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.
As a fellow native, and a historian of the state, I’d say that in addition to the above factors, South Carolina’s political culture is peculiarly insular and arms-length toward the federal government. As some have pointed out, the state has never really had [except, briefly and unstably, during Reconstruction and in the 1970s] an actual two-party system. In antebellum times it went its own way [basically wherever Calhoun led, before his death], and always saw the federal government not as a common institution to be influenced through party politics, but as an alien institution to be fended off, usually by restrictive constitutional theories or, when they inevitably didn’t work, secession. The same habit of mind led to what was, along with Mississippi, the most thorough one-party regime in the post-Reconstruction South: “Democrat” and “white” were mutually reinforcing identities, and blacks were thoroughly disfranchised. After 1932 this monolith began to crack, partly because of the national party’s one-eighty on race, but also because of the popularity of the New Deal with rural upcountry whites and millhands, which pitted them against Key’s black-belt oligarchs. This split persisted through the 1970s. You rightly note that the early postwar SC Republican Party was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Milliken; but this also reinforced a negative image of Republicans as “country-clubbers”; thus by the 1970s Republicans were largely middle-class suburbanites, while rural and working-class whites remained in the Democratic column along with the influx of black voters. What changed this, I think, was the rise of the Religious Right. As right-wing evangelicals reacted to what they saw as rampant Democrat-sponsored secularization, they moved into the Republican party and finally took it over [though not without continuing tension with business elements]; they also restored the long-standing sense of white South Carolinians that party was an ethnocultural expression of southern white identity. But one consequence of white identity politics of this sort is a sense that the most important conflict in politics isn’t between two groups of white South Carolinians, but between whites and blacks, on the one hand, and between white South Carolinians and a hostile national establishment and their black allies, on the other. Thanks to the religious right, this sense of a common minority status isn’t simply racial, but broadly cultural as well. Obama isn’t simply to be distrusted because he’s black, but because he’s a bundle of everything white South Carolinians have always seen as alien and threatening. He is, metaphorically if not literally, the AntiChrist, and anything he says is to be dismissed out of hand.
In conclusion, I’d suggest that it’s possible that South Carolina is in the vanguard in this regard; something similar seems to be going on in the rural upland South from West Virginia across Tennessee and Arkansas to Oklahoma–even while the expanding urban South, with its more sophisticated economy, is heading in a different direction.