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The pandemic has inspired new candidates to run, and defined the debate in campaigns up and down the ballots.
The coronavirus pandemic upended Pamela Walsh’s life. It shut down her office, leaving her working at home from a folding table. It forced her to turn her dining room into a Zoom classroom for her 7-year-old son. And the virus propelled a still more unlikely change: It led Ms. Walsh to run for public office.
“It wasn’t even on my radar screen,” said Ms. Walsh, 47, a political adviser in Concord, N.H., who has long worked for Democrats but never before considered seeking elective office herself. Months of supervising elementary school lessons from home, with little idea of when her son would return to school, convinced Ms. Walsh that she should vie for a seat on her local school board.
“I decided I needed a voice like mine on the board,” Ms. Walsh said in a phone interview, which she muted periodically as her son called out for her and at one point thumped a bat on a chair. “Everyone is struggling right now a bit and needs to be represented by how these policies impact real families.”
By some measure, all politics is virus politics in 2020, and the federal government’s handling of Covid-19 has become an explosive issue in the presidential race, which has been further complicated by President Trump’s own hospitalization for the virus.
Yet around the nation, there are local and state races in which the pandemic has also taken an outsize role. In some cases, the virus has been the reason for running; in others, handling of the pandemic has become the defining issue, eclipsing ordinary matters of taxes and services.
The virus — and the government’s response to it — has inspired parents, hair salon owners and others to run for the first time, turned sleepy races into competitive matches and injected a level of unpredictability and rancor into normally tranquil down-ballot contests.
“This is an issue that no one expected to be one of the pillars of this election, but it has clearly become one,” said Robert Griffin, research director for the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, which is partnering with academics at the University of California, Los Angeles, to poll about 6,000 Americans each week leading up to the election.
Mr. Trump’s own bout with Covid-19 only intensified some of the debates over the issue in lower races. “If you, Mr. President, have the best health system in the world and bodyguards and the whole thing, and you still get it, what does that say for us at the local level who are trying to figure out what to do with our children?” asked José Luis Bedolla, 50, who said he was motivated to run for the school board in Berkeley, Calif., because of the pandemic.
Candidates’ own cases of the virus have created all sorts of uncertainty for political races, yanking campaigns off the trail and into quarantine during crucial weeks and confounding political strategists, who have little precedent to lean on as they try to figure out how voters will respond.
In North Carolina, a race that could help decide control of the United States Senate was thrust further into limbo this month when Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, tested positive for the coronavirus after attending a White House ceremony. At the same time, his opponent, Cal Cunningham, is contending with a texting scandal.
In Missouri, where average new daily cases have risen sixfold since mid-June, the governor’s race is being defined in no small part by the pandemic. Gov. Mike Parson, the incumbent Republican who is leading in the polls, had resisted requiring people to wear masks and at times campaigned without one. Then last month, he came down with the virus himself.
As Mr. Parson was sidelined, his Democratic opponent, Nicole Galloway, wished him well while also soliciting donations in an effort to remind voters of their dueling positions on the virus. An online ad showed her wearing a blue mask, side-by-side with a barefaced Mr. Parson.
“Governor Parson has failed this test, and it’s apparent,” Ms. Galloway said in an interview. An accountant by training and the current state auditor, she has made public health a key issue in Zoom appearances, uses elbow-bumps on the campaign trail, and has said she will issue a mask requirement if elected.
Elsewhere, conservatives have made their opposition to mandates on masks and business closings the center of blossoming campaigns.
In Washington State, a small-town police chief has made Gov. Jay Inslee’s handling of the pandemic a top issue in a long-shot bid to become the state’s first Republican governor since the 1980s. The chief, Loren Culp, has criticized Mr. Inslee, a Democrat, as a “job killer” and is drawing a contrast by holding rallies where masks are not required.
In Texas, a salon owner who was jailed this spring for defying shutdown orders quickly became an anti-lockdown hero for the political right. The owner, Shelley Luther, spoke at rallies, gave Senator Ted Cruz a haircut and donned a T-shirt emblazoned with the popular Texas rallying cry “Come and Take It” — except in place of a cannon, there was a blow dryer.
