Member-only story
Will The Onion Be First To Publish The Republican Party Platform 2024?
If the party dares advance a platform in a post-Jan. 6 presidential election with Trump as its nominee, are there any needles it can credibly thread?*
What is a party platform, anyway?
Presumably, a platform lays out the party’s policies and goals to inform and, hopefully, appeal to members of the electorate, in particular undecided voters who remain persuadable. The last platform the Republican Party published was 2016, in advance of that year’s presidential election. Sixty-six pages in length, it addressed broad categories with detailed policies to achieve the Party’s objectives. The Preamble identified a long list of principles “the Republican Party reaffirm[s] . . . that unite [them] in a common purpose”:
You know incompetence and extremism have captured your party when it abandons publishing a national platform in a presidential-election year. In 2020, Republican Party leadership knew anything it could cobble together as a party platform would be universally mocked as blatant hypocrisy, particularly if it resembled anything the party had endorsed in past platforms.