If the Democratic National Committee follows through with its planned 2028 presidential nominating calendar, South Carolina — and not New Hampshire — will again hold the party's first official primary. James Pindell, national political reporter at The Boston Globe, talked with NHPR’s Julia Barnett about where things stand with Democrats’ 2028 plans and what those plans might mean for the New Hampshire primary.
Fighting over the order of states in the presidential primary is not new, nor is national Democrats’ desire to have states other than New Hampshire vote first. So why are we back here again?
Because every four years, both national parties do need to set some rules on how their upcoming presidential nominating convention will work. And then baked into that also is [the question of] when would these primaries occur? Now, again, when the national parties do this — and this is a very important distinction for folks to understand — it's all really suggestions. States run their own elections. The national parties do not. So this is trying to give some order to a process, but states don't exactly have to play along with it — and in some cases they refuse to. And New Hampshire is not the only one.
Read more from James Pindell: The DNC snubbed the New Hampshire primary. So what happens now?
When the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee voted on the primary order last week, there were arguments that the first primary just had to be in the South. It's been argued that South Carolina's more racially diverse and largely Black Democratic electorate better reflects the party's core and its future. How much is this calendar about honoring diversity, and how much is it about trying to engineer a calendar that produces a certain kind of nominee ideologically?
Your question gets at the heart of all that has happened this year with the Democrats. We should say Republicans have already established their calendar. It's the traditional calendar of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and then Nevada. There's really been no debate about that. Democrats wanted to open up the whole can of worms and reexamine it.
But to your point, if you listen to the 49 members of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee, identity was the only issue in the decision making: It was identity politics. No one was asking the question, what exactly are we doing here? And what they're doing there is — traditionally, anyway — you're a party trying to nominate the best candidate you can to win a presidential race. That is kind of the point. But no one was really talking about that.
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Well, New Hampshire election officials say they are going to hold the first state primary. That's the law, and it will be followed. How do you see this playing out here for voters and for candidates?
I think it's going to be a mess. As you said, and the audience can repeat after me in the car: New Hampshire will always have the first presidential primary. I'll repeat it: New Hampshire will always have the first presidential primary. That's not really the interesting question. The more interesting question is: will New Hampshire have the first primary that actually matters?
And what I mean by that is: Will voters actually vote? Will there be candidates actually putting their name on the ballot? Will there still be campaigning here? Will we still see the amount of activity and ads, and will the results actually matter going forward? Those are all questions right now that neither I nor can anyone really answer when it comes to the 2028 New Hampshire primary.
To add to the confusion: The most likely scenario right now is that New Hampshire is going to have two primaries, two Democratic presidential primaries about a month apart. There'll be one — probably, we expect — that will be held by the state, paid for by the state on the same day as the Republican presidential primary. And then about a month later, three weeks later, the New Hampshire Democratic Party will pay and put on their own primary and candidates likely will be on that ballot.
Now, will that mean that the January primary, the earlier primary from the state — will that just be write-ins for the candidates, or will the candidates actually file to put their name on it? And if they do, will they face their own repercussions for not following the DNC rules? This is where it gets very messy. And this is about in a year and a half, and no one has a clue how this is going to play out.
Do you think the proposed DNC calendar will mean that some candidates or kinds of candidates will choose to just not compete in New Hampshire, or only certain kinds of candidates will?
Yes and yes. Unlike in the past, the DNC is putting in a lot of sticks and carrots to try to keep everyone in line with what they want to happen. So if New Hampshire is at any time seen by the DNC to be out of compliance, as in they're not going to follow the rules on when their date needs to be, then any candidate who does anything in New Hampshire — hire staff, show up, maybe, obviously running TV ads, campaigning generally, putting their name on the ballot — they will be seen also as out of compliance. And they're banned from debates. They're banned from certain data platforms. And their delegates — if they win any states, not just New Hampshire, but all early primary states — could be voided. So there's some pretty big penalties.
But some candidates — now that the Democrats are having six early primary states, which has never happened before, we've only always had four — if now they're having six early presidential primary states within basically a month or within six weeks, you're going to have candidates picking and choosing states anyway.
