What the Republican and Democratic platforms say (indirectly) about Southwest and Southside Virginia

Campbell County Republicans don’t like the party’s 2024 platform. They feel the national party, at Donald Trump’s behest, softened the language against abortion and same-sex marriage, in particular.

Politically, the new language makes sense if Trump wants to cut into Democratic margins among suburban voters — something that’s probably not top of mind for Republicans in Campbell County, a place where Trump took 71% of the vote four years ago. Morally, you can make your own judgments.

Cardinal’s Markus Schmidt wrote about Campbell County Republicans’ concerns last week.

This raises several questions: What does the rest of the Republican platform actually say? Or the Democrats’ draft platform , for that matter? And, perhaps, more importantly, does any of it matter?

Historically speaking, the answer to that last question is “not very much.” A party platform offers useful insight into a party’s philosophy, but there’s no guarantee that any of it will become law. From 1972 to 2016, the Republican Party platform explicitly called for statehood for Puerto Rico, but no Republican president actually did much to make that happen. Given how our two parties are realigning, now might be a good time for Republicans to push for Puerto Rican statehood as a way to add some electoral votes — the island currently sends a Republican to Washington as its resident commissioner — but I digress.

What matters more is the presidential candidate’s platform, or the views of the advisers around that candidate, which is why Democrats have talked so much about the “Project 2025” document that the Heritage Foundation has put together. Still, the Republican platform is very reflective of Trump’s worldview, so I was curious to take a closer look at both that and its Democratic counterpart to glean any insights about what a Trump 2.0 administration — or a Kamala Harris administration — would mean for Southwest and Southside. There aren’t many insights to be found.

That’s not a criticism, just a factual observation. In 2016, the Republican platform was 66 pages long. This year , it’s 28 pages but is really just 12 pages once you account for all the pictures. (Of course, four years ago there was no platform at all.) Four years ago, Democrats had a 92-page platform, and their draft platform this year is 80 pages. Republicans may or may not succeed in reducing the size of government but they have definitely reduced the size of party platforms. (Fun fact: In Great Britain, party platforms are called “manifestos.”)

The Republican platform this year is a slimmed-down statement of principles, not a recitation of policy initiatives. Democrats are more inclined to get into specifics, just not some of the ones I wanted to see. What would another Trump administration mean for extending Amtrak service to Bristol? What about a Harris presidency? We don’t know. Even the more detailed Democratic platform isn’t that granular. Both platforms are also larded with lots of political hyperbole, which is entertaining to read but not particularly elucidating. Trying to find policy insights amid all the rhetoric is like sifting for gold and, frankly, there’s not a lot of gold in either of them thar hills.

Let’s see, though, what we can find. Let’s also use this as the opportunity to offer up some facts relevant to each parties’ platforms.

Energy: Republicans like fossil fuels, Democrats don’t

Ok, that’s not exactly news. This is also a place where the rhetoric doesn’t always match the reality.

The Republican platform declares: “Under President Trump, the U.S. became the Number One Producer of Oil and Natural Gas in the World — and we will soon be again by lifting restrictions on American Energy Production and terminating the Socialist Green New Deal.” That implies the United States was number one under Trump but is no longer.

However, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says that U.S. oil production is higher today than it was when Trump left office, hitting a record of 12.9 million barrels per day in 2023.

Natural gas production rose sharply under Trump, but has kept rising under Biden:

Trump may want even more oil and gas production, but the reality is that Biden has presided over the nation’s highest oil and production ever — that’s just not something he dares talk about, given the sensibilities of the Democratic electorate. To bring this home to us, remember that it was Biden’s energy secretary who advocated for completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which now pumps natural gas from West Virginia to Chatham. Biden, though, comes from a more traditional school of thought within the Democratic Party. A new generation of Democrats seems likely to be less inclined to support natural gas.

Interestingly, there’s only one fleeting reference to coal in the Republican platform, and that’s when they vow to end “end market-distorting restrictions on Oil, Natural Gas, and Coal.” In 2016, Trump famously campaigned in Southwest Virginia and proclaimed “We’re going to bring back King Coal.” He didn’t. U.S. coal production declined slightly each of four years in office, and then has declined further under Biden (with a slight uptick in 2022, but that may have been skewed by the pandemic years). Perhaps even Trump now understands that it’s market forces that are driving coal down. A few years ago, a utility executive with Appalachian Power explained it this way: Utilities have to make investments with a 40-year time horizon, not a four-year one. They’re not inclined to invest in a technology based on today’s shifting political climate. About 92% of U.S. coal consumption is by utilities, so the declining amount of coal going to those utilities is a good measure of the coal industry:

The Republican platform does make a specific mention of nuclear: “Republicans will unleash Energy Production from all sources, including nuclear, to immediately slash Inflation and power American homes, cars, and factories with reliable, abundant, and affordable Energy.” Republicans have always been more pro-nuclear than Democrats, but nuclear power is slow to build, so no nuclear power will be unleashed “immediately.” Democrats historically have been more divided on nuclear, although the Biden administration has been a strong proponent. However, the Democrats’ draft platform makes no mention of nuclear power at all, and Harris’ only comments have been to express concern about transporting nuclear waste to Nevada.

For what it’s worth, here’s how U.S. energy production has changed. You can see the sharp rise in natural gas, which started at the very end of the George W. Bush administration and has continued almost straight upwards since then, while coal has declined as a result.

The key question for us is unanswered in either party platform: How much will the next administration encourage the development of small nuclear reactors, the so-called “small modular reactors,” or SMRs? Gov. Glen Youngkin once pushed for an SMR in Southwest Virginia but has since pulled back on that. Ultimately, though, it’s utilities, not politicians, who decide where energy production facilities go. Dominion Energy recently announced it has accepted proposals for an SMR at its North Anna nuclear complex in Louisa County, which I’ve long thought made more sense than building one in Southwest Virginia: Dominion already has the infrastructure in place in Louisa. ( Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policies . )

The question is whether we’ll see the next administration encourage even more SMR development — Republicans because they like “all of the above” energy, Democrats because they grudgingly see nuclear as a way to create a decarbonized power grid. If so, we could see utilities looking at other places for SMRs. (A Department of Energy study suggested the Clover coal plant in Halifax County, co-owned by Dominion Energy and the Old Dominion Electric Cooperative, would be a good location.)

Finally, both party platforms say they want the U.S. to be “energy independent.” The Republican platform says: “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL and we will become Energy
Independent . . .” The draft Democratic platform praises Biden’s emphasis on renewables: “He is positioning America to lead the future — energy independent, resilient, innovative, and strong.”

Now, here’s the reality: We already are energy independent. The U.S. Energy Information Administrations says U.S. energy production exceeded consumption toward the end of the Trump administration, and there’s now a bigger gap between the two under Biden:

We still import some forces of energy (oil) and export others (natural gas and coal) so we may not be energy independent in every sector, but overall, we now are. Feel free to debate whether this has happened because of Trump’s pro-drilling policies or Biden’s pro-renewables policies (or perhaps a combination of the two), but we now produce more energy than we consume.

Both parties want to reshore manufacturing jobs, but how?

Can you guess which party said which?

“We will bring our critical Supply Chains back home.”

“Bring home critical supply chains.”

Answer at the end of this section.

Beyond those bromides, the details vary, such as they are. Trump is, as we know, very focused on what the platform calls “unfair” trade deals but, given the spareness of the Republican document, offers no specifics beyond support for tariffs. The theory behind tariffs is that they raise the price of foreign-made goods and thereby encourage or protect domestic manufacturing, which preserves or creates American jobs. However, if manufacturers don’t take advantage of that economic advantage, then tariffs simply raise the price of goods. Democrats talk at length about technology — promoting domestic manufacture of computer chips, encouraging the growth of green technologies that involve manufacturing and taking credit for providing funding for more than 30 technology hubs around the country. (One of those is Richmond-Petersburg.) That may someday prove to be a transformative policy but the economic reality is that those hubs will take years to build out.

Rather than get bogged down in the back-and-forth of which party is better for manufacturing, let’s look at some facts.

Manufacturing jobs peaked in April 1979 and declined until they bottomed out in February and March 2010. Many things have driven that: Some jobs have gone overseas to cheaper workforces. Some jobs have been eliminated altogether by technology. Since hitting that bottom, manufacturing jobs have been slowly increasing (with the exception of the pandemic). We now have slightly more manufacturing jobs in the country under Biden than we did under Trump.

The same trend is true in Virginia (although this chart shows a different time frame). If we don’t count the pandemic, Virginia’s manufacturing base hit bottom in February 2011 and has only increased slightly since, regardless of which party is in power.

That raises a question we don’t often see addressed: Both parties say they want more domestic manufacturing, but what’s realistic? Republicans do the better job of talking about manufacturing: “Revive our industrial base,” they declare. However, we are not going to rebuild the economy of the 1950s. The fundamentals of the economy have changed.

On a percentage basis, the percentage of American workers in manufacturing peaked in 1953 at 32.1%. By 2022, it was 9.92%. That sounds low. However, keep in mind, global employment in manufacturing is 12.8% — so the U.S. is below the global average, but not that far below.

The U.S. average is on par with many other Western countries — Canada is at 8.93%, Great Britain is at 9.14%. The nation with the biggest share of the workforce in manufacturing is China, where 28.7% are in manufacturing. Chinese workers, though, don’t get paid much, by our standards. That’s one of the conundrums both parties face: How can they encourage more good-paying manufacturing jobs when Americans like to buy cheap stuff? A lot of our manufacturing jobs went overseas for simple economic reasons: Labor costs were lower. Raise the labor costs, and those costs will get passed on to consumers. Neither party likes to talk about that.

Perhaps the Western country that both parties ought to look to for guidance is Germany: 19.93% of the workers there are in manufacturing.

As for the question at the top of this section, the first line is from the Republican platform, the second from the Democratic one.

Democrats vow “moral obligation” to coal country

Republicans don’t mention climate at all. Democrats devote seven pages to it. In those, they declare: “Democrats also know we have a moral obligation to make sure that fenceline communities benefit from the clean energy revolution.” The phrase “fenceline communities” is new lingo; I’ve never heard anyone in Southwest Virginia use that phrase, but it refers to communities next door to energy production facilities. This speaks to one of the political problems of clean energy. There really is a clean energy boom taking place. The transition to clean energy really is creating jobs, but it’s not necessarily creating them in the same places where the fossil fuel jobs were. Democrats have tried to address that in the Inflation Reduction Act, aka “the climate bill,” by designating enterprise zones in those “fenceline communities” where clean energy companies will qualify for tax breaks if they locate there. I wrote about these tax break zones in a previous column.

This seems a great idea, but I haven’t seen any action yet, either. Maybe it’s too soon. However, until something does happen, this feels like a meaningless promise. We’ve had enterprise zones of various sorts over the years, sometimes pushed by Republicans, sometimes by Democrats, but their track record is very mixed. Why do Democrats think this will be any different? Actually, I could make the case that it doesn’t matter what Democrats think — what matters is whether there’s any economic action on the ground from the private sector. As the famous Wendy’s ad from the 1980s put it: Where’s the beef?

Republicans vow “largest deportation program in American history”

The Republican platform says: “The Republican Party is committed to sending Illegal Aliens back home and removing those who have violated our Laws.” What it doesn’t say is how many people would be deported, but the phrase “the largest deportation program in American history” at least gives us a benchmark. The largest deportation program to date was under Dwight Eisenhower, when more than 1 million Mexican immigrants were removed in 1954.

What the platform doesn’t get into is the economic consequences of a large-scale deportation. Whether we call them “illegal aliens” as Republicans do or “undocumented workers” as Democrats prefer, this is not a population that exists outside the U.S. workforce. They are part of the workforce, so any deportation will have economic consequences. I wrote in more depth about what this would mean for Virginia in a previous column. The short version: Depending on the scale of the operation, Trump’s proposed deportations might cause Virginia to lose population for the first time since the 1830s.

The biggest impact of that would be in the construction trades. A port by the Migration Policy Institute (which a report by the Virginia Department of Social Service later referenced) says that 31% of the unauthorized population who are employed and are age 16 and older — about 50,000 people — work in construction. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis says there are 214,400 construction jobs in Virginia as of January 2024. If that earlier 50,000 figure hasn’t changed (and realistically, it’s probably gone up, right?), then we’re talking 23.3% of construction jobs in Virginia becoming vacant.

Another 16% of the employed unauthorized population works in accommodation and food services — 26,000 people, the report says. Now, here’s the figure that might surprise some. Another 16% — another 26,000 — are in professional, scientific, management and administrative jobs.

Immigration has become an emotional topic, but we might want to have a conversation about what the economic impact of deportations would be.

What’s not addressed

Well, lots. Both platforms also chose to include some curious details. Republicans vow to send astronauts “onward to Mars.” Democrats vow to create an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Climate, “modeled on the defense research agency that’s behind breakthrough technologies like the internet and GPS.” Republicans say they will “promote beauty in public architecture.”  Democrats vow more research toward “ending cancer as we know it.” Republicans say they will “defend the right to mine bitcoin.” Democrats say they will “work to get farmers the right to repair their own equipment, without having to pay big equipment makers for diagnostic tools and repairs.”

There are obviously more profound differences between the two parties than how they feel about public architecture, and we won’t be able to look at all of those today. In the end, I doubt most of these details matter to voters — many of whom had their minds made up long before the campaign began. Elections generally don’t turn on party platforms, they turn on emotions and how voters feel about particular candidates or particular parties.

What we have here is the classic contrast in visions of what kind of country we are and want to become. The Republican platform warns that “we are a nation in serious decline.” The Democratic platform more cautiously says we’re having a “great American comeback” from the pandemic fueled by “a clean energy boom.”

We’ll find out in November what Americans think of where we are, and where they want us to go. For better or worse, voters feel they have a good sense of what Democrats want to do, since they’ve been in office almost four years now. It’s always the party out of power we’re most curious about. In this case, though, don’t look to the party platform to learn many details.

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