Kingdom Voting (Part 11): Parties and Platforms

Since you are voting for an individual candidate, do parties and platforms even matter? Yes, but only to help you fill in the blanks with candidates you do not know as well. In general, most candidates will align with their party’s adopted platform, but they may focus on points where they strongly agree or differ with the party.

The United States has a two-party system. While that has a lot of problems and is subject to change, it has been the case for about 250 years, and has become entrenched in the political sphere. The two parties are not monolithic, and it may be more helpful to think of them as coalitions of interest groups. Democrats intuitively understand this, and think of every voter as the member of a group. Republicans are aware of it, but tend to focus more on the individual voter than the groups to which he or she belongs. However, the 2024 election brought so many different types of voters into the GOP that it may need to reconsider this strategy to keep them. 

Traditionally, Republicans had fiscal conservatives, national defense conservatives, and social conservatives. However, they currently have the Christian right, establishment Republicans, fiscal conservatives, libertarians, MAGA, neoconservatives, never-Trumpers, populists, and various others. These groups do not want all the same things, but they work together to get some of what they want.

Suppose that you are a conservative Christian. You are pro-life, support the biblical definition of marriage, and are very concerned about LGBTQIA+ activism in public schools. Your gay, pro-choice, libertarian neighbor thinks the government should stay out of abortion, marriage, and schools. While you disagree about the reasons behind your decisions, you can both agree to vote for a candidate who says the Supreme Court should never have legalized “gay marriage” and wants to cut funding for LGBTIA+ activism. This is how parties function as coalitions of diverse interest groups.

Each party develops a platform, or statement of beliefs and aims that unify their constituencies. The platform informs voters about what the party plans to accomplish through the seats it wins. It is useful to know each party’s platform in a general sense, because it serves as a baseline for evaluating candidates’ alignment. If a candidate says all the right things, but is aligned with a party whose platform is contrary to biblical principles, that should raise a red flag. Well-intentioned candidates can be limited or negatively influenced by surrounding themselves with people whose objectives contradict their own. Remember, light has no communion with darkness (2 Corinthians 6:14-15).