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After refusing to participate in the first two Republican debates, former President Donald J. Trump and his campaign advisers spent the past week arguing that there should be no more. They say the Republican National Committee should end the race for the party’s nomination, given Trump’s large lead in the polls.
But in interviews Thursday, more than a dozen Republican National Committee members suggested they were giving short shrift to the appeal of Trump’s campaign.
Two members of the party’s debate committee said the idea of canceling the debates had not even reached the level of discussion in the committee. Members Juliana Bergeron, a national committee member from New Hampshire, and Gordon Kinne, a national committee member from Missouri, also said they were undecided about which candidate to support.
Trump, they said, was not entitled to the deference the party would give an incumbent.
“This is what we are doing. She’s known all along,” Kinne said. “We understand that he has a substantial advantage and that he can remain that way, but these other people also have the right to have their day, and we are trying to make it fair. So you can’t change the rules in the middle of the game.”
The New York Times spoke with 14 RNC members, including Ms. Bergeron and Mr. Kinne. Only one member supported Trump’s suggestion, and reluctantly.
That member, Louis Gurvich, state chairman of the Louisiana Republican Party, said he considered the debates “an essential part of the political process” but realistically did not expect them to be productive in the current race. “Frankly, I think the debates have demeaned all the candidates who participated in them,” he said of the first two, expressing frustration at the candidates’ shouting as they fought for air time.
The other Republican National Committee members who spoke to The Times dismissed the idea, with varying degrees of frustration.
“It’s crazy. I mean, it’s crazy,” said Mississippi national committeeman Henry Barbour, adding that he hadn’t decided which candidate to support. “Why are we canceling the primaries?”
Paul Dame, chairman of the Vermont Republican Party, who had urged the Republicans to leave Trump behind, he said the suggestion was “a slap in the face to voters.”
“Trump would have been screaming if Jeb Bush had tried to do something like that in 2016,” Dame said. “Trump was the outsider in the 2016 race, and now he’s trying to use his position as an insider to exclude other people, which is exactly the kind of thing he used to be against.”
Gordon Ackley, president of the party in the Virgin Islands; Oscar Brock, Tennessee national committeeman; José Cunningham, member of the national committee from Washington, DC; Drew McKissick, chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party; Bill Palatucci, national committee member from New Jersey; Andy Reilly, national committee member from Pennsylvania; Iowa National Committeeman Steve Scheffler; and Michael Whatley, chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party and general counsel of the Republican National Committee, also rejected the idea.
“If the Republican National Committee is not going to handle a Republican presidential debate, who will?” said Reilly, who has not yet committed to supporting any particular candidate. He disagreed with Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita’s claim that the most recent debate on September 27 was “Boring and inconsequential.”
“I think it’s very constructive,” Reilly said of the process. “It perfects the candidates. Whoever is the final nominee will have more experience.”
The Times contacted nearly all of the RNC’s 168 members, but most of those publicly aligned with Trump did not respond. Some members, including Tyler Bowyer of Arizona, Patti Lyman of Virginia and Roger Villere of Louisiana, he told politician that they considered the debates to be pointless or were ambivalent about them, but these members did not respond to the Times’ questions.
The RNC does not pay for debates. It sponsors them and the costs are borne by the media companies that host them.
In a statement earlier this week calling for the debates to be canceled, LaCivita and another Trump adviser, Susie Wiles, suggested that the RNC needed to dedicate its money to fighting voter fraud. Going back to Mr. Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him, they claimed, without evidence, that the 2024 election would be stolen from him.
Neil Vigdor contributed reports.