New Hampshire’s all-Democratic Congressional delegation, led by U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, is doing everything it can to protect New Hampshire’s First-in-the-Nation Primary but is fighting against the party itself and the wishes of President Joe Biden.
Democratic Party officials meeting in the nation’s capital on Friday voted to supplant New Hampshire with South Carolina to kick off the presidential nominating calendar.
The proposal from the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee would see South Carolina lead off the 2024 Democratic presidential nominating calendar with a primary on Feb. 3, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada jointly holding their contests on Feb. 6. Georgia would vote on Feb. 20, followed by Michigan on Feb. 27. According to party rules, only states with special permission – known as carve-out states – can hold nominating contests before the DNC’s primary window begins in March of a presidential election year.
The change would upend years of tradition as New Hampshire has held the first primary since 1920 in both the Democratic and Republican Party schedules and Iowa has held the first caucus for the last 50 years. The move still needs the approval of the full DNC, which is expected to come early next year.
Before Friday’s vote, President Joe Biden unveiled a similar proposal to drastically upend the primary schedule.
Biden, who as the titular head of the Democratic Party is the most powerful player in the process, had finished fifth in the New Hampshire Primary in 2020. He won big in South Carolina, catapulting him to the White House.
Complicating matters, the Republican National Committee voted earlier this year to make no changes to their current order of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada leading off their schedule.
For years Democrats have knocked Iowa and New Hampshire as being unrepresentative of the party as a whole for being largely white with few major urban areas, while the Democratic voting bloc has attracted more minorities over the past several decades. Nevada and South Carolina — which had voted third and fourth in the calendar — are much more diverse than either Iowa or New Hampshire.
Compounding Iowa’s issues was the botched reporting of the 2020 caucuses, which became a national embarrassment for Iowa Democrats as well as the DNC. Michigan and Minnesota pushed to replace Iowa as the Midwestern representative among the early-voting states.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the all-Democrat congressional delegation’s senior member and a former governor, called the proposal “short-sighted.”
Shaheen pointed to the state’s famed small-scale retail politics that gives all presidential contenders – regardless of their fundraising prowess or fame – “a fair shot” and argued that “it’s tremendously disappointing that the President failed to understand the unique role that New Hampshire plays in our candidate selection process as the first primary state.”
The senator warned “as frustrating as this decision is, it holds no bearing over when we choose our primary date: New Hampshire’s State law stipulates that we will hold the ‘First-in-the-Nation’ primary. That status remains unchanged as we are bound by State statute.”
This is far from the first time New Hampshire’s cherished first-in-the-nation status has been threatened. Most recently, in 2007, several states tried to leapfrog New Hampshire, but the Granite State successfully kept its lead-off slot.
Friday’s news had been brewing among Democrats for months. Earlier this year, the DNC moved to force Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina to reapply for early state status in the 2024 calendar. Other states interested in moving up to the top of the calendar also were allowed to apply for an early position.
South Carolina, a red state where Black voters play a major role in Democratic primaries, gave Biden his first victory in the 2020 nomination race. After dismal fourth and fifth-place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden rebounded with a distant second-place finish to Sen. Bernie Sanders in Nevada’s caucuses before his landslide victory in the South Carolina primary propelled him toward the Democratic nomination and eventually the White House.
“We must ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process and throughout the entire early window,” Biden emphasized in a letter to DNC members. “As I said in February 2020, you cannot be the Democratic nominee and win a general election unless you have overwhelming support from voters of color — and that includes Black, Brown and Asian American & Pacific Islander voters.”
The president also reiterated his disdain for caucuses.
“Our party should no longer allow caucuses as part of our nominating process,” he wrote. “ It should be our party’s goal to rid the nominating process of restrictive, anti-worker caucuses.”
Not surprisingly, Democratic officials in Iowa and New Hampshire pilloried the move.
Iowa Democratic Party chairman Ross Wilburn argued Democrats had bigger issues to worry about than the primary calendar.
“Small rural states like Iowa must have a voice in our Presidential nominating process. Democrats cannot forget about entire groups of voters in the heart of the Midwest without doing significant damage to the party for a generation,” Wilburn charged in a statement.
And he warned that Iowa has a similar law to New Hampshire, mandating it shall go first. “Our state law requires us to hold a caucus before the last Tuesday in February, and before any other contest,” he said.
If New Hampshire or Iowa do move up the dates of their contests, the national party could penalize them by stripping them of some of their delegates to the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
But with Republican governors and state legislatures in Georgia and New Hampshire, and a new GOP governor in Nevada, it’s far from a done deal that the states will go along with any decision by the Democrats.
“The good news is that our primary will still be first and the nation will not be held to a substandard process dictated by Joe Biden and the Democrat Party,” New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu said Friday.
Touting that he’s accomplished his goals, New Hampshire GOP chair Steve Stepanek says he won’t seek a third two-year term steering the state’s Republican Party.
“When I was elected four years ago, the NHGOP was and had been in serious financial condition for many years. I made two commitments that day. The first was to put the party on a firm financial footing with an established donor base. The second was to create a solid grassroots organization,” Stepanek noted in a statement on Friday.
“I am happy to say that with the help of many dedicated people, a few of which I have mentioned, that my goal has been achieved,” the chair emphasized. “Therefore, today I am announcing that I will not be seeking a third term as Chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party.”
Stepanek, a businessman and former conservative state lawmaker, served as a co-chair of former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign in New Hampshire. And Trump held his first house party at Stepanek’s home in the early spring of 2015, a couple of months before the former president formally declared his candidacy.
Stepanek was first elected state party chair in 2018 and won re-election in 2020. His announcement not to seek another two-year term was not seen as a surprise by political insiders in New Hampshire.
NHGOP vice chair Pamela Tucker, in an accompanying statement, noted that she won’t seek another term.
The NHGOP will meet in late January to pick their new state party chair, who will serve the next two years. That NHGOP meeting will come just a day after the conclusion of the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting, where the RNC will vote on their next national party chair. Current chair Ronna McDaniel is seeking an unprecedented (in modern times) fourth two-yea r term, but may face challenges. Among those seriously thinking of running is U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, who came close to defeating Gov. Kathy Hochul last month in blue state New York.