GOP pulls debate threat from Trump playbook

“It certainly gives the candidate more of an out if they’ve decided debating is to their disadvantage to be able to say, ‘The party rules prevent me from accepting’ the commission’s invitation,” said Trevor Potter, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission who served as general counsel to Republican John McCain’s two presidential campaigns.

The RNC, he said, is attempting to “blow up the structure and therefore change the expectation to ‘will they or won’t they‘” debate.

If there was any possibility that the GOP, following Trump’s loss in 2020, would take a more traditionalist turn in the next election, the RNC’s war on the debate commission will serve as yet another reminder of how expansive the former president’s influence remains — and the stamp he’ll put on 2024 regardless of whether he runs. The debate commission was a joint creation of top officials at the RNC and the Democratic National Committee. But that was in the 1980s. Today’s populist-oriented GOP is far more mistrustful of traditional political institutions — including independent, nonpartisan organizations like the commission, which exists only to facilitate general election debates and receives no funding from the government or any political party, political action committee or candidate.

“To the average Republican voter, the response to this action will be some variation of, ‘It’s about time,’” said James Dickey, the former chair of the Texas Republican Party.

From the media to universities to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, he said, “We’re seeing institution after institution prove they cannot be trusted. It’s about time one of them paid the penalty for it.”

In its plan to amend party rules to prohibit future nominees from participating in commission-sponsored debates, the RNC is doing the work of an aggrieved former president who complained bitterly about the debate process in 2020, and who is now expected to run again in 2024.

Yet it’s also reflecting popular sentiment within the party. Republicans have long complained that debates and their media moderators are biased against them — what Saul Anuzis, a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party, called “a very serious frustration among Republicans in general, and many of the candidates in the campaigns, that we don’t necessarily get a fair deal.”

Even if “the RNC did this because they’re upset about the way the commission treated Trump,” said Scott Reed, the Republican strategist who managed Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996, “this issue’s been boiling for cycles now.”

The debate commission, he said, “has outlived its usefulness.”

Jeff Roe, a Republican strategist who managed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in 2016, said that “the days of playing ball with the insider media moguls is over.”

Few Republicans expect debates will not occur in some form in 2024. The commission may still…