On today's program: The NFL deals with its first coronavirus outbreak; one man is crossing Pennsylvania to distribute thousands of yard signs before the election; and the dispute over a successor to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg adds more tension to a divisive election year.
NFL delays first game due to the coronavirus
(00:00 — 5:27)
The Steelers are 3-0—their best start since the 2010 season. But they won’t have a chance to make it 4-0 Sunday in Nashville against the Tennessee Titans. A coronavirus outbreak has affected at least six staff members and four players for the Titans, and the matchup has been postponed.
This is the first time an NFL game has been affected by the coronavirus—“a pretty impressive feat of contact tracing,” saysSean Gentille, a senior writer forThe Athletic. Everyone in the facility (excluding the media) wears tracking bracelets to help track potential cases of COVID-19.
“I mean, it’s a major, major undertaking, and it doesn’t surprise me the NFL was prepared for this,” he says. “From the planning end of things, you know, they had four months or five months of runway for this. They decided it was going to work, and for the most part it has.”
The Steelers-Titans game will take place onMonday or Tuesday of next week.
Yard sign campaign offers a “low tech solution” to a mostly virtual campaign season
(5:31 — 13:28)
Jeff Eggleston, a Democratic State Committee member from Warren County, says he felt like didn’t do enough in the 2016 presidential election.
“That night I very distinctly remember saying to myself in 2020, in the next four years, I’m not going to leave anything on the table; it’s too important,” he says.
In the leadup to the 2020 election, he’s crisscrossing Pennsylvania distributing yard signs more than 120,000 voters. Though the yard signs don’t seem like a lot, Eggleston says in some parts of the state, they’re a way to signal to neighbors that it’s safe to express their political views. “The yard sign is the easiest way in a contactless environment to show your support and campaign and promote your candidate.”
He says the signs are in demand, and hopes they’ll make a difference in the November election.
“I’ve talked to people in counties, for instance, in the northeast where during the 2016 they had to fight to put out a thousand signs, and in this election, they’ve already put out 10,000 and they need more,” he says.
How will the dispute over the Supreme Court influence voters’ choices in the November election?
(13:31 — 17:47)
The U.S. Supreme Court has been thrust into the political spotlight following the recent death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As part of theSplit Ticket series looking at how issues like this influence voters’ choices, 90.5 WESA’sLucy Perkins reports the fight over Ginsburg’s replacement underscores the tensions of a divisive election year.
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