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.
Color me unsurprised by the midterm results, given the extensive and treacherous crosscurrents in politics today.
Without a doubt, the unaddressed gerrymandering in North Carolina and Wisconsin not only affected the outrageous partisan skew in their state legislatures but it also suppressed turnout, contributing to the narrow Republican Senate victories. Gerrymandering has a little appreciated suppressive effect on statewide races. When your vote has no chance of affecting the outcome in a congressional district or local judicial and legislative races, you’re less likely to think voting is worth the bother and this drags on statewide contests where there is less truth to that despair. That’s gotta be worth at least the 1.5% margins in these two Senate races. Wherever this gerrymandering ended in 2022, like Michigan, Democrats had clear breakthroughs. I suspect if Texas weren’t so badly gerrymandered, it would already be quite clearly competitive. The gross gerrymander in Florida also exaggerated the Republican sweep there.
Even more important factors in the 2022 results, however, have been overlooked. A week later and the talking heads still miss the most important demographic stories of the pandemic crisis: 1) Covid mortality and 2) the great pandemic migration. A year ago, I realized that the survival rates of the vaccinated combined with the partisan differences in vaccination rates would lead to approximately a net loss of fifty thousand Republican voters for every one hundred thousand Covid deaths. Since the vaccines appeared, at least a million people have died from Covid – and that skew in partisan death rates preceded the vaccines when red counties started prematurely lifting mask mandates and closures.
Frankly, 1.5 million dead is just the death rate measured in patients one month after contracting Covid. The earlier Covid variants killed up to 20% more between month two and six but these are often passed off as heart failure, diabetes and stroke – despite the known fact Covid causes and aggravates all of these conditions, which you can see in the spiking “excess death” rates, the vast bulk of which constitute cardiovascular and cancer deaths. These aren’t due to putting off checkups. The evidence suggests that the supposedly “non-Covid” excess death rates are in fact caused directly by Covid because A) Covid drives these types of problems (through TLR4 signaling, if you must know) and B) the excess deaths perfectly track Covid case counts, rising and falling with them.
Most of these short Covid deaths would be older men who tend to vote Republican anyway, even if vaccination rates weren’t skewed by partisanship. (I’ll leave off a psychological explanation as to why crypto-segregationists would flip out so self-destructively at the thought of being caught on the wrong side of cordons and quarantines they had built up for social “undesirables” over the centuries. “We’re not like *those* people,” seems to be the underlying excuse for dismissing Covid’s seriousness, as if wearing a mask was a confession to the world that they doubted the state of their own grace.)
Though devastating, this analysis doesn’t even take into account how long Covid affected the electorate. Though vaccines are less protective against long Covid than short Covid death, there are still ten to thirty million long Covid cases now – some quite serious and involving dementia, stroke and organ failure, none of which is conducive to enthusiasm in life, for voting or anything else. Though long Covid falls more on women, that partisan skew in vaccination still creates a heavy social burden that the corporate press refuses to acknowledge.
Neither the pandemic movements or the deaths and disability have been caught in the census statistics and therefore none of this data is in any polling or likely voter models. Inflationary currents may have shifted some wavering souls against the Democrats, but the lack of red county investments in education and health care took their toll. The 2022 results weren’t due just to young voters turning out who couldn’t be easily polled, but it was also older voters failing to show up because after they rejected reality, reality rejected them.
That problem won’t go away with Trump. Donald Trump isn’t the fever; he’s the thermometer. Segregationists need an ice bath before their brain (Fox News?) explodes from the self-mutilating cognitive dissonance.
In addition to Covid rejecting its deniers, American civilization is also about to get rejected by global warming, financial looting, rent-seeking, uncompetitive cartel control of markets, sickcare and an ever-giving cornucopia of other delusions flowing out of our “big lies.” We’ll need more than grievance conspiracy theories to rescue us from the very real damage.
But if grievance is all you care about, Donald Trump will make a perfect House Speaker. All the incoming “Freedom” caucus wants to do is sabotage Biden and Trump is the best qualified for the job – attacking, offending, making noise and accomplishing nothing. Plus, the job will be a poisoned chalice, suiting most Republicans behind the scenes just fine.