Top New Hampshire Democrats made their case Wednesday for why the Democratic National Committee should again make the state Presidential primary a lead-off contest in the party's presidential nominating calendar.
State law requires New Hampshire to hold its presidential primary election at least a week before any “similar election” in another state. But in 2024, with the backing of President Joe Biden, the DNC placed South Carolina atop its nominating calendar. Top national Democrats, from Biden down, argued the state’s largely Black Democratic electorate better reflected the party and its future.
New Hampshire’s demographics – racial diversity is growing but the state remains almost 90% white – came up several times as New Hampshire made its pitch to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee.
The committee is meeting in Washington to plan out the DNC’s 2028 presidential nominating calendar.
“Sometimes being a minority in a majority state your voice is muffled, and what we try to do is lift all voices in the state,” said Joanne Dowdell, a New Hampshire DNC member, who is Black.
But state Democrats mostly focused on other aspects of New Hampshire’s electorate, including that undeclared voters outnumber members of either political party, as proof that New Hampshire is a state suited to putting candidates of all stripes though their paces.
“New Hampshire should go first, not because we created and hosted the first direct primary a hundred years ago; we should go first because we are the best state to help our party win two years from now,” Sen. Maggie Hassan told the committee.
Read previous NHPR coverage of the New Hampshire Primary.
“New Hampshire has never wanted to be the decider; what we consider ourselves is a vetting operation,” added New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley.
The Democrats made other, mostly familiar arguments: that New Hampshire’s small size and small media market give candidates without much money or name ID a chance to compete; that votes get counted quickly and accurately on election night here; and that the state’s civic infrastructure – from Town Meeting to its volunteer legislature – mean there is an expectation that would-be presidents truly engage with voters who are conditioned to be frank about the issues affecting their lives.
Hassan said voters here made the opioid crisis a campaign issue in 2016 in ways other states couldn’t.
“Fentanyl ravaged New Hampshire in all corners of the state, and voters began to talk to candidates about it, and I literally had candidates say to me, ‘I didn’t know about the Fentanyl thing,” Hassan said. “These conversations make a real difference.”
How much of a difference New Hampshire’s pitch to the Rules and Bylaws Committee may make remains to be seen.
The committee is expected to decide this summer which four states – one eastern, one midwestern, one southern and one western state – will hold the Democratic party’s first nominating contests in 2028.
As New Hampshire Democrats started to wrap up their presentation, one Rules and Bylaws committee member Frank Leone posed an expected question:
“If the committee decides as it did four years ago that New Hampshire should be an early state but not the first state, what will you do?” he asked.
After a pause, Hassan gave an equally expected answer:
“We will do everything we can to comply with the decision, but the Secretary of State is required by state law to hold an election, and that state law is going to stay on the books,” Hassan said.
