Clipsheet

“This just makes me feel that the winter will be more ominous. I don’t think it’s going to go down. It could, we have the time for it to go down,” said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “But you really need to have a sudden and complete change in behavior across the state, and it’s hard to believe it will occur.”

Howard Schweber, a political-science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said the conflicts in all three states reflect the intense partisan divide, with Democratic governors and one or both houses of the legislative branch controlled by Republicans.

“What we have is just a sort of state-level version of what is sometimes called constitutional hardball,” he said. “Parties pushing the rules of the game and their interests to the extreme that the system will allow, which would be unfortunate if we were talking about, say, fiscal policy, but in the case of a genuine public-health crisis, is truly disastrous.”

“I think it’s a combination of widespread national interest in racial justice and the pandemic happening simultaneously [driving engagement]—and the fact that these arenas aren’t actually being used for sports [that] makes them available,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founding director of its Elections Research Center. “So it’s sort of a perfect storm of all these things coming together that’s made it sort of a natural extension for teams to make.”

David Canon, chair of the political science department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agreed.But he said Trump may have committed a “tactical error” by backing out of a virtual debate with Biden.“He needed the debates more than Biden did,” Canon said. “He’s the one that needs to change the momentum in the election.”