This presidential race will be fought over competing understandings of 'freedom' | Eric Foner

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

47% : But since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan in effect redefined freedom as limited government, low taxes and unregulated economic enterprise, Democrats have pretty much ceded the word to their opponents.
43% : As the contrast between FDR and Reagan illustrates, the first sees government as a threat to freedom and the second as removing barriers to its enjoyment, often by government intervention.
39% : The historian Jefferson Cowie, whose book Freedom's Dominion won the Pulitzer prize for history in 2023, argues that negative freedom, expressed as opposition to federal intervention in local affairs, has often boiled down to little more than the determination of local elites to exercise political and economic power over subordinate groups without outside interference.
23% : The frequent calls for "reproductive freedom" - the right to make intimate decisions free of governmental interference (or as vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz put it, the principle of "mind your own damn business") - embraced and expanded the idea of negative freedom.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.