Discussion about how democracy's norms are challenged has been episodic at best in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but it's the very first topic to galvanize those challenging President Trump for the Republican nomination.
All three of his announced GOP opponents are promoting a scathing op-ed column, published under all their names in The Washington Post over the weekend, condemning their party as undemocratic for canceling its presidential nominating contests in four states.
GOP leaders moved this month to cancel the 2020 primaries in South Carolina and Arizona and the caucuses in Nevada and Kansas — assuring Trump gets all the delegates in those early contests and thereby erecting a significant hurdle for his challengers to build momentum for their long-shot bids.
"The latest disgrace, courtesy of Team Trump, is an effort to eliminate any threats to the president's political power in 2020," wrote former Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, former Gov. Bill Weld of Massachusetts and former Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois.
"Do Republicans really want to be the party with a nominating process that more resembles Russia or China than our American tradition?" they wrote. "Are we to leave it to the Democrats to make the case for principles and values that, a few years ago, every Republican would have agreed formed the foundations of our party?"
The party bosses that scrapped the contests — two each on the books in February and early March, with a total 171 delegates at stake — said they were a waste of money and energy given the weakness of the challenger field.
They also noted that their moves were not unprecedented, since clutches of primaries were scrapped by the parties of each of the past three presidents when they ran for re-election: Eight were canceled by the Democrats when Bill Clinton sought his second term in 1996, six on the GOP side when George W. Bush ran in 2004 and 10 on the Democratic side before Barack Obama was renominated in 2012.
What is decidedly different, however, is that none of those presidents had opponents with any sort of national following or fundraising prowess; the intraparty challenges came from virtually unknown gadflies who sought access to the ballots in only a few states.
"If a party stands for nothing but reelection, it indeed stands for nothing," wrote Sanford, Walsh and Weld, all of whom have political organizations and name identification sufficient for a national effort. "Cowards run from fights. Warriors stand and fight for what they believe. The United States respects warriors. Only the weak fear competition."
The three also wrote that litigation to get them on the ballot would probably cost more than the party leaders in the four states purport to save, but they did not say explicitly if they'd be the ones going to court.
Demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court as justices hear oral arguments on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
Luz Angela Nuñez with her daughter Aisha Quershi Nuñez at their home in College Point, Queens. Photo: Mia Anzalone for Documented.
Kimberly Alvarez, 25, with her daughter Evangeline and her husband John Alvarez in Medellin, Colombia. Photo courtesy of Kimberly Alvarez.Alvarez arrived in New York City in February 2024 with her husband John Alvarez as asylum seekers from Venezuela. In April 2025, Alvarez found out she was pregnant with her first child, a baby girl. Her first reaction, she said, was fear.“How am I going to keep her alive?” she said. “That’s what I was thinking. ‘How am I going to be able to take care of her?’”At the beginning of Alvarez’s pregnancy, she said she was aware of the immigration enforcement occurring around the country, but vowed not to let it deter her from showing up to her doctor’s appointments.“When you went out, you were always on alert because you didn’t know if [ICE] might be around. I never saw anything suspicious,” Alvarez said. “But of course, you feel scared.”In October, when Alvarez was six months pregnant, her husband was detained by ICE agents at 26 Federal Plaza. When the immediate shock wore off, she obsessively checked the Online Detainee Locator System to find out where her husband went. A day later, she discovered that he was being kept at Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey. Alvarez quickly set up an account to pay for phone calls, and every two days, she would pay about $10 for a one-hour call, updating her husband about the baby, her appointments and how she was doing.“Crying was the only way for me to release the tension,” said Alvarez, who worried that her lack of sleep and bad diet were impacting her baby. “Crying was the only way for me to release the tension.”—Kimberly AlvarezThat tension built up day by day, week by week following her husband’s arrest. Alvarez had stopped her work as a cleaner in the neighborhood’s synagogues two weeks before her husband’s detention because of her pregnancy. The plan, she said, was to rely solely on his income as a maintenance worker for “the food, the rent, everything.” Left with few choices, Kimberley had to rely on her mother’s income as a cleaner. The older woman had moved to New York from North Carolina to assist with Alvarez’s pregnancy. “I feel like I’m supposed to help my mom, not the other way around,” Alvarez said. “I felt powerless because I couldn’t do anything.”On Dec. 9, Alvarez gave birth to a daughter, Evangeline. While her baby was healthy, Alvarez’s anxieties did not go away. While she returned to cleaning synagogues a few months after Evangeline’s birth to help make ends meet, Alvarez and her daughter rarely left home. Alvarez said she felt paralyzed, getting frequent alerts from a neighborhood WhatsApp group when ICE was spotted nearby. One day, she said, ICE arrested her friend’s husband in Sunset Park, in an area where she would sometimes take Evangeline for walks.“I’m so afraid that I’ll go out and run into one of them and that they’ll take her away from me,” Alvarez said. “That’s my biggest fear, that someone will take her away from me and I won’t know where my daughter is.”In March, her husband decided to voluntarily remove himself from the United States and move back to Colombia, where he is originally from. It was a family decision, but it was not a happy one — hiring immigration lawyers was too expensive, Alvarez said, adding that staying in the U.S. felt too uncertain. 
