Hillary Clinton plans to raise taxes on the rich, while Donald Trump plans to cut taxes on the rich. That’s a major difference between the two major candidates for president. But the three major nightly newscasts have not mentioned tax policy once in their coverage of 2016. Trump also wants to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care reforms and Wall Street reforms, while Clinton wants to keep them and strengthen them. Those issues haven’t made it onto the nightly news, either.
In fact, those traditional broadcasts on ABC, NBC and CBS have devoted just 32 minutes to all policy issues this year. That’s less than one-third of the airtime they devoted to Clinton’s emails. And most of those 32 minutes focused on terrorism and Middle East policy, with just a few snippets about gay rights, immigration and policing, according to media watchdog Andrew Tyndall. And when it comes to the issues, the rest of the media, new as well as old, haven’t done much more to elevate the information levels of low-information voters.
In semi-defense of our industry, many of the big campaign stories—Trump’s unreleased tax returns, incendiary insults, and conduct toward women, as well as Clinton’s controversial foundation, health scare and FBI investigation of her emails—have involved relevant and newsworthy conduct. The candidates themselves have also focused more on the personal shortcomings of their opponents rather than specific ideas. Trump just isn’t very interested in policy, and his website is virtually devoid of policy detail. Clinton is much wonkier, and she’s put out more than 200 pages of intricately detailed policy substance, but the main message of her campaign has been that Trump can’t be trusted with power.
But issues like climate change and education and health care matter, whether they get talked about or not, because one of these candidates is going to take charge of the United States government. And the differences between these candidates on the issues are really vast. As Hamilton star Daveed Diggs argues with a bit of exaggeration in this amusing pro-Clinton explainer video for millennials, they’re “like an aching chasm of infinity multiplied algorithmically by pi—and then quintupled.” Even if both candidates were universally respected paragons of virtue with unquestionable integrity, email protocols and attitudes toward minority groups, even if there had never been a WikiLeaks hack or a genitalia-grabbing tape, those policy differences would make this a hugely consequential and bitterly contested election.
The quick summary of those differences is that Trump is running to repeal the entire Obama era, while Clinton basically wants to extend it for another four years. The president’s approval ratings have been solid lately, which is why Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, endured a lot of ribbing after he tweeted “If you like the last 8 years, vote @HillaryClinton,” with a photo of the Democratic nominee hugging the man she hopes to replace. But as an issue-based shorthand for 2016, Walker had a point. Clinton has mostly embraced the Obama agenda; they have differences on trade, education and foreign policy, but otherwise she has few plans for change that the president wouldn’t endorse as well. By contrast, Trump has questioned just about everything about Obama, even his citizenship; with a Republican Congress, Trump would be well-positioned to undo much of the change Obama delivered.
Another way to think of the policy stakes in 2016 is that Clinton is running as a traditional liberal Democrat. And while Trump has savaged the Republican establishment, his bare-bones policy agenda—except for his stated opposition to trade deals and entitlement reforms, and perhaps his approach to foreign policy—sounds a lot like the Republican agenda. It’s weird to think of Trump as a traditional Republican, and Clinton has not tried to do that because her polling suggested that Americans wouldn’t believe it, but when it comes to the issues, he mostly is. She’s for universal pre-K. He’s for more military spending. She supports Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. He says it’s stupid, and plans to renegotiate it. She’s against racial profiling and “stop-and-frisk” police practices. He’s called for more of both.
One of these candidates will soon wield enormous influence over issues that affect the country and the world. Here are some of them, along with the very different approaches the candidates take with them:
Climate/energy: In 2015, with global carbon figures at their highest levels since human beings began walking the Earth, Obama helped bring 190 nations together for a global climate deal in Paris and launched the Clean Power Plan to reduce emissions from power plants at home. Trump has vowed to pull out of the Paris accord and scuttle the Clean Power Plan, while Clinton supports both. Trump has also called climate change a hoax, while Clinton endorses the scientific consensus that fossil fuels are warming the planet. And while Clinton has vowed to make America a clean-energy superpower, reducing energy waste by a third and installing half a billion solar panels, Trump’s energy plans focus on promoting drilling and ending anti-coal regulations and other Environmental Protection Agency rules that he says stifle economic growth.
A President Trump would find it hard to revive the coal industry, which is in trouble around the world for economic as well as environmental reasons. But at a time when U.S. carbon emissions are finally dropping even though the economy is expanding, he could remove climate action from the government priority list, which would deal a devastating blow to efforts to reduce emissions around the world.
Health care: Clinton supports Obamacare, although she wants to provide more subsidies for middle-class families who are facing higher premiums on the new exchanges. Trump wants to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a health plan to be named later—or, as Diggs put it in his video, “something terrific, like an Xbox that also makes kimchi tacos.” Still, if Republicans keep Congress, Trump should be able to engineer the repeal, even if he doesn’t replace it with anything. So what would that mean?
The 20 million Americans who have left the uninsured rolls thanks to Obamacare would presumably lose their coverage. Private insurers would no longer be required to cover consumers with pre-existing conditions and would once again be permitted to impose “lifetime caps” and other limits on payouts to sick patients. “Delivery reform,” an Obamacare-assisted effort to reward providers throughout the medical system for delivering quality rather than quantity of care, would slow down but probably not stop. It's also uncertain whether repeal would reverse the dramatic recent slowdown in health care cost growth, which, since the passage of Obamacare, has reached its lowest level in half a century. But repeal would definitely reverse Obamacare’s steep tax increases on income and investments for families earning more than $250,000 a year.
Immigration: This is the one policy issue that’s gotten a lot of attention in 2016, because of the famous wall Trump wants to build to keep out undocumented Mexicans. Clinton does not want to build a wall. Trump has also said he wants to deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants who are already here, although sometimes he says he wants to focus on criminals first, which is what Obama is already doing. Clinton does not want to deport immigrants who aren’t criminals, and supports immigration reform that would include a path to citizenship, which Trump derides as “amnesty.” Trump has also proposed a ban on Muslim refugees for security reasons, although he later amended that to a ban on refugees from certain countries, and sometimes just promises “extreme vetting.” Clinton supports bringing in some refugees from Muslim countries, as long as they’re vetted, and rejects the idea of discriminating against any refugees on the basis of their religion. She says she's also concerned about border security, although honestly, she seems much more concerned about breaking up undocumented families.
Economy: There are few starker differences between the candidates than their views of the Obama economy. Trump sees a jobless hellscape of anemic growth and stifling regulation, while Clinton sees a promising recovery that has broken free from the Great Recession and created 15 million new jobs but not yet reached its potential. Trump wants radical change. Clinton wants incremental improvements.
Trump believes that massive personal and corporate tax cuts along with a massive rollback of onerous regulations will spark a massive economic boom. This is standard Republican dogma, except that he also supports a draconian 35 percent tax on imports and tighter monetary policy, even though most economists believe those policies, at least in the short term, would stifle growth. Trump also wants major spending programs to rebuild infrastructure and strengthen the military, although he has not said how he intends to pay for those programs.
Clinton tends to talk less about jump-starting a boom and more about making the economy work for everyone. She has pledged not to raise taxes on the middle class, but she wants rich families, corporations and, especially, Wall Street to pay more. Her primary strategy for generating growth boils down to government investment—in infrastructure, clean energy, scientific research and higher education, as well as subsidies for child care and guaranteed family leave to help modern families in which both parents work. Clinton has been mealy-mouthed on trade issues, praising Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership deal with Asia as “the gold standard” when she was secretary of state, but then opposing it after getting a populist primary challenge from Bernie Sanders. Emails exposed in the WikiLeaks hack seemed to confirm that her team sees trade as a largely political issue, not a core economic belief like equal pay for women or access to affordable child care.
Budgets/deficits: Trump talks a lot about the evils of budget deficits and debt, but independent analysts have found that his plans would put the United States much deeper in the red than Clinton’s, although neither candidate supports the kind of cuts to Medicare and Social Security that would significantly reduce America's debt. The fiscal hawks at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget did find that Clinton’s plans would reduce projected increases in the debt by $500 billion over 20 years, because her high-end tax hikes would pay for her new spending. They found that Trump’s plans would add $16 trillion to those projections, because his tax cuts and military spending are not paid for.
The Trump campaign argues that this is short-sighted bean-counting, ignoring how his tax cuts and tougher trade policies will spark a tremendous economic boom that will pay for everything. Anything is possible, but it’s worth noting that the GOP supply-siders who still believe tax cuts generate explosive growth—a belief that took a serious hit in the George W. Bush era—also tend to believe that Trump-style protectionism generates recessions. It’s hard to find anyone who subscribes to both elements of Trump’s thinking.
Education: Although Obama has embraced tough accountability measures for public schools, and has clashed with Democratic teachers unions, Clinton seems much more union-friendly, emphasizing investment in buildings and teachers rather than accountability. But while Clinton has moved to Obama's left on education, Trump has moved to Obama’s right, proposing a $20 billion school choice fund that could be used to help children attend private schools, and suggesting he might eliminate the Department of Education. Clinton opposes private school choice, although she says she’s not opposed to charter schools within the public system.
On higher education, Clinton has proposed to expand federal aid and pressure states to expand their aid so that students from families earning less than $125,000 can attend public college for free. The Trump campaign has dismissed that kind of largesse as overly generous, but his debt relief plan is quite similar to changes Obama has already implemented, limiting student loan payments according to income and forgiving loans after 15 years.
Abortion: Trump used to be pro-abortion rights, but he is now opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest or the life of the mother at risk. Clinton is pro-abortion rights.
Gun control: Clinton is for it, including increased background checks and a ban on so-called assault weapons. Trump is against it, although he does support the idea that terrorism suspects on the “no-fly list” should lose access to firearms.
Supreme Court: This is an issue that could end up overriding much of the rest of this list, because a conservative Supreme Court could block Washington actions on climate change, immigration reform, campaign finance reform, voting rights and gun control—and in fact, it already has. Trump has pledged to appoint justices in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia, which would restore the court’s conservative tilt—and, if another vacancy emerges during his presidency, perhaps pave the way for the end of Roe v. Wade and other liberal priorities. It is not inconceivable that a court with two more Scalia-style jurists could embrace anti-New Deal legal doctrines that challenge just about all government programs that aren’t specifically authorized in the Constitution.
Clinton seems like a fairly conventional Democrat when it comes to judicial appointments. She has chastised Republicans for refusing to confirm or even hold hearings for Obama’s choice to replace Scalia, Merrick Garland. But many liberals hope that if she’s elected, she’ll ditch Garland for someone younger and further left. Some conservatives hope that if she’s elected, Senate Republicans will refuse to confirm any justice she picks, which would preserve the current 4-4 conservative-liberal balance of the court, and perhaps spark a constitutional crisis as well.
Foreign policy: Once again, the easiest way to tell the difference between the candidates is their view of the world under Obama. Trump sees a world going to hell, with America in imminent peril, and the community of nations laughing at what losers we are. Clinton sees progress in some areas and challenges in others.
It’s hard to parse the Trump Doctrine, because it often squishes around. He now says he opposed the Iraq War, which he supported at the time, but also says he opposed Obama’s withdrawal of American troops, which he also supported at the time. He once supported Obama’s opening to Cuba but now says he would reverse it. He initially said he had a secret plan to defeat ISIL and that he knew more about how to do it than the generals, but then he said he’d ask the generals for a plan.
Trump’s stated philosophy is America First, which he suggests would mean less military intervention in the Middle East and other hot spots. But he has also said he would have blown up an Iranian ship after one of its sailors made a rude gesture at Americans, which did not suggest a bias toward isolationism. He has been quite consistent that he intends to forge closer relations with Vladimir Putin; he suggested he wouldn’t want NATO to defend the Baltic states if Russia invaded, an unsubtle invitation for Russia to invade, and has called the NATO alliance “obsolete.” Otherwise, though, his core foreign-policy value seems to be Strength, which he seems to think will give him free rein to renegotiate the trade deals and treaties he considers dumb.
By contrast, Clinton’s views on foreign policy have sounded a fair amount like Obama’s, with an emphasis on diplomacy and coalition-building over threats and bombs, but she is considered more hawkish than Obama. She pushed hard for his intervention in Libya, which the president now regrets, and advocated internally for a tougher stance in Syria. But she supports Obama’s opening to Cuba, climate deal in Paris, and nuclear deal with Iran. She’s a fairly conventional member of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, while Trump, for better or worse, is not.
Horse soring and more: OK, horse soring isn’t the most important issue facing the nation in 2016. Honestly, I had never heard of it until I read about it on Clinton’s website, under her “Protecting Animals and Wildlife” section, where she pledges to “crack down on the practice of horse soring, in which chemicals or other inhumane methods are applied to horses’ limbs to exaggerate their gait.” She also pledges to make sure breeders and research institutions create plans to protect animals during natural disasters, strengthen regulation of puppy mills, and work to “eliminate the use of antibiotics in farm animals for non-therapeutic reasons.”
Clinton’s policy agenda is, to put it mildly, thorough. One could argue that it reflects a belief that government holds the solution to every problem. But it certainly reflects a belief that the presidency is a serious policy job. Perhaps the minutiae on her website is a bit of overkill, with its plans to expand autism screening, modernize credit underwriting, and double the AmeriCorps Segal Education Award for national service. But it’s a blueprint for a Clinton administration. The most reliable way to figure out what a candidate will do in office is to see what the candidate pledges to do during the campaign.
Trump’s policy agenda is thinner. One could argue that it reflects a desire to maximize his flexibility in the White House, or a hedgehog-over-fox approach that prioritizes a few big issues instead of sweating the small stuff. And even though he used to mock the Clinton campaign for churning out so many nine-point policy plans, his campaign has upped its white-paper game lately. I hadn’t noticed until my latest spin through his website that he’s announced an 18-item Contract With the American Voter, including plans to propose a constitutional amendment limiting congressional terms, freeze all federal hiring, label China a currency manipulator, approve the Keystone pipeline, and other promises for his first 100 days. But Trump has left a lot more white space in his agenda, white space that he could conceivably fill later, but could also be filled by the Republican Congress or his underlings.
The larger point, perhaps a Captain Obvious point, is that presidential elections have a huge impact on policies that affect millions and even billions of lives. Clinton thinks police should be required to wear body cameras, while Trump does not, and while neither one of them is running for police chief or city council, the president’s views on issues like that matter. Trump wants to eliminate Obama’s new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which cracks down on scams in the financial industry, and, if he wins, he’ll probably get his way. If he doesn’t, he won’t.
Of course, it also matters whether or not Trump is a serial groper, or a racist, or a congenitally impulsive bomb-thrower who shouldn’t be trusted with nukes. It matters whether Clinton was careless with classified information, and whether her foundation’s donors got access to the State Department. But those are not the only things that matter.
The future of issues like climate change and NATO will help determine the future of the planet, but in the 2016 campaign, they received about as much attention as horse soring. Perhaps in 2020, when the consequences of this decision have worked their way through the American system, policy will actually get some airtime.