If anything, that sense of European normality has made me all the more worried as I reflected on my trip and on the midterm campaign in this country. Like Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary, today’s Republican Party has repeatedly been willing to subvert democracy for the sake of power. It’s the single biggest reason that Republicans need to be held accountable in tomorrow’s elections. My column this week tells the story of my trip.

Related: If the column makes you want to learn more about Hungary, I recommend Zselyke Csaky in Foreign Policy, from September or April; Zack Beauchamp in Vox; and my colleague Roger Cohen. To go deeper, the book “Orbán,” by Paul Lendvai, is excellent and accessible.

Orbánism in Georgia. The latest example of Republicans subverting democracy to gain power is happening in Georgia. There, Brian Kemp is both overseeing the governor’s election, as a secretary of state, and running in that election, as the Republican nominee. And he’s behaving shamefully.

On Sunday, he leveled an apparently false allegation against Democrats: that they hacked into a state voter database. In Slate, the legal scholar Richard Hasen called Kemp’s move “perhaps the most outrageous example of election administration partisanship in the modern era.”

Michael McDonald, the data-minded University of Florida elections expert, called Kemp’s move “an appalling abuse of power” and “beyond the pale of what is acceptable in a well-functioning democracy.” That description captures why the parallels between Hungary and the United States have left me unnerved: one of our two political parties is behaving in ways I never expected to see in this country. It is discarding basic standards of democracy for the sake of holding power.