A few Republicans have also called for the Glass-Steagall law to be reinstated, notably Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas.

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All the same, the inclusion of Glass-Steagall in the official platform was unexpected. Wall Street opposes reinstating the law, and many Democratic and Republican experts on the financial system argue that reenacting it would do little to prevent another financial crisis. A bill in Congress to restore the law has received little support.

Some suggest that including Glass-Steagall was an effort by Donald Trump's presidential campaign to appeal to disaffected supporters of Sanders, the senator from Vermont who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination. Hillary Clinton, the presumptive winner of the Democratic primary, does not support reinstating the law.

“We believe that the Obama-Clinton years have passed legislation that has been favorable to the big banks, which is one of the reason why you see all of the Wall Street money going to her," Paul Manafort, the chairman of Trump's campaign, said on Monday, according to Bloomberg. “We are supporting the small banks and Main Street. We talk about legislation that affects, you know, some of the mistakes made in repealing Glass-Steagall."

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"It seems strategic, to try to get to the left of Hillary Clinton," said Mike Konczal, a financial expert at the liberal Roosevelt Institute. "It's the one thing you could try to get to Hillary's left on."

Konczal argues that restoring the Glass-Steagall law should not be a priority for reformers. He said that the financial crisis showed that institutions such as Lehman Brothers — which are focused on investment banking without commercial, Main Street operations — can cause the same kinds of problems that commercial banks do when they fail. For that reason, Konczal added, the government should regulate the two types of institutions together.

In any case, Democrats who are committed to Sanders's and Warren's ideas on financial reform are unlikely to find much in the rest of the platform that will appeal to them.

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For example, the platform includes several strongly worded paragraphs demonizing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Warren's brainchild. The bureau was "deliberately designed to be a rogue agency," according to the platform, which adds that the director of the bureau "has dictatorial powers unique in the American Republic."

The platform calls for requiring the bureau to receive its funding through annual appropriations by Congress, which would give Republican lawmakers more control over the agency. This language could alienate progressive Democrats who believe the bureau has important responsibilities in protecting borrowers from predatory and discriminatory lending.

"There’s this desperate belief that they can attract Bernie Sanders voters," said Tony Fratto, a former Treasury Department official in the Bush administration. He noted that Warren publicly attacks Trump all the time, and said adding Glass-Steagall to the Republican platform is unlikely to sway Sanders voters to cross the political aisle. "Not only is it wrong as a matter of economic policy, it's wrong from a political standpoint also," Fratto said.

Loyalists of Sanders and Warren are "not going to ignore all of the other sins of Donald Trump in order to support him based on this one issue, which they know he’s probably not sincere about anyway," added Fratto, who is now a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a consultancy that serves major banks and other financial institutions on Wall Street.

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Avik Roy, a former adviser to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and other GOP presidential candidates, also took issue with the inclusion of Glass-Steagall, but he argued that the platform on the whole shows the party is making progress on financial reform.

He pointed to language in the platform suggesting support for increased capital requirements on banks, which force shareholders to absorb more of the banks' losses in the event of a crisis and reduce the need for a bailout by taxpayers.

"The Republican approach, the conservative approach, to financial-sector policy has been, 'We don’t like regulation, therefore our answer is to repeal Dodd-Frank and do nothing else,' " Roy said, referring to the comprehensive reform Congress passed in 2010.

"We’re seeing a real healthy movement within the Republican party toward a more thoughtful and constructive approach toward how to reform the financial system," Roy added.