A bombshell poll out of New Hampshire showed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in a tight fight with former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a hypothetical 2028 Democratic presidential nomination contest, highlighting the importance of the primary.
That paints a radically different picture than the national polls, which former Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 nominee, has been dominating. The RealClearPolitics polling average shows Harris in first place with 28.1%, Buttigieg in third with 11.1%, and Ocasio-Cortez in fourth at 8.5%. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) is in second place with 16.5%.
But there is no national primary, whereas New Hampshire will get a chance to award Democratic candidates delegates and momentum — though perhaps not in its traditional role as the first primary.
Democrats are currently debating their exact 2028 primary schedule, with decisions to come as soon as this week. Iowa and New Hampshire, historically the first states to vote, have fallen out of favor.
Iowa and New Hampshire are seen as too white. Iowa also botched its 2020 caucuses, which led to its demotion in the 2024 calendar.
The 2024 Democratic primaries were not competitive, with then-President Joe Biden facing only token opposition, though the schedule was revised to help him anyway. He later dropped out after fumbling a debate and was replaced by Harris at the Democratic National Convention.
In 2028, the primary is expected to be much more competitive, and the order in which states vote could matter a great deal. New Hampshire remaining an early state could boost Ocasio-Cortez or another socialist. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) won the primary in 2020 and is still receiving 6% of the vote in the latest University of New Hampshire poll. If the octogenarian Sanders doesn’t run, most of those votes would presumably go to Ocasio-Cortez.
Or New Hampshire could help Buttigieg, who finished a close second there in 2020 and is right behind the New York congresswoman in the UNH survey. It might at least help him gain control of the nonprogressive lane, at the expense of Govs. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) and Andy Beshear (D-KY) or former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel.
South Carolina going first would appear to be a boon to Harris. Black voters in the state salvaged Biden’s slow-starting 2020 campaign, handing him a landslide victory that reestablished him as the front-runner the rest of the way.
But that’s where the racial coalition politics gets tricky for Democrats: Nevada, where the primary electorate is heavily Hispanic, also wants to go first.
“If Nevada gets elevated over South Carolina, it would be because of their Latino vote,” South Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Christale Spain bluntly told the New York Times. “So you would then be telling Black voters that you matter less than brown voters. And I refuse to believe that our party wants to send any type of message like that.”
Putting it in those crude bean-counting terms may not yield the results the South Carolina Democratic leader wants, however. Hispanic voters swung heavily toward Trump and the GOP in 2024 and are expected to at least somewhat swing back toward the Democrats this year.
Trump’s inroads with black men were more modest, and black women remained one of the Democrats’ most reliable voting blocs, giving Harris 92% of the vote. Hispanics will be courted by both parties in 2028.
South Carolina didn’t need to be first to help Biden in 2020, after he lost badly in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. The same was true of Barack Obama in 2008, when the Palmetto State confirmed the dramatic shift in black support away from erstwhile front-runner Hillary Clinton to then-freshman senator from Illinois. South Carolina just needed to be early.
“I learned that the best batter on the team is the cleanup hitter,” Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), arguably the state’s most influential black Democratic elected official, said in the New York Times article. Fourth place. And so South Carolina will be OK continuing being the best batter on the team, the cleanup batter.”
Under this scenario, South Carolina could remain influential simply by being the first in the South and voting before Super Tuesday.
But Biden supporters didn’t want to take that chance in 2024. Harris’s lieutenants might feel the same way. Her past presidential campaigns have started strong but then fizzled out. She might not want to cede momentum to other candidates.
In 2020, several non-socialist candidates cleared the field for Biden to help prevent a Sanders nomination. The socialist wing of the party looks much stronger now.
Maybe Democrats would circle the wagons around Harris or another candidate to avoid a socialist nominee once again. It seems more likely that ambitious Democrats would not want to invite the socialists’ ire by coordinating with the party establishment against them.
DEMOCRATS STILL SEARCHING FOR IDENTITY TWO YEARS AFTER BIDEN’S EXIT
Harris would surely like to avoid the fate of Rudy Giuliani on the other side of the aisle. Giuliani led in the national polls for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination for many months. For various reasons, he was reluctant to compete in the early states. By the time he was ready to make his last stand in Florida, his polling lead had evaporated, and the race had passed him by.
Much about the 2028 race remains up in the air. For Democrats, that includes the calendar.