Political parties’ platforms – their statements of where they stand on issues – get little respect. In 2020, then-President Donald Trump mused he might shrink his party’s platform from 66 pages in 2016 to just one page – but ultimately the party just kept the same platform document from four years earlier. Even as far back as 1996, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole claimed he had never read his party’s platform.

Hours after President Joe Biden's feeble debate performance Thursday night that left voters across the country stunned, two of Pennsylvania's most powerful Democrats, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) and Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), pushed back against calls for Biden to step down from his reelection campaign.