Well, it was just a matter of time, I guess. Perhaps upset at occasional bouts of Sympathy for the Devil being posted on his own page, Kos of DailyKos has more or less called for kicking the DLC out of the Democratic Party for being mean to other Democrats. Or at least I have no other way of understanding today’s characterization of myself and my colleagues as “the media’s handy tool for Democratic bashing. Enemies of unity of the left. Self-important fools who exist merely to advance the other side’s agenda.” Nothing much ambiguous about that, eh?The crowning “outrage,” apparently, is the recent suggestion by Al From and Marshall Wittman that maybe the leadership of MoveOn doesn’t speak for the Democratic Party as a whole, a suggestion Kos chooses to interpret as a call for the party to “purge millions of supporters from its ranks.” (Oh, yeah, Al also mocked bloggers; I somehow managed to get over it, down there in my basement).Man, talk about beams and motes. The vitriol that’s been poured on the DLC by Kos and several other netwarriors in the last couple of years is endless, personal, often obscene, and frankly, a little nuts. If we’re as irrelevant as he keeps insisting we are, why bother? Just ignore us, and we’ll go away, right? If our only value, as Kos suggests today, is to provide right-wing media with anti-Democratic quotes, then you have to wonder why so many elected officials bother to identify with us and come to our events (e.g., one today attended by Sen. Joe Biden)?Indeed, that question seems to bother Kos as well, since his very next post begins a process of “calling out” DLC-friendly Democratic pols and asking them to disassociate themselves from us. He even took the trouble to dig down in our web page–bypassing a few hundred thousand pages of policy work, which is what we do to pass the time while waiting for the next call from Fox News–and discover that Sen. Barack Obama is still listed in our data base! Scandal! (He’s in there because he recently joined the Senate New Democrat Coalition, all of whose members are in our database, which is about as controversial as a phone book). Hillary Clinton? Evan Bayh? Better get away from those people, or risk the consequences.This is more embarrassing than anything else, to tell you the truth. If Kos was screaming at us for alleged agreement with Bush or something, he’d at least have the beginnings of an argument. But being called “divisive” by a guy who’s way around the bend in hating this particular group of Democrats is just a bad joke.Well, I for one ain’t going anywhere. And having contested this particular guy’s right to show me the door, I will say no more about this or future Kos temper-tantrums. After all, I’ve got some of that deceptive Republican-bashing to do, and a few of those issues to work on that nobody cares to hear from me about. And despite this terrible anathema, I remain ready to break bread with anybody in the party who wants to talk, self-important fool that I am.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey
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TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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November 18: Coming Soon: Decisions on the 2024 Democratic Primary Calendar
One of my favorite wonky topics is the presidential nominating process, and as it happens, the way it’s shaping up for Democratic in 2024 is unusual, as I explained at New York:
Donald Trump’s 2024 announcement signaled that we are now officially in the run-up to the next presidential election. But there’s a big missing piece of basic election infrastructure, at least for Democrats: The order of states holding presidential primaries is very much up in the air.
Earlier this year, the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, which sets guidelines for the nomination process and administers sticks and carrots to get states to comply, announced it would authorize five “early states” allowed to have nominating contests prior to March 1, 2024. The four states that were allowed across this golden rope line from 2008 through 2020 — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina — would have to reapply for privileged status along with everyone else. As many as 20 state Democratic parties expressed interest in vying for these five spots. But because some of the changed calendar positions would require action by the state government, which typically control and finance primaries, the DNC delayed a final selection until after the midterms sorted out who ruled where.
Now Michigan Democrats, who flipped both legislative chambers and hung on to the governorship this month, are galvanizing the 2024 calendar discussion with a clear bid for an early spot, as NBC News reports:
“Michigan Democrats — led by Rep. Debbie Dingell — feel well positioned to join the coveted ranks of the early states, after they made huge gains in the Nov. 8 election. With Iowa facing possible eviction from the early states, many expect Democrats to elevate a Midwest state.
“Democrats now have full control of the Statehouse in Lansing, which would allow them to easily change state laws to support a new date for the 2024 primary.”
The DNC’s previously announced criteria for early states, as reported by CBS News, were diversity (racial, ethnic, geographic, and economic diversity as well as union representation), general-election competitiveness, and feasibility (whether states can move their contest into the early window, if they can run a “fair, transparent and inclusive nominating process,” and the logistical requirements and cost of campaigning in that state). It was an unstated but understood criterion as well that the five early states would represent different regions. So Michigan may be competing for an early-state slot with Minnesota, where Democrats also nailed down a trifecta in the midterms.
Iowa’s traditional first-in-the-nation caucus has looked doomed all along. The state is famously nondiverse and is now solidly Republican in general elections. The “feasibility” of an Iowa event was also called into question by the 2020 fiasco, in which no Iowa caucus results were announced until the next day.
New Hampshire will be harder to dislodge, despite its nondiverse population, because of a state law that authorizes the secretary of state to move the primary date around in order to maintain the position of first primary. But Nevada Democrats are making a sustained effort to leap ahead of New Hampshire by switching to a primary and aggressively advertising their superior diversity and obvious competitiveness. It’s unclear, however, whether Republican Joe Lombardo’s gubernatorial win in Nevada will disrupt efforts to authorize a new state primary.
That points to one of two variables complicating the early-state selection process: By and large, Republicans are happy with the existing order of states. There is no pressure within the GOP to dump Iowa or displace New Hampshire or do anything else unusual. So in states where Republican cooperation is necessary to move things around or make the requisite resources available, Democrats have to convince their partisan enemies to care about it as well. And if the proposed new primary date in any given state violates the RNC’s existing calendar rules, that state’s Republicans could be penalized and lose delegates to their own convention. The prospect of a serious battle for the GOP presidential nomination adds another series of calculations.
It’s a Rubik’s Cube, and that’s largely why the existing calendar for both parties has stayed in place for so long aside from the fact that, in Iowa and New Hampshire, both parties have long cooperated to defend their calendar privileges like crazed badgers.
The other big variable facing Democrats is the broader context: What sort of decisions will Democrats be facing in 2024? At this point, we don’t know for sure whether President Biden is running for a second term, and we don’t know if he’ll face major competition if he does. If Biden has to fight for renomination, how he performed in particular states in 2020 may have some influence on a loyal DNC deciding where he has to run in 2024. That might really doom Iowa, if it’s not already doomed, given Biden’s fourth-place finish there in 2020. And Biden finished fifth in New Hampshire. The DNC likely wouldn’t want to give calendar privileges to the home state of a potential rival.
But decisions have to be made, and the Rules and Bylaws Committee is set to make them when it meets from December 1 through 3 in Washington, D.C.