Nirav Shah, who narrowly lost the Maine Democratic primary for governor last week, didn’t run his campaign as a populist, a celebrity or a self-funded business owner. Rather, the first-time candidate is something that would seem anathema in contemporary politics: a public health technocrat who became a household name during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Dr. Shah has some of the highest favorability numbers of any public figure in Maine, despite having been a state resident for less than a decade. He entered the race months later than his four opponents, spent less money than most of them and received few significant endorsements. Graham Platner, the state’s headline-dominating Democratic nominee for Senate, and the current governor, Janet Mills, each supported other candidates — and, in a ranked-choice race, those other candidates endorsed each other.
Dr. Shah got the most first-choice votes of any candidate on the ballot but was beat out in the final ranked-choice tabulation by Hannah Pingree, a former Maine House speaker. His was an impressive and surprising showing.
Less than half of Americans feel their state leadership managed the pandemic well. More than 70 percent believe the pandemic did more to drive the country apart than to bring it together. The rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again movement was largely fueled by Covid backlash. Yet Dr. Shah managed to build durable trust, during a time when others in his field were losing it.
The public health field has spent the past several years wringing its hands about how it has been outcommunicated by its critics, fretting that it needs new strategies and trusted messengers to connect with people in our fractious information environment. “What went wrong” has become the dominant lens through which we consider the pandemic.
But the pandemic also introduced leaders who had to rise to prominence during an extraordinarily hard time. Some of those people are now running for office around the country, like Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, and Xavier Becerra, a candidate for governor of California who was the health and human services secretary during the Biden administration. Even among those candidates, Dr. Shah stands out for the good will he built up throughout those challenging years, which he effectively translated into a run for governor that went further than anyone expected. It’s worth considering how he managed that.
Beginning on March 9, 2020, Dr. Shah, then director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, conducted hundreds of televised news conferences. He took questions on a public radio call-in show a few times a month and posted on social media constantly. He became a mini-celebrity, introducing Mainers to his hobbies (cooking) and his dog. A local company named a chocolate bar after him.
Before his move to Maine, Dr. Shah was chosen to lead the Illinois Department of Public Health under Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner. Critics questioned Dr. Shah in that role over his agency’s handling of a 2015 Legionella outbreak. He internalized the lesson that for whatever crisis he managed next, he needed to be ubiquitous — to perform competence and reassure an anxious public that it could trust its decision makers. He remembers saying to Ms. Mills at the pandemic’s start, “Ma’am, we need to be out there every single day. Because if we are not, No. 1, misinformation will fill that void, and No. 2, we will be accused of being asleep at the wheel.”
Showing up early and often is a core tenet of public health crisis communications, yet it can be difficult to execute during the panic of a crisis. For reasons having to do with politics or personality, leaders often seem evasive when they most need to be visible. Subsequently, real or perceived lack of transparency undermines everything they do. “People don’t expect perfection, but they do expect presence,” Mandy Cohen, the former head of the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me.
Watching Dr. Shah’s pandemic news conferences, I was surprised that I hadn’t seen them before. They were a textbook example of well-executed pandemic communication. Day after day, he showed up at 2 p.m. in front of a microphone. He began with a rundown of statistics — how many people were in the hospital, how many cases had been diagnosed — and then calmly took reporter questions. He was quick to acknowledge both the extent of and limits to his knowledge. He was warm, confident, personal and clear.
“He was sort of what got me through the day — because I’m a widow, I live by myself,” Cindy Guertin, a now 84-year-old resident of Yarmouth, Maine, told me. “Who was going to help me figure out what to do? Well, he did.”
Maine did relatively well during the pandemic: Death rates were low and vaccination rates high, largely because state decision makers made good choices, compared with some of their peers. But those decisions came with trade-offs and consequences anyway: There were protests against closures, economic stress, learning loss and preventable deaths from other causes.
The real distinguishing factor of Maine’s response was Dr. Shah’s steady presence in the public eye. He continued scheduled news conferences at least a few times a week for 15 months, and then appeared regularly after that — longer than many other pandemic leaders did. In doing so, he demonstrated a high tolerance for frustration, disappointment and criticism. He communicated uncertainty well, from the beginning. By virtue of his consistency, he also communicated through that uncertainty — remaining present as his claims played out and accepting the pushback and second-guessing that inevitably resulted. He took accountability and managed to divorce his reputation from any single pandemic moment.
Dr. Acton also received high praise for her communications during the spring of 2020, when she was director of the Ohio Department of Health. She resigned from that post in June 2020, as the state’s response was coming under increased fire for its restrictions. Dr. Acton doesn’t speak much about Covid on the campaign trail, and Vivek Ramaswamy, her opponent, has tried to make it a political liability for her, rallying supporters with a choice of “lockdowns or liberty” at campaign stops.
Trust in public health, science and government has fallen significantly this decade, as those fields have been accused of overcautiousness, wokeness and insularity. But people consistently report high levels of trust in their own doctors. Dr. Shah has never been a practicing physician (despite having a medical degree, as well as a law degree), but he managed to have a similar effect on voters. People came to trust him personally, rather than seeing him as an avatar for a big institution. He embodied expertise while transcending its affiliations with arrogance and elitism.
As a candidate, Dr. Shah used the same communications strategies that he did as Covid czar. He made the case to voters that they already knew him as someone who could manage during a crisis, and he put forward public-health-inflected plans to address child hunger and elder care. During his many town halls, he implored attendees to ask him hard questions.
Strong leaders aren’t afraid of their audiences. They know themselves well enough to say what they mean and are mature enough to revise their positions in front of the public. Dr. Shah understands that. We shouldn’t be surprised to see him try his hand at politics again.
Rachael Bedard is a contributing Opinion writer, a geriatrician and a palliative care doctor.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Covid Politics Don’t Have to Be Toxic appeared first on New York Times.
