Riley Hinklin

November 3, 2020- I’ve been phone banking for months now, and I am honestly surprised at how infrequently COVID-19 comes up as a major issue on people’s minds when they’re deciding who to vote for. Sure, people will mention “healthcare” or “the economy,” which are tangentially related to COVID, but only a couple of people, maybe one per week, will immediately answer “COVID” when asked what issues they care about. Of those, about half are people who are very concerned about their health or their jobs and about half are people who are angry at Governor Walz for his emergency powers, the shutdown, and mask mandates. My informal guess-timates of how many people have COVID at the front of their minds when deciding who to vote for is roughly similar to what the PEW Research Center has found. The Coronavirus outbreak was only fourth on the list of issues that people rated as being “very important” with healthcare and the economy being higher.