — I applaud Senator Sanders, whose strong endorsement is critical, and Senator Warren today, as you correctly point out. Yes, we have a global pandemic. So we are changing our tactics, but we’re not changing our goals. We have trained 8,000 digital organizers in the last three or four weeks. We continue to do that. We continue to build up in these battleground states. We have laid a foundation that enables us to communicate with voters. No, we’re not knocking on doors, that’s for sure. But we’re communicating through alternative means. And the energy is out there. We just saw it in Wisconsin earlier this week, where we scored some really important victories there. And the momentum, I think, is on our side in very real ways. People want leadership in this country who’s looking out for them. They want competent leadership. This president has been an abject failure. He is chronically ineffective. He’s making matters worse by the day. People are seeing that.

AMANPOUR: Tom Perez, of course, he does — he is the president. He is an incumbent. And he has all the advantages of that, plus the daily White House, as they call it, the bully pulpit, where he’s very prominent, and all over everybody’s television screens. And he has — I mean, continuing this China conversation, he has put out a video, as you saw, trying to attach Joe Biden to China and trying to portray Joe Biden as weak on China. Now, obviously, the fact-checkers looked it up and found a lot of inaccuracies and false edits and all the rest of it all, selective editing. But it’s happening, and it’s happening in full view of a captive audience that Trump has, but Joe Biden doesn’t.

PEREZ: Well, the thing is, every time he speaks, he puts his foot in his mouth. He has violated every principle of crisis management. You speak clearly. You speak compassionately. You speak accurately. He says, I am in charge, I can do anything I want, something like that, the other day. That is chronically inaccurate. He says, this is under control. We still don’t have enough PPE. We are nowhere near the rest of the world on testing.