Don’t look now, but it’s already time for the DNC and the states to figure out the 2028 Democratic presidential primary calendar, so I wrote an overview at New York:
The first 2028 presidential primaries are just two years away. And for the first time since 2016, both parties are expected to have serious competition for their nominations. While Vice-President J.D. Vance is likely to enter the cycle as a formidable front-runner for the GOP nod, recent history suggests there will be lots of other candidates. After all, Donald Trump drew 12 challengers in 2024. On the Democratic side, there is no one like Vance (or Hillary Clinton going into 2016 or Joe Biden going into 2020) who is likely to become the solid front-runner from the get-go, though Californians Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris lead all of the way too early polls.
But 2028 horse-race speculation really starts with the track itself, as the calendar for state contests still isn’t set. What some observers call the presidential-nominating “system” isn’t something the national parties control. In the case of primaries utilizing state-financed election machinery, state laws govern the timing and procedures. Caucuses (still abundant on the Republican side and rarer among Democrats) are usually run by state parties. National parties can vitally influence the calendar via carrots (bonus delegates at the national convention) or sticks (loss of delegates) and try to create “windows” for different kinds of states to hold their nominating contests to space things out and make the initial contests competitive and representative. But it’s sometimes hit or miss.
Until quite recently, the two parties tended to move in sync on such calendar and map decisions. But Democrats have exhibited a lot more interest in ensuring that the “early states” — the ones that kick off the nominating process and often determine the outcome — are representative of the party and the country as a whole and give candidates something like a level playing field. Prior to 2008, both parties agreed to do away with the traditional duopoly, in which the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary came first, by allowing early contests representing other regions (Nevada and South Carolina). And both parties tolerated the consolidation of other states seeking influence into a somewhat later “Super Tuesday” cluster of contests. But in 2024 Democrats tossed Iowa out of the early-state window altogether and placed South Carolina first (widely interpreted as Joe Biden’s thank-you to the Palmetto State for its crucial role in saving his campaign in 2020 after poor performances in other early states), with Nevada and New Hampshire voting the same day soon thereafter. Republicans stuck with the same old calendar with Trump more or less nailing down the nomination after Iowa and New Hampshire.
For 2028, Republicans will likely stand pat while Democrats reshuffle the deck (the 2024 calendar was explicitly a one-time-only proposition). The Democratic National Committee has set a January 16 deadline for states to apply for early-state status. And as the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher explains, there is uncertainty about the identity of the early states and particularly their order:
“The debate has only just begun. But early whisper campaigns about the weaknesses of the various options already offer a revealing window into some of the party’s racial, regional and rural-urban divides, according to interviews with more than a dozen state party chairs, D.N.C. members and others involved in the selection process.
“Nevada is too far to travel. New Hampshire is too entitled and too white. South Carolina is too Republican. Iowa is also too white — and its time has passed.
“Why not a top battleground? Michigan entered the early window in 2024, but critics see it as too likely to bring attention to the party’s fractures over Israel. North Carolina or Georgia would need Republicans to change their election laws.”
Nevada and New Hampshire have been most aggressive about demanding a spot at the beginning of the calendar, and both will likely remain in the early-state window, representing their regions. The DNC could push South Carolina aside in favor of regional rivals Georgia or North Carolina. Michigan is close to a lock for an early midwestern primary, but its size, cost, and sizable Muslim population (which will press candidates on their attitude towards Israel’s recent conduct) would probably make it a dubious choice to go first. Recently excluded Iowa (already suspect because it’s very white and trending Republican, then bounced decisively after its caucus reporting system melted down in 2020) could stage a “beauty contest” that will attract candidates and media even if it doesn’t award delegates.
Even as the early-state drama unwinds, the rest of the Democratic nomination calendar is morphing as well. As many as 14 states are currently scheduled to hold contests on Super Tuesday, March 7. And a 15th state, New York, may soon join the parade. Before it’s all nailed down (likely just after the 2026 midterms), decisions on the calendar will begin to influence candidate strategies and vice versa. Some western candidates (e.g., Gavin Newsom or Ruben Gallego) could be heavily invested in Nevada, while Black proto-candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Wes Moore might pursue a southern primary. Progressive favorites like AOC or Ro Khanna may have their own favorite launching pads, while self-identified centrists like Josh Shapiro or Pete Buttigieg might have others. Having a home state in the early going is at best a mixed blessing: Losing your home-state primary is a candidate-killer, and winning it doesn’t prove a lot. And it’s also worth remembering that self-financed candidates like J.B. Pritzker may need less of a runway to stage a nationally viable campaign.
So sketching out the tracks for all those 2028 horses, particularly among Democrats, is a bit of a game of three-dimensional chess. We won’t know how well they’ll run here or there until it’s all over.
I agree completely with Neuhauser and Hapin. I would add two points. 1)Since many social and environmental needs are being neglected and even under the so-called “full employment” of the Clinton years, there weren’t enough jobs available, we need greatly increased federal funding for public-service jobs. 2) We need to reverse Clinton’s negation of federal responsibility for basic economic welfare.
The Third-Way’s new report is a far slicker coverage of their thesis than reviewed last summer. But it basically contains the fatal flaws pointed out by John Halpin in Truth-Telling, Populism and Inspirational Politics.
I think Third Way overstates and mischaracterizes what they call the neo-populist position when they make the case for its desrire to “recapture a bygone era” with outmoded solutions. However, that is to be expected since in order to the a “third” way, there must be two other, opposing camps to place yourself in opposition to. (Sort of a tiresome, academic literalness to it all, but not as badly done as the DLC which often resorts to distorted right-wing attacks on the left in order to create a “center” for itself.)
But the fundamental hook they hang their hat on for “de-bunking” the concerns of the “neopopulists” is the graph of the distribution of income by age class. While it does illuminate the age-diversity of income distribution hidden behind a single number of “All Households”, they assert that this very existence proves their point.
But that same distribution would have been true in the past as well.
The question is not just: Is there a spread in 2005? but it is rather: Is that curve significantly different than it was in the past? The curve has always been there, and prime-age earners have presumably always been better off than the average. Duh.
So, does this really tell us anything about their claim that “the middle class is just doing just fine, thanks!”? No.
The other argument they make is that, “Neopopulism feeds off of broad economic dissatisfaction and pessimism, but public opinion polls consistently show Americans to be optimistic about their personal finances.” Then they just ignore the “broad economic dissatisfaction and pessimism” because of the “personal optimism”. Futhermore, they ignore studies showing a much greater concern for whether people think their kids will be better off or not — and from personal anecdotes I can tell that concern has reached surprisingly high levels of the middle class.
I think they miss an important issue here — this is the same phenomenon with Congress (they’re terrible, but mine is ok) and schools (the system is bad, but mine is ok). According to Third Way’s methodology, Congress is doing great! Schools are doing great! The middle class is doing great! I’ve got a life jacket, so I don’t know what the dissatisfaction is with the Titanic — cruises are fun!
I don’t buy it and I think they do a disservice to ignore the broad dissatisfaction. There are important things underlying it.
What this Third Way sanguinity leads to is a set of policies that feel extremely incremental as it doesn’t recognize that we are in the midst of a great upheaval as important as the turn of the last century. There are three great global issues impacting everyone in America:
– globalized terrrorism
– global warming
– globalization’s commoditization of work
To be concerned about these issues as a concern for the future well-being of their children and grandchildren is not necessarily to be a Chicken Little. Nor does it require you to assume that the entire system must be chucked for some wild-eyed notion. Nor does it mean that “neopopulists” have no hope or optimism about the future — just that they think there is more to work on and bolder plans to lay.
When I looked at Third Ways solutions, they are basically:
More education
Retrain obsoleted workers
Tweak savings incentives
Give newborns a savings account
Tweak savings incentives some more
Be nicer to families with kids
Be nicer to families caring for their parents
Do more R&D
Have a more efficient healthcare industry
(One of the troubling aspect of the “nicer to family” solutions is that they are purely about more availability of services and tax (money), one the big issues are around time — it can take so much time to care for an older parent that you can’t work as much and so are earning less when your costs go up.)
All of these assume that people can afford to buy all the insurance and education and retraining and other things Third Way thinks they should and furthermore that they already pay enough in taxes to get back some meaningful amount in tax breaks to pay for them.
Which goes back to the core assumption of the Third Way: people make enough money, we just need to incentivize them to spend it more wisely.
But the reason 40M Americans don’t have healthcare isn’t because they they feel they aren’t getting a big enough tax break to justify buying healthcare insurance! The reason is they don’t have a spare $15,000/year to buy it on the open market themselves, no matter what tax incentives you give.
(I would note that this approach is the same thinking behind Bush’s health insurance “reform” pitched at the 2007 State of the Union.)
The reason this “agenda” sounds so paltry is that … it is!. And the reason for it goes back to the beginning — they think the status quo is basically fine, so clearly what is needed is an era of tweaking a few things to make them a little better.
Happy Days are already here!