The Democratic National Committee is now giving New Hampshire until June 3 to meet the party's requirements to hold an early primary.

The state originally had until Jan. 5 to repeal the state law requiring New Hampshire’s primary to be first and to allow early voting.

The state party has said neither can be done with Republicans holding both houses of the legislature and the governor's office.

The national party could take away New Hampshire’s current second spot in the Democratic primary calendar if the demands aren't met.

State leaders from both parties have promised to still hold the first primary.

To this day, I fail to understand how the hell political party rules supersede state law. Someone who knows more than me, please enlighten.

SC resident here (worked in NH for a couple months). Dems want the first primary to be in SC because they believe that black people will vote for whatever establishment crony Jim Clyburn tells them to. SC black people saved Biden’s candidacy in 2020 and Bernie has won the NH primary two too many times for their liking.

The Dem Party is allowed to set its own rules, more or less, on how it picks a nominee for president. The general election is obviously much more governed by rules outside of the control of any one party.

Because all states now offer caucuses or primary elections, the major parties have settled on that system. But they don’t have to use it.

Dems are saying that they still want to pick their nominee using the primary process, but they want a different order.

The problem is that they can’t control the date a state holds their primary. So if a state does not change its primary date to match the Dem’s preferred schedule, DNC has two options: accept the primary and assign delegates at the national convention based on the primary results; or do not put weight on the primary.

The DNC is saying they will go with option 2. They say that if NH goes forward with the FITN primary, then NH will not get any votes at the national convention (or the votes will count for half) thereby limiting NH’s influence on the party’s nominee for president. The DNC has further said that if NH goes forward with the FITN primary, any candidate who campaigns in NH during the primary will not be invited to any DNC sponsored primary debates. So they are trying to use the leverage to get NH legislature to change their laws.

NH isn’t changing its laws, it’s going forward with FITN primary in 2024. Unclear what DNC will do. A few elections ago, DNC tried to get FL and MI to change its primary process, making threats similar to the ones they are making now. FL and MI didn’t make the changes the DNC wanted, but the DNC eventually relented and FL and MI’s votes were counted just like all of the others. Presumably that is what they will do here as well, but since NH is a smaller state, they may feel more empowered to cut it off and tell NH to fuck off. The problem with that is that NH is a purple state but has 2 blue congresspeople and 2 blue senators. Party should be a little wary of getting too adverse to NH, because they are going to need to protect those seats.

I don’t understand why they are putting so much effort into creating this shakeup. When was the last time NH even picked the eventual nominee? Obama? It’s not like just because we’re first it’s a done deal that whoever wins NH, wins the nomination.

This could bite the DNC in the ass and for what?

Hillary notably won the primary - there was the famous scene of her crying in Portsmouth and prognosticators wondering if that was bad for her image. For dems if you want when nh picked the dem that won the general you have to go back to carter.

I’m kind of ambivalent about nh keeping it - but sc isn’t the place it should go to if it loses it. The best states to take it are either Illinois or Wisconsin.

Very informative. Thank you! Honestly have no idea how the DNCs hostile behavior toward the NH FITN will necessary impact the state’s attitude toward the party and it’s candidates. Not sure if Democratic and Dem leaning Independents will care enough to justify voting red or not voting at all.

They can issue any demands they like, they're not convincing the Republican trifecta government to change anything. The Republicans would love to see NH residents get mad at Democrats for abandoning the state in the primary; no one's going to get mad at the Republicans for not giving up something that NH has as a point of pride. This is the stupidest thing I've seen a political organization do that wasn't the Florida Democratic Party.

This won’t change the DNC from trying to push their favored candidate over who THE PEOPLE want to be the candidate.

I don't really know if it it'll impact the Democratic party at a federal level, but it may have a big impact at the state level with how much revenue the primary brings to New Hampshire.

Personally, I hope New Hampshire relents. We're still going second which isn't really all the different than before considering Iowa's caucus happened before NH's primary. I've personally always thought that NH, SC, and NV should all vote on the same day since that's a fairly diverse sample size and all three states are small enough media market wise that small time candidates wouldn't necessarily get boxed out by the campaigns with the big war chests.

I’ve got a couple of reasons I think NH shouldn’t relent but this isn’t the DNC moving NH 2nd. This is them moving NH to Super Tuesday. They knowingly put a poison pill in the terms that would allow NH to go 2nd. The DNC is acting in bad faith throughout this process.

Did they move NH further back? The original proposition I read was SC and then NV and NH the same day followed by MI after. It was Iowa that got booted way back.

It’s that NH can go second if the Republican-controlled legislature and Republican governor agree to change the state law on primary date and agree to change laws to expand access to voting. Republicans in NH have made it clear well-before the DNC made this ask that they don’t support those measures and won’t agree to them.

So NH can indeed go second if they were to go along with the rules? That's not Super Tuesday.

Basically, they're going to throw out our primary results entirely in favor of this law? As an NH Democratic voter, that's far more annoying than NH being moved a week behind SC which is effectively no different than a week after the Iowa caucus.

> So NH can indeed go second if they were to go along with the rules?

If they comply with DNC demands that the DNC is well-aware they can’t comply with, then yes. Which is why it is transparent bad faith and the intended effect is to move NH to Super Tuesday. It’s not correct to say NH would be going second under this proposal.

It’d be like me saying that I will vote for Biden in 2024 if he gets single-payer healthcare pushed through. I could pretend that means I’m giving him a chance to win my vote, but we all know that if I set out that criteria, all I’m really saying is I wouldn’t be voting for Biden in 2024.

NH isn’t throwing out Dem primary results, DNC is the one saying they would do that. And yes, I think a lot of NH Dems would be irked by that. Needless fight for DNC to pick.

Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot: Dem gov sits in statehouse and Dems control legislature and RNC says - okay state Republican Party, we are going to not count state Republican primary votes unless the state adopts the gerrymandered congressional map drawn up by Republicans. The Dem reaction, once the laughter stopped, would be something along the lines of: are you serious - who do you think you are - go pound sand.

Dems would be thrilled at the intraparty fighting that comes out of that; state and national republicans fighting. Dems would get to say that GOP doesn’t care about your votes but Dems do. They would get to say that GOP outsiders think they can come into our state and tell us what laws we can have. Dems would get to mobilize in the state (a purple state) and message to voters without any response or pushback from the GOP. Dems would be thrilled to be in the position state GOP are in.

This was going to happen sooner or later. I understand where the DNC is coming from, Iowa was a poor representative of the general electorate and are a poor predictor of what the national election would look like. NH isn't great either, but at least we're more representative of suburbia/college educated voters.

I think you're eyeing this a bit too vindictively. The DNC's purpose here is not to specifically spite NH, but make a more dynamic primary process that will respond to electorate and more relevant to the general election. Hence why you have Georgia and Michigan moving forward since both of those states are more relevant in the general election. In future years they'd likely move other states forwards or backwards based on the general election results. That's a good thing.

I also don't really care what happens with RNC. Their party and their primaries are way more of a shit show than the DNC. Their winner take all system is atrociously bad and it's partly the reason why we ended up with Trump in the first place.

> This was going to happen sooner or later.

Maybe so. But if that’s the case, they could have gone about it in good-faith. If they were intending to move NH to Super Tuesday, then just say that; just have that be the initial proposal. And if you are going to pick a state that is more racially diverse, pick one that makes sense in the larger scheme of things rather than the one that looks an awful lot like a political kickback to a state that helped propel the current president to the WH. Pick one that is purple or reliably democratic. One that is more religiously diverse and better represents the country and Dem voters on that front.

And I don’t think everyone in the DNC is being vindictive (I certainly think some are), I just think they are needlessly picking a fight that they cannot win. And one that isn’t going to help them with purple voters who have currently sent an all-blue delegation to Washington. And it’s one that hands the GOP a lot of assets that I’m sure they are thrilled to have.

> I also don't really care what happens with RNC.

Nor do Republicans about the DNC. It’s why the DNC will be the ones people blame (to the extent people blame anyone) if they choose to disenfranchise NH voters.

I think you overestimate how much voters care about the primary and underestimate how much they care about actual policy. Case in point, the Republicans straight up canceled a bunch of their primaries going into 2020 and voters did not punish them for that.

If Biden is running again, he's the de facto nominee and Democratic primary turn out would be low regardless. If he opts not to run, then maybe this has a small impact. Furthermore, the primary really only impact Democratic voters or Democratic leaning independents, not potential swing voters who don't vote in the primary anyways.

Regardless, whatever small spat happens over the primary will largely be forgotten by the general election. It's actually better to pull off this band-aid now with a sitting Democratic President running for a second term rather than later when the primary actually matters.

It may be that primary order is a non-issue for people but the push to move SC first indicates it isn’t a meaningless issue for a lot of other people, its one people put weight on. That people think it is important is why this fight is occurring. And NH’s FITN primary is a part of the political culture of NH, so taking that away is a little more precarious. There’s a reason that all of the State officials felt comfortable coming out strong against this (including state Demparty).

And of those five states you referenced , 3 were deep red so they were never at risk for GOP. The two purple states they played with in 2020, Arizona and Nevada, both went for Biden and both of the toss up Senate seats went blue. Can’t say that the canceled primary was the reason but I don’t think we can say with confidence that voters didn’t tag them for it.

NH has open primaries so it will stop independent voters who want to weigh in on Dem candidates from doing so.

Main point in all of this is that the DNC picked an unwinnable fight and are posturing to significantly reduce the presence of the party in a purple state with an all-blue delegation. And they are doing this in service of something that you say voters don’t care about: primary order. It’s so stupid and is just them shooting themselves in the foot. And it was done in bad faith. This does not strike me as something the DNC really thought through.

I honestly don't think anyone cares.

Besides, even if this was an issue it would still not matter compared to policies.