Republican presidential candidates Ron DeSantis, Asa Hutchinson and Doug Burgum have something in common: They were in governor’s mansions for most or all of the time the federal government said COVID-19 was a public health emergency.
From Jan. 31, 2020, to May 11, 2020, more than a million Americans perished, countless businesses closed and then reopened, and the unemployment rate shot up beyond 14% and then almost as quickly came back down.
But as the U.S. returned to some, albeit altered, sense of normalcy, the questions remain: Could more lives have been saved? Did the economic road back have to be so long and bumpy?
To answer those questions for the three presidential candidates/governors, HuffPost looked at Centers for Disease Control and Infection data, government economic statistics and private sector estimates.
The three governors present very different profiles. DeSantis took a lot of criticism for being slow to close public spaces in his state, including beaches, at the…
