Top Democratic National Committee officials are meeting this week to determine which states will vote first in the 2028 nomination contest. And this decision, which could come as soon as Friday, has become quite a source of friction. Some Black Democratic officials say it’s a diss of Black voters if South Carolina does not remain the first primary state, as it became in 2024. Others say Nevada or New Mexico are better to start off the process because they have large populations of Latino voters, who are more of a swing bloc than Black voters. Another argument is that Democrats should choose Nevada, Michigan, or another purple state, on the theory that a robust primary in a given state will improve the party’s prospects there in the general election. And while none of the various factions are stating this openly, what’s underlying this jockeying is the suspicion that certain states voting early is an advantage to some candidates and a disadvantage to others.
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 three candidates had strong support among Black voters, which was then replicated throughout the South, helping them amass a huge advantage in delegates.
So looking at that history, we don’t need to worry that South Carolina, Nevada, or whatever state(s) are picked first and second will alone determine the Democratic nominee. The early states aren’t likely to choose the same candidates. If they do, as 1992 and 2020 showed, later states might override those early results. Also, the Democratic Party these days emphasizes that it has a slate of several early primaries, trying to ensure the first or first two don’t overwhelm the process. So in 2020, even as Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders did very well in Iowa and New Hampshire, the results in the other two other states, Nevada and South Carolina, were closely watched too. Biden’s strong showings in the latter two helped catapult him to the nomination.
This emphasis on the entire slate of early primaries also means the calendar doesn’t give any one candidate that much of an advantage. The early slate will include one state from the South, one from the West, one from the Midwest, one from the Northeast, and likely one bonus state. Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina are expected to be among those that vote in February 2028, although it’s not clear in what order. It’s easy to imagine Kamala Harris being strong in South Carolina, a state with a lot of center-left African Americans like her, but losing New Hampshire to Buttigieg, whose base is college-educated white voters. The early states are diverse enough that either different candidates will win them or one person will rightly become a huge front-runner for the nomination by winning four or five contests in places that are demographically and geographically distinct from one another.
The primary calendar also doesn’t matter for the general election, despite the claims of people who should know better. David Axelrod, who was a top adviser on Obama’s presidential campaigns, wrote on X this week, “Dems would be wise to pick states to start the process that will be swing states in ’28.Candidates spend a lot of time in these early states and it lays an organizational foundation to compete in the fall. SC won’t be a swing state.” Hmm. There is no research showing that having an intense primary in a state helps a party win there in the general election. And it’s easy to disprove Axelrod’s argument. The Democrats won Iowa in November 2012 after not having a competitive primary, then lost the state in November 2016 and November 2020, after the party’s presidential candidates held dozens of events across the Hawkeye State during primary season. South Carolina has remained red, while Georgia has become purple, even though the former is a huge part of the nomination process and the latter isn’t. What if … primaries and general elections are completely different contests whose results aren’t connected to one another?
So if the order that the states vote in doesn’t tell us much about who will win the primary or the general election, doesn’t it at least show which groups the party cares about most? Isn’t it a sign of respect for Black voters if South Carolina votes first? Not really. If you are a Black political operative or Black Democratic official in South Carolina, having the first primary in your state is a coup. Presidential candidates might pay big consulting fees for your advice on winning in the state or actively seek your endorsement. But any serious Democratic presidential candidate knows they must win Asian, Latino, Black, and most importantly white (the biggest bloc) voters to win the nomination. Black voters don’t control the nomination if South Carolina votes first, neither do Latinos if it’s Nevada, or whites if it’s New Hampshire. The Democratic Party is truly diverse, and all demographic groups matter.
I’m not suggesting that the calendar is totally irrelevant. When I first started covering presidential campaigns in 2004, I was unnerved by how little the candidates interacted with minority voters, because they spent virtually all of their time in Iowa and New Hampshire. But the Democratic Party has made a laudable effort to make the nomination process more representative. And it has succeeded. In 2028, no matter which states are chosen to vote early, those states combined will be fairly representative of America overall. They won’t give any candidate or group any particular advantage. And that’s a good thing. It would be better if the Democrats had a national primary where everyone voted on the same day, to give party members in all 50 states an equal voice in the process. But four states across the country voting early offers some of those same benefits. The voters of Des Moines should never have had so much power to pick the Democratic presidential nominee. Now, even if they get to vote first, the Democrats of Charleston, Las Vegas, and Detroit alone won’t choose the nominee in 2028.
