On the menu today: President Biden aims to reshuffle the 2024 Democratic presidential-primary schedule, moving South Carolina to the front of the line, putting Georgia in the top four, and pushing the Iowa caucuses back significantly. But he’s learning that the primary schedule can’t be easily dictated from the Oval Office, with New Hampshire officials of both parties ready to resist, and Georgia Republicans less than enthused about changing their established schedule to help fit Biden’s preferences. The stage is being set for a knock-down, drag-out fight over which state gets to go when, with the losing states perhaps holding grudges against an incumbent president seeking another term.
Scheduling Snafu
Way back in 2011, I tried to put together a presidential-primary calendar that started with the smallest states and territories and worked its way up to the largest states, while trying to cluster them together geographically. I envisioned a primary that would run from roughly the first week of February to July, and then “Everyone gets August off; the convention is held at the end of the summer, and the general election lasts a bit longer than two months.”
The aim was to set up a system where lesser-known, less-well-funded candidates could attempt the old-school method of retail politicking and using success in early states to catapult to national viability. But those candidates would also need to demonstrate the ability to steadily scale up to larger and more diverse states. Every state would get a week in the spotlight, shared with no more than three other states, and the states are reasonably contiguous and similar in demographics, economies, resonating issues, cultures, etc. There wouldn’t be any more “Super Tuesdays” where ten or eleven states made their choices simultaneously, which were almost always won by the candidates with the most money.
New Hampshire would still be first, but it would share its primary day with Vermont and Maine. South Carolina would still be early in the process and get its own day, Iowa would be just two weeks later, and Nevada would be at the end of that month. (And yes, listing Hawaii early was my attempt to create an excuse to cover a primary held on tropical islands in the frigid month of February.)
The old system of having the Iowa caucus go first became untenable after 2020, when the state’s vote-counting software failed and no one knew who won on caucus night, in what many were sure was going to be the biggest disaster of the year. (Ha! How naïve we all were!)
It’s easy to forget in the aftermath of the rest of the 2020 drama, but the Iowa Democratic Party had no results reported by midnight on Caucus Day, and had reported only 62 percent of the results by late the next afternoon. As I wrote roughly 36 hours after the caucuses were held:
The Iowa Democratic Party was entrusted with running the first and arguably one of the most consequential contests in the presidential nominating process, and it completely fumbled, prat-falled, and metaphorically set itself on fire in the process. Not only can the state party not provide the full results, not only can they not say when they will be able provide full results, but they also cannot explain why they cannot provide full results.
After the election-management equivalent of steering the Hindenburg into the Titanic, there’s a strong argument that Iowa should lose its privilege of being the first caucus in the nation, although the Iowa Republican Party is quick to point out that it had nothing to do with the incompetence of its Democratic counterparts. The Republican presidential-primary schedule, at least for now, is likely to look the same as it has in previous cycles.
But the 2024 presidential-primary calendar is likely to change, at least on the Democratic side — and that will generate an enormous fight in the coming year.
Back on December 2, “The Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee formally made the decision to deny Iowa its 50-year privilege of kicking off the nomination process. Instead, South Carolina will lead the contest on February 3, followed by Nevada and New Hampshire on February 6, Georgia on February 13, and Michigan on February 27.”
Biden reportedly wants Georgia moved up the calendar, and he wrote a letter to the DNC earlier last month stating that, “We must ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process and throughout the entire early window. As I said in February 2020, you cannot be the Democratic nominee and win a general election unless you have overwhelming support from voters of color.”
Keep in mind, Joe Biden has run for the Democratic presidential nomination three times. The first time, he dropped out before the Iowa caucuses, the second time he finished fifth in Iowa and then dropped out, and the most recent time, in 2020, he finished a disappointing fourth. The following week in New Hampshire, he finished fifth and won no delegates. In other words, Biden may not have particularly fond memories of Iowa or New Hampshire Democratic primary voters, and he may not be so inclined to indulge their insistence that they must keep their traditional first-in-the-nation roles.
The result is a proposed Democratic presidential-primary schedule that looks a bit like the order is determined by the strength of college-football conferences. (Sorry, TCU fans.)
But there’s a catch: Presidential primaries are usually managed in cooperation with state election officials. And in Georgia and New Hampshire, Republican election officials aren’t all that interested in changing schedules set by state law to fit the preferences of President Biden:
But Democrats can’t unilaterally shuffle the calendar in Georgia. State law gives [Secretary of State Brad’ Raffensperger the power to realign the schedule, and Biden’s plan triggered a behind-the-scenes effort to win over the Republican.
While he hasn’t outright rejected the proposal, Raffensperger has laid out stringent requirements that may prove impossible for state Democrats to meet.
“We’ve been clear: This needs to be equitable so that no one loses a single delegate and needs to take place on the same day to save taxpayer funds,” Jordan Fuchs, Raffensperger’s top deputy, said last week.
Georgia officials don’t want to run two separate presidential primaries on different dates in 2024, and Governor Brian Kemp doesn’t support the idea of his state jumping to the front of the line. Kemp’s approval isn’t needed to enact the change, but Democrats believed a Kemp endorsement would nudge Raffensperger in their preferred direction.
Unsurprisingly, New Hampshire Democrats are spitting hot fire, pointing out that they ran their 2020 primary with no problems. New Hampshire state law requires them to be the first presidential primary in the country, requiring state officials to hold its primary on the first Tuesday in March or seven days prior to any comparable contest, whichever is sooner. This is one of the rare times you’ll see just about every New Hampshire Republican and Democratic elected official in lockstep agreement: The state should go first.
Last Thursday, Republican governor Chris Sununu sent a letter to Senate president Donna Soucy, pledging that the New Hampshire primary will be held before any other state’s, come hell or high water:
I have a message for (the DNC) and President Biden — you can try to come and take (the primary) — but that is Never. Going. To. Happen. It’s just not in our DNA to take orders from Washington,” he said in the letter to Soucy. “We will not be blackmailed. We will not be threatened, and we will not give up. You see — the New Hampshire Primary has stood the test of time, giving everyone a fair shot. No matter your name ID, the money in your campaign account or the elected office you held before running for President, for over 100 years, New Hampshire has given voice to lesser-known candidates and provided a pathway to the presidency for anyone dedicated enough to test their mettle with the voters of New Hampshire.
New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Ray Buckley wrote to the DNC late last week, warning that New Hampshire residents are likely to see the revised schedule as a slap in the face, and that could well cost the party in 2024 races.
“New Hampshire in recent years has become a true battleground state, and as purple of a state as you will find,” Buckley wrote. “Races up and down the ballot here are commonly decided by less than five points. As it was for President Clinton in 1996 and President Obama in 2012, it will be critical to the President’s re-election that Democrats run a robust year-round campaign in the Granite State. I, along with many New Hampshire Democrats, fear that this decision by the DNC will put our four electoral votes in jeopardy.”
Many years ago, an RNC official explained to me that the party committees have exactly one significant form of leverage over candidates, state parties, and other factions: They can deny states delegates at the nominating convention. Yes, the party committees can raise and distribute funds, but some candidates can raise a lot from small donors on their own, and independent-expenditure groups, SuperPACs, and other non-party groups now raise and spend almost as much as candidates and parties.
If a majority of the party committee decides that a particular state has misbehaved, it can deny the recognition to a portion of that state’s delegates. You may recall back in 2008 when the Democratic National Committee punished the delegations of Florida and Michigan because those states had moved up their primaries earlier than the February 5 date allowed by the party. The DNC declared that each delegate from those states would get half a vote, while all the other states and territories would get one full vote per delegate. (I presume it would have been too historically awkward to count each Florida and Michigan delegate as three-fifths of a person.)
Theoretically, if push comes to shove, the Democratic National Committee can punish New Hampshire by not recognizing all of its delegates. But in that scenario, Buckley’s warning sounds more plausible. In the last presidential cycle, Iowa Democrats screwed up their caucus, but New Hampshire Democrats ran their primary just fine. Biden’s letter emphasizing voters of color, and proposed plan to make New Hampshire share a date with Nevada, sounds like an assessment that New Hampshire is too white. (The state is just under 93 percent white; the largest minority group there is Asian-American at just over three percent.)
Or maybe New Hampshire is being punished for never being that enamored with Joe Biden’s presidential ambitions.
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President Biden, in an interview with 60 Minutes three months ago, describing what thoughts went through his head when he saw the images of classified documents on the floor of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate: “How that could possibly happen? How anyone could be that irresponsible? And, I thought, what data was in there that may compromise sources and methods? By that I mean names of people who helped or etcetera . . . and it just, uh . . . totally irresponsible.”
Classified documents from President Biden’s tenure as vice president, discovered at his think tank’s office, are under review by a U.S. attorney in Chicago.
Attorney General Merrick Garland charged the U.S. attorney with investigating the records, which were located at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C. two sources aware of the situation told CBS News.
Mmm, how could anyone be that irresponsible, right, Mr. President?