#policy differences

WASHINGTON: Indian-American Vivek Ramaswamy has acknowledged that there were some “very small” differences between him and former US president Donald Trump but they were “deeply aligned” on policy issues, “90-plus per cent of the way” as the two fight it out for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024. Speaking to Fox News on Friday about his policy differences with Trump, his…

Despite significantly different proposals from the Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination, the policies they would end up implementing in a hypothetical administration would probably not be extremely different from each other’s. Paul Krugman explains in his column:

[T]he Democratic Party is very different from the G.O.P. — it’s a loose coalition of interest groups, not a monolithic entity answering to a handful of billionaires allied with white nationalists. But this if anything makes it even harder for a Democratic president to lead his or her party very far from its political center of gravity, which is currently one of moderate progressivism.

Any Democrat who alienates a significant portion of the party’s diverse base won’t get elected president anyway. So it become a moot point.

The candidates can argue all they want over policy, but few of those policies will become law without a Democratic Senate. Any presidential campaign needs to mesh well with the campaign to retake the Senate which is largely focusing on half a dozen states.

We might actually do better to argue about personal history, electability, style, and fitness than to nitpick over policy proposals by prospective nominees at this point.

Differences aside, Dr. Krugman points out the most important commonality among the Democratic candidates: