Introducing the 2020 Democratic Candidates

I decided to write about all the major, the people who made it to the first debate, 2020 Democratic candidates. For each candidate I went to their website, found their issues page, and checked which issues they supported.

I chose to look at my top issues for 2020 as well as some other ones like marijuana legalization or breaking up monopolies. Some issues I probably didn't need to look into, like abortion. Virtually every candidate is pro-choice. I wish I included student loan cancellation/forgiveness as more candidates than I expected support this.

I'll probably do a follow up with different issues so if you have any issues you want to see on a table let me know.

I tried to be generous to candidates where if they mentioned a particular issue on their site they got marks for that. Some issues, like health care, or Green New Deal support are a bit more complicated.

When it comes to a single payer heath care system, of the candidates that do support single payer health care, most either would still allow private insurance or think that we should work towards single payer. In the spirit of being generous they get marked as supporting single payer even though their position sounds more like a public option health care system first and a single payer health care system "later".

For supporting a Green New Deal I was looking for the words "Green New Deal" on their website or acknowledgement of the 2030 and 2050 goals as outlined by the latest IPCC report, which the Green New Deal resolution aims to hit.

Each candidate's name is a link to a separate post about them detailing the issues I looked at which should give more insight into why I gave them a specific mark.

You're still probably wondering what marks are better than what other marks so here you go.

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So here's the issue support table. The first half are the candidates debating on night 1, the second half are the candidates debating on night 2.