Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and incumbent candidate President Barack Obama have remained tied in the polls for several weeks now, and, with early voting already started, it’s important to understand the issues each candidate supports and rejects.
Gay Marriage
President Obama supports marriage equality– which means he supports marriage of all people.
Presidential Candidate Romney only supports traditional marriage– the marriage between a man and a woman.
Immigration
Obama had a record setting amount of deportations during his first term in office, and it looks like he would keep that up should he be re-elected.
Romney believes that illegal immigrants need to be forced out of America. He also supports higher levels of immigration for skilled immigrants. This means he wants immigrants who are highly skilled in certain jobs to immigrate to America. He also wants a lower amount of the immigrants with less skill to immigrate.
Abortion
Obama is pro-choice. This means he stands by what women want, whether it is abortion or to have the child.
Romney is pro-life. He previously supported a woman’s choice on abortion, but has since moved his standpoint to adamantly stand against abortion.
Healthcare
Obama believes in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which is where everyone pays for other people’s healthcare because some people don’t have jobs in order to pay for it.
Romney wants to kill the Affordable Care Act and wants to give the power to the states to choose their own healthcare plans.
Gun Control
Obama used to be a gun-control supporter while in Chicago, but now he doesn’t even mention gun control. He usually avoids the subject and moves to another topic. When confronted during the second presidential debate, Obama said he is in favor of the assault rifle ban, stating “we’re a nation that believes in the second amendment,” then switched to talking about law enforcement, schools, then to faith groups.
Romney is a Republican who supports gun control. However, when asked about guns, he talked for less than half a minute about it and switched to schools.
Both candidates, when asked about gun control, highly favor education.
Minimum Wage
Obama supports raising the minimum wage. However, he has not showed potential to act on this. In 2008, one of the things he promised in his campaign was to raise the minimum wage. It was supposed to be $9.50 by 2011, and it hasn’t budged once from $7.25.
Romney supported raising minimum wages, but now however deems it fit that the minimum wage should only rise should we need it to compete in the global market. He says as of now we don’t need to raise the minimum wage, therefore he does not support raising it right now, but may choose otherwise later.
Job Creation
Both candidates strongly believe in job creation.
Obama wants to create 60,000 jobs annually by exploring for natural gas. He wants to give aid to states for teachers ($85 billion would create 1.5 million jobs). He would also extend unemployment benefits ($62 billion would create 1.178 million jobs).
Romney wants the private sector (private companies) to create jobs.
