Democrats’ 2028 Primary Schedule: A Cold Shoulder to Their New Activist Base

David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, has opined in The New York Times about the six states that the party has designated to lead off the 2028 presidential primary season. In order, they are South Carolina, with Nevada second, New Hampshire third, New Mexico fourth, Michigan fifth, and Virginia sixth. At the risk of winning this week’s “Fools Rush In” contest, I now submit my own take on the politics of these selections.

More from Harold Meyerson

First, by both tradition and logic, both parties’ primaries have long begun in small states. The logic here is that small states are less expensive to campaign in and afford voters a better chance of actually encountering the candidates and forming their own conclusions—thereby presumably creating a more level playing field for the contestants and giving semi-long-shot candidates with less funding and not much of a national reputation a chance to advance to the big leagues if they do well in the sticks. (One survey found that an amazing 30 percent of the voters in the 1992 New Hampshire Democratic primary actually personally encountered one candidate fighting furiously—and ultimately, successfully—to save his embattled campaign: Arkansas’s then-governor Bill Clinton. I covered his New Hampshire campaign that year, and he was indeed the most goddamned ubiquitous candidate in the history of electoral politics, at least in the dead of winter.)

Small states, however, lack the demographic and political diversity of big states. The two states that long kicked off the season, Iowa and New Hampshire, afforded the more obscure candidates a chance to get around, but both states were overwhelmingly and are still disproportionately white, which the national Democratic Party is not. By now designating South Carolina to lead off the lineup, the Democrats have chosen a state where party members are very heavily Black—albeit with a measurably smaller share of the kind of young Black progressives found in major cities and a virtual absence of the kind of progressive and union infrastructure also found in major cities. (Hence, the state’s voters’ overwhelming preference for Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary.) The recent disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South, engineered by the Supreme Court’s near-total nullification of the Voting Rights Act, was doubtless and properly a factor in the party’s decision to move South Carolina to the front of the line.

The next state, Nevada, has a substantially but by no means overwhelmingly Hispanic Democratic electorate, as well as one of the nation’s largest and most electorally active union locals: the Las Vegas hotel workers (Culinary Local 226). State number three, New Hampshire, remains much whiter than most, and while its progressive infrastructure is small, its primary contests have long been a mecca for liberal and progressive volunteers who quadrennially flock into the state from the rest of New England and New York. Very heavily Hispanic New Mexico has never figured heavily in presidential primaries before. Only when the season reaches Michigan do the diversified demographics and cultures of metropolitan politics begin to figure in elections, a development sustained when suburban Washington, D.C., then goes to the polls in Virginia.

For a number of decades, the real decider state in the Democratic primary season was Illinois, which held its contest in mid-March, well after the first tranche of primaries had partially winnowed the field. Illinois winnowed the finalists. The verdict of its multiracial, urban/suburban/rural voters elevated its winners—among them, Walter Mondale and Bill Clinton—to nominee-in-waiting status.

While the logic of starting in small states, which by definition don’t have much in the way of big cities (Las Vegas, of course, is big, but also almost grotesquely sui generis), is still sound, it now comes at a price. That price is the disenfranchisement during the primaries’ crucial winnowing period of the largest category of Democratic voters: urbanites. When the party’s candidates still attracted a substantial share of rural votes, its membership wasn’t overwhelmingly metropolitan. Today, it is. And while there’s definitely something to be gained from testing candidates’ capacity to win votes in areas where Democrats plainly need to win more votes, the Democrats also need to pile up the votes in the polyglot big cities, which are also home to, and the base of, the party’s new and avowedly social democratic and socialist left. All of which is to say that if Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez enters the race and manages to survive the first group of primaries in particular, that would constitute a strong testament to her ability to emerge as the Democratic nominee—seeing as how the party’s new primary schedule gives a cold, or at least cool, shoulder to its new generation of activists.