Why Democrats Should Stop Obsessing About the 2028 Primary Calendar

Top Democratic National Committee officials met this week to determine the order of the party’s 2028 primaries, and on Friday voted to keep South Carolina as the first state on the calendar. Michigan, Nevada, and New Hampshire are also slated to hold early primaries, although the full DNC must still ratify the decisions of the Rules and Bylaws Committee when it meets next month. But the process to set the primary calendar has been extremely contentious, with various factions in the party debating which states should go first and Black officials suggesting that Black voters would feel dissed if South Carolina had been moved back.

This is all nonsense; much ado about little. It doesn’t really matter which state(s) vote first. The eventual Democratic nominee will have to win voters across racial, class, and geographic lines. All factions in the party will be heard. And the primary calendar likely will have no impact at all on the 2028 general election.

For decades, political journalists like me have focused obsessively on the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, traditionally the first two contests in the presidential nomination process. So obviously the winners of those early races go on to win, right? Not quite. In the last six competitive Democratic presidential primaries ( 1992, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2016, 2020 ), the winner of the Iowa caucuses eventually won the nomination four times (Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton). That’s a bit more than half the time—hardly a guarantee of victory. The New Hampshire victor is just two for six (Gore in 2000, Kerry in 2004). Bill Clinton, and then Joe Biden almost three decades later, won the nomination after losing both states.

Since South Carolina became one of the earliest voting states in 2008, all the winners there (Obama, Hillary Clinton, Biden) have gone on to win the nomination. But that isn’t because all of their rivals dropped out after South Carolina. Rather, South Carolina showed that those…