Democratic Party platform makes one thing clear: We’re not Trump

The Democratic Party’s platform for the next four years: We’re not Donald Trump.

The Democratic National Committee is poised to take up a draft of its 2024 platform proposal — a sweeping set of ambitious, though largely symbolic, policy priorities — that heavily emphasizes the former president, seeking to reframe an election that in recent weeks has focused almost exclusively on the incumbent’s abilities and electability to a referendum on his predecessor. Trump’s name appears on 61 of the document’s 80 pages, totaling nearly 150 mentions.

The DNC’s party platform, obtained first by POLITICO, comes just days ahead of the Republican National Convention, which will convene in Milwaukee on Monday. The proposal features a raft of Democratic Party priorities, including raising a billionaire income tax, lowering the cost of childcare to $10 a day for low-income families, investing in clean energy and restoring reproductive rights.

It also lays bare the difficult line the president continues to walk on Israel — a front that has been overshadowed by his poor debate performance but that remains a significant point of contention within the Democratic Party and could fuel infighting around its late-August convention.

The platform lays out Biden’s support for an “immediate and lasting ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas, outlining plans for a “durable peace” in the Middle East that, as in the 2020 platform, includes a “negotiated two-state solution.” Biden, the draft platform says, has “made real progress on a way forward that will free the hostages” and “establish a durable ceasefire” as well as “meaningful progress and a political horizon for the Palestinian people.”

It does not echo many progressives’ calls for the United States to cease supplying Israel with munitions, outlining at several turns the Biden administration’s “ironclad” commitment to Israel’s security.

The platform acknowledges the death toll on both sides of the Israel-Hamas conflict, saying Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris “recognize the worth of every innocent life, whether Israeli or Palestinian.”

It also reiterates Biden’s pledges to combat antisemitism, amid calls from Jewish groups for a clear commitment to doing so in the platform.

“The Platform Committee has taken great care to address the issues of peace, security, and stability in the Middle East. We have discussed this issue with an eye toward the understanding that the stability of the United States is based on stability around the world, including in that region, and that safety, security, and supporting our allies is critical. But also addressing historic conflicts such as that between Israel and Palestinians is an important priority of the United States,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said at a meeting of the platform drafting committee earlier this week. “We support a two-state solution in the platform and also recognize that since October 7th that human suffering has hit both Israelis and Palestinian people.”

Overall, the 2024 platform builds on the speech Biden delivered in Michigan on Friday laying out a vision for the first 100 days of his second term that includes codifying Roe v. Wade, signing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, banning assault weapons and expanding Social Security and Medicare, which he cannot accomplish without Congress.

While the document largely aligns with the 2020 platform, there are notable exceptions. There is no reference to “Black Lives Matter,” a rallying cry during the George Floyd protests in 2020. In 2020, “we believe Black lives matter” was mentioned twice. The updated platform does, however, pledge to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and highlights several actions the Biden administration has taken — pardoning low-level federal marijuana convictions, expanding the Child Tax credit and wiping out some student loan debt — that have aided people of color. And it expresses support for Congress studying reparations.

The 2024 proposal also falls short of meeting several of progressives’ biggest policy goals. The document leaves out an explicit mention of Medicare for All — which received a nod in the 2020 platform — even as it hits on other progressive goals around health care, including emphasizing the president’s campaign-trail calls to end medical debt. And even as it outlines the ways in which Biden is “delivering on the most aggressive climate agenda in history,” it does not suggest he will declare a national climate emergency as some progressives and climate activists have urged him to do.

Still, drafting the party’s platform came without the drama and divisions from 2016 and 2020, both election cycles marked by hotly contested primaries. In 2020, Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders , the last of his primary opponents to drop out, jointly appointed task forces to merge the party’s moderate and progressive policy priorities.

This year, the party is using its platform rollout to reinforce one of Democrats’ main lines of attack against Trump, issuing a press release contrasting each policy topic not with those that Republicans passed earlier this week , but with the pro-Trump Project 2025 — the conservative think tank blueprint for a new Republican administration that the former president has tried to distance himself from.

“While Donald Trump and the RNC crafted an extreme MAGA platform behind closed doors, we know that their real blueprint for a second Trump term is their toxic and dangerous Project 2025 wishlist to rip away Americans’ freedoms, give handouts to billionaires on the backs of working people, and clear the path for Trump to be a dictator on ‘day one,’” DNC Chair Jaime Harrison said in a statement. “The contrast couldn’t be clearer.”

The DNC’s platform committee is scheduled to meet about the draft on Tuesday. Should the committee pass it, then it will be voted on by the full DNC membership at the convention next month.