hot button

hot button

Highly politicized or emotionally charged. Often used in the phrase "a hot button issue." Primarily heard in US. Wealth redistribution is a hot button issue on both sides of the political aisle.
See also: button, hot
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

a hot button

AMERICAN, INFORMAL
COMMON If a subject or problem is a hot button, people have very strong feelings about it. If crime is the city's issue most known to outsiders, rent control is the city's hot button for its residents. Note: Hot-button can be used before a noun. These controversial, hot-button issues create hazards for politicians.
See also: button, hot
Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed.
See also:
  • a hot button
  • get hot
  • go like hot cakes
  • right on the button
  • diggety
  • diggity
  • (I've been) keeping cool
  • button up
  • (as) hot as fire
  • hot as fire
References in periodicals archive
What are the emotional hot buttons that lead you to over-react?
The prospect will have her guard down, hear what you said and if you are truly speaking to a real prospect, your hot button messages will grow a little more every time one of those issues pops up.
Join this hot button panel and find out what the federal regulators have been doing, what the NCUA expects from credit unions, and what's to come for credit unions as part of the agency's oversight mission.
Executive compensation is a hot button topic for the legal and financial worlds these days as companies report their CEO salaries for 2013, with most of the reports coming to the conclusion that executives are overpaid and that the standards that CEOs are held to are too low to qualify them for the kinds of salaries they are rewarded.
The Live Gamer HD will be shipped with comprehensive accessories including HDMI cable, DVI to HDMI cable, HDMI to DVI connector, 3.5mm audio cable, RECentral software application and the Hot Button.
CIVIL servants have been given a guide on how to butter up their new Tory ministers with a list of "hot button" phrases.
Hot button issues, all opposed by the church, include: homosexual marriages, artificial contraceptives and the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
"Pushing text messages to cell phones--this is really the hot button right now," says Carmine Piscopo, president of the Association for Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education, and the telecommunications manager for Providence College (R.I.).
Obama touches all the hot button words like the "nuclear option," "strict constructionists," and the like but never really says anything deep or brave or new other than to remind us that the hot buttons are really hot.
Gay marriage is as 'hot button' now as serving in the military was then, and it's being defeated all across the country."
After examining and analyzing hundreds of records on coerced sexual relations, Professor Sharon Block concludes that interracial sexuality has been a hot button since America's colonial period.
Leagues know the "hot button" issues in their locales and, more importantly, know how to engage the public and effect change.
Instead, he calls his supervisor on the IP phone with the touch of a hot button. The supervisor receives the call on her wireless IP phone a couple of floors down, and heads up to correct the problem.
Shannon: Catholics have pretty much accepted libertarian ideals as the ultimate truth and have little awareness of the conflict between these ideals and their faith--except maybe on a few hot button issues such as abortion.
ONCE THERE, SELECT THE AMMOHELP ON THE WEB HOT BUTTON AND FILL OUT THE FORM.