Progressive Voters Guide

Among all the candidates, Sanders has one of the most ambitious climate plans. He is aiming for 100 percent renewable energy for transportation and electricity no later than 2030, with complete decarbonization by 2050. His $16.3 trillion plan is the costliest, but his campaign estimates that it would provide 20 million jobs and cover nearly every aspect of the climate crisis.

Sanders is promising to create a $40 billion Climate Justice Resiliency Fund that would help frontline communities, including communities of color, Native communities, the elderly, people with disabilities, and other underserved groups. The fund would help communities navigate an energy revolution with access to jobs and economic development. Another $2.18 trillion would go towards grant assistance for families with low and moderate incomes to weatherize and retrofit their homes. Major national investments would include conservation efforts, research and development, and transit and drinking water system renovations.

Sanders and Warren are the only major candidates who have pledged to ban fracking outright, with Buttigieg seeking to ban new fracking permits and phase out current fracking sites.

Sanders introduced and originally wrote the Medicare for All legislation, a single-payer plan that would largely get rid of private health care options. He contrasts his version of Medicare for All with Warren's by saying that if he is elected, he would implement the policy in his first week in office with a phased roll-out over four years.

In single-payer programs, the government pays for and provides everyone insurance, as opposed to the current model where payment may come from a state, private insurance companies, or federal Medicare. With Medicare for All, all Americans would be automatically enrolled into the healthcare plan; healthcare providers and facilities would remain independent and would be paid by the healthcare plan. Sanders' health care program as proposed would cover every American and be free at the point of service, and would include vision and dental care as well.

Sanders is a co-sponsor of the FAMILY Act, but beyond that would guarantee 6 months of family leave as recommended by World Health Organization. His pre-K plan starts at 3 years old, and his Foundations for Success Act would allow all children to receive child care and early education access from 6 weeks old to kindergarten.

Sanders' labor platform is very extensive. Like Warren, he supports sectoral bargaining, ending worker misclassification, extension of labor laws to domestic and farm workers, and allowing government workers to strike. He also wants to give workers ownership in their companies. He has proposed allowing those working for companies with at least $100 million in annual revenue, as well as publicly traded companies, to have ownership. Most notably, Sanders' plan calls for an end to at-will employment. If this legislation were to pass, employers could only terminate workers with "just cause" based on their performance at their job.

Sanders is proposing an "Extreme Wealth Tax," a tax on top 0.1 of wealthiest Americans with a net worth of over $32 million. He also wants to establish a federal jobs guarantee and would raise taxes on businesses whose CEOs make at least 50 times that of their median worker. In October 2019, Sanders declared that he does not plan to release a detailed plan of how he'll pay for Medicare for All, opting instead to publish a list of options of how to pay for it. Though he says that the middle class will pay more taxes, Sanders also asserts that savings on from Medicare for All will ultimately mean paying less.

Sanders' Green New Deal for Public Housing exemplifies his strong belief that affordable homes are a fundamental right, and that public housing is a national asset that we should improve and expand upon. Like Warren, he would work to stop the criminalization of the homeless and would spend $32 billion over five years to end homelessness, including doubling grants for permanent supportive housing.

He is aiming to repeal the Faircloth Amendment to allow the construction of new public housing units, make a $70 billion investment into repairing and modernizing our current public housing stock with energy retrofits, high-quality community spaces, and high-speed internet.

His administration would also expand the National Housing Trust Fund, which builds homes for people with low incomes and fully fund Section 8 housing.

Sanders' racial justice policies are woven throughout his platforms. Some of the biggest reforms include re-enfranchising the formerly incarcerated with the right to vote, ending private prisons and mandatory minimums, guaranteeing a job to every American, ending healthcare disparities, and addressing gentrification.

Sanders supports the use of the 10-20-30 approach to federal investments, which focuses "at least 10 percent of total investments to counties where at least 20 percent of the population has lived under the federal poverty line for at least 30 years."

For K-12 education, Sanders is proposing a slate of policies aimed at bringing American education up from its global ranking in the 11th spot. Sanders' plan to triple Title I funding for low-income schools is similar to Biden's, but goes much further by investing in a more complete educational revamp. He would enforce school desegregation and fund teacher-training programs to increase educator diversity, ban for-profit charters and stop charter school construction until a national audit is complete, raise teacher salaries and triple educator's tax deductions for out-of-pocket classroom expenses, provide free universal meals in schools, and much more.

Sanders would forgive all $1.6 trillion in student debt for 45 million Americans in addition to making public colleges and universities, trade schools, minority serving institutions, and historically black colleges and universities free.

Sanders is calling for a $1 trillion investment into American infrastructure, noting that the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the United States a cumulative grade of D+ for the current state of our infrastructure. As part of his Green New Deal plan, he plans to make investments into bridge and road repair, water systems, railways, and more. Much of the funds for these infrastructure plans would come from closing a corporate loophole that allows multinational U.S. companies to stash profits in overseas banks.

Sanders would break up ICE and Customs and Border Patrol and redistribute their roles to other organizations such as the Department of Justice. In addition, he would go a step further by calling for a moratorium on deportations until his administration completed an audit of current and past immigration policies.

Sanders' health care plan would cover undocumented residents as well as citizens. He also has extensive plans for racial equity, including strengthening labor laws for immigrant workers, including a $15 minimum wage for agricultural workers and a bill of rights for domestic workers. Sanders would provide a path to legal permanent status and citizenship within five years for the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the country.

In his implementation of Medicare for all, Sanders vows to confront the health disparities across the LGBTQ populations. He would work to ensure available mental health care, access to PrEP, a highly effective daily medication for prevention of HIV, gender affirming health care. On education, he also states that he will help LGBTQ students by passing the Safe Schools Improvement Act and the Student Non-Discrimination Act.

Abroad, he pledges to assist in the worldwide protection of LGTBQ people with "strong and binding" human rights standards.

In a move that surprised some Democrats, Biden appears to have been pushed leftwards by progressive sentiment and embraced the Green New Deal, with some additions of his own. Biden is calling for a $1.7 trillion dollar investment from Congress in clean energy research, as well as a requirement that public companies disclose climate-incurred costs. He intends to create a series of executive orders that would require any federal permitting decision to consider the effects of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. He wants the U.S. to reach a 100% clean energy economy and net-zero emissions by no later than 2050.

He has a longer record than other candidates on energy issues, which also leaves room for missed votes and contradictions. For example, Obama's 2009 energy strategy allowed for the growth of renewable energy, but also fracking and natural gas production. In the CNN September climate debate, Biden said that he would not try to ban fracking nationally but would ban new wells on public land (presidents cannot act unilaterally on private lands).

While not as far-reaching as plans of other candidates, Biden's health care reform would substantially affect American health care and build on the foundations of the Affordable Care Act. Biden is proposing the creation of a public option that would allow everyone the choice of buying into a public health insurance option like Medicare. Because the government has much higher purchasing and bargaining power than private insurance companies, such an option would likely be much cheaper for patients. His plan also aims to tackle surprise costs from emergency room bills when patients don't have the option of choosing an in-network provider and measures to reduce the pharmaceutical costs.

Biden's plan for workers allows for 12 weeks guaranteed paid sick and family leave. As of February 2020, Biden has not released a comprehensive childcare plan, but he has called for universal pre-K with open enrollment at 3 years old.

Some unions have already declared their support for the former vice president, including those representing firefighters, ironworkers, and electrical workers. Biden's labor plans include support of secondary boycotts, expansion of farmworker and domestic worker protections, and a ban on permanent replacement of striking workers, policies that he shares with the more progressive candidates seeking nomination.

Biden would pay for $3.2 trillion in policy proposals with increased taxes on corporations, closing loopholes that allow companies like Netflix and Amazon to avoid paying federal income tax, and taxing capital gains as income. Biden's plans would lower taxes on middle- and lower-income families while raising taxes on capital owners. He would tax capital gains as normal income, raise the corporate rate to 28 percent, revert 2009 real estate tax rates, and cap the value of tax breaks at 28 percent for the wealthiest earners. Biden would also reverse Trump's tax cut for the wealthy and corporations.

As of February 14, 2020, Biden is the only candidate without a housing platform, though in the same month he made a statement to the Sacramento Bee that he plans to "fully fund housing," make sure that everyone has access to Section 8 housing, and ensure that no one should pay more than 30 percent of their income to housing. Of particular note is Biden's proposal to ensure that 100% of formerly incarcerated individuals have housing upon re-entry.

There are several aspects of Biden's record on racial justice that he must acknowledge and address. His past support for the war on drugs, his "predators" comments about African American men, his failure to call witnesses for or support Anita Hill, and his sponsorship of a 1975 bill that made it more difficult to mandate desegregation by bus are just a few past examples. Biden is also behind his opponents when it comes to a lack of a platform for Indigenous communities and his refusal to repeal Section 1325, the section of U.S. immigration law that makes unauthorized entry a criminal rather than a civil offense. Some of the more successful areas of Biden's racial justice platform include his support of ending cash bail, eliminating mandatory minimums, and addressing "green gentrification" to keep families of color in their homes after climate improvements have been made. 

Biden is on the more moderate end of the spectrum when it comes to addressing student loan debt. He is calling for a fix to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, an existing program that cancels the debt of those who work in service jobs for ten years. Outside of higher education, the former vice president is proposing a tripling of federal funding for Title I low-income school districts, totaling about $48 billion, as well as increased pay for teachers and an unspecified amount of increase for mental health care in schools.

The former vice president is calling for major investments in transit in high-poverty areas ($10 billion over 10 years), as well as in high-speed rail, biking, transit, and $50 billion on bridge and road repair. Biden is ascribing to the "complete streets" model of transportation that is lauded by experts for accommodating many different types of transportation. He states that he will pay for his $1.3 trillion dollar plan through a combination of measures like reversing Trump's tax cuts, increasing taxes on the very wealthy and corporations, and ending fossil fuel subsidies.

Biden has taken some heat from Democrats on his immigration record as vice president. Additionally, Biden is the only remaining major candidate who would leave Section 1325, the policy that makes unauthorized entry a criminal offense rather than a civil one, in place. During a debate exchange with Julian Castro, the former vice president stated, "If you cross the border illegally, you should be able to be sent back. It's a crime."

The rest of Biden's immigration plans fall mostly in line with the current Democratic platform - a rollback of the Trump administration's most hostile policies, including ending the "national emergency" that Trump is using to siphon money for a border wall, stopping the breakup of families, lifting asylum restrictions, and more.

Biden points to the accomplishments of the Obama administration as benchmarks of his success protecting and expanding LGBTQ+ rights, including the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell and the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. In June of 2019, he stated that the Equality Act would be his top legislative priority as president, which if passed would grant federal protection against discrimination for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. The act would amend existing civil rights laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to to explicitly include sexual orientation and gender identity as federally protected characteristics in public spaces, federally funded programs, and services.