U.S. — With campaigning for November's elections running at full speed and polls showing GOP candidates building sizeable leads, the Republican Party rushed to implement an emergency platform change after seeing how close they were to winning a landslide victory.
Struggles on the Democratic side of the ticket, including the growing scandal surrounding President Joe Biden's cognitive ability, led to Republicans gaining tremendous momentum in recent weeks, causing leaders to shift gears and push for changes to the GOP platform in hopes of avoiding any decisive wins in November.
"We were just getting way too close to winning big," said Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley. "Some of these recent polls really got us spooked and concerned that we might actually run away with this thing, so we knew we had to take drastic steps to avoid steamrolling our competition. These changes to our platform should help frustrate, anger, and alienate enough of our loyal voters to make the races a lot closer."
As reported by the AP, the Republican National Committee moved Monday to adopt a party platform that reflects former President Donald Trump’s position opposing a federal abortion ban and ceding limits to states, omitting the explicit basis for a national ban for the first time in 40 years. The new platform draft also removes language from 2016 condemning the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to grant same-sex couples the right to marry.
Thus, the updated GOP platform included changes or outright omissions of longstanding Republican stances on abortion and traditional marriage, giving the party the negative reaction it was looking for from lifelong GOP voters. "Thankfully, there's been some good backlash," Whatley said. "With any luck, we'll see our leads start shrinking as we head into the home stretch of these campaigns. We don't want to do anything that might put us at risk of ensuring total victory."
At publishing time, Republican insiders revealed the party was also preparing to abandon other foundational values on issues like immigration, taxes, election security, and the 2nd Amendment to make sure they don't receive too many votes in November.
