Later this week, the Democratic Party’s platform committee will convene for its final meeting, to finalize changes to the document that lays out the party’s vision and priorities for the next four years. A draft of the platform — hashed out by a team of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton supporters — includes some of the most progressive policies ever embraced by Democrats, some of which were considered radical just a few years ago. On topics ranging from criminal justice to abortion rights to energy, the blueprint is a sharp departure from the one approved by the party in 2012. Some delegates say they are not yet satisfied, and vow to continue fighting for revisions in the coming weeks, including a ban on fracking and strongly-worded opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Yet the platform as it stands now leans further to the left than any in recent history.
Here are the major areas where this year’s Democratic platform is more progressive than the one President Obama ran on in 2012:
1. “We will continue to oppose — and seek to overturn — federal and state laws and policies that impede a woman’s access to abortion, including by repealing the Hyde Amendment.”
For the first time ever, the Democratic platform includes a call for the repeal of a 1970s-era law that bans the government from providing any federal funding to support abortion services. Both Clinton and Sanders have called for the law’s repeal, citing its harmful impacts on low-income women who can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars out-of-pocket to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.
“Any right that requires you to take extraordinary measures to access it is no right at all,” Hillary Clinton said in a speech in January on ending the restrictive policy. Striking down the law would allow women to use Medicaid funds to pay for abortion care.
2. “We oppose drilling in the Arctic and off the Atlantic coast.”
The 2012 Democratic platform touted President Obama’s controversial “all of the above” energy policy, which embraced fossil fuel extraction along with solar, wind, and other clean sources of power. The platform explicitly supports natural gas fracking and calls for more oil and gas pipelines to be built. The 2016 draft is a sharp departure. It calls for ending all tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuel companies, ensuring all government buildings use “100 percent clean electricity,” and demands a moratorium on offshore drilling. The document also suggests that all corporations be legally bound to study how climate change will impact their business and reveal that information to their shareholders.
Years of grassroots pressure contributed to this shift, pushing President Obama to reverse course on new pipelines and underwater drill sites.
3. “We will abolish the death penalty, which has proven to be a cruel and unusual form of punishment.”
The question of the death penalty created a major divide between Clinton and Sanders during this election. Since launching his bid for president, Sanders has called for the abolition of the practice, calling it state-sanctioned “murder.” Yet Clinton has said repeatedly that she believes capital punishment should be used “limited and rare” circumstances, such as punishing those who commit terrorist attacks or mass shootings. Sanders’ position appears to have won out in the platform fight.
Since the pro-death penalty, tough-on-crime stance of Democrats in the 1990s, support for the practice has plummeted. While the 2012 Democratic platform said only, “We believe that the death penalty must not be arbitrary,” a series of excruciating botched executions over the past few years has galvanized opposition to the practice. Last year, Nebraska became the 19th states to pass its own ban.
4. “We will invest in…the use of smart strategies like police body cameras.”
The 2012 platform called for giving police officers “the equipment, training, and technologies they need to keep their communities safe.” The 2016 platform goes further, calling explicitly for police to wear body cameras. The question of law enforcement cameras has divided the country over the last few years, in the wake of several high profile killings of unarmed black men and boys. Some say the devices will curb police brutality and create better legal accountability, while others argue they will violate civilians’ privacy. Some officers who already been ordered to wear cameras have turned them off, destroyed the footage, or otherwise tampered with them, and some cities have pursued polices to block the public from accessing the footage.
5. “Americans should earn at least $15 an hour and have the right to form or join a union.”
The current minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and hasn’t been raised since 2009. Democrats have long demanded that it be increased, and in the 2012 DNC platform mentioned raising it three times. But until recently, the demands were modest, and the previous party platform didn’t specify how much workers deserve to paid. In 2013, President Obama called for an increase to $9 an hour. But fast food workers started a movement when they went on strike in November of 2012 to demand they be paid at least $15 an hour.
Since then, the movement has spread rapidly and notched a series of victories: California and New York passed laws this year mandating statewide $15 minimum wages, and Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill that would increase the federal wage to that level last year.
6. “Democrats will make sure that the United States finally enacts national paid family and medical leave.”
The United States is extremely lonely on the national stage when it comes to our lack of a guarantee that workers can take paid family leave to care for new children or sick family members. The only guarantee is that those at large enough employers can take 12 weeks of unpaid time off. In 2012, Democrats supported expanding that unpaid leave to more people and working with states that have been passing their own paid programs. But in 2013, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) introduced the first bill to create a paid family leave program for the entire country. In the 2016 race, nearly all Democratic presidential candidates supported a national program.
7. “We will make sure Social Security’s guaranteed benefits continue for generations to come by asking those at the top to pay more.”
Social Security faces a long-term financing problem if things stay the way they are. By 2020, without action from Congress, payments will exceed the income it gets from payroll taxes, according to the latest report from its trustees. The 2012 DNC platform pledged to “find a solution to protect Social Security for future generations.” This year it has landed on an easy one: raising taxes on the wealthy. Currently, any money someone earns over $117,000 is exempt from the payroll taxes. That overwhelmingly helps the wealthy — the top richest people in the country stop paying into the program shortly after the year begins — while starving the fund of revenue. Eliminating the cap, which would impact just 6 percent of American workers, would almost entirely close Social Security’s funding gap for the next 75 years. Others in the party have sought to go further, though, and actually try to expand benefits, rather than keep the status quo that leaves many retirees in poverty.
8. “Democrats believe we must make it easier to vote not harder.”
In 2012, the Democratic platform boasted about the work the Obama Administration had done thus far on protecting voting rights and pledged to continue. But in 2013, the Supreme Court took away the federal government’s best tool for ensuring access to the ballot box: Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. Since then, more than a dozen Republican-controlled states have passed laws that have made voting more difficult, especially for traditionally Democratic voting groups such as students and people of color.
The 2016 platform not only calls for restoring the Voting Rights Act to its full power, but lists a number of progressive policies that would make voting much easier, including “expanding early voting and vote-by-mail, implementing universal automatic voter registration, same day voting, ending partisan and racial gerrymandering, and making Election Day a national holiday.” For the first time, the platform also calls for restoring the voting rights of formerly incarcerated citizens — more than 5 million of whom are currently barred from political participation.
9. “Democrats support…an updated and modernized version of Glass-Steagall.”
After the collapse of the world economy during the Great Recession and the bailout of some of the country’s largest banks, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank financial reform package. The new rules are meant to rein in the risky bank behavior that led to the crash and keep the financial sector from endangering the economy again. But many have noted that big banks are still large and concentrated and may be Too Big To Fail. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 enacted a firewall between their regular commercial banking activities and riskier investment and insurance activities, but it was repealed in the 90s. Lawmakers like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have argued that bringing it back could significantly reduce the risk banks pose.