The caucus gyms of first-in-the-nation Iowa transformed Barack Obama from curiosity to contender in 2008. Black-church networks in South Carolina handed Joe Biden the Democratic nomination in 2020. If not for the restaurants and bowling lanes of New Hampshire, Bill Clinton’s campaign and career would likely have been, to borrow a phrase, as dead as the “last dog” in 1992.
Picking Democratic presidential nominees in the United States, in other words, has always been a concocted local game. Even after Democratic leaders decided in the early 1970s to empower regular people through primaries and open caucuses, they kept a grip on the schedule of contests and the rules by which delegates are selected and can act. Rather than aspiring to provide equal representation, party bosses designed the system to give voters in some states more sway than those in others.
Now the Democratic Party is trying to decide what type of voters it wants to shape its attempt to regain the White House in 2028. Three years after then-President Biden effectively eliminated the Democratic nominating competition by reordering early contests in his favor, the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee has invited all 57 states and territories to apply by tomorrow for pole position in the reshuffled 2028 calendar. The result, expected to be announced later this year, will reset the playing field for Democratic aspirants to the world’s most powerful job—and likely anger those who feel cut out.
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Even though the party has the power to do virtually anything it wants, conversation has once again largely centered on the handful of states that have led the calendar for decades. Iowa Democrats, who appear likely to be shut out of the early-nominating window for the second cycle after a disastrous 2020, are openly discussing the option of going rogue and holding an unsanctioned early caucus. The New Hampshire and Nevada state parties are lobbying to be the first-in-the-nation primary state, and New Hampshire is threatening to hold a meaningless first contest if it doesn’t win the prize. South Carolina, which has represented the nation’s Black Democratic electorate in the early window since 2004 and went first in 2024, wants to stay there, but other southern states—including Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina—are expected to jockey to crowd in on their traditional importance.
At stake is not just a geographic advantage or disadvantage for prospective candidates, but the prospect of windfalls for local-television stations and roadside-hotel chains, as candidates devote tens of millions of dollars to winning early contests in hopes of slingshotting in popularity. The result could also give Republicans, who plan to stick to the traditional early-state order of Iowa and New Hampshire, a general-election advantage in states where Democrats are trying to regain statewide office. Entire campaigns could rise or fall on the outcomes. Quentin Fulks, who worked as the principal deputy campaign manager for the Democratic ticket in 2024 and has been discussed as a potential campaign manager in 2028, described the calendar order as a weight on the scale of the whole contest.
“It’s essentially a filter on the party’s future, determining which voters are heard first, which issues shape the race, and which candidates remain viable by the time the rest of the country weighs in,” Fulks told me; he has previously worked for Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia. “We should be clear-eyed about there being advantages for specific candidates in whatever order is chosen.”
This year’s fight has already created some unlikely allies and shuffled allegiances. Twenty years ago, Donna Brazile, fresh off a turn as campaign manager for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential bid, celebrated the addition of Nevada and South Carolina to the top of the calendar as a win for racial and ethnic diversity in the party. This year, she told me, her focus has shifted.
“I think the most important thing is that the party needs to look at how to woo independents, because without independents, Democrats cannot win in 2028,” Brazile said. That means, as a member of the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, she is looking favorably at restoring New Hampshire—where roughly 90 percent of residents are white and the largest share of voters are “undeclared” for either political party—to its historic position as the first primary contest. She also said that she has some doubts about South Carolina because it has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, and she hopes other southern states enter the conversation. “I am open to a southern state, but I don’t believe I am necessarily open to South Carolina. I am all about the Electoral College. Period. End of sentence,” she said.
South Carolina stumbled into first place during the 2024 cycle because Biden chose to overrule DNC deliberations to make his path to the nomination as seamless as possible. Now the state that never asked to go first is defending its position, though many of its voters will be happy if it retains some place in the calendar before Super Tuesday. “We are 100 percent defending our position for first,” Jay Parmley, the executive director of the South Carolina Democratic Party, told me. He added that if the committee declines, it will “have to explain away removing a primary for a southern state with Black and rural voters.” He also said that South Carolina welcomes another southern state joining the early window, as long as his remains.
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Nevada state leaders, meanwhile, sent holiday cards and candy canes to the committee members late last year. The cards feature a prickly Joshua tree wearing a Santa hat, and an invocation to “keep fighting the good fight” from “your friends in Nevada.” There are plans to distribute “Nevada First” poker chips to the committee in the coming months, according to people involved in the process. Four years ago, Nevada felt that it was on the verge of winning first-primary blessings, only to have Biden impose his will. It doesn’t want to see the chance slip away again.
“Nevada is what America is,” Artie Blanco, one of the state’s two members on the committee, told me, before listing off stats about the state’s ethnic diversity, low number of college graduates, and powerful unions, not to mention its razor-thin margins in recent elections.
But New Hampshire is in a stronger position now that Biden, who finished fifth there in 2020, has left the scene. Unlike everywhere else, the New Hampshire secretary of state is empowered to choose the state’s primary date at the last minute, and, by state law, he must select one that occurs ahead of any other presidential primary in the nation. In practice, this means that if Democrats don’t let New Hampshire go first, New Hampshire will go first anyway with a contest that doesn’t count toward the nomination—a loss that could sting in a purple state. It could also shut Democratic candidates out of valuable news cycles as the Republican primary in the state takes center stage. Lawmakers in the state, who are facing contested statewide 2026 races for governor and U.S. senator, are likely to make the point loudly that the party stands to lose if it shows again that it doesn’t care. “We certainly aren’t taking anything for granted,” New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley told me.
These words will likely please some potential 2028 candidates, such as Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, and Pritzker, who all found time last year to visit the state. Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel also signaled to my colleague Ashley Parker that he sees a first-in-the-nation New Hampshire as a potential springboard to the top tier. Other possible candidates, such as Maryland Governor Wes Moore, visited South Carolina last year, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared for a town hall in Iowa. (Another potential presidential contender and Nevada neighbor, California Governor Gavin Newsom, is my cousin. I do not report on him and am not involved in coverage of him.)
Some party leaders with close ties to Buckley and DNC Chair Ken Martin have suggested that they hold early sympathy for New Hampshire reclaiming kickoff status. “The folks on Rules and Bylaws understand that state laws and state governance will truly matter with who is in the first four states,” Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb told me. “This is not a ‘Well, we hope the calendar looks like this.’ This is a very practical decision.”
None of that bodes well for Iowa, which starting in 1972 carved out an enormously powerful place as the first contest in the Democratic presidential saga. That fell apart in 2020, when the party, already struggling to hold any statewide office, failed to produce a clear caucus winner for days because of a technological glitch. Biden effectively erased the state from the 2024 process. After Iowa’s leaders declined to support Martin’s bid for DNC chair, Iowa lost its seat on the Rules and Bylaws Committee, even though the representation of South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Nevada doubled to two. Martin distanced himself from that decision by delegating the committee selection to other party members.
The state known for nice is now shifting closer to war footing. “All options are on the table for Iowa Democrats in 2028,” Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart told me in a statement. “No matter what the Rules and Bylaws Committee decides, Republican presidential candidates will be in Iowa. It was a mistake for the DNC to cut us out of the calendar, letting Republicans’ attacks go unanswered in Iowa while millions of dollars in advertising, organizing and the worldwide media flooded our state.”
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One Iowa Democrat told me that the unspoken threat is a “rogue” caucus, which would occur outside of the Democratic nominating process at the same time that Republicans are campaigning in the state. “Part of it depends on if we think the process was fair and we get a fair shake,” this person said, requesting anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Such a move could lead some candidates for president to campaign for a caucus win even if it wouldn’t award delegates, in the hopes of raising their public profile. In the past, the DNC has threatened to strip convention delegates from states that hold contests outside of the rules. In 2008, the early states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina pressured major Democratic candidates to pledge that they would not even campaign in Michigan and Florida, which were defying the rules.
Under the committee’s rules, four or five states will get special permission to go in the early window of contests, and they will include a single state from each of the nation’s party-recognized regions: the West, the Midwest, the South, and the East. Michigan, which was put in the early schedule in 2024, is expected to seek to maintain its spot, though Democrats expect the total number of applicants for an early role to be fewer than the 20 states and territories that applied in 2022. As before, the committee will decide on a group of finalists to offer more formal presentations.
Without a sitting president to disrupt the process this time, party leaders have established a vague three-pronged test to decide the outcome: “The Rules and Bylaws Committee is committed to running a rigorous, efficient, and fair process that will deliver the strongest presidential nominee for our party,” Jim Roosevelt and Minyon Moore, who lead the committee, told me in a statement. But as with everything in party politics, such principles are easily subsumed by horse trading and individual influence. After the bosses decide, the nation’s Democratic candidates and voters will have to make do.
