Republican Party Needs a 2024 Platform

For 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.

About the Author

Tevi Troy

Tevi Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute and a senior scholar at Yeshiva University’s Straus Center. He is the author of The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.

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For 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.

About the Author

Tevi Troy

Tevi Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute and a senior scholar at Yeshiva University’s Straus Center. He is the author of The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.