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.
For Democrats there is no path for a Senate victory in 2022 either if things continue as they have.
Biden must go full economic populist from day one:
1. Wages. Bring up a vote on raising the minimum wage, but also establish a new framework for minimum wages in the United States. We need a clear differentiation between regions and inside regions between urban, suburban and rural areas. Bring up the minimum wage for professionals, administrators and executives too.
2. Place based development. Good jobs are concentrating in only a few neighborhoods in a few cities. The federal government must require corporations, starting with federal contractors, to spread jobs so that the working class, both white and non-white, has access to good quality jobs.
3. Follow up on executive action on prescription drugs.
4. Marihuana decriminalization, both legislative and executive-regulatory.
5. Instruct the Department of Justice to continue and expand anti-trust actions in the information technology sector.
6. Instruct the Department of Justice to begin anti-trust actions in the agriculture sector. Expand subsidies to agriculture as a consequence of trade wars, but require more production for domestic consumption.
Biden must also move to the right or center right on several issues:
1. Funding the Police. Get the Party behind a unified legislative and fiscal position that is easy to explain. Make sure this position can be implemented quickly everywhere from the biggest and most diverse cities to the smallest villages that Democrats control. Convince the most radical Democrats that this is the best position to have. Democrats can’t continue with the current messaging cacophony.
2. China. Keep Trump’s framework. Actually, pledge to deepen the decoupling.
3. Support national voter id and other changes to address even the slightest possibility of voter fraud.
4. Authoritarianism in Latin America. As foreign policy is within the President’s primary jurisdiction, develop a policy on how to deal with Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba, as well as Brazil, that puts the primary focus on human rights and democracy. Go beyond platitudes and appoint someone with an exclusive focus on this. Reject incrementalism in sanctions (either putting them in place or lifting them) though, it doesn’t work.
5. Immigration. Allow moderate immigrant groups to shape the Party’s position. This will inevitably lead to focus on comprehensive reform and a rejection of open borders. The Party should repudiate the concept of sanctuaries. The Party wouldn’t tolerate sanctuaries for racism, so why support sanctuaries where the law is not applied evenly. Defunding sanctuary cities should be contingent on passing comprehensive reform.
6. Israel, Iran, Palestine, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and the Middle East and East Mediterranean. Keep Trump’s policy objectives. Biden’s original idea of partioning Irak shows he understands that final solutions are important. On Iran the point is basically about making it a better regional actor. No simple return to the previous nuclear framework. On the Middle East Peace Process the pressure needs to be kept up on Palestinians and repudiation of boycott movements against Israel. Palestinians should be both pressured and allowed to hold elections so that they can appoint a legitimate peace negotiator with Israel, which is what has been missing for more than a decade. Lebanon may also be about to flip. Saudi Arabia’s modernization needs to be supported, so no place for sanctions there. The Yemeni peace process is important but secondary to other objectives. The Syrian, Libyan and Iraq stabilization are more important and require real geopolitical vision. The US needs to intervene more on the Cyprus and Greek Aegean conflicts, so that Turkey can be at least partially appeased. The Armenians and Kurds problems need to receive more US attention with the US pressuring both to compromise in relation to their territorial ambitions.
7. Military spending, more and better.
8. Global warming. Push other countries to make more efforts. Continue supporting natural gas at home and its use abroad. Get other countries to stop using coal. Focus at home and abroad on electric cars. Develop a framework for a carbon tax at the border on imported goods just like the European Union is considering.
9. Crack down on higher education cost inflation.
The reason so many Democrats are mad as hell is because not only did the party underperform, but the polls we rely on for deciding things in primaries would also probably be wrong.
Late deciders once again broke for Trump though.
In the most fundamental way this election was an “its the economy, stupid” vote.
Losing with the white moderates in Maine. Losing with the white populists in Montana. Where are the Senate pickups we were promised?
Arizona already went through decades of Trumpism, just like California before it. Doesn’t mean the model is replicable in states with less Hispanic immigration or with immigration from Hispanics from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, etc.
Trump has done well even with Libertarians running pretty good in many states. Meanwhile the Green vote collapsed.
Democrats ran on covid and demeanor. Republicans ran against political correctness and on the economy.
The people who came out for Trump voted because they liked him.
The Democrats who came out again for Biden (many after not voting in 2016) voted for a diversity of reasons. The few Republicans who voted for Biden did it to stop Trump.
The Republican party is the minority party yet is more structurally strong now than in 2016. They have a clear path forward with America First and opposing all the myriad manifestations of toxic wokeness. Their path is clear as in Europe.
Gays will continue voting for Trump. Trump was bad on transgender rights but neutral on gay rights. Transgender rights are stuck because they are choosing the wrong framework to push for an incoherent agenda. More equal protection under the law and less culture wars on pronouns. The bathroom thing is unenforceable and easy to mock but transgender leadership is choosing moralizing.
The left is not anywhere near ascendant in the US.
30% of Puerto Rican in Florida voted for Trump, for example.
Florida voted to raise the minimum wage and to enfranchise ex convicts. It also reelected its Republican Governor, elected a Republican Senator and twice voted for Trump. Floridians who are moderate must have buyers’ remorse with their experience with Gillum. But the state is not reactionary or conservative.
If I was in Florida looking at how California closed Disneyland and Universal Studios taking away the livelihoods of all those Hispanic service workers and still having an epidemic and then considered that Democrats would also close Disney World and Universal Studios Orlando if voters let them I would have to balance competing ethical interests. When it comes to covid old people are voting out of self interest. It doesn’t mean their ethics are superior, as we see in all the other ways they vote.
2018 was overshadowed in 2020 by moralizing about masks and ambiguity over cultural issues.
Is it progress that in order to have the Squad speaking about things that will never become legislation we have to lose seats that are key to getting anything at all done? Loses in congressional and state legislative seats, including in New York, will soon tell us.
If Biden wins and loses the Senate it will be a good reminder that the Electoral College is not the only constitutional problem. Democrats had no ideas beyond filibuster reform (which would be moot) and ludicrous ideas about DC and PR as states.
Encouraging mail vote turned out to be an incredibly flawed strategy when it comes to perception. Even early voting in places like New York that don’t do an early count was a bit stupid.
Neither the Democratic party nor the left have paths forward.
1. The white suburban route requires moving a lot more to the cultural center and that wouldn’t pay dividends for a while.
2. A white working class route would be even more uphill as it would pit the suburban fiscal moderates against the working class populists.
3. The Bernie strategy of turning out disenchanted progressives has been twice disproven.
4. The identity politics BLM agenda doesn’t even have the support of many Black elected officials and is stuck even in the Bluest of cities, yet is incredibly divisive at the national level and in most key battlegrounds.
Black Democratic partisans made Biden the nominee. Dettached Black voters are another thing.
I suspect that the strategies of neither Biden nor Bernie would have worked.
The presumption that covid would only work against Trump I think was misguided. Covid also worked in his favor as people want to get back to work. The media fear mongering over covid may have backfired.
The Black, Hispanic and White working class male vote (including the gay vote) may have tipped further enough towards Trump to make the Republican party even more hegemonic in most of the states of USA.
Democrats’ historic mishandling of deindustrialization and China, silence over authoritarianism in Latin America and the ambiguity over defunding police all contribute to pushing at the margins just enough against Democrats.