It's Presidential election time again, and we continue a longstanding tradition on the weblog, with the sixth quadrennial rating of party platforms on grounds other than partisan politics! In the first year of competition, the Libertarians won handily with spartan and spare; in the second competition, the Republicans seized the prize with flashy and glossy; in the third competition, the Democrats won mostly on improvement; in the fourth competition, the Greens won on informativeness and accessibility; in the fifth competition, the Democrats won due to a mix of unusually weak competition and having for the first time made no serious blunders. How will things fare this year? Will the Republicans be as lazy as they were last time? Will the Greens still struggle with complicated concepts like 'preamble'? Will the Libertarians stop being boring? Will the Democrats continue to use muddled and unintelligible metaphors? Which parties are capable of figuring out how a cover sheet works? The excitement of this competition is that there is no possible way to tell before you actually look and see.
Democratic Party Platform (PDF)Republican Party Platform (PDF)
Cover Sheet
The Republican cover sheet is very, very blue, with a little red and white. There is a picture, not very discernible in all of the blue; they lose points for bad presentation on that. (I suppose the picture is of Milwaukee, where the convention was held? It's hard to tell.) However, there's a little elephant logo in the lower right-hand corner that is just awesome. They should have put that front and center. The Libertarians cover sheet is much more plain, but they continue their idea from last time of having a yellow eagle logo on the cover; it is a very striking logo. The Democrats just have letters and a little circle-D logo at the bottom; it is not very striking, although the color scheme is OK. The Greens provide no easily discoverable PDF of their Party Platform, and therefore are disqualified from the cover sheet competition. If you don't play. you don't win.
Normally, keeping things over from the previous Presidential election only gets you mocked around here, but in this category it worked for the Libertarians; their cover sheet happens to be the moderate middle ground between the boring Democrats and the over-busy Republicans. That seems more luck of the competition than their own excellence, but that's how competitions work.
Organization
Organization is often the Libertarians' strongest category, and they stick with what is tried and true. The Party Platform starts with a Preamble and a Statement of Principles, then has a numbered sections with clearly identified headings. To our surprise, they also have a Table of Contents in the PDF version this year, which they usually skip. I like it; it shows that they are not just resting on their laurels. The organization also works equally well in the HTML and the PDF versions.
The Greens also continue their streak of good organization, with their now-standard alphanumeric outlining, well suited to their relatively sprawling set of topics. It also lets them have a very neat and clean Table of Contents.
The Republicans have a very poorly designed Table of Contents, with vague and unexplained general titles. However, when we move from the ToC to the actual chapters, the organization is astonishingly good, far better than one would expect from a Major Party. Each chapter starts with an "Our Commitment" section, then has numbered points on specific topics. This is easily their best organization ever.
The Democratic Table of Contents this year is also genuine contender; it is -- astoundingly -- a clear guide to relatively specific topics. This is not quite so clear in the actual chapters themselves, where the relatively straightforward topics identified in the ToC are replaced by much less helpful sloganish section titles. The inconsistency between the two is a bit annoying.
So the Republicans this year have a bad Table of Contents but good internal chapter organization; the Democrats have a good Table of Contents but mediocre internal chapter organization. Thus it is once again a fight between the Libertarians and the Greens, and I give it to the Greens by a hair.
General Informativeness
General Informativeness is the substance category of our competition, and the one that is of greatest practical importance.
As usual, the Libertarian organization works for them, but their conciseness works against them; the platform mostly stays in a middle ground between general principle and practical policy. The Greens, on the other hand, give us the entire range from general values to particular practical policy proposals.
The sudden Republican improvement in organization this year mostly works in their favor, by sharply reducing the symptoms of Major Party Disease, in which the platform consists of blah-blah-blah-vague-proposal-blah-blah-blah-slogan. However, they have a serious case of Solution Problem, in which the proposed solution to a problem is 'solve the problem'. For instance, their proposal to rein in government spending is "slashing Government spending". Nonetheless, this is not a consistent problem through the party platform; specific practical proposals, and even more often general outlines for specific practical proposals, do show up semi-regularly.
The Democrats are somewhat hampered by the fact that they changed candidates after their party platform was finalized. This would not have hurt a party that made its party platform about the issues, but it very much hurts the Democratic Party Platform, which consistently frames the election as being between Biden and Trump. You wouldn't have this problem, Democrats, if you had, like the Libertarians and Greens, and even this year to some extent the Republicans, made the platform more about the party than the candidate. A party platform is neither a political ad nor a loyalty statement.
When we look more closely at the proposals in the Democratic platform, we get an appearance of very practical proposals, but a large chunk of them are things that the Biden Administration has already done; there is a sort of argument, sometimes implied, sometimes made explicit, that these kinds of things should continue to be done. And there's nothing necessarily wrong about explaining what you intend to do by occasionally giving examples of what you have done and intend to keep doing. Nonetheless, it aggravates the problem with this party platform that was already noted: it's often less a platform for a national party, which has to handle local, state, and federal politics, than an advertisement for President Biden. Pretty much all the examples are federal examples, and they are not always helpful for understanding what would be relevant for local and state politics. Usually party platforms err by being too general and vague; but this platform in many ways makes the opposite error: the examples used here make the platform often too narrow to be fully informative. However, the focus on examples does have one benefit: this platform also reduces the symptoms of Major Party Disease. It does not do so to the extent the Republican platform does, by any means, but using specific examples means there's a lot less blah-blah-blah than might be expected, particularly given the length of this platform. Likewise, while the platform doesn't avoid the Solution Problem completely, it at least has something to point to in order to give substance to its more vague proposals. It also helps them cut down the flowery prose that made their previous platform hilarious but uninformative.
This category is highly competitive this year; Libertarians and Greens both continue to be good, and Democrats and Republicans both significantly improve over the past few elections. Of the four, however, the Greens seem to have the best overall balance, so I give the category to them.
Preamble
The preamble is the glamor category of our competition, because it's the preamble that captures the spirit of the party. Nothing crowns a party platform like a good preamble.
Whoever wrote the Republican Party Platform Preamble really likes Capital Letters. Here is the Opening:
Our Nation’s History is filled with the stories of brave men and women who gave everything they had to build America into the Greatest Nation in the History of the World. Generations of American Patriots have summoned the American Spirit of Strength, Determination, and Love of Country to overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges.Other People might find this Annoying, but I confess that as Someone Who Reads Early Modern Texts I find this Charmingly Familiar. The Entire Platform is actually like this, so it is Good that they have introduced the Practice so that the Reader can get used to it. Mostly the Capital Letters are only at the Beginnings of Words, but there are two places an Entire Phrase is capitalized: we are told that the Nation is in "SERIOUS DECLINE" and that we will "DRILL, BABY, DRILL"; I'm not sure these are the Concepts one really wants to be giving the Honor of All Capitals, particularly in a Preamble, which serves to identify the Essential Issues and to express Party Optimism. This Preamble is in fact quite Negative, and although it is more Practical than Preambles usually are, its primary Emphasis is on Stopping the Democrats.
The Democratic Preamble, on the other hand, is surprisingly lean; it is not just shorter, it is much more focused on statistics and campaign slogans. It makes for less interesting reading. But it does share the property of negativity with the Republican Preamble. The primary emphasis is on stopping the Republicans. But, particularly as the Democrats focus much more on the Presidency than on general political issues in the way the Republicans do, this reads as a much weaker position for the party that has incumbency. The Democrats hold the Presidency; they shouldn't be sounding this much on the ropes, as if they were underdogs in desperate need of help.
The Greens, as is their tradition, struggle with the concept of a preamble by putting in a bunch of non-preamble preambular material. They have a Call to Action, a Preamble, the Four Pillars, and the Ten Key Values. Of these, the Call to Action should be part of the Preamble; a case could perhaps be made for keeping the Pillars and Values distinct from the Preamble, but they should at least be combined with each other. The actual Preamble is not well written; the author seems to like four- and five-syllable words as much as the Republican author liked capital letters. However, one refreshing thing about the Preamble is that for the first time in a long while it does not claim that 'Never has the country faced so many challenges'. On the contrary, it is easily the most optimistic of the preambles this year.
The Libertarians do what the Greens should have done; they have a short, clear, clean Preamble, and then a separate Statement of Principles, and that is it. It is not as optimistic as that of the Greens, but is more optimistic than those of the the other two Major Parties.
I give this category to the Libertarians, who actually seem to understand what a Preamble is and are the only party who managed to avoid any weird writing choices.
Page Formatting
The Democrats have a nicely formatted PDF this year; this is a massive improvement over their previous platforms. They have a nice header image, clear page numbers, and readable type. The Republicans take a step down this year in this category, at which they usually excel, but this is mostly for chosing a much less readable type than necessary. The Libertarians as usual have excellent page formatting on every point, and I like that their page nambers are of the "Page # of 10" format. The Greens don't have an easily discoverable PDF version, and so forfeit this category. That makes it a contest between Libertarians and Democrats; I give the victory narrowly to the Libertarians.
Principles and Values
The Greens always have Ten Key Values; they also have Four Pillars, which is nicely architectural. It's not particularly clear how Values and Pillars are related. The Libertarians have a Statement of Principles. The Major Parties again seem not to think either values, or principles, or, for that matter, pillars, are important.
Internet Accessibility
To find the Democratic Party Platform, you have to search the Democratic Party homepage, and find a little link at the very bottom, which takes you to the Democratic Party Platform page, which has the wrong Democratic Party Platform. Yes, the Democratic Party Platform page does not have the 2024 Party Platform; it still has the 2020 Party Platform. Bad Donkeys! Take this category seriously! The Republicans, on the other hand, make their Party Platform very easy to find; it's a clearly identified link that only requires scrolling down a little bit. The link only takes you to a PDF; they have no HTML version. The Greens, on the other hand, have no easily discoverable PDF version, only an HTML version. Libertarians have a platform with both HTML and PDF versions, as all of them should. Both Libertarians and Greens have links from their main webpage, but neither make them obvious. The Libertarians, who have more than one link explicitly to the platform (although both are small, one at top and one at bottom), I think edge out the Greens, whose homepage links to the platform are not explicitly labeled as such. Not a category in which anyone shines this year, I'm afraid, but the Libertarians come closest to making their platform as accessible as it should be.
Miscellaneous
* The Democrats once again have a Land Acknowledgement. I gave them some credit for it last time, because it gave an interesting distinctive element to their platform in a way that tied it to actual American history. It still does this. However, they botch it a bit by ending it with self-congratulation, which seems to miss the point of a Land Acknowledgement; Land Acknowledgements don't exist to congratulate yourselves on how good you are at recognizing Native American association with the land. Stop making it about you! I still give them some credit, but definitely not as much as last time.
* The Green Call to Action is as absurd as usual. "If not now, when?" This would have a great deal more impact if you didn't use it every election, because it makes it look like you're desperate.
* The Democratic Party Platform is 91 pages long in PDF. I think it probably could have been tightened up a bit. Contrast this with the Republicans, whose platform is under thirty pages, a number of which are full-page photographs or filler.
* The Republican Party Platform is written in light blue. Why would you do this to the eyes of your readers?
* The Republicans continue their tradition of dedications for their party platform: "To the Forgotten Men and Women of America". They also have a sort of epigraph before their Table of Contents.
This has been a surprisingly strong year for party platforms, which is especially nice after some relatively poor party platform years. The Major Party platforms in particular are significant improvements, and I hope that such improvements continue. I also like that both Democrats and Republicans are clearly trying new things. The experiments don't always work, but experimentation is better than continuing to do badly. Nonetheless, this year there has emerged a clear winner, by dint of narrow victories across several categories combined with no serious failures. Congratulations, Libertarians, for winning this year's Party Platform contest. As we are not in any way subsidized, if they want a cash prize for it, they will have to earn it by free market means.
