Bill Clinton famously said “It’s the economy, stupid” that helped him beat George Herbert Bush.

Bernie Sanders is going to say, “It’s health care and workers rights, stupid” that will push him in by a landslide.

Besides the fact that Bernie has always been an outlier on trade, more like Trump than he’d like to admit, the spread of the Coronavirus will be faster and more deadly in the US due to two systemic issues:

• Lack of universal health care (or as he likes to call it, Medicare for all) will prevent people from getting early treatment and intervention due to costs involved.
• Lack of paid sick leave for the lowest paid workers, fast food, house keeping, etc. will keep them working and propagating the virus because of their need to earn a paycheck.

Both of these issues are foremost on Bernie Sanders agenda for America.

While Trump believes that he has been responsible for the insane rise in the stock market, the devastation to global supply chains due to the virus will continue to impact the market and the global standard of living well up to and past the election.

People will shop less, go out less, spend less as fear of being in public rises. Products will be harder to find, thanks to runs on supplies. Hand sanitizer and medical barrier masks are already in short supply.

And while the rich believe that their money will protect them from infection, sadly, because of interdependencies, no one is safe.

Shortages of raw materials from medical ingredients to magnets, hockey sticks to headphones, our global economy will slow down as workers can’t work, people can’t travel and people die.

If Trump wasn’t in denial of the looming devastation, he’d be diverting funds from building the wall, to providing guaranteed free health care for anyone with a positive diagnosis, and a plan to provide paid time off so that the rest of us don’t get bonus Coronavirus with your happy meal. The National Guard should be mobilized in every city that has a first case, and every effort should be made to quarantine all contacts of every confirmed case as fast as possible to minimize spread.

Funds should be poured into the CDC and medical research to find better tools to deal with the outbreak, instead of worrying about lowering the prime rate to “spark” investment by business.

This isn’t the first time a pandemic has threatened civilization, however, never has it been as easy to travel as something as easily transmitted as the Coronavirus. For the US to survive it will call for a bold new vision and innovative leadership.

My prediction: Sanders for the win.