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.
The problem here is that the whole idea of a centrist bloc just itching to vote for moderates in Congressional elections is not really supported by empirical evidence. It is based upon the faulty assumption that most (or even many) average voters make voting decisions based on rational decisions about issues, and then judiciously choosing the side that comes closest to their considered opinion. This is clearly not true. Nearly a century of political science research makes it very clear that most Americans rarely think about politics at all, and those who do tend to be partisans. The people who swing tend to do so because of grievances against one side or the other, not because of affection for one or the other. How difficult is this to understand? Why would the House change hands so often otherwise? That the Democrats held the House for 50 years reflects not centrism but the institutional advantage of the Democratic Party in the South for many years. Now that advantage belongs to the Republicans. The worst drubbing in Democratic history in recent decades was in 1994, during the administration of centrist Democrat Bill Clinton. In every election cycle since then, centrists in both parties have found rough sailing. This in and of itself refutes Teixeira’s central argument, in my opinion. At the Presidential level, there is some evidence that a centrist Democrat will do better than a progressive, but the dataset is quite small. And, importantly, the Republican media machine will paint that moderate as the second coming of Lenin who is also a depraved pervert anyway. I remember many calling both Clinton and Obama Marxists, anyway, even after they trimmed their sails on issue positions.
The Teixeiras of the world have an answer for 1994. It’s to bring up the tax increase, failed health care bill, gun control, and pretend that the budget cuts in the 1993 budget, NAFTA, and crime bill never happened.
From reading these pro-centrist pieces over the last year and a half, it has been painfully clear to me that they are trying to sell nonsense wherein only victorious moderates count. Sleight of hand, smoke and mirrors.
Starts off well, but…
“Why on earth do party leaders like Biden and Trump think they are immune somehow from the penalties of economic failure? The answer lies in the intense polarization between the parties in an evenly divided political era. Surveying the parties’ decisions in one election cycle after another, the natural conclusion is that they are stuck at 50-50 because they choose to be. They have not operated as institutions geared to construct broad coalitions and win large general-election victories. Instead, both have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters—who would never vote for the other party—over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way.”
Um, no. Despite the centrist copes to the contrary, the story of polarization is not neither party being willing to compromise but rather each sides’ compromisers getting beat. But moderates can’t admit this, can they? To accept that their dilemma is the soft partisans that they have historically depended on for survival are vanishing would be very painful to them. Because how do they get out of that? You got me. And based on their refusal to face this fact, them too.