What Did Your Straight Ticket Buy? Both Parties' Platforms, Graded

<p>What Did Your Straight Ticket Buy? Both Parties&#39; Platforms, Graded. A Contemporary Bonus Episode to the series: Parties, Ideologies, and Systems. </p><p><br></p><p>A party-line vote is a vote for a party, and the one formal statement a party adopts of what it stands for is its convention platform. Almost nobody reads it. Bob Dole said he never read his own.</p><p><br></p><p>This episode reads them. Each of the two major parties wrote a platform, then won the White House and both chambers of Congress this decade: the Democrats in 2021 and 2022, the Republicans now. Each majority is graded against its own platform, on the issues voters ranked highest in its own campaign year, using five grades: enacted by law, done by executive action, attempted and failed, never brought to a floor vote, and contradicted.</p><p><br></p><p>The records fail in different ways. The Democratic majority&#39;s characteristic failure was the promise it never brought to the floor, or the one its own members blocked. The Republican majority enacted a bill that worked against its written promise to defeat inflation and improve fiscal sanity, and went to war under a platform that promised to prevent one. Both enacted what I call corporatism: public money routed through chosen firms. Then the Libertarian platform, the only one of the three that sets itself against it, and the only one that has never governed.</p><p><br></p><p>Recorded five weeks before the November 3, 2026 midterms. Live matters, including the Iran war and the election bills, are as of that date.</p><p><br></p><p>A stand-alone episode of Parties, Ideologies, and Systems. It follows my answer to Victor Davis Hanson on third parties: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/in-the-age-of-trump-and-biden-victor-davis-hanson-is-wrong-about-third-parties</p><p><br></p><p>Did it leave Americans more free, or more governed?</p><p><br></p><p>⏱️ CHAPTERS</p><p>0:00 Voting as an Affirming Act</p><p>3:05 Introduction</p><p>4:00 Four Voters, One Lever</p><p>5:48 Capitalism or Corporatism?</p><p>8:11 Almost Nobody Reads the Platform</p><p>10:50 How Platforms Get Written: Treaty vs. Top-Down</p><p>13:44 Project 2025 Is Not a Platform</p><p>14:57 How the Libertarian Party Writes Its Platform</p><p>15:46 The Straight-Ticket Ballot</p><p>16:54 The Case for the Party-Line Vote</p><p>19:40 Counting Agreement vs. Weighing It</p><p>21:59 The Five Grades</p><p>23:08 Democrats, 2021–2022: The Scorecard</p><p>27:37 Republicans, 2025–202