Joe biden was doing it again.
In the year leading up to the 2024 election, Biden was repeating the same thing he had done eight years earlier, standing on the brink. He had a campaign in waiting, but he had not pulled the trigger and made an official announcement. The uncertainty had started to lead to bad headlines. Party insiders were increasingly antsy.
Biden’s aides brushed off the speculation and concerns.
“Democrats are always worried,” one staffer from Biden’s 2020 campaign said in April 2023.
After all, this was not 2015. Biden was the sitting president of the United States and the leader of his party. Waiting was his prerogative. He had the ability to fly Air Force One and make appearances around the country without a campaign apparatus. All of his most serious potential primary challengers had fallen in line and the donors would too.
“He intends to run,” the staffer said. “We’ve been clear. We’re making preparations.”
The staffer indicated Biden had “the space he needs, especially coming off the midterms.… We don’t feel like we’re in any rush.”
But the pressure wasn’t all coming from the press or anxious boosters. Trump was back, and Biden’s own team had put him on a deadline.
Trump officially launched his comeback bid in November 2022 and reporters wanted to know when Biden would make an announcement of his own. Ron Klain, who was still Biden’s chief of staff at the time, offered a real answer the following month. Klain said that he expected Biden to kick off his campaign after the holidays.
Yet the holidays came and went. Not just Christmas and New Year’s, but Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and Easter too. Throughout early 2023, Biden hesitated to come out of the gate. As January passed, his team said the announcement would come after February’s State of the Union address. By the time that speech was delivered, Biden’s inner circle was again signaling something new—that the campaign would take off in April. As that month began and the flowers bloomed, Democrats who approached Biden aides looking for campaign work were told it would be even longer.
The president’s waffling led to a swirl of doubts, rumors, and probing articles by respected reporters suggesting he could bow out. Other politicians who were deferring to Biden were quietly making their own Plan B preparations and fishing for gossip about the president’s plans.
But for the expectation Klain had set, Biden’s hesitancy might not have even been noticed. Barack Obama waited until April 2011 to officially kick off his second campaign. George W. Bush went in May. Indeed, when pressed about Biden’s intentions, his aides would point to those two dates, which they had committed to memory.
Once again, drama unfolded around the president fueled by the public’s almost reflexive doubts about Biden and his team. By late February 2023, Politico joined the chorus of pundits speculating Biden might stay on the sidelines with a flashy article bylined by six reporters that suggested the president “may not run.” Biden’s aides dismissed it all as the DC press corps’ obsession with the campaign horse race and insatiable need for content.
“Our view on the speculation on us is that it’s like dumb and pointless,” the campaign staffer said.
The president’s aides knew he was plotting his campaign with an innermost circle of confidants who weren’t talking to the press: his longtime advisers Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, and Jen O’Malley Dillon.
The campaign staffer said they “wouldn’t put any stock” in coverage suggesting Biden was waffling and cast it as the product of reporters feeding a need for content with the musings of gossipy figures in the president’s outer orbit. “Especially Politico.… They just feel like they need to do things on this all the time and they’re talking to people on the periphery.”
But there were real concerns at play. There was work to be done; presidential races kick off in earnest the year before the election. Between the primaries and the general, the campaign goes on for months and, well before that, it takes time to build your machinery in the key states, hire staff, and raise the massive amounts of cash needed to pay for it all.
Biden ultimately pulled the trigger on April 25, 2023. During the months when the president bided his time, Trump was traveling the country, hosting rallies, and raising millions. Other Republicans, including former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, were starting to do the same.
But Biden wasn’t just standing still prior to his campaign launch. He had already put his stamp on the presidential primary.
At the Democratic National Committee’s winter meetings in February 2023, Biden pushed through a sweeping realignment of the party’s primary process. The plan was designed to answer some of the tensions and frustration that emerged around Iowa’s collapse three years earlier. The changes also gave Biden a smoother path to a second term. However, elements of the new system set the stage for major conflicts down the road.
On the surface, the reforms were part of efforts by Biden and top Democrats to make peace with progressives and address their concerns from 2016 and 2020. However, as it was enacted, Biden’s vision sparked discontent from the left. It wasn’t just about the next campaign. Aspects of the plan virtually guaranteed the primary calendar would be a focal point of feuds for years to come.
The modern primary process is the product of past tensions between the Democratic left and center. It dates back to 1972. Prior to that race, party nominees were chosen on the floor of the quadrennial conventions and, really, in smoke-filled back rooms during those conclaves. The old-school machines that controlled Democratic cities and counties around the country also had a hold on the presidential nomination. Early primary voting took place, but it was on a small scale and played little formal role in the final decision. A state’s voters might elect their delegates to the convention, but the delegates’ names were what appeared on the ballot, not the presidential candidate’s. Once those elected delegates got to the convention, they could vote however they wished—or however they were told. Party bosses, not voters, held sway. For decades, true participatory democracy was just a token element of the Democratic Party. The infamous “Siege of Chicago” at the DNC’s 1968 convention, when protesters from an array of anti-war and countercultural groups battled with police in the streets, helped pressure the bosses to make a change.
Following the riots, the party created a commission that was initially chaired by progressive senator George McGovern to review the delegate selection process. Following the recommendations produced by the commission, the votes conducted by state parties took on a much larger role in the presidential nomination. More than ever before, primary voters would choose the presidential candidate they preferred, and their collective choices would be given a binding effect at the nominating conventions.
States are generally supposed to hold their nominating contests between the first Tuesday of March and the second Tuesday of June, a period the DNC’s bureaucracy refers to as “the window.” However, a certain number of states are permitted a waiver to go earlier, in what’s called the “pre-window period.” Iowa and New Hampshire owned this early “pre-window period” for most of the modern primary era.
There are various stories about how Iowa ended up first on the calendar. According to one tale, the state party had a slow-moving mimeograph machine and they set an early date in order to have time to produce copies of the results in all the precincts.
The state’s early caucus date garnered little attention at the time due to the overall novelty of the process. Because it was a caucus rather than a primary, it also sidestepped a potential clash with New Hampshire, which was immensely proud of its own “first-in-the-nation” primary that dates back to 1920.
New Hampshire’s tradition went unchallenged during the decades when the voting was largely an afterthought in the nominating process. However, with the tensions of 1968, leaders in the Granite State mounted an effort to protect their status.
As the 1976 election approached, a bipartisan group of New Hampshire lawmakers backed by the Republican governor (who was mulling his own presidential bid and eager to secure home field advantage) proposed a bill to forever enshrine the state’s “first-in-the-nation” primary. The legislation allowed the secretary of state to schedule the primary “seven days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election.”
In an essay held in the secretary of state’s archives, James Splaine, a Democratic former state senator who helped mastermind the plan, explained that the law was specifically designed to ensure New Hampshire stayed at the front of the line. Splaine and his allies realized they needed to give the secretary of state the authority to quickly change the date of the primary to avoid a game of hopscotch between states. Splaine made his case at a state senate committee hearing in March 1975.
“The bill you have before you was first introduced last December after I learned that a number of other states were trying to take the first-in-the-nation presidential primary away from New Hampshire,” Splaine said. “There was an amendment tacked onto the bill. [It] guarantees that even if [there is a] concerted effort to get a regional primary [we] would still guarantee that ours will be first.”
It took only ten minutes for the committee to approve the bill. The senate passed it that same day. Soon after New Hampshire enacted its primary law, Iowa adopted its own measure designed to keep its caucuses first.
Splaine’s essay demonstrated the paradox at play in the efforts by the early states to guard their status. “In the Granite State, our presidential primary not only has stood the test of time, it is pure American democracy at its best,” he wrote. Splaine and his fellow lawmakers had convinced themselves that an election process that granted them undue influence despite the protests of their countrymen was somehow uniquely fair.
Along with legal maneuvering, Iowa and New Hampshire managed to fend off various challenges from other states for decades with the help of national party leadership who saw the benefit of opening the primary campaign in relatively cheap media markets—and avoiding broader conflict.
For Democrats, increased pressure for diversity and the debacle during the 2020 Iowa caucus changed all that. Even Iowa’s leaders began to realize the decades-old arrangement would have to change.
“I certainly don’t think we’re ever going to see the old, traditional caucus ever again,” one high-level Democrat who worked in the state said in a 2022 interview for this book. “I think people are done with that. I think the counting fiasco was really what finally gave everyone the hook.”
Iowa’s Democratic establishment knew they had little defense for the overly complex, undemocratic nature of the game. One Democrat who’d served in various campaign and government roles in the state over several decades described coming to a reluctant conclusion that change was overdue.
“We all know you fundamentally don’t really have a good answer for why this process leaves out all the people who can’t show up at seven o’clock at the church hall or somebody’s basement or wherever it is,” this Democrat said.
“As someone who has spent a chunk of my career and life in Iowa, I nonetheless absolutely believe—and would have believed this whether or not the counting blew up in 2020—that the time has passed,” they added. “When I first started working in Iowa, I probably didn’t have the language to tell you that … a very old and very white state exerts an ideological influence in the way that I do now.… It becomes sort of hard to reconcile in your head.”
The problems went beyond the caucus process and the vote count meltdown. Many Democrats—particularly former HUD secretary Julián Castro, who ran for president in 2020—had begun to raise concerns with the fact that over 60 percent of the state was white.
In April 2022, citing worries about diversity and the general election competitiveness of the early part of the primary calendar, the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) expanded to five the number of states it expected to permit to hold contests during that crucial “pre-window” period and invited any state or territory that wanted an opportunity to go early to apply. For the first time, Iowa and New Hampshire would be at risk not only of having their first-in-the-nation status diluted, but of losing it entirely.
“We said, ‘Let’s throw the door open,’ ” observed 2022 RBC member and longtime Democratic operative Mo Elliethee in an interview for this book. “Let’s just see who wants it. The current four can reapply.”
Twenty states submitted their bids over the course of the summer. Even tiny Delaware, Biden’s home state, put in an application to the committee.
The RBC was set to meet to discuss changes to the primary calendar on the first weekend of December 2022. That Friday, coming off the Democrats’ reassuring performance in the November midterms, Biden sent a letter to the committee explaining how he wanted the process to look.
His letter listed a series of principles. First, Biden wrote, “We must ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process.” Second, “Our party should no longer allow caucuses as part of our nominating process.”
“We are a party dedicated to ensuring participation by all voters and for removing barriers to political participation,” Biden wrote. “Caucuses—requiring voters to choose in public, to spend significant amounts of time to caucus, disadvantaging hourly workers and anyone who does not have the flexibility to go to a set location at a set time—are inherently anti-participatory. It should be our party’s goal to rid the nominating process of restrictive, anti-worker caucuses.”
Third, “the early states” on the calendar “must reflect the overall diversity of our party and our nation—economically, geographically, demographically.” Fourth, somewhat repetitively, “There should continue to be strong representation from urban, suburban, and rural America.”
At the conclusion of the letter, Biden outlined the rationale behind his push for changes.
“I have made no secret of my conviction that diversity is a critical element for the Democratic Party to win elections AND to govern effectively,” Biden wrote, later adding, “Just like my Administration, the Democratic Party has worked hard to reflect the diversity of America—but our nominating process does not.… I am committed to working with the DNC to get this done.”
But there was a fifth principle as well. Biden specified that “the Rules and Bylaws Committee should review the calendar every four years.” It was just a dozen words, but that simple idea is likely to detonate inside the party for years to come.
Along with outlining his principles for the primary process in writing, Biden let it be known more discreetly the specific lineup of states he would prefer. Various comments made by party leaders during the RBC’s meetings acknowledged that the new order had come down from the White House. The party followed Biden’s recommendations precisely.
The plan officially passed at the DNC’s winter meetings, which took place in Philadelphia in February 2022, two months after Biden sent his letter. On the night before the vote, Biden and Harris made a rare appearance to rally the troops in the hotel ballroom where the proceedings were set to take place.
A stage was set up in front of a bank of TV cameras with a lectern, a printed “Biden—Harris” backdrop, and a pair of risers where a couple dozen supporters could stand in tight knots behind the speakers holding signs that read “GO JOE” and “KAMALA.”
Standing at the lectern beneath the hot lights, Harris cast the moment in heroic terms that were starkly at odds with the pair’s actual standing.
“When someone asked me a few weeks ago for my one word to describe the new year, I said, ‘momentum.’ Momentum!” she declared.
A moment later, Harris seemed to admit that, despite her feeling they had “two years of good work” with “a lot of good material to show for it,” the public was not necessarily sold.
“We have momentum, and now let’s let the people know!” she said.
After Harris warmed up the crowd, Biden took the stage.
“Folks,” he said. “I truly believe we’re living in an inflection point in modern history, it comes along every four or five generations where what happens in a short period of time in a country or around the world has a fundamental effect for the next three to four decades.”
Biden’s assessment of the moment was dramatic, but it was also fundamentally optimistic. With his voice alternating between shouts and a stage whisper, Biden called it an “extraordinary opportunity to build America and a world that’s more fair, and just, and more free.” And, in the president’s telling, he’d already made great strides on that front. As he ran through the dangers, including an ascendant China and increasingly extreme right wing, Biden also rattled off a laundry list of his own achievements including a rebounding economy, significant gun control, police reform legislation, and major steps to combat climate change.
The performance was vintage Diamond Joe. With all of the questions hanging in the air, the speeches, which were punctuated by chants of “Four more years!” felt like a clear answer. One DNC member in attendance aptly described it as “the soft launch” of their 2024 reelection run.
Without making much news, the event signaled to any loyal Democrat who had pondered the president’s advancing age or the ticket’s flagging popularity that it was time to put such thoughts aside. Biden and Harris remained a united ticket with the full support of the official organs of their party, and whatever their faults, the train was leaving the station.
The dress rehearsal the DNC held for the campaign was a simple and safe, if emphatic, exercise in practical politics. What came the following day was more audacious and far riskier.
When the DNC dignitaries gathered in the ballroom, they voted to move South Carolina to the front of the line. Along with resetting the location of the first vote, the DNC proposed scrambling the other early states on the schedule. According to the plan, three days after South Carolina’s voters headed to the polls, New Hampshire and Nevada would simultaneously hold a second round of primaries. Georgia would go next and Michigan would be the last of the early states.
The basic intention behind the changes was clear. This lineup was a major injection of diversity into the process. According to census data, the new list of states brought over 3.1 million new voters of color into the first two rounds of the primary process. Swapping Iowa for Nevada and South Carolina meant the early primary electorate would be about 24 percent more diverse. Reordering the states also removed caucuses from the party’s early primary calculus.
These moves followed all of Biden’s recommendations. They also rewarded South Carolina, the state that propelled him to the nomination in 2020.
In elevating South Carolina, Biden also seemed to be dealing a blow to progressive insurgents—a notion that the allies of Bernie Sanders instantly seized upon. Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s 2020 campaign manager, blasted the proposal. In a New York Times op-ed published shortly after Biden’s letter was made public, Shakir argued that South Carolina’s conservative political tradition, its hostility to organized labor, and its status as a staunchly red state in general elections made it undeserving of the special honor of going first. To him, the move was more about doing a favor for Biden’s allies in the state, who helped him vault past Sanders in the primary.
“We all know why South Carolina got the nod,” Shakir wrote. “President Biden, Representative Jim Clyburn and many of his top supporters were buoyed by their campaign’s comeback in February 2020 when the state delivered Mr. Biden his first victory of the season—and a big one at that.… None of that story is a reason to put South Carolina first, however.”
Nina Turner, the co-chair of Sanders’s campaign in 2020 who was mulling her own potential presidential campaign, saw the move as an attempt to handicap her and others on the left.
“There is only one reason why they changed that, and that is to make sure that there’s a higher hurdle for progressive candidates to jump,” Turner told the online publication Semafor shortly after the DNC vote. “There are plenty of states with diverse electorates that they could select to be the first. But they pick South Carolina, deliberately, to try to thwart the chances of any progressive candidate.… It’s not in service to Black voters, it’s in service to artificially creating momentum for their status-quo candidates.”
There is some truth to this interpretation. Both Biden and Hillary Clinton scored some of their biggest wins over Bernie Sanders in South Carolina. Accordingly, moving up South Carolina’s primary might also be seen as a way to put obstacles in the path of any challenger to the incumbent president or—one day—to his anointed successor.
On the other hand, in 2008, Barack Obama bested Clinton and John Edwards in South Carolina by a thumping margin as a progressive insurgent. Moreover, Edwards had won the South Carolina primary four years before that, balking John Kerry on his otherwise untroubled march to the nomination. If Biden chose South Carolina for its predictability, he might be disappointed.
The remainder of the new calendar also largely aligned with Biden’s general election needs. It would spur Democrats to get a head start organizing the key battlegrounds of Nevada, Michigan, and Georgia, close contests in 2020 that were essential to Biden’s electoral college victory.
Biden’s slate stripped Iowa—a state which had gone for Trump in two straight elections—of power. However, New Hampshire, which Biden had won by seven points in 2020, was staying in the early window. And, according to Elleithee, an RBC member, it was Biden who saved their spot.
“It is because of President Biden that New Hampshire is being offered a waiver to stay second in the nation,” Elleithee said.
Elleithee noted there was substantial support for pushing New Hampshire down the list.
“A lot of people were saying, ‘Well, let’s bump them. Let’s maybe push them further back into the window. That might actually make more sense.’ The president saved them,” he explained.
With South Carolina going first, New Hampshire could no longer claim it was the “first-in-the-nation” primary. Sharing a date with Nevada also meant it was not alone as the second stop on the calendar. Still, Elleithee made the case that, practically speaking, this is where New Hampshire had always been—as the perennial second contest—and that the distinction of being the first-in-the-nation primary, rather than a caucus, was always a “fallacy.”
“The committee was torn on whether or not New Hampshire should remain in the early window at all,” Elleithee elaborated. “I think they made some very compelling arguments to stay in early window, not the least of which is they make the most sense [as the representative] from the East.”
In his assessment of why the DNC kept New Hampshire among the early states, Elleithee touched on a few of the requirements the committee had as it evaluated the various applicants. Ideally, the DNC wanted states from the different major regions of the country. It also wanted to select states where candidates would be able to compete without massive budgets. This gave smaller states, which are easier and cheaper to barnstorm, an advantage in the selection process. It also meant locations with pricier media markets, like New Jersey—which is largely serviced by television stations in the major cities of New York and Philadelphia—were out.
“There were slim pickings among the Eastern states,” Elleithee explained.
Delaware, which is the second smallest state by size and roughly a third non-white, would seem to fit the bill. However, in Delaware’s case, its association with Biden proved damaging. A former DNC official asked to maintain anonymity when discussing Delaware due to the sensitivity of the matter.
“Let’s stay on background on the Delaware question,” the official said. “At least until Joe Biden leaves office.”
According to this official, when the Delaware delegation came to the DNC, they were told in no uncertain terms that it would not work out by Elaine Kamarck, an RBC member and fiancée of Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who was the Democrats’ House majority whip at the time.
Kamarck saw Delaware as “the worst idea.” She had two opposing concerns. Legitimate challengers might stay away and view the state as in the bag for Biden. Meanwhile, more left-field upstarts like Marianne Williamson, the New Age author who entered the Democratic Primary in 2020 and was running again in 2024, could “wound” Biden if they decided to compete in Delaware and notched even 30 percent of the vote.
“There is literally no upside to having the home state of the incumbent president in the early window,” Kamarck said, according to the staffer. “It becomes a wasted primary.”
With few options in the East palatable to the RBC, New Hampshire would basically stay second on the calendar. Iowa received no such olive branches, and a wide range of voices pronounced the outcome just.
“Iowa failed the country,” Shakir wrote in his op-ed. “It embarrassed a party that was trying to defeat Donald Trump by appealing to democratic foundations and principles. And most unfortunately, Iowa failed its own residents, who cycle after cycle had shown an incredible seriousness of purpose in fulfilling their unique role to choose a president.”
While others may have rejoiced at Iowa’s downfall, the decision left many in the state with raw feelings. Scott Brennan, Iowa’s representative on the RBC, told a local newspaper, The Courier, that the move would help drive the state further right.
“Republicans in Iowa will seize this opportunity to double down on their caucuses and feed the narrative that Democrats have turned their back on Iowa,” Brennan said. “We are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of electoral failure and creating a Fox News bubble for our presidential candidates in which they have no opportunity or responsibility to meet and communicate with voters in red-leaning states.”
There was bitterness from New Hampshire too. Brennan voted against the measure along with New Hampshire’s RBC delegate Joanne Dowdell. “It is frustrating because the DNC is set to punish us despite the fact we don’t have the ability to change state law,” Dowdell said.
Her comment underscored a major potential problem with the DNC’s plan. The party organization controls the nomination process and the delegates that are awarded based on the primary results, but it is not actually in charge of the primaries themselves. While the DNC voted to make changes to the primary calendar, it had no direct power to make that calendar a reality. Primaries are run by state governments and scheduled according to state law, and caucuses are generally run by the state-level political parties, which are not obliged to take orders from the DNC.
In New Hampshire’s case, the law mandating the first-in-the-nation primary was bipartisan and applied to both the Democratic and Republican races. For its changes to be implemented, the DNC would need to rely on the good graces of New Hampshire’s secretary of state or legislature. Iowa and its caucus law posed a similar problem—and, as of this writing—both states are led by Republicans who have little motivation to do any favors for the DNC.
There were similar problems elsewhere. While Georgia was theoretically being rewarded by the committee with an opportunity to move up its date, it had a Republican governor and secretary of state who control the calendar. As of this writing, both of these Republicans insist the date for the primary is already set at its normal place outside of the early window.
Republican power in Georgia meant the DNC’s handling of its reforms gave the opposition the ability to create serious headaches for the Democrats. It also highlighted a simple fact: while the Democrats’ primary process was mired in debate and uncertainty, the Republican National Committee and its constituents swiftly signed off on their 2024 schedule and were set to maintain their status quo. While the major establishment Democratic institutions may have been more unified than their progressive counterparts, they couldn’t match the ruthless efficiency on the opposite side of the two-party system.
The DNC could not dictate the primary calendar outright, but its control of the nominating process gave it substantial leverage to enforce its will, and the Rules and Bylaws Committee sketched out a range of fairly stern penalties to that end. This enforcement mechanism was based on a precedent set in 2008, which was the last time the Democrats had a major fight over the primary calendar.
That cycle showed how difficult and dangerous it can be for the party to change the primary process. The problems in the 2008 race actually started in 2006 when, in a gesture at diversity, the DNC opened up the pre-window period to add South Carolina and Nevada for the 2008 primary. That last series of reforms to the calendar ended up putting the entire system through an intense stress test.
When the pre-window period was expanded to include Nevada and South Carolina for 2008, Florida and Michigan opted to jump the line. Each scheduled primaries before Iowa (and all the other early states) without obtaining a waiver. The DNC initially reacted harshly, stripping Florida and Michigan of all their delegates at the national convention and warning candidates not to campaign there.
This became a potent issue in the protracted contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Obama had done as the DNC wished. He had taken his name off the Michigan ballot (it wasn’t an option to do this in Florida) and he had refrained from campaigning in either of the two states. Most of the other candidates in the primary, including Biden, had done the same. Clinton had not; unlike the other candidates, she had kept her name on the Michigan ballot and had visited Florida again and again for fundraisers in the days leading up to its vote. Naturally, Clinton won the most votes in both Florida and Michigan. When the officially recognized primaries were over, Obama held an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates and he was set to become the nominee—unless you were to count the disqualified delegates from Florida and Michigan.
With the race down to the wire, the Clinton campaign and its supporters—hardened in opposition to Obama by months of campaign brawling—seized on the possibility of legitimizing the Florida and Michigan delegates, who, after all, were backed by the votes of millions of Americans, and just maybe snatching the nomination from Obama. It turned into a bruising battle, which featured a tumultuous protest by hard-core Clinton supporters on the outskirts of a decisive 2008 Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting at a Marriott hotel in Washington.
In the end, the RBC settled on a face-saving compromise: Florida and Michigan would each have half of their pledged delegates seated. It was not enough for Clinton to win or to throw the convention into chaos, but it was something. The rogue states were punished for their intransigence, and the nomination was settled, but the roughly two million Democrats who voted in Michigan’s and Florida’s primaries would at least have some voice at the convention.
That compromise served as the blueprint when the RBC met in late 2022 and outlined the penalty for states that refuse to comply with the DNC’s 2024 primary calendar. The rules would automatically strip any state that held a nominating contest outside the window without a valid waiver of half its delegates. Moreover, any candidate that campaigned in such a state would lose all pledged delegates from that state.
During the 2022 RBC meeting, David McDonald, a committee member, elaborated: “The penalties [for non-compliant states] are automatic and don’t require a vote of the DNC. You lose half your delegates without us taking any action. But in practice, we are highly likely to take away the rest of the delegates with an actual vote depending on the state. That’s what happened in 2008. Because if a state is large enough, half of its delegates is still a big chunk of delegates. So for larger states, we might well take away the rest of the delegates [and] go beyond the automatic.”
Of course, the enforcers of these rules on the RBC would confront a situation somewhat unlike 2008. Rather than policing up-jumped states who sought to disrupt the established order, the RBC would be trying to institute a new one. And their vision of enforcement gives color to the fears that the DNC’s calendar reforms could go seriously awry. If New Hampshire scheduled a primary before South Carolina, as its long-standing law would require its secretary of state to do, Joe Biden’s reelection campaign and any other campaigns in the field would face hard choices driven by New Hampshire’s potential as a battleground state in a general election race.
If the state’s leaders follow through on their threat to ignore the DNC’s rulings, Biden would be forced to either boycott New Hampshire, which would mean devoting no early resources to the state, or to campaign there and open himself up to delegate penalties in a primary or charges of hypocrisy later on.
Biden entered the 2024 race as a powerful incumbent within his own party, but he won the White House in 2020 by fewer than 100,000 votes spread across several states. As his reelection bid began, Biden could much more easily afford to sacrifice New Hampshire’s convention delegates than risk losing its electoral votes. State leaders potentially could exert considerable leverage on the Biden campaign by arguing that sitting out a noncompliant primary would cost him those electoral votes in the general. As of this writing and as the 2024 general election draws nearer, those pressures appear likely to build.
Biden’s own calendar may have created land mines for him on the general election trail. But the delegate issue wasn’t necessarily the most dangerous looming obstacle the reforms posed for the party.
That was Biden’s fifth principle. In his letter outlining his recommendations for the primaries, Biden called for the calendar to be reset every four years. In agreeing to do this, the party baked in potential fights down the road.
The infighting that may occur during the 2024 race is likely to be just a small preview of what will come down the line. There has already been acrimony over the calendar with a powerful incumbent and a primary that is not expected to be competitive. Imagine what could happen if a more crowded field of candidates fights over the calendar. The reforms guarantee that, every four years, the stage will be set for serious battles and candidates scrambling to gain advantages from the schedules.
The calendar decisions each cycle, by necessity, will occur in obscure party committee meetings well before anyone casts a vote. Thanks to modern laws, you won’t find anyone lighting a cigarette in those meetings, but they could represent a return of the smoke-filled room. After all of his efforts to heal the divisions within the party, Biden created a new venue for major internecine fights going forward.
Perhaps the clearest winners from the calendar makeover were South Carolina and the man who was pivotal in delivering the state to Biden: Jim Clyburn. At the end of the DNC meeting in Philadelphia, the last word went to “Big Jim,” who delivered final remarks from the dais. His stamp on the new process was clear.
On his way out of the venue, we asked Clyburn whether he had talked with Biden about moving his home state to first position.
“Not for one second. Never. I don’t know where people get that idea,” Clyburn insisted.
However, as he was walking away, Clyburn paused, turned around, and seemed to admit he had indeed made a request on behalf of his state.
“I just wanted to be in the window,” he said with a wry smile.