Democratic Convention
What the 2020 Democratic Party Platform Tells Us About Joe Biden’s Issue Priorities
The Democratic National Committee released their platform for the 2020 election this week. It contains 62 dense pages of policy promises, ranging from statehood for Washington, DC to expanding U.S. Department of Agriculture loans to small farmers to a $15 minimum wage.
It’s tempting to treat the platform as an academic exercise. Few voters will ever read it, and it in no ways binds the party to policy decisions should they regain power. However, my research shows that the issues emphasized in the platform tend to predict the issues that the new Congress will take up after the election. Party coalitions use the platform as an opportunity to hash out the party’s issue priorities. Thus, we can learn about what what a Biden Administration 2021 policy agenda might look like.
We can roughly approximate the attention to issues in the Democratic platform with a quick content analysis of the platform’s table of contents. Below, I’ve counted the percentage of pages devoted to each Policy Agendas Project policy topic.
While party platforms tend to have a heavy emphasis on foreign affairs due to the President’s dominant role in foreign policy, Joe Biden’s emphasis on diplomacy is clear. The platform devotes about 17% of its pages to foreign affairs, up from about 11% in 2016. Unlike some of the defense-heavy platforms of the 2000s, the 2020 Democratic platform focuses on peacetime foreign policy goals like rebuilding damaged alliances.
The platform also has a strong emphasis on health care. While Democrats traditionally prioritize the issue, the 2016 and 2020 Democratic platforms more than 10% of their text to health care. Democrats include extended promises on a public option for health insurance. It pledges to automatically enroll low-income families that would be eligible for the Medicaid Expansion in states that did not join the program. The platform also makes extended promises to address the cost of prescription drugs, inequities in the health care system, and to dramatically increase funding for research and development.
We also see considerable attention to civil rights, climate change, immigration and education. These, along with traditional health care and redistributive economic policy, are core Democratic policy priorities. However, the platform emphasis in line with previous platforms.
In contrast, the platform has relatively little emphasis on many other economic policy issues. It only spends a handful of pages each on labor, anti-trust, trade, housing, banking regulation, taxes and social welfare policy. Much of this section is devoted to dealing with the economic damaged caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, with surprisingly little on other issues. During the primary, Democratic candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris introduced many interesting and innovative policy ideas in these areas, but they are for the most part absent from the platform.
The biggest change from previous platforms is an emphasis on democratic reforms. It promises to allow Washington DC and Puerto Rico to become states, make Election Day a national holiday, strengthen the Voting Rights Act, and fight voter suppression and gerrymandering. It also promises to enact government transparency reforms in response to corruption in the Trump Administration. While modern Democratic platforms have always included pro-voting and good governance planks, they expanded these sections considerably in 2020.
Overall, this platform signals three clear goals for the Democrats in 2021. If elected, Joe Biden will have a heavy emphasis on diplomacy and non-military foreign affairs. A Democratic Congress will likely first focus on passing a major health care reform that includes a robust public option and prescription drug price regulation before moving on to education, civil rights, immigration and climate change. It will spend less time on changes to business regulation and redistributive economic policy.
Finally, Democrats will likely prioritize major changes to voting rights and anti-corruption with an intensity not seen since Watergate.
