Here’s a teaser from William A. Galston’s response: “I am sympathetic to Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach’s argument that the term “moderation” conceals more than it reveals and threatens to mislead party reformers who seek to strengthen the Democratic Party as a bulwark against autocracy. I fear, however, that much of their argument is open to the same criticism.The authors lead off by intimating that Kamala Harris might have won with a less moderate campaign. Maybe so, but they offer no evidence. In reality, she lost for several reasons: because she was the successor to an unpopular president from whom she did nothing to separate herself; because the issue of reproductive rights, on which she bet heavily, receded in importance compared to the 2022 midterm elections; because the Biden administration was seen (rightly, in my view) as having botched the two issues—inflation and immigration—whose salience rose the most relative to 2020; because her campaign did not even try to counter Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them” attack ad that served as effective synecdoche for a host of unpopular progressive stances on cultural issues; because Trump was seen as a stronger leader more likely to bring needed change and better equipped to handle a crisis; and finally, because messaging about democracy being “at risk” did not work the way her campaign expected. Some 73 percent of voters regarded democracy as “threatened,” but Trump beat Harris by 50 to 48 in this group. He did even better among the 4 in 10 voters who saw democracy as “very threatened,” carrying them by 52 to 47.
Could Harris have overcome the multiple handicaps with which she began? The most obvious road not taken was a bold step to distinguish herself from the president she served. Those with long memories will recall that after Vice President Hubert Humphrey broke with President Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam, he nearly erased the fifteen-point edge that Richard Nixon enjoyed in late September of 1968 and almost caught him at the finish line. Would a similar break—on immigration, say—have helped Harris? We will never know…”
Now that the Supreme Court has relegated Donald Trump’s tariffs to the history books, their obituaries need to make clear how utterly out of sync with any previous tariffs they actually were. Nothing in their raisons d’être or implementation bore any resemblance to any previous American tariffs.
(On Saturday, Trump levied 15 percent tariffs on goods from all nations under a different law, but that law stipulates that the tariffs are only good for 150 days unless Congress votes to extend them—a vote that would be tantamount to electoral suicide for many Republicans up for re-election in November.)
To begin, the tariffs of the 19th century, for which Trump has been volubly nostalgic, were enacted to protect America’s fledgling new industries, centered in Northern states, from competition from the more developed industries of Britain and Europe. By contrast, as early as the 1820s, leaders of the almost entirely agricultural American South, John C. Calhoun most particularly, railed against tariffs that had been enacted to give breathing space and growing room to these nascent industries (the “tariff of abominations,” Calhoun termed it). The Southern slave plantation owners whom Calhoun represented loathed having to pay more for the European-made luxury goods they enjoyed; the Southern industrialists—well, there were no Southern industrialists. But the owners of the New England clothing and iron mills, and later in the century the owners of the massive steel mills, welcomed tariffs that enabled them to grow their domestic markets free (or at least freer) from British competitors.
Trump’s innovation in tariff-ology is that the domestic industries he’s most insistent on protecting aren’t fledgling or new; they’re dying or dead. Far from being threatened by foreign competition, they’re industries that rival nations either are scaling back or have abandoned altogether. So Trump attempts to resurrect coal, while blocking the further development of wind and solar power. He promotes fossil-fueled cars and cripples the domestic sale and construction of EVs, enabling our chief economic competitor, China, to take a giant step toward cornering the burgeoning global market in EVs, and then cars in general. When it comes to our most cutting-edge industry, AI computer chips, Trump has allowed their manufacturer, Nvidia, to sell them to China so long as his government gets a take—25 percent of the proceeds—from every sale.
So Trump’s policy protects industries which our competitors are rapidly transferring away from, even as we abandon the essential industries of the future that our competitors are working furiously to develop. This isn’t to say that selective tariffs aren’t still sound policy in major American industries that remain central to the nation’s prosperity, autos and steel in particular. But both those industries (and the auto- and steelworkers they employ) would be in a lot better long-term shape if Trump allowed them to position themselves for future markets by going electric. Instead, his myopic view of transactional policy leads him to consider it a win when he wrangles a quarter share of Nvidia’s proceeds from bolstering Chinese power. In for a penny, out for a pound: That’s the economic logic behind Trump’s trade policies.
From “Apprenticeships can help save the Democratic Party” by John Kenneth White, professor emeritus at the Catholic University of America and author of “Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism” at The Hill via aol..com:
Democrats are well-positioned to win control of one or both houses of Congress in this year’s midterm elections. The Republicans are in such a weakened position that a Fox News poll finds them with just a 10-point lead among white working-class voters — the party’s smallest such advantage since 2006.
Ever since President Trump entered politics a decade ago, he has won strong majorities from white working-class voters. In “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, one person expressed his support for Trump this way: “To me, there are only two groups of people, the globalists and the nationalists, and unfortunately the Democrats have wound up appearing to be the friends of the globalists.”
In 2024, Trump beat Kamala Harris among this group by a whopping 34 points. Working class voters were once a mainstay of the Democratic party. In 1940, 57 percent of skilled and 68 percent of semiskilled and unskilled laborers voted to keep Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House for a third term.
But the Republican Party’s weakened position with working-class voters should hardly give comfort to the Democrats. Rather than plan to bank votes based on their disillusionment with Trump, Democrats need to deliver results that improve their lot.
Shapiro was following the lead of Republican governors in Utah and Maryland, who had previously abolished the college requirement for employment in their state’s agencies. Issuing his executive order, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) said, “Instead of focusing on demonstrated competence, the focus too often has been on a piece of paper.”
The inspiring victory won in the streets of Minneapolis gives Democrats an opening for a realignment of American politics, but only if we build a bridge to working-class voters conflicted on immigration, based on the populist economic issue driving their anger right now: the abuse of corporate power. We must show people that the same government that is terrorizing people in cities like Minneapolis is also allowing big business to abuse its power to make life tougher for all working families.
The combination of wages’ not rising fast enough plus the inflation of recent years has hit working families very hard. These voters have not liked the excesses of ICE, so we have an opening with them on immigration, but it will never be their main issue. Economic struggles will always be the first order of business for most working-class voters.
Right now, the political dynamic favors the Democrats. Republicans are no longer winning the immigration debate, and the economy is hurting them because they are the party in power.
The problem is that Trump is moving fast to develop and promote his own populist-sounding affordability agenda, including proposals to cap credit-card interest rates at 10 percent; prohibit large corporate investors from buying up single-family homes; and slash the cost of prescription drugs.
“At 39, he is the Senate’s youngest member. Ossoff gave what national pundits have already dubbed the “Epstein class” speech before an Atlanta audience on Feb. 7.
“We were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans,” Ossoff told that crowd. “But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich. It is the wealthiest cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class ruling our country. They are the elites they pretend to hate.
“(Trump) was supposed to drain the swamp,” he added. “Instead, this is the most corrupt administration of all time and everybody knows it.”
It was a simple yet brilliant negative branding, tying the scandal of the disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to the economy that enriches Trump and Republican economic elites.
Democratic strategist Matt McDermott, with nearly 100,000 followers on X, wrote of the speech: “Jon Ossoff renames the MAGA elites running the country: the Epstein class,” according to Newsweek.
Newsweek reported that an account on X named “Call to Activism,” which aims to expose MAGA corruption, defend democracy and that has 1.1 million followers, said: “Jon Ossoff is on fire at his rally.”
Progressive political YouTuber Jack Cocchiarella wrote: “Every Democrat needs to watch this video and sound more like Jon Ossoff.”
I listened to all of it on YouTube and emerged enormously impressed with how Ossoff’s message might appeal to elusive white, working-class voters as well as the different ideological and identity groups within the Democratic base.
Ossoff also ripped Trump for his recent post that portrayed Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
“You’re seeing what I’m seeing, right?” Ossoff asked his audience. “The president posting about the Obamas like a Klansman at 1 a.m.”
Yes, I thought, that is the perfect analogy.
He also told the audience: “You see our government transformed into a tool of one man’s personal vengeance, power and enrichment.”
Ossoff pounded Republican actions on health insurance costs: “While prices are going up and jobs are getting harder to find, they decided to let health insurance premiums double for more than 20 million Americans.”
In a “Project Battleground” essay on Substack, political strategist Chase Lindsey wrote this about the speech: “I didn’t watch Jon Ossoff in Atlanta for inspiration. I watched him the way an organizer watches anything: for what actually moves people.”
He continued, “Democrats love persuasion theater. We love the fantasy that if we just explain ourselves better (cleaner charts, nicer tone, sharper policy) we’ll win. But that’s not the country we’re organizing in. People aren’t confused. They’re bruised. They’re watching prices climb, jobs wobble, hospitals cut back, and politics get used like a personal weapon. They’re waiting to see if anyone will talk about it without flinching. Ossoff did.”
Finland notes that U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan said: “First and foremost, Democrats need to get much more ruthless about winning,” which, she added, is not necessarily compatible with the “weird consensus-based leadership” Democratic leaders lean toward.
Fanlund adds, “Something to think about next time you read about the Democratic squabbles between young and old, identity groups versus the general population, the center left and the far left.
Before you can do anything, help anyone, you have to, you know, actually win elections. Sounding more like Ossoff might help.”
Read the whole article here. You can support Ossoff’s re-election campaign here.
The following article by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:
Gavin Newsom has had quite a year. While other Democratic politicians have struggled to adapt their pitches to the chaos of the second Trump term, Newsom has responded with a blizzard of activity that has dramatically raised his national profile. He has also benefited from copious, if not fawning, media coverage including a splashy recent profile in Vogue magazine. At first mired in single digits with a scrum of other potential candidates, all trailing Kamala Harris by wide margins, he is now close to her or narrowly ahead in three commonly-cited poll averages (RCP, 270toWin, Race to the WH) of primary voter support for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.
His rising strength is reflected in the betting markets. On Predictit, he is far and away the betting favorite for the Democratic nomination, way ahead of AOC (second) and Harris (third). And in the market on the 2028 general election, he is way ahead of other Democrats and very close to the leading Republican candidate, JD Vance.
What accounts for this remarkable pro-Newson surge? How did this liberal California Democrat win over so many in the wake of Democrats’ comprehensive defeat running…a liberal California Democrat?
The answer lies in Newsom’s ability to be everything to, well not everybody, but to every Democrat. Think of Gavin Newsom not as an ordinary politician but as a message delivery system—and a very effective one. Of course, all politicians to varying degrees are about that. But Newsom stands out as letting absolutely nothing stand in the way—principles, beliefs, prior positions—of delivering the message he deems most politically effective at any given time to any given audience.
That has enabled him to appeal to diverse Democratic audiences. Think of Resistance liberals, whose white-hot anger at Trump is sure to galvanize a large share of Democratic primary voters. Right after Trump was elected, he declared a special session of the California legislature. His office said:
The special session responds to the public statements and proposals put forward by President-elect Trump and his advisors, and actions taken during his first term in office—an agenda that could erode essential freedoms and individual rights, including women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights…A special session allows for expedited action that will best protect California and its values from attacks.
A steady stream of denunciations of Trump administration actions from Newsom and the governor’s office has followed, especially during last June’s protests against ICE actions in Los Angeles which resulted in the deployment of the National Guard to quell riots. Newsom did not hold back his rhetoric or legal actions against this development. He said:
Democracy is under assault right before our eyes—the moment we’ve feared has arrived.
He’s taking a wrecking ball to our Founding Fathers’ historic project.
And so on. Indeed, Newsom has not missed a chance to aggressively oppose everything the Trump administration has done, whether it directly involved California or not. He has traveled to Brazil to oppose Trump climate policies at COP30 and, most recently, showed up at the World Economic Forum in Davos to denounce the administration. And, in reply to Republican attempts to gerrymander congressional seats in Texas and elsewhere, he has happily torn up nonpartisan districting in California to heavily gerrymander the state for the Democrats.
In essence, he has appointed himself “Chairman of the anti-Trump Resistance” and has the receipts to back it up. In Resistance liberal land, they love this just as Newsom intends.
But for those who are concerned that the party must moderate some, not just resist Trump, Newsom also has something to offer. He started a podcast, This is Gavin Newsom, where his guests have include the late Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, and other conservative luminaries. This has provided him with the opportunity to venture some cautious signals that he is more moderate than the average Democrat. In his podcast with Kirk he agreed that trans-identified biological boys in girls’ sports seemed “unfair” to him. And in his very recent podcast with Shapiro, he allowed as how calling ICE activities “state-sponsored terrorism” was not justified and that it was probably not a good idea to call for abolishing ICE. Related, in a conversation with Ezra Klein, he admitted that “we [the Democrats] failed on the border, we have to own that.” He has also, in his actions as California governor, responded to moderates’ concerns about homeless encampments by supporting moves to dismantle them and to concerns about crime with tougher rhetoric and additional tools to prosecute felonies and drug dealers.
This hasn’t translated to political success, though. After starting his second term much more popular than he was in 2017, he’s converged on his own poor approval ratingsfrom his first term.
And yet, it’s not as if there’s been massive political mobilization against his corruption.
The money machine works in part because Trump has, through persuasion or intimidation, induced the vast majority of Republicans to refrain from criticizing or challenging him on any of this in any kind of meaningful way.
So will the party pay a price for Trump’s corruption? They’re set to lose the House, which almost always happens to the president’s party during a midterm, but remain the odds-on favorites1 to hold the Senate, in which case Trump will be able to keep MAGAfying the judiciary and getting away with his corrupt schemes.
So how does he get away with it? Some people think it’s because the voters don’t care about corruption, but I think that’s probably wrong.
Searchlight Institute polling on this shows that voters just have an incredibly low estimate of the baseline level of integrity of politicians. Seventy-one percent say the “typical politician” is corrupt. Typical Republican? Sixty-eight percent. Typical Democrat? Sixty-one percent. Seventy-two percent say that “long-term elected officials” are probably corrupt.
I think it’s hard to make political hay out of Trump’s corruption because, while it looks extraordinary to me (and probably to you if you’re reading this), many voters see it as pretty normal.”
In 1980, nearly three-quarters of voters nationally were white Americans without college degrees. In 2024, it was about 40 percent. Greater cultural diversity explains some of that, but the key element that changed our politics so much wasn’t about ethnic identity but rather education.
In 1980, a college degree was far less essential as a stepping stone to success and entry to the managerial class. Only about 17 percent of all adults older than 25 back then had a bachelor’s degree or more. Now, a four-year degree is the ante price even for many kinds of administrative jobs. Accordingly, about 40 percent of adults now have college diplomas, a share that will continue its climb as those baby boom Americans who were new in the less credentialist job market of 50 years ago pass away — and out of the demographic tables — in large numbers over the coming 15 years or so.
What changed our politics, though, wasn’t so much that more people were going to college, but rather that those who did and those who did not started voting very differently … the white ones, anyway.
According to the University of Virginia Center for Politics analysis, Black voters from 1980 to 2020 were not only consistent in their preference for Democrats, but also there was no significant difference between Black voters with or without college degrees.
Over the same period, white voters without college degrees went from narrowly favoring Democrats (2.2 points in the 1980s) to overwhelmingly favoring Republicans in the 2010s (23.7 points). College-educated white voters went on exactly the opposite trip, going from solidly Republican (12.2 points) to kind of Democratic (2.5 points). What the heck happened there?
…In each of President Trump’s three presidential contests, a majority of his overall support came from white voters without college degrees. That would be an alarming degree of dependency on one shrinking demographic group, unless … you could score increasingly high shares of those voters.
The last time Republicans won the national popular vote before 2024 was in 2004. That year, white working-class voters split about evenly, with a slight edge for then-President George W. Bush. He got a little more than half of a group that was back then a little more than half of the electorate itself.
Twenty years later, the white working class made up about 40 percent of the electorate, but Trump won 66 percent of them. Like a diver on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, Republicans are going from increasing heights into a smaller and smaller pool. Which is fine, as long as you hit the target.
Which is why, if you are a Republican, you might want to let your eyes drift through the crosstabs of the most recent survey from Marist College’s excellent polling unit. Trump’s approval rating among whites without college degrees — the same voters that went for Trump by a 2-to-1 ratio in 2024 — is 46 percent. Trump is at 43 percent with these voters on his handling of the economy, including an abysmal 38 percent among the women of that group. These voters don’t even like the tariffs that are supposed to be a boon to them: 35 percent approve of Trump on the import taxes.
On how Immigration and Customs Enforcement is conducting its operations? The white working class clocks in at 40 percent approval. On foreign policy generally, it’s 43 percent. On Greenland, it’s 13 percent.
Democrats do love a good government shutdown—though this time it’s just the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes ICE, that would be deprived of funding. Last time around in October, they said the government shutdown was over the price of health care, one of their best-polling issues with voters. That fight fired up their base and may have helped them win big in elections in New Jersey and Virginia.
This time they may shut down the government agency responsible for immigration enforcement, one of their worst-polling issues in recent years. Put this way, the Democrats’ strategy doesn’t seem to make sense.
But it does make sense to Democrats today and for a very simple reason: the Trump administration has managed to take an issue Republicans have dominated for years and turn it into a big loser for the GOP on multiple fronts.
Public approval of Trump’s handling of deportations, and specifically his use of ICE, has plunged precipitously. Trump now polls heavily net negative on the immigration issue, not far off his overall net negative job approval. As Nate Silver points out:
On average, over the course of his term, Trump’s net approval on immigration has been about six points better than his overall rating; it had been his least-bad issue. Now, that gap has mostly evaporated.
To be clear, the public hasn’t completely changed its mind on the issue of illegal immigration. Far from it. There’s still majority support for deporting all illegal immigrants back to their home countries, as shown by recent polls from Cygnal (which was taken after the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis) and from Marquette University. Significantly, the Marquette poll, which was taken after the killing of Renee Good but before that of Pretti, showed essentially no change in support for deportation from their November poll.
Consistent with this, the Cygnal poll shows majority support for “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcing federal immigration laws to remove illegal immigrants from the U.S.” And according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, voters still prefer the Republican party over Democrats when asked who would better handle immigration, and especially border security. This is confirmed by the even more recent Marquette poll, which showed Republicans preferred over Democrats by 18 points on “immigration and border security.”
But that’s the theory. When it comes to the Trump administration’s practice, as instantiated in ICE’s real world activities, voters are strongly negative on the results. Approval of ICE has plunged precipitously. In The New York Times’ latest poll, approval of ICE has sunk to just 36 percent compared with 63 percent disapproval—a net negative approval of a whopping 27 points. Among the critical independent voter group, disapproval has hit a remarkable 70 percent. Even the fringe view that ICE should be abolished is getting a more sympathetic hearing from the public.
As to specific tactics, voters in the poll overwhelmingly feel ICE has gone too far—61 percent versus 26 percent who think they’ve been about right and 11 percent who think the tactics haven’t gone far enough. Other polls have similar results. These views are likely to get even more lopsided in the wake of Pretti’s death.
It wasn’t so long ago that the idea of actively and aggressively resisting immigration enforcement belonged to a small slice of the activist left. That is no longer the case. Thanks to how severely the Trump administration has overplayed its hand, resistance to enforcement has been mainstreamed and receives tacit support even from many who believe the Democrats are not trustworthy on immigration, and who still support the overall goal of cracking down on illegal immigration.
President Trump has staged a master class in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It underscores a lesson neither party seems interested in learning. Both have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters, who would never vote for the other party anyway, over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way. They have not operated as institutions geared to construct broad coalitions and win large general-election victories. Instead, they have focused on fan service—satisfying their most partisan and loyal constituencies.
Ironically, America’s 50-50 political divide has made it difficult for either party to break out of this pattern. You might think that two minority parties would each feel pressure to expand their coalitions and construct a majority, but actually, both have behaved as if they were the rightful majorities already. Each finds ways to dismiss the other’s wins as narrow flukes and treat their own as massive triumphs. Indeed, each has responded to close election losses with various forms of denial.
This is sustainable only because elections are so close. Politicians learn big lessons from big losses or big wins, so neither party has learned much in a long time, and neither can grasp that it isn’t popular and could easily lose the next election.
The good news about Donald Trump’s efforts to take control of the upcoming election is that the legal changes he’s seeking to make won’t get through the Congress. The bad news is that his illegal efforts might succeed.
When Trump first raised the topic on a podcast over the weekend, his own press secretary felt compelled to say he was only referring to his support for the SAVE Act, now pending before Congress, which would require a raft of documentation from those trying to register to vote. Given the 60-vote threshold that the bill will run up against in the Senate, however, the nation will be saved from SAVE by Democratic opposition.
Similarly, Trump has no legal authority to get states to send him their voter rolls, which he fairly lusts after so he can strike likely Democratic voters from these lists. That absence of legal authority was rather glaringly revealed last week when Attorney General Pam Bondi offered Minnesota a deal: If the state just forked over its rolls, she hinted that the administration might just withdraw its ICE and Border Patrol goons. No administration action has revealed so starkly as Bondi’s ploy the fear Trump harbors about the coming election, and the absence of legal channels available to him to rig or curtail it.
As we’ve seen in Atlanta over the weekend, Trump can use the FBI to try to seize ballots, though he’s being sued by local government officials over that action. Come November, he could, I suppose, send in the feds to stop the vote counting in Democratic cities (and keep in mind that virtually every large American city is heavily Democratic). The problem with that is that if an urban county can’t certify its votes, neither can the state in which it’s located certify its votes. Impounding the ballots in, say, Harris County (Houston and its suburbs) means that Texas can’t certify its statewide election results for senator, governor, and its members of Congress and the legislature. Trump would probably be fine with that if he’d interceded in so many states that the new Congress couldn’t convene, but it’s hard to imagine that Republican elected officials would feel the same way.
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.
