page_title: Hillary Clinton
section_title: Political positions
hierarchical_section_title: Hillary Clinton / Political positions
context_page_description: Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is an American politician, diplomat, lawyer, writer, and public speaker who served as the 67th United States secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, as a United States senator from New York from 2001 to 2009, and as First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Clinton became the first woman to be nominated for president of the United States by a major political party when she won the Democratic Party nomination in 2016. She was the first woman to win the popular vote in an American presidential election, which she lost to Donald Trump.
  Raised in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Clinton graduated from Wellesley College in 1969, and earned a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1973. After serving as a congressional legal counsel, she moved to Arkansas and married future president Bill Clinton in 1975; the two had met at Yale. In 1977, she co-founded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. She was appointed the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978, and became the first female partner at Little Rock's Rose Law Firm the following year.
context_section_description: Using her Senate votes, several organizations have attempted to measure Clinton's place on the political spectrum scientifically. National Journal's 2004 study of roll-call votes assigned Clinton a rating of 30 on the political spectrum, relative to the Senate at the time, with a rating of 1 being most liberal and 100 being most conservative. National Journal's subsequent rankings placed her as the 32nd-most liberal senator in 2006 and 16th-most liberal senator in 2007.
  A 2004 analysis by political scientists Joshua D. Clinton of Princeton University and Simon Jackman and Doug Rivers of Stanford University found her likely to be the sixth-to-eighth-most liberal senator.The Almanac of American Politics, edited by Michael Barone and Richard E. Cohen, rated her votes from 2003 through 2006 as liberal or conservative, with 100 as the highest rating, in three areas: Economic, Social and Foreign. Averaged for the four years, the ratings are: Economic = 75 liberal, 23 conservative; Social = 83 liberal, 6 conservative; Foreign = 66 liberal, 30 conservative. Total average = 75 liberal, 20 conservative. According to FiveThirtyEight's measure of political ideology, "Clinton was one of the most liberal members during her time in the Senate."
  Organizations have also attempted to provide more recent assessments of Clinton after she reentered elective politics in 2015. Based on her stated positions from the 1990s to the present, On the Issues places her in the "Left Liberal" region on their two-dimensional grid of social and economic ideologies, with a social score of 80 on a scale of zero more-restrictive to 100 less-government stances, with an economic score of ten on a scale of zero more-restrictive to 100 less-government stances. Crowdpac, which does a data aggregation of campaign contributions, votes and speeches, gives her a 6.5L rating on a one-dimensional left-right scale from 10L (most liberal) to 10C (most conservative). Through 2008, she had an average lifetime 90 percent "Liberal Quotient" from Americans for Democratic Action, and a lifetime eight percent rating from the American Conservative Union.
  In March 2016, Clinton laid out a detailed economic plan, which The New York Times called "optimistic" and "wide-ranging". Basing her economic philosophy on inclusive capitalism, Clinton proposed a "clawback" that would rescind tax relief and other benefits for companies that move jobs overseas; providing incentives for companies that share profits with employees, communities and the environment, rather than focusing on short-term profits to increase stock value and rewarding shareholders; increasing collective bargaining rights; and placing an "exit tax" on companies that move their headquarters out of America to pay a lower tax rate overseas. Clinton currently opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) (though she previously described it as "the gold standard" of trade deals). She supports the U.S. Export-Import Bank and holds that "any trade deal has to produce jobs and raise wages and increase prosperity and protect our security". As senator (2001–2009), her record on trade was mixed; she voted in favor of some trade agreements but not others.
  Given the climate of unlimited campaign contributions following the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, Clinton called for a constitutional amendment to limit "unaccountable money" in politics. In July 2016, she "committed" to introducing a U.S. constitutional amendment that would result in overturning the 2010 Citizens United decision. On December 7, 2015, Clinton presented her detailed plans for regulating Wall Street financial activities in the New York Times.
  Accepting the scientific consensus on climate change, Clinton supports cap-and-trade, and opposed the Keystone XL pipeline.
  She supported "equal pay for equal work", to address current shortfalls in how much women are paid to do the same jobs men do. Clinton has explicitly focused on family issues and supports universal preschool. These programs would be funded by proposing tax increases on the wealthy, including a "fai
caption: 2016 presidential campaign logo