The Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee has begun the process to decide its 2028 nominating process, taking the first in a series of steps that will determine whether New Hampshire returns to its traditional spot at the front of the party’s presidential primary calendar.
The committee Monday voted unanimously to require any state hoping to win an early spot in its 2028 primary to submit a proposal by mid-January arguing for why it is best poised to help Democrats win back the White House.
Party leaders stressed they want what DNC Chairman Ken Martin called a “rigorous, effective, fair calendar and process” to select the party’s next presidential standard-bearer.
Martin noted that final decisions on the Democratic calendar are still a long way off. But the jockeying for calendar position is already well underway. Several committee members said the priority needs to be to select early-voting states that will help Democrats win in 2028.
“The real question we face is asking each state why including them in the early window period helps us elect a Democratic president and win the elections,” said Stuart Applebaum, a DNC member from New York.
New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley participated in Monday’s meeting, but did not speak. Yet in a memo Buckley released last week, he argued that New Hampshire deserves to lead off Democrats’ 2028 nominating calendar because it is a state that fairly tests candidates by making them go face to face with voters.
“We believe that we should go first because we are a small, purple state with unmatched civic participation. In other words, there is no other state that better meets the efficiency, rigorousness, and fairness criteria needed in our presidential nominating process,” Buckley said.
The process of setting the Democrats’ primary calendar has been increasingly contentious in recent presidential cycles. In the runup to the 2024 elections, the Rules and Bylaws Committee endorsed a primary calendar favored by then-President Joe Biden that gave South Carolina the party’s first primary.
Under that same proposal, New Hampshire was offered the chance to share the second slot in the calendar with Nevada if lawmakers here repealed a 50-year-old state law mandating that New Hampshire hold the first primary. The DNC also told New Hampshire it would need to pass a law authorizing no-excuse absentee voting to earn the second spot in the primary calendar.
Both proposals were essentially political non-starters, given in GOP-control of the New Hampshire State House and the state’s bipartisan tradition of fighting to preserve its early role in presidential primaries for both major parties.
At the time, many national Democrats cited New Hampshire’s lack of racial diversity as justification for bumping it from its leadoff role.
Four years later, the state remains one of the whitest in the country, a fact Buckley’s memo aimed to address.
“New Hampshire’s racial diversity continues to increase, especially among our youngest Granite Staters,” Buckley wrote, adding that New Hampshire has a record of diversity that extends beyond race.
“We are the only state in the country to elect a woman both governor and senator — which we’ve done multiple times,” Buckley said.
In Monday’s meeting, it was apparent that racial diversity won’t be the only front on which New Hampshire’s could have to fight. Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan, a Rules and Bylaws member who has long championed placing her state at the front of the nominating calendar, stressed that to win the presidency in 2028, a Democratic nominee should be tested in big states — the earlier the better.
“Retail politics isn’t a reality by October, and we need to see how candidates do in real states, in early states,” Dingell said.
