The party does not desperately want free and fair elections. It desperately wants to continue to exist;
Duh. That’s each party’s JOB.
And that's why each party will happily game the system to its own advantage, whatever the system is.
it desperately wants to be a permanent ruling dominant party without any functional opposition where it can; and where it can't, it desperately wants to maintain the two-party system that guarantees it will continue to frequently get a turn in power, every time the other tolerated party wears out its welcome with the voters.
I had to correct the “permanent ruling” part, as I think the current Republican presidential candidate is the only one seriously questing for that, and only for his personal benefit.
He's doing it only for his personal advantage, yes; the evil he does will be interred with his bones. Harris and Walz have long histories of anti-free-speech positions, and they do it for their party and their ideology, not for a cause that will go away when they do.
Most political professionals, however impure, power hungry and greedy, have a sense patriotism, public service and legacy (or at least the appearance thereof) that drives them to want to win by the rules. The malevolent faction wants to destroy the rules.
The degradation of our collective ethic has been accelerated out of control by Citizens United, and there’s probably no turning back, now that our system is officially rigged to do the bidding of whoever has the most money, no exceptions, and to lavish riches upon anyone who can win and toe their line.
Oh for the love of god. Both factions are malevolent; both factions want to destroy the rules and replace them with new rules designed to benefit themselves. You're bringing up a case in point and siding with malevolence. Citizens United
was* the rules; the BCRA it overturned was blatantly unconstitutional; the faction that has ever since been screaming about C.U. malevolently tried to shut down piddling electioneering expenditures by shoestring outfits like Citizens United while at the same time explicitly permitting unlimited electioneering expenditures by its preferred corporations: ABC, NBC and CBS.
(* No, C.U. v FEC did not declare money to be speech; quite the reverse. No, C.U. v FEC did not declare corporations to be people; "corporate personhood" is a centuries-old common-law judicial technicality that makes it possible to sue a corporation without tracking down every shareholder and serving writs on them all personally. C.U. v FEC held that individual humans do not lose their First Amendment rights just because they make use of "corporation" legal machinery. That was already settled law -- see
New York Times Co. v. United States. By wishing it away, you are wishing away the right of the New York Times to ignore the court order not to publish. If C.U. had no right to advertise
Hillary: the Movie, because it's a corporation, then The New York Times had no right to publish the Pentagon Papers, because it too is a corporation. Is that really what you want? When you condemn C.U. you are de facto siding with
Richard Nixon. Can we at least agree that Richard Nixon was malevolent?)