Information on

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Here you will read about the presidential candidates in alphabetical order and their views on some selected topics along with their statements.

The topics you will read about are:

Healthcare/ COVID- 19
Climate Change
Racial Equity and Equality/ Law Enforcement
Women's Rights
LGBTQ+ Rights
Immigration
Education
Gun Control

Democratic Party

Joe Biden

and

Kamala Harris

Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris are running for president as the Democratic presidential nominee against Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Biden has served as the 44th Vice President to Barack Obama 2009-2017. He served as the United States senator for Delaware 1973-2009. He was also the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2001-2009. He was Chair of the International Narcotics Control Caucus from 2007-2009. He was Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1970- 1972. He was also Member of the New Castle County Council from the 4th district from 1970- 1972.

Healthcare/ COVID-19

As president, Biden will protect the Affordable Care Act from these continued attacks. He opposes every effort to get rid of this historic law – including efforts by Republicans, and efforts by Democrats. Instead of starting from scratch and getting rid of private insurance, he has a plan to build on the Affordable Care Act by giving Americans more choice, reducing health care costs, and making our health care system less complex to navigate.

Whatever the state of the COVID pandemic on the day Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take office, their administration will:

Listen to science
Ensure public health decisions are informed by public health professionals
Restore trust, transparency, common purpose, and accountability to our government

Climate Change

Clean Energy Revolution- Green New Deal: (1) the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to meet the scope of this challenge, and (2) our environment and our economy are completely and totally connected. Ensure the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050. Rally the rest of the world to meet the threat of climate change. Make climate change a core national security priority.

Racial Equity and Equality

Specifically, Biden will:

Reform Opportunity Zones to Fulfill Their Promise
Make a Historic Commitment to Equalizing Federal Procurement
Ensure His Housing Plan Makes Bold Investments in Homeownership and Access to Affordable Housing for Black, Brown, and Native Families
Achieve Equity in Management, Training, and Higher Education Opportunities Connected to the Jobs of the Future
Boost Retirement Security and Financial Wealth for Black, Brown, and Native Families
Ensure Workers of Color Are Compensated Fairly and Treated With Dignity
Strengthen the Federal Reserve’s Focus on Racial Economic Gaps
Promote Diversity and Accountability in Leadership Across Key Positions in All Federal Agencies

Women's Rights

Improve economic security. Biden will start by fighting for equal pay, investing in women-owned small businesses, expanding access to education and training, and strengthening pay and benefits in careers disproportionately filled by women.
Expand access to health care and tackle health inequities. Biden will expand access to high-quality, affordable health care for all women.

Help women navigate work and families. Biden will expand access to affordable child care and care for older Americans and people with disabilities, and provide paid leave and other important workplace benefits and protections.

End violence against women. Biden will work to end violence against women, continuing his leadership on this issue since he authored the Violence Against Women Act in 1994.

Protect and empower women around the world.

LGBTQ+ Rights

As President, Biden will stand with the LGBTQ+ community to ensure America finally lives up to the promise on which it was founded: equality for all. He will provide the moral leadership to champion equal rights for all LGBTQ+ people, fight to ensure our laws and institutions protect and enforce their rights, and advance LGBTQ+ equality globally. Biden will:

Protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination.
Support LGBTQ+ youth.
Protect LGBTQ+ individuals from violence and work to end the epidemic of violence against the transgender community, particularly transgender women of color.
Expand access to high-quality health care for LGBTQ+ individuals.
Ensure fair treatment of LGBTQ+ individuals in the criminal justice system.
Advance global LGBTQ+ rights and development.

Immigration

Immigration: As president, Biden will forcefully pursue policies that safeguard our security, provide a fair and just system that helps to grow and enhance our economy, and secure our cherished values. He will:

Take urgent action to undo Trump’s damage and reclaim America’s values
Modernize America’s immigration system
Welcome immigrants in our communities
Reassert America’s commitment to asylum-seekers and refugees
Tackle the root causes of irregular migration
Implement effective border screening

Protect Dreamers and their families. End the so-called National Emergency that siphons federal dollars from the Department of Defense to build a wall. Rescind the un-American travel and refugee bans, also referred to as “Muslim bans. Ensure that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel abide by professional standards and are held accountable for inhumane treatment.

Education

Support our educators by giving them the pay and dignity they deserve.
Invest in resources for our schools so students grow into physically and emotionally healthy adults, and educators can focus on teaching.
Ensure that no child’s future is determined by their zip code, parents’ income, race, or disability.
Provide every middle and high school student a path to a successful career.

Joe Biden has a simple five-step roadmap to support local decision-making on reopening schools safely and to help students whose learning was interrupted:

Get the Virus Under Control
Set National Safety Guidelines, Empower Local Decision-Making
Provide Emergency Funding for Public Schools and Child Care Providers
Ensuring High-Quality Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Closing the COVID-19 Educational Equity Gap

Gun Control

Hold gun manufacturers accountable. Keep guns out of dangerous hands. End the online sale of firearms and ammunitions. Create an effective program to ensure individuals who become prohibited from possessing firearms relinquish their weapons. Give states incentives to set up gun licensing programs. Adequately fund the background check system. Make sure firearm owners take on the responsibility of ensuring their weapons are used safely. Empower law enforcement to effectively enforce our gun laws. Prohibit the use of federal funds to arm or train educators to discharge firearms.

Green Party

Howie Hawkins

and

Angela Walker

Statement
Our Green Party presidential ticket is campaigning for real solutions to life-or-death issues. Real solutions can’t wait!

COVID-19 Pandemic: The ever-growing sickness and death from COVID-19 in the US shows that the two governing parties are presiding over a failed state. Organized countries around the world have suppressed the virus. We will enact a comprehensive Test, Contact Trace, and Quarantine program to suppress community spread of the virus so we can safely re-open the economy and schools.

Police Brutality and Systemic Racism: We call for community control of the police through commissions selected by the community with the power to appoint police chiefs, set policies and budgets, and investigate and discipline police misconduct. We support reparations, including a massive federal investment in jobs, housing, schools, healthcare, and businesses in racially-oppressed communities that have been impoverished by generations of segregation, discrimination, and exploitation.

Economic Inequality: After 45 years of stagnant wages and growing inequality, working-class life expectancy is declining. We will enact an Economic Bill of Rights to end poverty and economic despair, including a job guarantee, a guaranteed income above poverty, affordable housing, Medicare for All, free public education from pre-K through college, and doubling Social Security benefits for a secure retirement for every senior.

Climate Crisis: We will enact an emergency Green New Deal to achieve zero carbon emissions and 100% clean energy by 2030. We will ban fracking and new fossil fuel infrastructure.

Nuclear Arms Race: We will cut military spending by 75%, withdraw from the endless wars abroad, pledge no first use of nuclear weapons, and disarm to a minimum credible nuclear deterrent. On the basis of these tension-reducing peace initiatives, we will go to the other nuclear powers to negotiate complete and mutual nuclear disarmament

Libertarian Party

Jo Jorgensen

and

Jeremy "Spike" Cohen

Statement
While 3,000 miles separate Olympia from Washington, DC, it sometimes feels that there is an even greater divide between Washingtonians and the politicians who claim to represent them. The Evergreen State shares a name with our nation's capital, but not the same refusal to try new ideas.

Perhaps that is why more people in Washington state voted Libertarian in 2016 than ever before.

Washingtonians have made it clear they won’t wait for the federal government to act, and time and again, they have been ahead of the pace of career politicians. After all, Washington was the first state where death with dignity, marriage equality, and recreational cannabis were all legal at the same time.

Just like those in Washington state, Libertarians know it doesn’t have to be this way.

We can reduce healthcare costs without putting government in charge of highly personal medical decisions and creating a one-size-fits-all system. We can prioritize our national security without being involved in unnecessary foreign wars and stationing troops around the world in dozens of countries away from their families. We can protect our communities without sacrificing freedom through failed initiatives like civil asset forfeiture, no-knock raids, qualified immunity, and the War on Drugs. We can value necessary responsibility for workers and employers without endless barriers of entry to professions and new businesses. We can balance the budget without raising taxes. By ending excessive government overspending, we can also eliminate the federal income tax.

I’m running for President not just to present a new way of addressing important issues. I’m running because Washington state deserves a better way — solutions that create real change for real people

Socialist Workers Party

Alyson Kennedy

and

Malcolm M. Jarrett

Statement
The Socialist Workers Party demands the federal government immediately fund a massive public works program to provide jobs at union- scale wages for the millions thrown out of work. The COVID-19 virus has exposed the crisis of capitalism. Workers can build hospitals, housing, schools and day care centers and replace crumbling infrastructure.

The bosses divide working people by scapegoating immigrant workers who they exploit. My campaign demands amnesty for all undocumented workers in the U.S.

Workers Control of Production. Workers need to work! It is only at work that by acting together, we utilize our power and stand up to the bosses. Such resistance has taken place among Walmart workers, fruit packing workers in Yakima, machinists union shipyard workers on strike in Bath, Maine along with copper miners who struck in Arizona and Texas and among workers on the railroads – who all demand safe working conditions, control over line speed, pay raises and forty-hour work weeks.

Our campaign points to what is possible and needed. If workers wrested control of production, we could set up workplace committees to combat the bosses’ production of shoddy goods, expose their waste, as well as protect the environment.

Workers need our own party—a labor party – to fight to take political power out of the hands of the bosses and bankers and the Democrats and Republicans who represent them. We need to emulate what the workers and farmers of Cuba did when they made their revolution in 1959 - -establish a workers and farmers government. We call for arrest and prosecution of all cops who kill working people and we fight against women’s oppression and defend a woman’s right to choose abortion.

Join the Socialist Workers Party 2020 campaign! Read and subscribe to our campaign newspaper, the Militant.

Socialism and Liberation Party

Gloria La Riva

and

Sunil Freeman

Statement
Vote Socialist in 2020!

Gloria La Riva, a labor and anti-war activist, is the Party for Socialism and Liberation candidate for President in the 2020 election. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, her father was a letter carrier, her mother an immigrant from Mexico and garment worker. La Riva is a delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council.

La Riva’s 10-point program calls for making a job or income, health care, education, adequate food and affordable housing Constitutional rights; Cancelling rent and mortgage payments for tenants, small landlords and small businesses for duration of COVID-19 pandemic; Ending racism, police brutality and mass incarceration, freeing Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu Jamal, Jalil Muntaqim and all political prisoners; Shutting down all U.S. military bases around the world and stopping the drive toward war against China and Russia; Ending U.S. aid to Israel - self-determination for the Palestinian people; Lifting the sanctions/blockades on Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea and other countries; Independence for Puerto Rico; Honoring Native treaties; Defending unions and a $20/hour minimum wage; Equal rights for women including all reproductive rights; Full equality for LGBTQ people; Full rights for all immigrants; Nationalizing banks and corporations, using their vast stolen wealth to provide for people’s needs.

“Today, while the obscene wealth of the super-rich grows every day, half the U.S. population is living in or near poverty,” says La Riva. “When the capitalist bankers torched the economy the federal government bailed them out with trillions of dollars. Now it’s time to rescue the people!

“For the Earth to live, capitalism must go. The multiple crises of inequality, injustice, endless war, environmental destruction and more can only be overcome by replacing capitalism with a system based on meeting people’s needs – socialism. If you agree, join our campaign!

The Republican Party

Donald Trump

and

Mike Pence

Donald Trump and Mike Pence are running as the Republican presidential nominee against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Trump is currently serving as the 45th president. Before he was in politics he was a businessman and television personality.

Healthcare/ COVID-19

President Trump has mobilized his entire administration to address drug addiction and opioid abuse by declaring the opioid crisis a nationwide public health emergency.

Climate Change

The lead for each sector serves as the ombudsmen within the respective agency across program offices, conducts educational site tours, analyzes data and advises options for environmental improvement, and develops reports that profile the impact of each sector. It also works to streamline EPA practices and operations.

EPA has re-launched launched the Smart Sectors Program to partner with the private sector to achieve better environmental outcomes.

Racial Equity & Equality/ Law Enforcement

President Donald J. Trump and the Department of Justice are working with local law enforcement to protect American communities. President Trump and the Department of Justice have aggressively confronted organized crime from street gangs to criminal cartels. President Trump’s Administration is protecting the rights of all Americans.

Women's Rights

Donald Trump has not officially commented on this subject

LGBTQ+ Rights

Donald Trump has not officially commented on this subject.

Immigration

The President released his immigration reform proposal which calls for the transition to a merit-based immigration plan.

President Trump has enforced immigration laws to protect American communities and American jobs.

President Trump protects American communities and restores law and order at the border so Americans can feel safe in their communities.

Education

President Trump’s proposed budgets have made school choice a priority.

Gun Control

President Trump signed the STOP School Violence Act and the "Fix NICS Act."
The Trump Administration has allocated $2 billion for school safety.