“Most people,” he said, “don’t have that right now.”

So much of the world is stuck in this uneasy pause, this rattling standstill, on account of the spread of Covid-19, but Carnes and Pacific are two of a legion of political professionals in a particular sort of limbo. All of a (very long) month ago, four major presidential campaigns ended in the span of less than a week, the bids of Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren shuttering one after the other after the next. The end of any campaign marks the beginning of an always unnerving interval for suddenly out-of-work staffers. But seldom do so many sprawling operations stop in such rapid succession—and never, needless to say, has that coincided with the rise of a sweeping, life-upending pandemic. Millions of Americans, of course, are being sidelined, laid off and thrown into a kind of confusion and doubt that has no match in modern times, and those who work in politics are not measurably worse off—but the outbreak did arrive for them at an especially vulnerable juncture.

Spread out and all but stranded across the country, sheltering in parents’ guest rooms or spartan apartments with leases about to end, near sad, cleaned-out headquarters, more than two dozen jobless strategists, operatives and organizers described in interviews post-campaign exhaustion coupled now with the extreme anxiety of this lurking illness. They worry. About where the next job is coming from at a moment in which most campaigns—from presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden all the way down the ballot—are all but dormant. They worry about what politics in a dramatically altered country even will look like in a month. Three months. On November 3. Beyond. They worry about health insurance and rent payments. They worry that all this has the potential not just to stall but to smother the nascent careers of promising political pros.

“Everything is on ice,” said Michael McLaughlin, Klobuchar’s national field director. “A lot of younger folks are really stressed.” Added Klobuchar political director Lucinda Ware: “They’re trying to grieve and mourn, readjust. They thought they’d move into other jobs and opportunities, and overnight, or within seven days, they have left the race, started interviewing, looking for places of their own—and that’s all gone now.”

“The absolute unknown of when campaigns are going to be hiring again is the scariest part for a lot of us,” Warren senior adviser Rebecca Pearcey said.

“It’s almost as if you are going a million miles an hour, slam on the brakes, and you’re spinning,” said Nina Smith, who was Buttigieg’s traveling press secretary. “It’s like hitting a patch of ice. I’m trying to find my feet. It’s uncertain enough ending a campaign, and then ending a campaign just days before an unprecedented, historic event like this, I’m still reeling.”

“It’s deeply disruptive. In some ways, it’s frozen campaigns into a state of suspended animation,” said David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former chief campaign strategist. “A lot of my life now is dedicated to inspiring and encouraging young people to get involved in this process, and now they’re adrift.”

In the meantime, instead of getting coffees or cocktails to talk about jobs, they’re making calls and sending texts and circulating résumés on listservs. They’re walking dogs and going for runs. They’re making banana nut bread and French bread pizza. They’re drinking margaritas and White Claws and moonshine. They’re joining virtual happy hours, virtual brunches, virtual birthday parties on Zoom. They’re watching QVC and HSN and “Grace and Frankie” and crazy-pants “Tiger King.” They’re failing to keep track of what day it is. They’re tweeting DIY hire-me pleas. They’re crying on the phone trying to sign up for unemployment.

“I’m starting not to get anxious, but I would say I’m a little bit twitchy,” said Austin Cook, who was Klobuchar’s Iowa press secretary. He’s 25, and this was his first full-time campaign. Now he’s crashing with his mother in Alexandria, Virginia. “I take some solace,” he said, “in knowing that I’m not alone.”

In South Bend, out the windows of her apartment at the Hibberd, Greta Carnes, 28, looks out at the city’s old refurbished Studebaker factory, at the empty streets and the empty seats at the stadium of the local minor league baseball team. One recent evening, in one of her conversations in the corridor with Joey Pacific, she mentioned that she had a bunch of apples and wanted to bake a cake but had no vanilla extract. The next morning, she got a text saying he had washed his hands, for the full 20 seconds, before leaving what was left of his vanilla extract on the floor outside his door.

***

These campaign staffers are mostly young, hardworking, adaptable and durable—but they’re not indestructible.

Take Wyatt Ronan. He was the New Hampshire communications director for Beto O’Rourke, and then he was the New Hampshire state director for Deval Patrick, and in the wake of the state’s primary he was planning on moving to Washington to look for work. It didn’t happen. He’s still in New Hampshire. Sharing an apartment in Manchester. Counting down the days remaining on the health care plan he had from the Patrick campaign. The situation with the coronavirus is of special concern for him, too, because he had heart surgery three years ago and his lung capacity isn’t what it was.

“Since I had my surgery, I’ve been nervous about my health,” said Ronan, who’s 27. He was hunkered down well before there was an official order to stay put. “I’m wary, knowing that a railing or a piece of fruit in the store could be contaminated.”

These concerns only have intensified his anxiety over what’s next with work.

“How long does this go on for?” he said. “Is it a month and a half? Is it 18 months? Is it a year where things are stalled out, and when we get back, you know, how broken is everything going to be? To the point where we’re not just going to be able to hit restart on where we were? And what does that mean for a career trajectory? And what does that even mean for doing something you want to do?”

He granted that he’d been at least starting to think about other ways to pay his bills.

“I’m not there yet,” he said, “but I’ve definitely thought about doing things outside of the political realm.”

Most staffers for the recently folded presidential campaigns had health insurance through the campaign through much of March, but by April, they would be out on their own. But some were more stunned by the ending than others: Bloomberg’s campaign, after dangling yearlong contracts for many of its organizers, abruptly laid them off. State-based Bloomberg staffers had health coverage through April, while those in its New York City headquarters saw theirs end on March 31.

“Health insurance—that’s the scariest issue, more so than even the work or a job,” a former Bloomberg staffer said.

“Honestly, that’s been probably the biggest thing,” said Anjan Mukherjee, who was Klobuchar’s research director, referring to what he’s hearing from more junior staffers from the campaign. “‘Where will I get my health care?’”

Down in New Orleans, Erick Sanchez, who was the traveling press secretary for Andrew Yang, has health insurance through his wife’s job and still has sufficient consulting work. But he acknowledged the “depressing reality.”

“One of the things that Andrew used to say in his pitch that I really feel resonated with a lot of folks is that if our bodies were equipped with a self-destruct button surely there’s a period in anybody’s life where, you know, with their back against a wall, if it was that easy, they would just slam that button,” Sanchez said. “And right now, I can’t imagine how many people would just press that button.”

“It has prohibited any of us to try to rebuild a life after a campaign,” said Ware, the political director of the Klobuchar campaign. Especially staffers with less experience and smaller networks of contacts to lean on. “They don’t know how long it’s going to last or how they’re going to afford this.”

“Some have never filed for unemployment before,” said McLaughlin, Klobuchar’s field director. “We’ve had to walk them through that process.”

“It’s hard,” said Cook, the Iowa press secretary for Klobuchar, “knowing that I don’t really know when I’ll get back into it.”

“I really feel for the folks who are marooned in Boston, South Bend and Minneapolis,” said consultant Ian Russell, a former political director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “They’d go and do a million coffees on Capitol Hill in March and April. It’s scary enough to have a campaign end and no paycheck, but there are folks who are closing up campaign offices.”

“Presidential campaigns are more like pilgrimages than campaigns,” said Ace Smith, a Democratic consultant who was a top adviser to the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris. “You’re making this journey together with this group of people, and when it’s done, it’s simply heartbreaking. Under any circumstance, it’s difficult, but then you throw on these horrific, unique, external circumstances …”

“I was going to drive across the country,” said Stefan Smith, who was Buttigieg’s online engagement director. “My plan was: Get past this, go to the goodbye party, pack up, start driving. But you obviously can’t do that in the middle of the pandemic.”

Matt Corridoni, who was the deputy director of rapid response for the Buttigieg campaign and, before that worked for Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton on Capitol Hill and during his short-lived presidential effort before that, is at his mother’s house in Saltsburg, Pennsylvania. He has some irons in the fire, he said, and one in particular feels promising. But the timing now is up in the air.

“Everything sort of got thrown into a tizzy because of this,” he said, “and I also think, if I was looking to go back to the Hill, I don’t even know what that would look like right now. I mean, how would you onboard a new communications director in the middle of a pandemic? I don’t think it’s impossible, but it means, like, setting up your Hill email remotely and starting to flack and staff a member virtually.”

As jittery as they might be, though, these between-jobs staffers wanted to make sure they don’t sound like they’re complaining.

“I’m not in the same situation as, you know, a bartender with two kids,” said Randy Jones, who was Yang’s press secretary and then political director before briefly working for Bloomberg, from his apartment in Charleston, West Virginia. “When you work in politics, you have to plan for uncertainty. You don’t know if you’re going to win, you don’t know when the next job is going to be—so I expect that, but for so many people right now, this is the worst possible scenario.”

“I feel weird being kind of woe is me,” Ronan said.

***

Back in South Bend, at the Hibberd, Carnes is trying to make productive use of this unexpected downtime. Her house plants, for instance, are thriving, more consistently cared for than they ever were in the thick of the campaign. She’s getting better at baking. The second apple cake she made, she said, was better than the first. She has her regular (adequately social-distanced) sit-downs with Pacific. And she’s spent hours and hours on the phone. The Buttigieg campaign ended up having some 200 organizers on staff, and Carnes by now has talked to nearly every one of them, breaking down what worked where and what didn’t, plucking lessons to take into the next campaign—wherever, and whenever, that might be.

Still, she misses being able to just walk on down to Fiddler’s Hearth or Chicory Café, her favorite haunts in the place that’s been her adopted home since the day before Buttigieg launched.

And most of all she misses being able to do what often is a big part of how she heals after a campaign—helping people who worked with her and for her find new gigs. Take next steps.

“What’s been uniquely difficult is usually there are a ton of jobs immediately,” Carnes said. “I remember in 2016 in so many ways we could not hire fast enough. I was on the Hillary campaign, and it shifted from the primary to the general, and the hiring—we just had so many spots to fill. We had gone from having, like, seven regional organizing directors in Iowa to having like 50 in Florida and like 40 in Ohio. We were able to bring so many people on. And this time, talking to our organizing staff, they are all applying for the same tiny subset of jobs that are available.”

Not being able to move on has left her, too, with a little too much time to think.

“We won Iowa not that long ago, right?” Carnes said the other day. It’s been not even two months. “And to go from that to this,” she said, “is just jarring.”