Although President Joe Biden is no longer running for re-election, the Democratic Party failed to scrub his name from their official platform.
In a document released on Sunday, references to Biden as well as a “second term” were mentioned well over a dozen times as the party outlined its aims and principles.
The issue came just one day before the party met in Chicago for the first day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC), where Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to receive the presidential nomination.
“The official DNC platform by my count refers to Biden’s ‘second term’ no less than *nineteen* times,” conservative author Jerry Dunleavy IV wrote. “Safe to say that Kamala will be a continuation & extension of the awful foreign & domestic policies of the Biden-Harris Admin if she wins in Nov.”
The platform’s preamble states that “President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Democrats are running to finish the job,” despite the president dropping out of the race last month.
The document’s lack of an update is being used by those on the right to claim either Harris plans to continue the worst policies of Biden’s presidency or that she was secretly running the show since 2020.
However, that push undercuts the most recent tactic against Harris, claiming she’s much farther left than Biden. Trump, in recent speeches and posts, tied her to Communist policies and imagery, something he didn’t do with Biden.
Others questioned why the platform had not been updated after Biden announced he was stepping down.
“Wow. Isn’t a month enough time to change your platform and stop calling it ‘Biden’s second term?’” another added.
The document was originally approved on July 16, just five days before Biden revealed he would be moving aside and endorsing Harris.
It remains unclear why the platform wasn’t updated for Harris, who differs in opinion from Biden on several policies, including speaking out more vocally on Gaza.
Steve Grossman, a former Democratic National Committee chairman during Bill Clinton’s presidency, argued that the Harris campaign may have declined to update the platform ahead of the DNC in order to avoid “any divisiveness whatsoever around platform issues.”
“The bigger question that is going to guide everything—and that’s guided everything since the president left the race and Kamala became the nominee—is the question of creating party unity,” Grossman said to CNN. “Setting aside differences between different communities and constituencies—and there clearly are differences on a variety of issues—in the service of the greater goal and greater good.”
For now, the DNC has not publicly commented on why it chose to release an outdated platform. It remains unknown whether an updated version for Harris exists or will be released during the four-day political forum in Chicago.
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