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New Yorker: How the debate over the first-in-the-nation primary became a battle over the future of the Democratic Party.
Would You Let New Mexico Pick the President?
How the debate over the first-in-the-nation primary became a battle over the future of the Democratic Party.
Democrats are deciding what kind of party they want to be, but first they have to decide who gets to decide. Since January, twelve states have been trying to court the Rules and Bylaws Committee, insisting that their primary is the one that will determine a Democratic Presidential candidate who can beat the Republican heir to the MAGA movement. This has turned the discussion, at least in part, into a competition over which state is most like the rest of the nation, as several officials and party chairs told me. “Nevada is a microcosm of the United States, with its diverse population,” the Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto said. “I think you get a microcosm of the Democratic Party here,” Representative Sarah McBride, one of Delaware’s biggest boosters since the Bidens, said of the literal First State. “We are a state, I think, that is the melting pot for the country,” Anderson Clayton, the chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, said. “We look like America,” Curtis Hertel, the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, said. “It’s a country of fifty states, but Georgia is the best representation of the diversity of our party,” Charlie Bailey, who chairs the Georgia Democrats, said.
But the contest over the first-in-the-nation primaries has also become a proxy war over the future of the Party. The D.N.C.’s decision, expected by late summer, could have a significant effect on the 2028 cycle—from the crop of campaign staffers who can afford to relocate to the ability of small campaigns to break through in large media markets. Although Iowa and New Hampshire haven’t always picked candidates that go on to win the Presidency, the early victors get to fly out of Des Moines and Manchester with an extremely valuable spoil: momentum, the type that an inert political party might need against a major popular movement. “The issue here is about the stakes in this election, in 2028,” the New Hampshire senator Maggie Hassan, who won her seat in 2016 by a thousand and seventeen votes, told me. “We have to win. We have to reverse Trumpism.”
For more than a century, New Hampshire was the entire story—since 1920, it hosted the first primary, and, beginning in 1972, Iowa hosted the first Presidential caucuses. But over time, many Democrats came to believe that those early, white-majority states no longer represented the Party’s base. The reckoning came at an opportune moment for Joe Biden, who’d called himself a “bridge” to future generations but had left the window open to running again. In December, 2022, Biden wrote to the D.N.C. expressing his concern that, although Black voters were the “backbone” of the Democratic Party, the Party had not “recognized their importance in our nominating calendar.” The letter prompted the committee to select South Carolina, the state where Biden’s flagging 2020 Presidential campaign had recovered—with the endorsement of a powerful, longtime ally, Representative Jim Clyburn—as the new starting point of the primaries. “That was kind of what elevated South Carolina to be first, was the Biden letter,” Christale Spain, now the chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, told me. On February 4, 2023, the D.N.C. selected South Carolina as the first primary; Biden announced his fateful rëelection campaign about two months later.
How the debate over the first-in-the-nation primary became a battle over the future of the Democratic Party.
Democrats are deciding what kind of party they want to be, but first they have to decide who gets to decide. Since January, twelve states have been trying to court the Rules and Bylaws Committee, insisting that their primary is the one that will determine a Democratic Presidential candidate who can beat the Republican heir to the MAGA movement. This has turned the discussion, at least in part, into a competition over which state is most like the rest of the nation, as several officials and party chairs told me. “Nevada is a microcosm of the United States, with its diverse population,” the Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto said. “I think you get a microcosm of the Democratic Party here,” Representative Sarah McBride, one of Delaware’s biggest boosters since the Bidens, said of the literal First State. “We are a state, I think, that is the melting pot for the country,” Anderson Clayton, the chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, said. “We look like America,” Curtis Hertel, the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, said. “It’s a country of fifty states, but Georgia is the best representation of the diversity of our party,” Charlie Bailey, who chairs the Georgia Democrats, said.
But the contest over the first-in-the-nation primaries has also become a proxy war over the future of the Party. The D.N.C.’s decision, expected by late summer, could have a significant effect on the 2028 cycle—from the crop of campaign staffers who can afford to relocate to the ability of small campaigns to break through in large media markets. Although Iowa and New Hampshire haven’t always picked candidates that go on to win the Presidency, the early victors get to fly out of Des Moines and Manchester with an extremely valuable spoil: momentum, the type that an inert political party might need against a major popular movement. “The issue here is about the stakes in this election, in 2028,” the New Hampshire senator Maggie Hassan, who won her seat in 2016 by a thousand and seventeen votes, told me. “We have to win. We have to reverse Trumpism.”
For more than a century, New Hampshire was the entire story—since 1920, it hosted the first primary, and, beginning in 1972, Iowa hosted the first Presidential caucuses. But over time, many Democrats came to believe that those early, white-majority states no longer represented the Party’s base. The reckoning came at an opportune moment for Joe Biden, who’d called himself a “bridge” to future generations but had left the window open to running again. In December, 2022, Biden wrote to the D.N.C. expressing his concern that, although Black voters were the “backbone” of the Democratic Party, the Party had not “recognized their importance in our nominating calendar.” The letter prompted the committee to select South Carolina, the state where Biden’s flagging 2020 Presidential campaign had recovered—with the endorsement of a powerful, longtime ally, Representative Jim Clyburn—as the new starting point of the primaries. “That was kind of what elevated South Carolina to be first, was the Biden letter,” Christale Spain, now the chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, told me. On February 4, 2023, the D.N.C. selected South Carolina as the first primary; Biden announced his fateful rëelection campaign about two months later.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/would-you-let-new-mexico-pick-the-president
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