An Inside View Into Donald Trump’s Winning Platform

An Inside View Into Donald Trump’s Winning Platform

W. Va. state Senator Jack David Woodrum helped draft the GOP’s policies.

(West Virginia state Senator Jack David Woodrum | SOURCE: Greenbrier Journal)

For the near decade since his ride down the escalator in June of 2015, Donald Trump has run his political campaigns unconventionally. This year, Trump's bucking of tradition included a radically revamped Republican Party platform, with West Virginia State Senator Jack Woodrum there to see it all.

Woodrum, a Republican who represents West Virginia’s 10th senatorial district, described a platform committee that was “different than a lot of previous years.” 

This difference included a shortened debate process. “A lot of years they spent days hashing it out,” he said. Not this year, as Woodrum reflected, “Within a day, we had a platform.”

Woodrum would have chaired a subcommittee of the Republican Platform Committee, but “we never used the subcommittees, because we voted on the initial draft.” “The vote was so high in favor of it, that was just the end of it. So we pretty much did it all in one day … with what we had,” Woodrum said.

Woodrum discussed the process of how the platform was approved. “A lot of people on these various platform committees and people that weren’t on the committees had submitted recommendations and ideas for the platform. So all those had been taken into consideration and a draft, initial draft, had been put together,” he said. “The draft turned out very well,” Woodrum said, which helped it to be approved so quickly.

Woodrum discussed President Trump’s involvement in the platforms’s construction. “The platform … was worked on quite a bit by President Trump. He was very engaged in it,” Woodrum said. “The president was on the phone, giving his opinion of different statements of what we had,” he continued.

The end result was quite stark. “The platform before,” Woodrum said, referring to the 2016 Republican Platform which was recycled in 2020, “might have been 32 pages or something. It was horribly long, convoluted, difficult to read.”

“So we wanted a platform that was easy to read and understand, so people could campaign on it and the public could read it in half an hour or so,” Woodrum said. “So we were down … to maybe 17 pages and pretty, pretty straightforward.”

In Woodrum’s mind, a shorter platform had many advantages, including limiting the weaponization of a longer platform by political opponents. “Our opposition sometimes will take segments out of the platform and they use that as a basis for a negative ad against a candidate,” Woodrum said, continuing, “So we were very conscious of that.”

Woodrum explained in detail how platforms could be turned into fuel for opposition advertisements. “And these are outside groups, so they have … some liability for things in a negative ad. So they have to have some basis in truth,” he said. To preclude Democrats from weaponizing the platform, the committee “tried to take away things that they could use to generate negative ads about … somebody who had nothing to do with the platform,” Woodrum said.

The Republican Platform Committee predicted that a few specific issues would be targeted by Democrats, particularly abortion. “They were going to run on … abortion, they were very clear they were running on that because they were very much pro-abortion,” he said. “So the … language is very clear and fairly short on abortion … in the platform,” and “it didn’t give them much ammunition to try to take it and twist words.” Woodrum noted that “abortion has been used successfully by Democrats” in past elections. 

Abortion was the primary issue that created dissension among members of the committee. Trump “was fine with it” according to Woodrum, but, “there were some people that were upset. They wanted all that detailed language on rights [and] life issues in there. There’s a reason it wasn’t all in there, but they weren’t happy with that.” Woodrum maintained that, despite any disagreements within the party, that Trump has “been the most pro-life president” in American history.

“All that the national platform said on abortion was it was going back to the states and the states make the decision. So, it didn’t change anything for West Virginia, the way we do business,” he said.

Israel was another issue where the committee attempted to maintain strategic ambiguity. Woodrum cited the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 as an example of how Republicans “give them ammunition to beat us over the head with.”

Woodrum noted another benefit of keeping the platform short was that it allowed wiggle room for candidates in swing districts and for the individual state parties. “The national platform doesn’t limit what states can put in their platform.”

By any metric, it seems like the work that Woodrum and the other committee members put in had its desired effect.