Which 2020 Candidates Are The Most Progressive On Criminal Justice Policy?

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

There are a lot of people running for president. That record-breaking field has made it hard to compare the candidates ideologically — overall and on individual issues.

The catch-all, macro metrics we usually rely on — the FiveThirtyEight trump score and DW-Nominate, for example — don’t work that well for the 2020 field. Those measures rely on congressional roll-call votes, and some of the candidates have never served in Congress (Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Yang, for example) or have not done so recently (Joe Biden and Jay Inslee). Also, some of the issues that the candidates are addressing on the trail, such as legalizing marijuana, haven’t really come up that much on Capitol Hill for votes, so those aren’t represented in the macro scores.

Another option for assessing the field is to go micro and look at each candidate’s current position on each issue. But that has problems, too. The 2020 Democratic primary has turned into something of a wonk-off — the candidates are releasing a seemingly endless string of policy papers. But these plans don’t necessarily tell you that much. You really need to be well-versed in a specific issue to suss out if a proposal is new — as opposed to merely what the Obama administration was already doing and any Democrat would do if elected — or different from another candidate’s positions.

So in the next few months, we’re going to try to bring a little clarity to the 2020 policy debates. The plan: ask every campaign a set of yes-or-no policy questions within a larger issue. To start, we asked the 23 most prominent Democratic presidential campaigns six questions about criminal justice policy.1 The goal here is to reveal not only what the candidates might do if elected president, but also how that differs from the rest of the field — hence the decision to use yes-no questions, which will allow us (and you) to compare the candidates systematically.

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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-democratic-candidates-are-the-most-progressive-on-criminal-justice-issues/

[thesquanderer]

1. Surprised, no question about private prisons, and Sanders the only one to support voting.

I think Sanders is right on this issue.

[Politicub]

3. I agree. I'm with Sanders on allowing incarcerated people to vote. The imprisoned are still

citizens.

Maybe if they had the right to vote, conditions would be better. As it stands now, they're grist for the for-profit-prison mill.

His position on this is that once you start removing the right to vote from some people, it's easier to remove it from another group. Then another. That makes sense.

[Politicub]

2. Helpful chart. And eye opening.

I was surprised at some of the positions that the candidates are taking.

I would have hoped that Biden would have responded to the questionairre. I would like to know his position on these issues.

[Voltaire2]

4. Nor did he respond to the NYT questions.

Apparently his campaign doesn’t want him on the record yet.

Hopefully the debates will get some positions out of him.