"Democrats are deciding what kind of party they want to be, but first they have to decide who gets to decide. Since January, twelve states have been trying to court the Rules and Bylaws Committee, insisting that their primary is the one that will determine a Democratic Presidential candidate who can beat the Republican heir to the maga movement. This has turned the discussion, at least in part, into a competition over which state is most like the rest of the nation, as several officials and party chairs told me. 'Nevada is a microcosm of the United States, with its diverse population,' the Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto said. 'I think you get a microcosm of the Democratic Party here,' Representative Sarah McBride, one of Delaware’s biggest boosters since the Bidens, said of the literal First State. 'We are a state, I think, that is the melting pot for the country,' Anderson Clayton, the chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, said. 'We look like America,' Curtis Hertel, the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, said. 'It’s a country of fifty states, but Georgia is the best representation of the diversity of our party,' Charlie Bailey, who chairs the Georgia Democrats, said.
"But the contest over the first-in-the-nation primaries has also become a proxy war over the future of the Party. The D.N.C.’s decision, expected by late summer, could have a significant effect on the 2028 cycle—from the crop of campaign staffers who can afford to relocate, to the ability of small campaigns to break through in large media markets. Although Iowa and New Hampshire haven’t always picked candidates that go on to win the Presidency, the early victors get to fly out of Des Moines and Manchester with an extremely valuable spoil: momentum, the type that an inert political party might need against a major popular movement. 'The issue here is about the stakes in this election, in 2028,' the New Hampshire senator Maggie Hassan, who won her seat in 2016 by a thousand and seventeen votes, told me. 'We have to win. We have to reverse Trumpism.'"
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Noteworthy: This is a really nice, well-reported piece. But... [You knew there was going to be a but.]
But it is typically gauzy media account in how it approaches this "battle" within the Democratic Party. Rodríguez goes heavy on diversity and representation, which are important! Each are among the many factors the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee is using to home in on the four or five states that will ultimately fill out the party's early window on the 2028 presidential primary calendar.
However, what's missing from the piece is arguably the most important component to the RBC's decision: Can the state/state party actually get the contest in question into the early window? And if one is going to report that a calendar decision is "expected by late summer," then not mentioning feasibility of primary/caucus movement -- even once! -- stands as a pretty glaring omission.
Why?
Well, if the end of summer is the point at which a decision on the calendar is to be made, then it really constrains the choice that is being made. It would limit the decision to states with contests already in the window or those that can easily get there. And not all 12 of the state parties that threw their hat in the ring for one of those early spots can get there.
Not without the certainty that the midterms will likely bring.
Control of state government come January 2027 will not be assured until then. And which party controls the levers of power will determine whether those states can or will be motivated to move a contest into February ahead of 2028. State governments hold that power in 10 of the 12 states vying for early slots in 2028. Iowa and South Carolina are the only exceptions.
These things matter. They may not be wholly determinative of the outcome, but they have an outsized role in how this is all going to shake out at some point later this year.
And don't get FHQ started on this "two-hundred-and-seventy-thousand dollar fine" that the DNC will slap "on any state that staged an unauthorized competition." There is much more to it than that.
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