The call came from inside the White House.
On Tuesday, New Hampshire’s Democrats will participate in an unsanctioned version of the traditional “first in the nation” primary the state has held for more than a century. The Granite State went rogue after an ambitious shakeup of the nominating calendar that was engineered by President Joe Biden and his team.
With Biden almost certainly coasting to victory, the Democratic primary has received very little attention. However, the dispute in the Granite State could have larger ramifications in this year’s general election and the process that led to the unusual unsanctioned contest will unquestionably have a major impact on future presidential races.
Iowa’s 2020 meltdown was the final straw after years of mounting concerns about the traditional early states.
According to New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley, the news that his state was being stripped of its status came when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jen O’Malley Dillon rang up Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., to inform her that Biden was making a major change to the presidential nomination process. Soon after that call, Biden released a letter to the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee outlining his vision for the overhaul.
While Biden’s missive was technically only a recommendation, the party organization followed it almost exactly. “The DNC is, as all national political parties are when you have the White House, just an extension of the White House,” Buckley said somewhat ruefully in a phone conversation earlier this month.
Shock waves will be felt far beyond New Hampshire. The president’s push to dramatically reshape the Democratic primary process will have long lasting implications. For our new book, The Truce, which comes out on Tuesday, we spoke with leaders at every level of Democratic politics. We learned how Biden improbably managed to heal the deep rifts that erupted between the party’s progressives and centrists in recent years. Our reporting also shows how Biden made the most significant reforms to the primary calendar in the modern political era. Those changes might help Democrats hold on to power, but they could also reignite the kind of infighting that Biden previously managed to quell.
From 1976 to 2020, both parties began their nominating process with a wintertime trek through Iowa and New Hampshire. This schedule was shaped by long-simmering dissatisfaction with the party bosses and “smoke filled rooms” of an earlier era that helped spark violence at the 1968 Democratic convention.
Iowa, which has caucuses not a primary, and New Hampshire were alone at the front of the line until the 2008 election cycle, when the DNC allowed South Carolina and Nevada to jump into the so-called early state “window.” This fueled a bitter dispute between the two leading candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and protests among their rank-and-file supporters. In the aftermath, the primary schedule remained largely unchanged until the chaos at the 2020 Iowa caucuses, when the Iowa Democratic Party’s app crashed and the official results were delayed for days.
That meltdown was the final straw after years of mounting concerns about the traditional early states. Caucuses are less democratic than a popular vote. Additionally, Iowa and New Hampshire, are, between them, about 90% white. Many Democrats wanted change and Biden agreed.
In the letter to the Rules and Bylaws Committee, Biden outlined a series of priorities that began with giving voters of color an earlier role in the process. He also called for eliminating caucuses.
Potential presidential hopefuls are clearly already eyeing the schedule and backing their preferred versions of it.
These were laudable goals, but Biden’s marching orders left the party with a complex calculus. Officials had to try to tap each region of the country while keeping in mind factors that made the traditional early states friendly to cash-strapped campaigns: small size and cheap media markets.
Our book chronicles how Biden’s home state, Delaware, fit many of the criteria but lost out on a place in the early window because of its tie to the president. Top Democrats feared both the perception of favoritism and potential drama if even a small number of votes against Biden there received undue narrative importance. While party leaders fretted about showing favoritism in Delaware, they granted the first slot to South Carolina, the state that helped Biden cement his victory and the home of one of his biggest political benefactors, Rep. Jim Clyburn, not to mention DNC Chair Jaime Harrison.
Clyburn insisted to us that he never asked for the first position. For him, it would have been enough for South Carolina to remain among the early states. “I just wanted to be in the window,” he told us shortly after the decisive DNC meeting last year.
Along with putting South Carolina at the front of the line, the DNC committee also allowed Nevada, Michigan and Georgia in the early window. While Republican officials in Georgia blocked the plan to move up that state’s primary date, the rest of the changes still meant a massive influx of voters of color into the Democrats’ primary process. Biden and other Democrats believe this more diverse electorate will select presidential candidates with wider appeal and give the party an edge in future races.
While Iowa and its caucuses were cast out of the window, the need to represent the Northeast helped convince the DNC to keep New Hampshire second in line — after South Carolina and on the same date as Nevada. Even though New Hampshire always followed Iowa’s caucuses, the fact the state would no longer play host to the sole first primary ran afoul not only of its leaders, but also a state law that enshrines its “first in the nation primary” status.
New Hampshire is now moving ahead with its unsanctioned contest Tuesday. Due to penalties imposed by the DNC, any candidate who campaigns or appears on the ballot in the rogue primary will not get any delegates from the state. Biden took his name off the ballot and agreed not to have a ground operation there. As a result, an unconventional write-in campaign is his main presence in the state at the outset of the presidential race.
State leaders on both sides of the aisle are incensed with the DNC. For his part, Buckley vowed New Hampshire is “never going to be left out of it.”
“If anything, the behavior that’s occurred this cycle is going to further dig in the heels of the people of New Hampshire,” he said.
The attempt to reform the primaries and the ensuing fallout is a perfect example of the challenges of uniting the diverse coalition that makes up the Democratic Party.
Will enough voters in the state share their representatives’ rage to affect the general election? New Hampshire is a relative battleground and Biden has put himself in the position of angering the populace while being unable to have an early campaign there.
Even as he vented at the White House, Buckley said he would fight to secure a victory for Biden. Yet though he predicted a win, “we would be in a lot better position if the Biden Harris team had shown up in August,” Buckley said.
New Hampshire this year is only the tip of the iceberg for the Democrats’ new approach to the primary calendar. The new rules include a provision for reviewing the early state window ahead of every presidential election cycle. A DNC Rules and Bylaws committee member who requested anonymity said it makes “sense” to revisit the calendar as the presidential map evolves, so key swing states can go early and receive more attention.
Still, the committee member acknowledged that review could lead to conflict — particularly if presidential candidates and their loyalists are lobbying for favorable schedules. The member suggested the committee should consider “moving the timetable up” for setting the calendar, and having their meetings at least a year earlier than in the past to avoid the heat of a campaign.
However, that solution might only go so far. Potential presidential hopefuls are clearly already eyeing the schedule and backing their preferred versions of it. In an email, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who is widely seen as a possible progressive contender, offered his own ideal calendar.
“South Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada and Michigan represent the vibrant diversity of our nation,” Khanna said. “I hope the DNC will figure out how to have them all be in the early state window.” Other progressives — including aides to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., — have expressed concerns about South Carolina and its relatively conservative electorate.
Overall, the attempt to reform the primaries and the ensuing fallout is a perfect example of the challenges of uniting the diverse coalition that makes up the Democratic Party base. That obstacle doesn’t exist on the other side of the aisle. Former President Donald Trump’s brand of authoritarian nationalism has united the GOP and a majority of white voters behind him. This year, the Republicans stuck with their traditional primary schedule and even though Trump has attracted challengers, most of them have adopted relatively similar platforms and vowed to fall in line if he secures the nomination.
Drama over the primary calendar and the infighting between Democrats’ various factions in recent years is all an outgrowth of the party’s ideological and demographic diversity. This helps give Democrats more popular support — the party has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections — but with the electoral college thwarting majority rule in this country, they experience some of the downsides of a broader base without reaping all of its benefits.
The DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee member acknowledged that, in a party that is trying to hold together a diverse coalition, discord around the primary process is a constant risk.
“There’s always going to be some states that are pissed off and make some noise and some states that end up happy,” the committee member said.
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