On August 24, 2020, the US entered a new period leading up to November 2020 presidential elections. The Republicans began the Republican National Convention (RNC) proceedings on Monday morning, at Charlotte Convention Center, in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Vice President Pence was renominated by acclamation. He stopped by the convention center and delivered brief remarks to the convention delegates. He is scheduled to deliver a formal address on Wednesday night from Fort McHenry in Baltimore.
Then, the RNC delegates proceeded with a roll call of states to renominate President Trump for a second four-year term. He secured enough votes to win the nomination. The states and territories were called in alphabetical order, except for Florida, the president's home state, which was the last to have its votes counted. After the votes, in the early afternoon, President Trump, in an unscheduled appearance after the nomination was official, emerged to chants of "four more years". He said: "Our country can go in a horrible, horrible direction or an even greater direction and before the plague came in from China, that's where we were going."
Now, the US and the World are waiting for President Trump's speech highlighting his agenda, later on the week. He is expected to make an appearance on each of the four nights of the RNC, but will officially accept the nomination from the White House garden on Thursday, August 27, 2020.
Meanwhile, the discussions have been focusing on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's agenda and key policies.
What is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's agenda?
The agenda of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can be summarized in the following key areas:
- Healthcare: Expanding Obamacare by offering all Americans a public insurance option.
Lower costs for medicare. Reduce medicare age requirement from 65 to 60 years old. - Social Security: Preserve and strengthen social security, by putting Social Security on a path to long-run solvency and protecting benefits for teachers, widows and widowers, and elderly
- Immigration: Create guaranteed access to counseling for immigrants; access to health case for all immigrants
- Climate Change: Support Green New Deal with major investments, to more than $2 trillion. Ban fracking ban, mostly for oil and gas production from federal lands.
- Economy and Banking: Keep strict rules and regulations on bank lending, especially targeting big banks. Eliminate income gaps between men and women and whites and minorities, enact minimum wage and allow workers to join unions. Ensure some guaranteed income to all americans.
- Technology: fight monopolies and protect users' privacy online.
- Law Enforcement/Policing and Criminal Justice: strengthen America’s commitment to justice and reform our criminal justice system. This includes: reducing the number of people incarcerated in this country while also reducing crime, rooting out the racial, gender, and income-based disparities in the system, and focusing the criminal justice system on redemption and rehabilitation
- Racial inequalities: advance the economic mobility of african americans and close the racial wealth and income gaps by investing in African American businesses and entrepreneurs, ensuring equal access to credit and capital, enacting policies and regulations enforcing fair lending and fair housing protections for homeowners, and increasing opportunities for African American-owned businesses to obtain or participate in federal contracts
- Foreign Policy: Restore and reimagine partnerships and strengthen cooperation with democratic partners beyond North America and Europe by reaching out to partners in Asia to fortify collective capabilities and integrating friends in Latin America and Africa.
@AfroAmerica Network, 2020
