Joe Biden’s announcement of his candidacy released Tuesday is the incumbent’s fourth bid for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. It will be not only Biden’s first run for president as the presumptive nominee, but also the first without Iowa and New Hampshire firmly set at the top of the primary calendar. In early February, the Democratic National Committee formally voted to shake up its primary calendar and ratified a change to move South Carolina’s nominating contest first, while reducing the role of New Hampshire and eliminating Iowa as an early state altogether.
For Democrats, the changes would remake the presidential primary calendar, with the Palmetto State going first on February 3, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada on February 6, then Georgia on February 13 and Michigan on February 27. The change follows decades of Democrats carping about the primary order, especially complaints about the process in Iowa and New Hampshire. Those complaints have ranged from the fact that the traditional early states are insufficiently racially diverse to their penchant for rewarding anti-establishment candidates to the specific details of the state’s election processes. This has been particularly true in Iowa, a state that has long used a precinct caucus system in which Iowans typically gather with their neighbors to debate candidates and elect delegates to county conventions as the first step in a multipart process. Iowa’s caucuses do not have an absentee component and require participants to commit to spending part of the evening at their caucus site in order to participate.
So why have Democrats scrambled around something so arcane as the particular order in which states hold presidential primaries? It’s because of the mammoth amount of attention that early states get. These states tend to winnow the field of presidential hopefuls, which can often reach the dozens, down to something more manageable. The result is that politicians and…
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