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Welcome to Sightline Institute’s redesigned website!

You’ll find our same top-notch solutions research, just with a fresh new look. Learn more here about new features, or simply browse as usual. 

Collection: Coronavirus and Cascadia

Listen In: Policymaking in a Pandemic

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Social distancing and stay at home orders are in place to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

This week, I joined KBOO Community Radio‘s Barbara Bernstein for a wide-ranging conversation about how the coronavirus pandemic shapes our policymaking and may change our calculations about climate change. We talked about the profound challenges of the crisis, as well as the way it presents new opportunities for important policies like voting by mail and universal … Read more

UPDATED: State-by-state Coronavirus Election Readiness Tracker

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Vote By Mail Mail-Out Ballot Drop Box - How to Virus-Proof and Putin-Proof Elections

As Americans are maintaining physical distance from each other to protect themselves and slow the spread of coronavirus, some states are better prepared than others to continue holding safe, fair elections. States’ preparation for and response to the global pandemic could have major consequences for voters’ ability to participate in their democracy, both in primary elections this spring and for the presidential election this fall. We are tracking states’ preparedness. Ideally, every voter would have the choice to cast a mailed-out ballot from the safety of their home. We’ll continue to update our coronavirus election readiness tracker as things change. 

UPDATED: Fifteen Thoughts on the Coronavirus and Cities

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UPDATE 4/17/20: Since publishing this I’ve been trying to keep up with the ongoing firehose of related stories and happenings in a big bad Twitter thread (click “show this thread” once it opens on Twitter): What did I get right? What did I get wrong? What did I miss? Threading through the 15 things…https://t.co/0ht4s9x14H — … Read more

FAQ: Pandemic-Proof Elections With Vote By Mail

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Vote By Mail virus-proofs elections, safeguarding our health and our democracy.

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Protecting the right to vote has long been an urgent priority; coronavirus has made it an emergency. Vote By Mail is one tested tool to protect American voters’ right to cast their ballot—and to safeguard democracy even as communities across the US grapple with the pandemic. With long lines, rooms full of people, and shared … Read more

We Shouldn’t Need a Virus to Embrace Cash Benefits

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On coronavirus lockdown, families will benefit from public cash benefits. For the long haul, cash payments give stability and flexibility.

As government cash arrives in the coming weeks to help millions of people in desperate financial need, we should be asking: Why don’t we do cash benefits more often?

The global coronavirus pandemic is an acute crisis, of course. But there’s never been a day in the world’s history without people in desperate need. Cash is the best way to help them, for the same reasons it is the best way to help people right now. Cash is faster and more flexible, allowing individuals and households put it toward their own unique immediate needs, whether it’s housing or other expenses. 

Households in Cascadia and beyond have been holding their breaths as federal coronavirus response bills race toward passage in both the United States and Canada. The US package should help stanch hemorrhaging finances for the nearly 4 million Americans who have filed for unemployment insurance since the beginning of March, including nearly 200,000 people across Oregon and Washington. 

The relief package is a response to the shock wave of layoffs triggered by coronavirus lockdowns. It includes public money to boost state-provided unemployment insurance (UI) by $600 per week for the next four months. 

For comparison’s sake, $600 is the weekly income of someone working full-time at $15 an hour. That’s on top of states’ usual unemployment benefit, which varies state to state. Oregon offers about two-thirds of pre-layoff pay; Washington offers half (up to a maximum in both cases).

This is a big deal—the largest temporary expansion of direct cash benefits in modern US history. (We were among those urging it last week as the best way to shield workers from the effects of an unprecedented public health crisis.)

Canada’s federal government announced Thursday that it is planning a similar provision: a flat $2,000 a month for four months to “people who have lost jobs or are unable to work.” On Friday, it added a 75 percent wage subsidy to small and medium businesses that keep workers on payroll.

British Columbia, meanwhile, is sending one-time payments of $1,000 to affected workers, and the US federal government will issue one-time checks of $1,200 per adult, and $500 per child, to individuals making less than $75,000 per year. 

This is a breakthrough moment for cash payments. It’s long overdue.

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Mailing Checks is More Than a Good Idea: It’s a Moral Imperative

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Something unprecedented happened in the United States this week: A nation moving at full economic steam slammed the brakes on its own locomotive, deliberately bringing its economy to a screaming halt.

The cause: Saving a million or more lives nationwide, particularly (but far from entirely) those of the medically vulnerable.

The cost: It’s not clear yet. But it will be steep. This week saw what seems to be the single biggest tsunami of layoffs in US history. Last weekend, an estimated 18 percent of US workers were already saying they’d been laid off or lost work hours, reflecting massive cutbacks and mandatory shutdowns in the restaurant, entertainment, travel, and events industries. On Tuesday, Oregon reported a 3,200 percent rise in unemployment claims, far beyond what it saw in the peak of the Great Recession; the latest figures for Washington are due soon. On Thursday, Goldman Sachs predicted 2.3 million new unemployment claims nationwide this week, a figure the Wall Street Journal reporter described as “apocalyptic.”

As Americans do their part to flatten the COVID-19 contagion curve, we need to protect the economically vulnerable. The best, fastest way to do that is with cash payments.

There’s a word for this situation—debt.

Every American who is or cares about someone medically vulnerable already owes a debt to the millions of workers who are now suffering. This recession is a burden dropped on millions of service-industry workers, many of them low-paid, by the public. If the public doesn’t do something to help them with that burden, many will be crushed by it.

Just as we can’t let a million people die without fighting to save them; we can’t let collateral damage from this catastrophe crush the economically vulnerable.


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We’ve got to start mailing checks. And—this part is important—we’ve got to start doing it almost immediately.

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How the Market Collapse is Impacting Northwest Fossil Fuel Companies

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Global markets are in a steep week-and-half long slide, with major US indices plummeting during some of the worst sell-offs in history. Fossil fuel companies felt the greatest financial pain when two shocks hit almost simultaneously: worldwide fears of the coronavirus leading to reduced consumer demand and a price war between major oil-producing countries. It is too early to say what any of this will mean for the Northwest’s fossil fuel industry, but it could usher accelerated decline.

It’s unlike anything in history, according to oil industry expert Daniel Yergin. “There’s just so much weakness,” he said. “It’s a problem of an oil price war in the middle of a constricting market and the walls are closing in.”

Investors are fleeing the Northwest’s oil refinery owners and selling off their stakes in gas pipeline companies. To understand just how much trouble these fossil fuel companies are in, we can examine how prices—for their stock and their products—have declined since the trouble started at the beginning of 2020.

BP, the biggest oil company in the region, fared best among Northwest refiners, but it has still lost 50 percent of its value since the beginning of the year. Meanwhile, Shell and Marathon are down 57 percent each, and Phillips 66 has lost a staggering 71 percent of its value since the opening bell on January 1. US Oil, the smallest refiner, is owned by Par Pacific Holdings, which has seen its share price drop 70 percent in 2020. Meanwhile, nearby Targa Resources, which stores and transports a range of petroleum products from its Tacoma terminal, has seen its stock price decline by 76 percent in the nearly three months of 2020 so far.

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Vote By Mail Can Save Elections from Coronavirus

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Vote Here - Vote Aqui

Every state in the US already has at least some experience with Vote By Mail. During the Coronavirus pandemic, we all should be able to vote from the convenience and safety of our home–for our own health and the health of our democracy. Sightline’s Kristin Eberhard shows how we can virus-proof American democracy in time for Election Day, November 2020.

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