Exclusive—Ronna McDaniel: The RNC Is Fighting for Fair Debates

Debates are an important part of the democratic process, but this outdated organization has had a monopoly on organizing general election presidential debates and, for far too long, has shown clear bias against Republican candidates. We are not walking away from debates. We are walking away from the CPD.

It didn’t have to be this way. Over the past year, we have attempted to work with the CPD to enact simple and commonsense reforms to help ensure fair debates going forward: hosting debates before voting begins, selecting balanced and unbiased moderators who have never worked for candidates on the debate stage, and prohibiting board members from publicly disparaging nominees. A guarantee that they would fix these issues would have solved the problem, but they refused to do that. Now, we are officially initiating the process of changing the Republican Party’s rules to ensure that our future candidates are not forced to go through the biased CPD in order to make their case to the American people on the debate stage. It’s time for new, unbiased, modern debate platforms to emerge.