Someone at the Republican National Committee must have gotten worried that Donald Trump’s ego needed a little extra massage, because on Tuesday, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel sent an angry letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates, relitigating Trump’s grievances from 2020 and folding them into a new set of threats for 2024—and in the process, again highlighting the Republican Party’s move away from basic democratic norms, a move that is actually quantified in a new study.
That study, from the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, measured political parties on two axes, one of which was illiberalism, or the degree to which parties embrace or reject free and fair elections. The Republican Party shifted dramatically away from free and fair elections between 2008 and 2018, moving from being not too dissimilar from the Democratic Party on that measure in 2008 to being much closer to the far-right parties of Europe or even United Russia, Vladimir Putin’s party.
It’s in that context—the context of a party that is now trying to undermine and overturn elections and cover up insurrection—that the RNC is threatening the Commission on Presidential Debates.
