The 2024 Democratic platform is more extreme than the draft

The final version of the Democratic Party’s 2024 Platform has added references calling transgender procedures “medically necessary,” claiming that Christian schools may further “discrimination,” shifting blame on the U.S. border to the previous administration, and promising American children a more “multilingual” education. The platform maintains its promises to keep “fighting” parents’ efforts to keep pornographic books out of children’s hands, expanding abortion nationwide, and promoting transgender procedures for children and prisoners. 

Delegates to the 2024 Democratic National Committee in Chicago adopted the revised platform last week inside Chicago’s United Center. The final version contains minor modifications from the draft platform, which was released on July 13 and obtained by Politico. At that time, Joe Biden remained the presumptive Democratic Party presidential candidate.

Curiously, the 2024 Democratic Party Platform did not update the previous version’s references to the nominee’s name: It contains 20 references to 2024 being an election for Joe Biden’s “second term.” For example, the 2024 platform states, “In his second term, President Biden will continue to support access to FDA-approved medication abortion” and “stand with Ukraine.” It contains less than 10 references to Kamala Harris in an individual capacity, rather than conjoined with Joe Biden or as part of the “Biden-Harris administration.”

Yet the alterations made between the two drafts indicate a Democratic Party moving ever further to the Left. The revised platform added a brand new promise — not to average citizens but to the transgender industry: “Democrats will vigorously oppose state and federal bans on gender-affirming health care and respect the role of parents, families, and doctors — not politicians — in making health care decisions.”

Yet Minnesota Governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz (D) signed a bill disrespecting the role of parents in their children’s health care by allowing children whose parents will not allow them to undergo transgender procedures to flee to Minnesota, a “sanctuary” where the state will reassign custody until the child has undergone a transition against his/her parents’ wishes. Walz also signed a bill outlawing so-called “conversion therapy,’ even if parents and children want it.” The 2024 Democratic Party Platform doubles down on transgender procedures, adding that Biden “protected transgender Americans’ access to health care and coverage, including medically necessary gender-affirming care” (emphasis added).

The platform also strengthened promises to come after individuals accused of holding the wrong positions on hot-button issues. The revised platform changed its promise of “protecting LGBT children from bullying and assault” to stopping anti-LGBT “bullying and discrimination” (emphasis added). The platform still mentions the party’s intent to prosecute “hate crimes,” noting, “The Justice Department is taking an all-of-department approach to protecting LGBT rights.”

That promise may be directed at Christian schools, which may lose federal funding for holding to biblical morality under the vague language of the 2024 Democratic Party Platform. A new section added to the platform states: “We oppose the use of private-school vouchers, tuition tax credits, opportunity scholarships, and other schemes that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from public education. Public tax dollars should never be used to discriminate” (emphasis added). Teachers’ unions and LGBT pressure groups have accused Christian schools of “discrimination,” because they do not allow teachers who flout biblical morality to set that example for their students, or because they do not allow GSA Networks clubs like the one Tim Walz founded in his high school, which promotes transgender transitions without parental notification. Traditional Christianity teaches that one’s biological sex is unalterable, a gift from God, and should be treasured, as well as opposing all sexual activity outside biblical marriage.

The revised platform also deals with language, promising a greater cacophony inside public schools: “[W]e’re working to provide every student with a pathway to multilingual education, while ensuring equitable access to a high-quality education for English learners, who’ve historically been underserved.”

The revised platform pledges to tax U.S. citizens and their communities to facilitate giving U.S. citizenship to non-citizen immigrants. A new sentence states the Harris administration “will also help to fund community-based organizations that host clinics to assist with immigration cases.”

Seemingly, the revised platform added references to the LGBT movement wherever possible. The revised platform adds that not only did President Joe Biden pardon gay veterans, but he “pardoned approximately 2,000 gay, lesbian, and bisexual veterans who were convicted years ago just for being themselves” (emphasis added). Again, “President Biden … expanded funding for campus sexual assault prevention and is keeping students safe on campus by restoring and strengthening protections under Title IX, including explicit protections for LGBT students” (emphasis added). At other times, it worsens the reputation of those who disagree. It notes that Biden and Harris “reversed Trump’s un-American ban on transgender service members and ended the disgraceful and discriminatory ban on blood donation by gay and bisexual men” (emphasis added). It also replaced the term “gay” with the ever-more expansive “LGBT.”

The platform still contains its promise to expand taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand nationwide: “With a Democratic Congress, we will pass national legislation to make Roe [v. Wade] the law of the land again … We will repeal the Hyde Amendment. And in his second term, President Biden will continue to support access to FDA-approved medication abortion, appoint leaders at the FDA who respect science and appoint judges who uphold fundamental freedoms.”

A second abortion-related plank invokes the so-called Equal Rights Amendment, a relic of the 1970s feminist movement led by Gloria Steinem. “Democrats will fight to make the Equal Rights Amendment the law of the land,” although the never-ratified ERA has been interpreted to codify both a constitutional right to abortion and women’s eligibility for the military draft.

At times, the revision nods toward reality. It edits a sentence saying “the cost of living can still feel too high” to say the cost of living “is too high.”

The revision specifies that national rent control is coming in a Harris-Walz administration. A new sentence states that their housing policy “offers corporate landlords a basic choice for the next two years: either cap rent increases at 5 percent, or lose a valuable federal tax break.” The new platform added another line on housing policy: “And we will go after negligent landlords who don’t maintain basic habitability standards. We will also crack down on those who violate the Fair Housing Act, and on landlords who discriminate against low-income and minority renters and people with housing vouchers.” The Obama-Biden administration ignored written law and interpreted the Fair Housing Act as though it applied to people who identify as transgender. If you are renting out a room in your home but do not want your children sharing a bathroom with a trans-identifying male, you could become the target of a federal lawsuit.

A new section also alleges that former President Donald Trump “and his allies benefit directly from the housing shortage.”

The language does soften some of its anti-Trump rhetoric in light of the July 13 assassination attempt. Rather than saying, “Trump is a greater danger to democracy than ever,” the revised platform states, “Trump refuses to defend core tenets of our democracy: the Constitution, the rule of law, our system of checks and balances.” In two other instances, the platform changes some variant of the word “threat” to softer language (e.g., “The stakes in this election for the soul of our nation are profound.”). It also deletes a sentence stating Trump “has never respected service because he does not understand sacrifice.”

Yet it seeks to blame Trump and others for a historic influx of illegal immigrants over the last four years, and away from the Biden-Harris administration, discussing “a broke immigration system decades in the making” (emphasis added).

The revised platform contains the pledges made in the previous draft, as well, to continue “fighting” alleged “book bans.”

Since delegates did not revise the nominee’s name — or pronouns — the platform gives an insight into what a Joe Biden reelection campaign might have looked like. Until her rebranding as the candidate of “joy,” Kamala Harris was seen as the weaker link on the ticket, with major publications calling on her to drop out so Biden could choose a stronger running mate in articles with titles such as “The Case for Biden to Drop Kamala Harris,” in New York Magazine last September, or “For the country’s sake, Vice President Harris should step aside” in The Washington Post this March.

The Republican National Convention in Milwaukee adopted a slimmed-down document containing only a handful of campaign promises that resonated with Donald Trump’s campaign. Notably, the 2024 Republican Party Platform jettisoned its traditional language vowing to protect life from the moment of conception until natural death. Over the weekend, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance indicated that President Donald Trump opposed any federal legislation to protect life, leaving the matter entirely to the states.