Top 3 Liberal Issues

  • social equality
  • wealth equality
  • health equality

Based on responses so far it’s pretty clear that there while there is no 100% consensus, there is pretty strong agreement on the top 3:

1)health care
2)income inequality
3)climate change

However, I think that top 3 represents QT3 and not necessarily Dems and liberal voters nationally. For example, some Dems would have this as their top 3:

1)police reform
2)prison reform
3)jobs

Other Dems would this as their top 3:

1)Ending Family Separation/Reuniting Families
2)Immigration Reform
3)Repeal of travel ban

We QT3 liberals are a subset, so it’s possible to get some agreement. However, when you cast the net more broadly I do think there is less agreement.

In terms of a message that will win elections, I believe it should focus on these three:

1)Universal Health Care (with some form of Medicare Buy In or Phase In)
2)Inequality/Tax Reform (fix Social Security by uncapping the payroll tax, re-vise the Trump tax bill to lower working and middle class taxes and reduce the gains given to the top earners)
3)Ending Corruption and Voter Manipulation (re-purpose the draining the swamp meme to target voter suppression and gerrymandering)

Climate change, immigration reform and social justice sadly aren’t going to motivate the low-intensity Dems and the weakly aligned voters who we need to get to turn out as much as the above 3 topics, IMO.

1)Ending Family Separation/Reuniting Families
2)Immigration Reform
3)Repeal of travel ban

Isn’t this all part of immigration reform? Seems a bit weird to go granular on this specifically.

My point was, some Dems are focused on those topics like a laser, so they would make it granular.

Hillary’s platform

Defend and expand the Affordable Care Act, which covers 20 million people.Hillary will stand up to Republican-led attacks on this landmark law—and build on its success to bring the promise of affordable health care to more people and make a “public option” possible. She will also support letting people over 55 years old buy into Medicare.

Hillary’s platform:

Hillary is committed to restoring basic fairness in our tax code and ensuring that the wealthiest Americans and large corporations pay their fair share, while providing tax relief to working families.

Hillary’s platform:

Ever since the Supreme Court eviscerated key provisions of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Republican governors and legislatures across the country have proposed and passed laws making it harder to vote, systemically disempowering millions of voters—particularly people of color, poor people, and young people. At a time when so many Americans are disenfranchised, that’s the opposite of what we should be doing. Hillary Clinton believes we must take action to restore the Voting Rights Act and do everything we can to make it easier—not harder—for Americans to vote.

You’re going to say that Hillary focused on too much–that she should have limited her messaging to just a few core issues. Maybe (probably?) that’s true, but it’s also horrible. Instead of a comprehensive platform that focuses on detailed, realizable policy goals, we should do propaganda? All to appeal to some narrow subset of white rural voters in a couple of swing states? That’s… not democracy.

I guess I kind of, on reflection, reject the premise of this thread. I think that liberals do focus on a lot of issues. And that’s a good thing. We. Care. About. Policy. Screw trying to distill that laudable impulse down to a 3-point sound-byte. Republican voters care about sticking it to the libs, preserving the status quo, empty patriotic rhetoric, dick measuring, and (finally a policy issue) making abortion illegal. Hillary had a wide range of well-though-out positions on a variety of issues that she made public and could speak to in-depth off-the-cuff. Trump doesn’t even have an “Issues” page on his website. He’s all bellicosity and rage and the thin-skinned machismo of a rapist bully. We are better than that. I don’t think we should sacrifice our policy-focused orientation for electioneering’s sake. We should play it up more. We have solutions. They’ve got empty rhetoric and rage.

In terms of turning out the weakly aligned, mostly low-information voters we need to win elections, I do think framing the message in a simple understandable way with a few bullet points is a huge positive.

I have no quarrel with Clinton in terms of her policies or her wonk-credentials. I also have no interest in relitigating what went wrong in 2016. But going forward, I do think a simple message can serve as a good introduction, and a focus for campaigning. More detailed policies can be made available for those who want to dig deeper.

  • Basic needs inequality
  • Education inequality
  • Election reform

The first two on my list address the most important aspects of income inequality, to me. As long as everyone has their basic needs met at an equal level (the grand view of health care: food, shelter, medicine and access to care) and they’re provided equal opportunity via education and training, I’m actually okay with income inequality. Please note, I don’t ever expect this to come to pass, but that’s the direction I want us to move as a nation.

As for election reform, this is also all-encompassing. GTFO to the electoral college and gerrymandering (and yes, Citizens United). The former strikes me as an outdated model which no longer applies to the modern nation, and the latter strikes me as corruption. To note, I think there are some benefits to gerrymandering, as one is more likely to get experienced politicians. However, it doesn’t strike me as being worth it.

  1. Peace
  2. End the War on Drugs
  3. Lower trade barriers

No one cares about mine. :(

  1. Universal healthcare. I’m old. I will need it very soon.
  2. Legalize it. Same.
  3. Get rid of Trump. Same.

I was thinking last week about starting a thread proposing to group-construct a party platform for Democrats that we could plausibly all get behind. The idea was inspired by that list out recently associated with Ocasio-Cortez. This thread would go a long way towards the same idea.

My three are no surprise: universal health care, universal education for free (with associated payback serving the community) and reversal of Citizen’s United.

Pie in the sky? Removal or massive rewrite of 2nd Amendmemt.

  1. income inequality
  2. due process
  3. freedom of the press

I’m not a liberal, but if i were to craft 3 issues that would be electorally advantageous:
Universal healthcare
Climate change
Rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure

You can get far left folks with the healthcare, young kids with the climate change, and peel off the white lower middle class Union workers with a serious plan to rebuild infrastructure.

And you would be tackling 3 major issues that America needs to deal with.

Is probably put Reformation of the Justice system in there, but i think it would likely need to take a back seat to those 3, if you are trying to win elections.

It’s also an issue that I’m not sure can even be fixed from the national end.

If cops kill people and juries let them… there isn’t anything Congress can do about it. If Iowa decides drug offenses have a insane minimum sentence. Again not much Congress can do about it.

They would consider it charity, or something, and resent tricky underhanded Liberals for it. If it were Trump on the other hand…

  1. Universal Healthcare
  2. Climate Change
  3. Income Inequality

I’m conservative, and actually I would strongly support any of these, with the following caveats:

Add in “Much higher taxes on large corporations and tax breaks for local businesses”

Okay, so I’m not what’s typically considered a conservative in today’s parlance, but I promise I can support all of these with conservative arguments. (Frankly, environmentalism is fundamentally a conservative position!)

Conservation != Conservatism

(Joke.)

What’s the basis of your caveats? I don’t reject them out of hand, but I’m not sure why they ought to be deal-breakers for you either.

The feds run Medicare and the states run Medicaid. Is there evidence that the latter is better or more efficiently run than the former? Granted, these are not otherwise problem-free examples because health care in the US is an especially broken ‘market’ AND many state administrations run Medicaid while being actively hostile to the program.

I think both UBI and universal health care have to be at least financed at the federal level. No way that states like Louisiana and Mississippi can carry that load without fiscal transfers from other states.

UBI is not going to be an easy sell. It’s not really the ideal platform to build a political resurgence upon.

The cost will be fairly immense, with most estimates at around $3.6 Trillion per year. Now, presumably, folks above a certain income will be paying a lot of this back to the government in the form of increased taxes, but this means adding in a significant tax increase which is always a hard sell.

That’s not to say that it couldn’t be sold. On some level, my libertarian leanings can find UBI appealing, when presented as an alternative to all the existing welfare programs. It’s basically making the whole system much more simple, and eliminates any of the government making judgement calls about how we live our lives. It removes disincentive for finding jobs. Overall, it’s likely preferable to all the existing systems.

However, the magnitude of the changes to our social safety net systems would really be immense, and that can’t be understated. It’s not like folks just get a free $12k check on top of what’s going on currently. UBI replaces all that. Social security is gone, a lot of other stuff is gone. You’d need some serious competence in terms of governance to actually make such an overhaul work.