2 weeks Ago
An intra-party battle is now officially underway to protect New Hampshire’s cherished first-in-the-nation presidential primary in the Democratic Party’s 2028 nominating calendar. While the Democratic National Committee (DNC) won’t decide on the next presidential primary schedule for another two years, the DNC’s election this past weekend of Minnesota chair Ken Martin as the new national party committee chair formally kicks off the two-year process. Martin’s election is the party’s first formal step to try and rebound from the November election, in which President Donald Trump captured the White House and Republicans flipped the Senate, held on to their fragile majority in the House and made major gains with working-class, minority and younger voters.
“We have one team, one team, the Democratic Party,” Martin said as he preached unity following his victory on Saturday. “The fight is for our values. The fight is for working people.
The fight right now is against Donald Trump and the billionaires who bought this country.” But expect a heated battle over the 2028 calendar, which will take on heightened importance as Democrats aim to win back the White House. While the Republican National Committee (RNC) didn’t make any changes to its 2024 calendar and kept the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary as their first two contests, the DNC upended its calendar.
The party overwhelmingly supported a proposal by former President Joe Biden to put South Carolina first, with New Hampshire and Nevada coming a week later. Adhering to a nearly half-century-old law that mandates the Granite State hold the first presidential primary a week ahead of any similar contest, New Hampshire Secretary of State Dave Scanlan scheduled the contest for Jan. 23, 2024, with the Democratic presidential primary ending up being an unsanctioned election.
Biden didn’t set foot in the state and kept his name off the primary ballot. But, to avoid an embarrassing setback for the then-president, a write-in effort by Democratic Party leaders in New Hampshire boosted Biden to an easy primary victory as he cruised to renomination. Seven months later, following a disastrous debate performance against President Trump, Biden ended his re-election campaign and was replaced by former Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the Democrats’ 2024 national ticket.
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Cross|Word Flipart Typeshift SpellTower Really Bad Chess Martin has repeatedly pledged he wouldn’t put his “thumb on the scale” when it came to the 2028 calendar. Last week, at the final DNC chair election debate before Saturday’s vote, he said he would hold a “fair and transparent” calendar selection process that would “battle-test” the presidential candidates and respect “the traditions and the diversity of our Democratic Party.” National Democrats for years have knocked both Iowa — whose caucuses for 50 years led off the party’s nominating calendar — and New Hampshire as unrepresentative of the party as a whole because the states have largely white populations with few major urban areas.
Nevada and South Carolina, which in recent cycles have voted third and fourth on the calendar, are much more diverse than either Iowa or New Hampshire. Nevada and South Carolina were added to the Democratic calendar nearly two decades ago to increase the diversity of the early states’ electorate. But New Hampshire Democrats have long pushed back saying the state’s rich tradition of grassroots, retail politics, its well-informed electorate, its high percentage of voter participation and its longtime status as a key general election swing state make it the perfect locale to hold the first-in-the-nation primary.
Veteran New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley, who backed Martin in the DNC chair race, told the Monitor he believes the new chair will keep his word that every state will have a “fair shot.” “We don’t need any special favors, but we don’t need somebody putting their thumb on the scale against us, either,” Buckley said. “We think we have a powerful message on why we should retain the first-in-the-nation primary.
” Meanwhile, after he was reelected as RNC chair last month, Whatley told this reporter that “I have not had any conversations with anybody who wants to change the calendar, so we will wait and see what that looks like as we’re going forward.” “I don’t think that changing the calendar really helped the Democrats at all,” Whatley argued. “And I think that us, making sure that we are working our system the way that we always have, is going to be critical.
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