CHICAGO — The Democratic platform drew widespread criticism Monday for referring 21 times to retiring President Biden’s second term — while not including policies pushed by the party’s actual presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, including her plans for price controls on groceries.
The document was approved shortly before Biden, 81, dropped out of the race on July 21 and endorsed Harris, 59, as his successor — and there are no plans to update it this week during the Democratic convention in Chicago, a source told The Post.
“Kamala doesn’t even have a policy page on her website,” Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign said in a Monday release. “She is simply a puppet to the same radical and insane class of socialists and communists who have been running the country into the ground under Biden.”
Trump’s former White House adviser Stephen Miller jabbed in an X post: “The DNC ditches Kamala after disastrous rollout of Soviet price controls, endorses Biden (19 times!) for a second term in the DNC platform. 19 times!! Total party dysfunction.”
The 92-page platform was ratified July 13, The Post’s source said — during a period of time in which Biden resisted calls to step aside following his dismal June 27 debate against Trump.
Follow along with The Post’s live reporting of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Re-drafting the sprawling set of policy promises is a “challenging thing to do,” the source said — and is not currently a priority as Democrats gather for their four-day convention.
The platform forged little new ground in terms of policy and largely repeated well-worn Democratic criticism of Republicans, including of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, while vowing to push environmental policies, the restoration of abortion rights and a ban on semiautomatic weapons.
Biden will speak Monday night at the convention and is expected to be lavished with praise in a supportive sendoff, despite other party leaders forcing him to step aside with a nearly month-long pressure campaign over concerns about his mental acuity and electability.
The president will then leave town for a vacation in Santa Ynez, Calif.
Harris, who will deliver her nomination acceptance speech on Thursday, has enjoyed a prolonged honeymoon period of largely favorable press — in part because she has not given a single interview that could throw her off-script.
But there are signs of the honeymoon ending following her rollout last week of plans to use price controls to address inflation, which she blamed on corporate “gouging” — attempting to redirect Republicans’ charge that Democrats’ large spending bills and the Biden-Harris administration’s foreign and energy policies fueled inflation.
Trump referred to the policy as “the Maduro plan,” in reference to Venezuela’s socialist leader Nicolas Maduro, who has presided over an economic collapse in his country.
The Washington Post editorial board, which generally backs Democrats, referred to Harris’ plan as a “populist gimmick.”
“Never mind that many stores are currently slashing prices in response to renewed consumer bargain hunting,” the paper wrote in a scathing staff editorial.
“Ms. Harris says she’ll target companies that make ‘excessive’ profits, whatever that means. (It’s hard to see how groceries, a notoriously low-margin business, would qualify.) Thankfully, this gambit by Ms. Harris has been met with almost instant skepticism, with many critics citing President Richard M. Nixon’s failed price controls from the 1970s.”
Still, the vice president has re-energized Democrats who feared a devastating landslide loss if Biden remained their candidate in the Nov. 5 election — with national and swing-state polling averages showing her making up significant ground.
The RealClearPolitics average of recent polls shows that Trump, 78, would win narrowly if the election was held today — carrying swing states Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Trump has focused his TV ad spending in Georgia and Pennsylvania — indicating his campaign views those battlegrounds as essential to his path back to the White House.
