The policy platform adopted Monday at the Democratic National Convention is unlikely to sway many voters, but it does offer some insights into how the party is attempting to move toward the center on key issues such as immigration.

It also is a different type of platform from those at past Democratic conventions in that the 2024 version spends a lot of time criticizing the other party. 

“It is a very odd and unconventional party platform,” said Austin Sarat, a political science professor at Amherst College. 

“Party platforms are typically written in discursive style: ‘We’re gonna do this and we’re gonna do that,'” he said. But this year’s 92-page policy document for Democrats is heavy on criticism of the Republican candidate, with more mentions of former President Donald Trump (150) than there are of their own presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris (32).

Sarat had a similar assessment of last month’s Republican National Convention platform, which included an all-caps section of policy goals that could have been taken directly from a Trump social media post, starting with “SEAL THE BORDER, AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION” and “CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”

“The platform for the Republican Party and the form of the platform for the Democratic Party are as unconventional as this political year itself is unconventional,” Sarat said.

The platform adopted by Democrats this week borrows heavily from a draft document released by the party in July before Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket. 

It appears the writers worked so quickly that they forgot to change the language to reflect Harris’ new status. The preamble, in fact, describes the administration’s accomplishments so far and then states: “President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Democrats are running to finish the job.”

Overall, the platform mentions Biden nearly 300 times, including this sentence in the first chapter: “This election is a choice between two very different economic visions for America: Donald Trump, who sees the world from his country club at Mar-a-Lago; and Joe Biden, who sees it from kitchen tables in Scranton like the one he grew up around.”

The preamble sums up the Democratic Party’s policy goals this way: “To grow our economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down. To reward work, not wealth. To lower costs. To tackle the climate crisis, lower energy costs, and secure energy independence. To protect communities and tackle the scourge of gun violence. To secure the border and fix the broken immigration system. To advance the President’s Unity Agenda. To strengthen American leadership worldwide.”

Sarat called it “a pretty fair representation of a left-of-center approach, but not a radically left approach,” with an aggressive agenda on climate change “but also a promise to be tough on the border.”

Message strategy

The platform is a combination of broad appeals to voters and specific policy plans sought by constituent groups of the Democratic Party, said Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University.

“It’s always going to be a matter of negotiation,” she said.

The Republican platform is just the opposite, with no mention of views from across the party, but only positions taken by Trump, Hershey said. She noted that the GOP didn’t have a platform in 2020, simply stating, “What he said” in a bow to Trump. “It was the first time in recent memory that any party has ignored the opportunity to put down its chips and say what it believes in,” Hershey said.

This year, Republicans went “full Trump” in their platform, she said. “It was basically a Trump tweet. It had his vernacular and his capitalization. It was incoherent, a series of clippings on the cutting room floor from Trump speeches.”

While few voters will actually read them, “platforms can be very useful in predicting what the incoming elected officials will do if they are able to hold all of the federal government,” Hershey said. “But when one party holds the White House and the other holds Congress there’s likely to be clashes on a lot of issues.”

Justin Buchler, associate professor of political science at Case Western Reserve University, agreed that platforms are not game-changers for most voters.

“Party platforms are not nearly as important in the United States as they are in a lot of other party systems,” including in countries with proportional representation where members are firmly bound by the precepts of the party’s platform, he said.

Buchler said he sees an evolution in Democratic platforms since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who advanced the New Deal in the 1930s to pull the nation out of the Great Depression. The 1960s brought the focus on civil rights, voting rights and Medicare for seniors under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and in 2008 the emphasis shifted to expanding health care as Barack Obama won the White House, he said.

Now the focus for Democrats is identity politics, with policies attempting to address inequities based on gender, race and sexual orientation, Buchler said.

“What comes from this is you look at society as a relationship between the oppressor and oppressed, you figure out who is oppressed and you side with the oppressed,” he said. “That is the ideology underlying everything about the Democratic Party in 2024.”

Hershey agreed with Buchler’s assessment. “What’s important, though, is specific stands that the Democrats have taken on issues have not changed all that much,” she said. “It’s been the priorities that have changed. It’s not that Democrats have gone from opposing government-provided health care to favoring it. It’s that government-provided health care has gone lower on the priority list as a result of the Affordable Care Act having been passed.”

At the same time, Democrats are not likely to focus on identity politics as much as Republicans, Hershey said. 

“Basically what the Democrats are going to emphasize this year is, ‘We’re not Trump,'” she said. “We believe in the principles of democracy. We’re the real majority party in the sense of preserving democratic principles, and these guys want to take it away from you.”