Democrats moved to keep South Carolina as the first state to vote in their party’s 2028 presidential primary process, while moving up several other states, in an effort to better represent the views of the party’s racially diverse voter base.
At a meeting in Washington DC of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) rules and bylaws committee on Friday, South Carolina received a slim majority of votes to take the first spot, scheduled for 22 January 2028, with Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia set to follow, in that order. The selections must still be confirmed by the full DNC at a meeting set for next month.
Minyon Moore and James Roosevelt Jr, who co-chair the committee, called the proposal “a rigorous, fair, and efficient calendar that will win Democrats back the White House in 2028”.
South Carolina was the state whose primary voters revitalized Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020, and as president he returned the favor by encouraging the DNC to make the state the first to vote in the 2024 nominating calendar.
That supplanted New Hampshire, the site for decades of the first primary for both parties, as well as Iowa, which holds caucuses that have traditionally been the first nominating contest of presidential election years.
However, both states are overwhelmingly white, and with Democrats increasingly relying on Black, Latino and other minority voters to elect their candidates, the party has sought to move states with larger populations of those groups towards the front of the nominating calendar, where they can play a crucial role in selecting the presidential frontrunners.
Making the case for South Carolina, the long-serving congressman James Clyburn said in a statement ahead of the meeting: “We have a record that all of us can point to and be proud of. It’s a relatively small state. It has four distinct cultures, a relatively cheap media market, and demographics that reflect what our voter population needs to be in order for our candidates to be successful in the general election.”
During the meeting, the Nevada Democratic chair, Daniele Monroe-Moreno, argued that her state offers the ideal racial mix and nodded to Donald Trump’s success there in 2024, when he became the first Republican in two decades to win its electoral votes.
“When we go into the next presidential cycle, my state, the state of Nevada, is that coalition that we need to win back,” she said.
The new early voting states are either presidential battlegrounds or home to hotly contested US Senate races and House districts. They also have substantially more Black and Latino voters than the states that led the 2020 nominating calendar, as well as larger populations of voters in unions or without college degrees, both constituencies with which many Democratic candidates have struggled to win in recent elections.
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