South Carolina Went First to Protect Black Votes. Democrats Should Say So.
On Friday, July 24, the Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws Committee did something that would have seemed impossible a decade ago. It handed the opening slot of the 2028 calendar, January 22, to South Carolina outright, stacked Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia behind it across the five Tuesdays of February, and left Iowa off the early-voting map entirely. The caucus state that opened every Democratic cycle from the 1970s through 2020 is now a rounding error in somebody else's primary.
The case against this, made by people who have spent real time in Manchester diners and Iowa VFW halls, deserves to be stated at full strength before it gets answered. Small, retail-politics states let a candidate with no money and no name recognition out-organize a favorite through door-knocking and town halls rather than television ad budgets. Compress the early calendar into six larger, more diverse states voting in five weeks, and you shift the advantage toward whoever can buy statewide media and field a national operation from day one — which tends to mean whoever the party already likes. Iowa and New Hampshire were never representative of the country. They were representative of what an underfunded campaign could survive.
It is a real cost, and Democrats should not pretend otherwise. But the evidence for what South Carolina actually does to underdogs is more complicated than the theory suggests, and Democrats have already run the experiment. In 2020, South Carolina did not reward the shoestring campaign. It rescued the establishment one. Joe Biden had finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire before Rep. James Clyburn's endorsement and a decisive South Carolina win put his campaign back together four days before Super Tuesday. Clyburn stood in Columbia again on May 29, this time with Rep. Ro Khanna and Gov. Andy Beshear, at an event that read less like a primary preview than a rehearsal for exactly this fight. South Carolina is a proving ground for who Black voters, specifically, are willing to save.
That is the actual reason for the move, and the DNC gave two explanations for it that do not carry equal weight. One was that Nevada, the other finalist for the top spot, has struggled to process election results quickly — a real administrative concern, and a convenient one. The other, stated by party officials to Politico, was that Democrats wanted to strengthen Black voting power in the South after the Supreme Court significantly restricted the Voting Rights Act earlier this year, a ruling that has already triggered redistricting fights across several states. The second reason is the true one, and it is a defensible strategic choice for a party whose most reliable voting bloc just watched a federal court narrow its legal protections. It should be argued for on those terms — as a considered response to a Supreme Court ruling — not laundered through a claim about county election servers in Clark County.
Put the rest of the ledger on the table too, because the DNC's fix for one state creates a genuine mess for another. New Mexico currently holds a consolidated primary in June, covering the presidential race alongside its House and legislative primaries. To vote on February 15 as the new calendar demands, the state legislature must either pass a standalone presidential primary law or move its entire consolidated primary nearly four months earlier — which would give New Mexico the earliest downballot primary in the country, whether its legislators want that distinction or not. Virginia gets off easy by comparison, sliding its date up by a single week. Michigan beat out Iowa for the Midwest's early slot. New Hampshire, demoted to third after decades of going first or second, has state law requiring it to hold the nation's first primary and has floated jumping to January 11 regardless of what the DNC decides — eleven days ahead of South Carolina.
This is the part worth sitting with longer than the diversity headline. A national committee of roughly 400 people voted to reorder an entire nominating process, and that vote does not bind a single state legislature to do anything. New Hampshire has broken from national party calendars before and can do it again; its law does not care what Washington decides in a rules committee. New Mexico's legislature has to actually pass something, on its own timeline, in its own political weather. The DNC can design the machine. It cannot compel fifty separate sovereignties to run it on schedule.
None of that undoes the legitimacy of the choice to lead with South Carolina. A party is entitled to decide which voters it most needs to hear from first, and after a Supreme Court ruling that narrowed the Voting Rights Act, prioritizing Black voters in the South is a coherent answer to a real problem rather than a symbolic gesture. What Democrats owe their own coalition is the honesty to defend that choice on its merits, instead of smuggling it in behind a line about Nevada's vote-counting software.
The full DNC votes on this calendar in August. Whether it survives contact with New Hampshire's state law, New Mexico's legislature, and whatever the courts do next with redistricting will tell you more about who controls a modern primary than the committee's vote ever did.