With the recent adjournment of the Maine Legislature and the subsequent Maine Republican Party convention in Augusta, the Maine GOP had a real chance to contrast itself with the ruling Democratic majority in Augusta.

Members could have adopted a platform that specifically called out the failures of Augusta Democrats this session, on both a policy level and a governance level. They could have, for instance, laid out a specific plan to address the state’s shortcomings when addressing child welfare. Such a section could have rightly pointed out that, while Maine’s child welfare programs clearly need systemic change, Democrats conveniently decided to avoid even having an open debate about the issue.

Such an approach would have nicely dovetailed with the party’s supposed support of family values, expanding that concept to more than opposition to abortion and marriage equality. While they didn’t completely ignore the issue, they didn’t offer any real solutions, either, preferring to make a vague call for improvement and work with faith-based organizations more. The platform spent more time discussing gender identity issues than the state’s mishandling of child welfare as a whole.

It would have been one thing if Maine’s Republicans had chosen to address other specific, everyday issues in the platform instead, and they didn’t. Instead, they produced a short, vague platform, with some of the few areas devoted to specifics addressing issues that aren’t particularly at the forefront of most voters’ minds. There’s not one word about inflation, for instance, one of the top issues that voters in both parties seem concerned about this year. They didn’t even take the time to criticize the Biden administration over the problem, let alone call for an improvement or offer a solution. Instead, they kept traditional fiscally conservative policies in place, like calls for a right-to-work law and lower taxes, while adding a return to the gold standard, an issue that was last central to a presidential campaign in 1896.

In fact, they set a pattern that way: They didn’t address a series of issues of national importance with the potential to divide the Democratic Party, nor did they zero in on issues of particular importance in Maine. Instead, they continued to embrace a series of positions that haven’t proven successful to win over independent voters, like repealing clean elections, ranked-choice voting and implementing voter ID. None of those are necessarily bad policies – they’re just not anything that’s going to attract new voters to the party, nor are they particularly meaningful this year.

They did manage to address immigration, even if by accident, by continuing to reject blanket amnesty and support tough enforcement of existing laws, even if that was simply holdover language from the 2022 platform. Indeed, apart from the amendments passed on the floor and a few tweaks here and there, the platform is mostly unchanged from two years ago.

In a sense, that’s a blessing: There was no takeover of the convention floor leading to a wholesale rewrite of the state convention, like there was back in 2010. There’s no mention of one-world government, Austrian economics or auditing the Federal Reserve, as there was in that infamous document.

Instead, that wing of the party settled for passing a few floor amendments. That’s not a bad thing; indeed, it’s just fine. It’s hard to remember now, but back in 2010, there was much concern among the Republican establishment that the platform would have a negative impact on the party at the ballot box. Not only did that not happen; instead, Republicans had one of their best years in Maine ever, at least in modern history. That wasn’t thanks to the new platform, nor was it in spite of it; while it’s hard to know, the platform probably didn’t have much of an effect one way or the other.

These days, the Maine Republican Party seems to have veered away from the belief that the platform is important to voters. Now, though, it seems to have gone too far in the opposite direction, hardly putting any effort into the platform at all, merely letting it stand as is. That’s an understandable reaction, but the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Every two years, the party should put real effort into crafting a document that’s updated to reflect present times while trying to enhance the party’s appeal. While hardly anyone will ever look at it, if the Republicans are going to have a platform at all, they should still try to produce a document that’s actually worth reading.

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