In a rush to reopen, ‘Florida put itself in the position that it’s in now’: Fmr. Florida AG Nominee

People Over Profits Founder and Former Florida AG Nominee Sean Shaw joins Yahoo Finance’s On The Move panel to discuss the surge in COVID-19 cases across the country.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Want to talk about the fact that you've got the state of Georgia, the governor Mr. Kemp saying that cities and municipalities may not mandate the wearing of masks. And then you get this kind of confusion in Florida. I'll call it confusion. I may be wrong. But from Governor DeSantis, where he's still leaving it up to the individual counties, not even inviting a mayor from one of the largest cities in South Florida to a meeting about masks. What do you make of all this?

SEAN SHAW: I appreciate you having me on. Our governor has made it awfully partisan, unfortunately. And so he's following the lead of President Trump. And so he's trying to make it seem like it's not a big deal. But you know the numbers in Florida are skyrocketing. We don't have a statewide mask order. It's just really unfortunate that we are where we are.

JULIE HYMAN: Sean, it is unfortunate that we are where we are. It's Julie here. And I know your organization's called People Over Profits. And there's been this sort of debate since this pandemic began about, well, you want to keep people safe. But also there is a cost to keeping businesses closed, right? So the sort of People Over Profits idea is more complicated than it seems on the surface right. So what do you think a state like Florida needs to do? What do you think businesses in the state of Florida need to do to simultaneously keep their doors open, keep people working, and also keep people safe?

SEAN SHAW: Well, at this point, we're in a place where that conflict is a little more pronounced than it should have been. If we would have endured a little bit more short term pain, short term sacrifice, we would not be in the place where we are now. So in our rush to reopen and normalize, Florida really put itself in the position that it's in now, which is these really bad spikes.

And so now we're in a place where I think we're going to have to go backwards some and get back to a place where we can flatten this curve. But our governor's not talking like that. In fact, we're going to reopen schools and in-person schools when 1/3 of Florida school-aged children are testing positive for coronavirus. Florida is just-- unfortunately, listen, I've been from here-- I've lived here all my life. And we unfortunately don't get a lot of good national media. And it's because of things like this.

We didn't close the beaches when we should have. We rushed to reopen. Our governor then kind of preened and said he wanted the media to apologize to him for criticizing him for reopening so fast. And now here we are, leading the nation in coronavirus cases on a daily basis.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: It's Anjalee here. I know that masks continue to be one of those debating points, even with the CDC coming out earlier this week and sort of promoting it and saying that it does work. How does this play into the debate for schools? Is that being seen as the way forward When. It comes to reopening for schools, do you think?

SEAN SHAW: Well, there are some talk. For example, I'm in Hillsborough county, which is in Tampa. And our superintendent here has kind of said, well, we're comfortable with that timeline. We're going to require masks. But other counties, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami Dade, much larger counties in South Florida have said, we are not comfortable with the time line under any circumstance, including masks. And we're not going to fully reopen our schools to in-person classes when the governor suggests. So I think we're in for maybe a little conflict there.

But we're in a world that's just not normal. And so I think we really need to understand you don't send kids back to school under those circumstances. Just because you can go to Walmart or Target and social distance doesn't mean that kids ought to be in a classroom for six hours, all amongst each other, even if they have masks on. It's just not-- and a lot of parents don't seem to be comfortable with that. And we will see how this goes forward.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Sean, I want to shift the subject to something else that you're involved in, which is helping African-American and other disenfranchised voters vote and register to vote. I too, by the way, grew up in South Florida. Part of my high school curriculum, we read Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God," which is the story of an African-American woman in Florida in the 1920s. So if you want to talk about disenfranchisement-- and yet here we are today.

And then we get the news out of Asheville, North Carolina that that city is looking at reparations for the wrongs of the past. Where do we stand in Florida on those kinds of issues? And what would be an appropriate path forward?

SEAN SHAW: Well, you grew up in Florida. So I'm probably not telling you anything you don't know. But we don't stand anywhere close probably to getting where we are there. You know, Florida people often mistake Florida as this wonderful state that's got a lot of diversity. And so there must be partisan diversity. But in fact there's not. We are we are run by Republicans who, you know, quite frankly don't seem to have a sympathetic ear to those sorts of issues.

We're trying to get there. You know, for example, we just passed Amendment Four a couple years ago. And in Florida, what that allowed was for returning citizens who have paid their debts to society and done their sentence, they were automatically allowed to register to vote. The people voted for that amendment to the state constitution. Unfortunately, politicians got their hands on it, and that amendment is now up in the air. The legislature messed up the implementation. And those people are in fact not allowed to vote and register right now, even though the people voted for that two years ago.

So that's where we are in Florida. Even when the people pass a voting rights amendment, the politicians down here kind of mess it up. So we've got a long way to go in Florida. I hope that we can get there. At least we passed that amendment on the first blush. But we're just not as progressive, I think, as people around the rest of the country would think. And now you can see the press conferences of our governor. And I think you can understand why a lot of us believe that.