Why the Republican Party Needs a Platform

F or more than a century, going back to the origins of the GOP, the Republican Party has issued a platform telling voters what it planned to do in the years ahead. In 2020, this tradition was broken, and it is not clear that it will restart in 2024. The potential demise of a party platform should worry conservatives.

There were a number of reasons for what happened in 2020. First was the Covid outbreak, which made it hard to hold the meetings to deliberate over the platform. At the time, the party claimed that it “did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement.” But something else was going on as well. The Trump team wanted to rethink the platform, and the coronavirus challenge gave it an excuse for doing so.

The Trump operation had looked at skipping a platform in 2016. According to Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh, “a more focused platform was considered” in that cycle. That did not happen, and the Republican National Committee’s platform committee instead created a traditional 58-page platform in 2016, with a number of important provisions, including strong pro-Israel language pushed by David Friedman that foreshadowed a pro-Israel administration and Friedman as ambassador to Israel.

In 2020, the Trump team was more confident in its standing with the party and more determined in its quest not to have a traditional platform. Trump aide and son-in-law Jared Kushner had been pushing a pocket-card-size platform as early as December of 2019, even before Covid became a serious concern. This suggests that the Covid explanation for the short platform may have merely been an excuse for what they were trying to do anyway.

This effort to create a new kind of platform succeeded in 2020, as the Trump campaign, not the RNC, put out a 600-word compilation of policy preferences. This statement did not so much resemble a platform as a list filled with aspirations. One item, “Made in America Tax Credits,” came with no explanation whatsoever, leaving readers to wonder what exactly these were, and whether the party was for or against them.

The reason to avoid a platform is simple. It prevents the candidate from having to be tied down to any specific policy. It gives the party and its nominee maximum flexibility in governing. Changes in direction are relatively cost-free, as they will not entail the violation of any pledged positions.

Despite this understandable desire for flexibility, a vague platform is also a liability. A platform tells voters what a party aspires to do. A compelling platform can attract new voters and excite base voters. It does not lock in the party to a course of action, but it does force the party to explain itself if it acts in ways contrary to what it laid out in the platform.

From a conservative perspective, the platforms are generally pretty solidly designed to appeal to the right. Russ Vought, a former Office of Management and Budget director who has worked for conservatives like then-congressman Mike Pence and former senator Phil Gramm, was recently named the policy director of the platform committee, which is the primary drafter of a platform. His credentials suggest that this platform would be fairly conservative as well. If that is indeed the case, the more robust the platform the better, as detailed platforms help keep candidates tethered to a conservative agenda.

For these reasons, the 2024 party platform should be an articulation of the Republican Party’s vision, telling potential voters what the party stands for and why. It should be able to get an undecided voter to read it and say, “That party represents my values and my concerns,” as it did to a politically untutored 21-year-old named Mary Copeland in 1976. Copeland was from a Democratic family and expected to vote the same way, but upon reading a summary of the Republican platform that year, she became a Republican, and, years later, governor of Oklahoma Mary Fallin.

Typically, the small platform team collects material from a vast array of sources: talking points, speeches, policy papers, and op-eds. A skilled platform-writing team can get to the essence of what the party stands for, avoid unnecessary fights and controversies, and put together something coherent that can both unite the various party factions and attract new voters to the fold.

It’s a challenging task, and it takes some time, which is why the party needs to start the platform-creating process sooner rather than later. But in addition to time, it takes will. The party leaders have to want to make it happen. The will was lacking in 2020, and the party lost both the election and the chance to lay down its policy markers for the next four years.

As for this year, the jury is still out. While the platform staff has been selected, the party has yet to select platform chairs, which is the key step that would be required around now to produce a standard platform by the time of the conventions. This delay could suggest the creation of what’s known by platform veterans as an imperial platform, like the one Richard Nixon produced in 1972. In that case, the platform process, including the text of the draft, was largely dictated by the campaign. Conservatives know what happened there. Although Nixon won a large victory, his domestic-policy agenda was far from conservative.

If the intent for 2024 is to replicate the shortened 2020 platform, the delayed approach makes sense, as that kind of platform can be written fairly quickly. A longer, more detailed platform that takes into account the views of the conservative grassroots takes longer, and time is running out.

What all this means is that things remain in a state of uncertainty. When asked in a recent interview if the party would return to having a platform in 2024, RNC co-chair Lara Trump responded with an uninspiring, “Yeah, I think so.” The Republican Party will need more definitive leadership if it is to return to the grand and necessary tradition of laying out the party’s aspirations in a 2024 platform.