Charlie Neibergall/AP Photo
Iowa Democratic Party chairman Troy Price speaks to reporters about the delay in Iowa caucus results, February 4, 2020, in Des Moines, Iowa.
As of today, the Democratic National Committee has missed its own deadline to review last year’s primary nomination process. The DNC had committed to holding at least one public hearing on its 2020 process, as well as offering opportunities to submit comments by March 31, but it has not yet begun its review. The self-imposed deadline was set by a July 30, 2020, resolution that was approved by the Democratic National Convention last August.
The resolution called for the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee to make improvements to what will be 2024’s nominating process, with the goal of promoting “further accessibility, transparency, and inclusion in [the] Party.”
CNN reported yesterday that the DNC pushed back its deadline, citing an unnamed DNC official. However, according to the DNC website and DNC YouTube page, where meetings are live-streamed, there was no mention of any deadline changes and no recent meetings. If there was any change, it was not voted on by DNC members and members were not informed.
DNC members—and at least one member on the Rules and Bylaws Committee—have yet to even be informed about the review process, potential changes, or what feedback they may have on last year’s primaries and caucuses. And as the DNC drags its feet on the issue, statehouses around the country are proposing and passing new voting laws that will shape elections moving forward.
In Republican-run states like Georgia, where the Democratic Party made historic gains with victories for two U.S. Senate seats, a flipped U.S. House seat, and its Electoral College votes for the presidency, these new proposals will make it harder for people to vote, with rollbacks of no-excuse absentee voting, more voter ID requirements, and a reduction of the number of ballot drop boxes.
Such voter access issues are not confined to any one state. Republican state legislators have introduced more than 250 bills aimed at restricting access to the ballot, mostly, but not exclusively, in 2020’s swing states, according to the Brennan Center’s latest tally. Democrats in Congress and in statehouses have sounded the alarm about the dangers of some of these bills. But many Democrats believe their own party’s rules also need some work.
“The Democratic Party has no credibility to talk about voting rights, if there’s not a commitment to expand voting rights inside the party,” said Larry Cohen, a DNC at-large member and board chair of Our Revolution, in an interview with the Prospect.
Going into the 2020 nominating process, the DNC implemented some of its biggest reforms in years. In the aftermath of the 2016 convention, leaders from Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’s campaigns formed a unity task force and persuaded the DNC to pass new rules to stop superdelegates (also called unpledged delegates) from voting on the first candidate nomination ballot at the convention and to reduce the number of caucuses, rather than primaries, from ten to three. But that doesn’t mean that the primaries, much less the caucuses, ran smoothly.
Even before the coronavirus upended the normal voting and convention procedures, there were calls for change. DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee member and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten says she thinks there will be analysis of how well the last round of reforms worked, the order in which the states’ primaries are held, how well (or poorly) they reflect the demographics of the Democratic electorate, and how well caucuses actually work. (This is all without yet mentioning the Iowa caucus results debacle.)
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Weingarten says she’s not privy to what might be happening now at the DNC. “I’m sure that [newly elected DNC Chair] Jaime Harrison has already started doing that analysis of [the 2020 nominating process]. There will be hearings, there will be an analysis and considerations with the Rules and Bylaws Committee over the course of the next few years,” Weingarten says. “However, right now it’s really important to focus on what’s going on in states on issues undermining the basic right to vote.”
Weingarten also says that people should give Harrison time to conduct such an important review. The DNC denied the Prospect’s request to interview Jaime Harrison at this time.
The lack of transparency and communication about the 2020 nomination process review, as well as the missed deadline with committee members and the rank-and-file membership, is part of a larger pattern of what appears to be DNC insularity, even secrecy.
“We’re more hopeful under the Harrison administration, but one of the challenges with the DNC has been the lack of involvement in high-level decisions from rank-and-file DNC members,” DNC member David Atkins told the Prospect. “The Rules Committee meets at every DNC meeting, but there are also other Rules Committee meetings that are not entirely open to DNC members [when it comes to] knowing when they are and what their agenda is. So there’s a limited ability for rank-and-file DNC members to engage on the rules-making process, which is a problem. I think we need to involve our members more.”
“The Democratic Party has no credibility to talk about voting rights, if there’s not a commitment to expand voting rights inside the party.”
When asked if she had had an opportunity to give comments on the 2020 primary process ahead of the March 31 deadline, DNC member RL Miller started laughing and said that the laugh was “on the record.” Miller added that she is “shocked by how badly [DNC members] are treated” and finds it difficult, as a newly elected member, to even find out who her colleagues are. There are no publicly available DNC membership lists, nor are there rosters of the members who are on specific committees.
In the absence of DNC action, state parties are making their own procedural changes as they jostle for the opportunity to become more important to the primary process.
When the first Democratic voters in the country had their opportunity to weigh in on the 2020 race at the Iowa caucuses, their process imploded. A vote calculator and reporting application, developed by a company called Shadow, crashed on caucus night and delayed results for weeks. It wasn’t until nearly a month later that election results were sent to the DNC to add to the delegate tallies.
Questions about the competence of Iowa’s Democratic Party were compounded by pre-existing concerns about the limits of caucuses when it comes to questions of voter accessibility, and whether a disproportionately white, Republican-leaning state should be so heavily prioritized in the Democratic Party nomination process. By the morning after the app failures, people were already willing to write off Iowa’s caucus process and lead-off positioning for 2024.
Similar criticisms about diversity were also leveled at New Hampshire, the second state and first primary in the nomination process. New Hampshire’s secretary of state, Bill Gardner, the longest-serving secretary in the country, is the sole decision-maker when it comes to setting New Hampshire’s primary date and remains committed to having the first primary in the country. Indeed, both state parties are also reportedly committed to fighting any changes to their early placement on the calendar—fights in which they can almost surely count their Republican-controlled state governments as allies.
In response to 2020’s public criticisms, Nevada’s Democratic-controlled state assembly has before it a bill to move the state from a caucus to a primary. It has not yet been voted on, but dropping the caucus format could make Nevada more appealing to the DNC leaders. Nevada was the third state in the 2020 primary process and was handily won by Sen. Bernie Sanders.
South Carolina is also in the running to be moved to the first-place spot, as a state that already has a primary voting process and is more diverse than either New Hampshire or Iowa. Unlike the other states that are taking action to hold their lead-off positions, South Carolina has the benefit of being the first and most important state that then-candidate Joe Biden won in last year’s primaries, as well as being the home state of DNC chair Harrison.
The changes that the DNC will make are in no way clear—but whatever happens will almost surely reflect the will of the White House.
Update: After publication, the Prospect found that the DNC sent out an email to its members announcing that it will not meet its deadline for the primary review process. The email also stated that there would be two virtual meetings that will be live-streamed and a section for comments added to the DNC website, but links are not yet available.
