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Tweet Share Share Comment If you want a fun challenge, here’s an idea for you: Pull out a calendar and try to figure out when, exactly, all the presidential primary contests are going down this year.
I did this recently. I learned the Iowa caucuses are Monday—but just for the Republicans. I learned the New Hampshire primaries are in a couple of weeks—and Joe Biden is not on the ballot. I learned that the South Carolina primary is in early February for Democrats—and three weeks later for Republicans. This year’s primary process is “extremely disorganized compared to past primaries,” according to Ari Berman, who is something of a voting expert. “If there was to be a competitive primary, the whole calendar would be a complete mess.”
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Characterizing an election as a “complete mess” before even considering that the leading Republican candidate is charged with dozens of felonies is not what I’d call reassuring. In some cases, Berman says, the primary calendar seems designed to frustrate a casual observer. Take the Republicans’ Iowa caucuses next week. They’re not being held on the usual voting day in this country, Tuesday. They’re being held on Monday, which is a holiday: Martin Luther King Day, to be exact.
“What a fitting way to honor Martin Luther King with Trump winning Iowa. I’m sure this is the full fulfillment of the dream that Martin Luther King had in 1969,” Berman said.
On a recent episode of What Next, we spoke about how the 2024 primary calendar got so confusing. And why, as a result, voting in this country is about to get really weird. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Mary Harris: How has the schedule for American primaries usually gone? Like, which dates go first? How did it get there?
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Ari Berman: Since the 1970s, it’s been Iowa and New Hampshire. The Iowa caucus kind of emerged by accident. My understanding is Jimmy Carter went there early on during the ’76 campaign and did really well. And then the Iowa caucus started to become a thing.
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Why does the order of the primaries and caucuses even matter? How big of a deal is this to candidates? And has it always been that way?
A huge deal. You could very credibly argue that Barack Obama would not have been elected president of the United States had he not won Iowa as his first state in 2008. That showed that he was for real. You also see how it derailed people there. Howard Dean was the Democratic front-runner until he had a disastrous third-place finish in Iowa and then gave this speech that people later thought of as the “Dean scream.” And that almost ended his candidacy.
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So, Iowa has played a huge role in terms of potentially elevating long-shot candidates into being front-runners. It’s played a significant role in confirming that people who say they’re front-runners actually are front-runners. And it’s a small enough state that you can actually visit all of the counties, and you can do a lot of retail politicking. That way, the person with the most money or the biggest name or the most endorsements isn’t the person that always necessarily wins.
Let’s just lay out what exactly is happening next week, because it is funny. The Republicans have their caucuses on Monday, MLK Day. The Democrats, are they even doing an in-person caucus?
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They might be doing an in-person caucus for some kind of minor offices, but nothing’s going to be decided on Jan. 15 for Democrats.
How did the Republican and Democratic caucuses come to evolve to have such different processes and dates in the first place?
The basic thing is Iowa Republicans wanted to keep Iowa, and Democrats didn’t want to keep Iowa. It’s also reflective of where Iowa is. Iowa used to be a major swing state. Now it’s much more of a Republican state. Republicans are very happy going to Iowa because it solidifies their dominance of the state, whereas national Democrats wanted to move the Democratic Party away from Iowa, because Iowa is not a state they view as a swing state anymore.
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Democrats, my understanding is, have been thinking about demoting Iowa for a while now, but they kind of got a very compelling reason to do so in 2020. Can you remind us what happened?
Basically, we didn’t know who won Iowa. The votes took forever to be counted, and they were contested in terms of who won. Was it Bernie Sanders, or was it Pete Buttigieg, or was it Amy Klobuchar? And in the end, it made a lot of people very angry. And no one can argue that they got an Iowa bounce because nobody knew who won the state.
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I have been to an Iowa caucus, and the way they add up the votes is extremely confusing. It’s gone through this whole complicated math process that looks like you’re scribbling a bunch of crazy numbers on a whiteboard. So, I’m not surprised this thing finally went kaput. That was the last straw for saying not only is Iowa not reflective of the Democratic Party or the country as a whole, but they can’t even count their votes properly.
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My understanding is that for Democrats who’ve made the most moves in terms of the calendar and when their elections are happening, the seed of all this change started with one meeting between 30-odd members of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee back in December 2022. What was that committee trying to accomplish when they met up?
Basically Biden and his supporters wanted South Carolina to go first.
Why South Carolina?
Because South Carolina was the state that delivered for Joe Biden in 2020. Remember, he lost Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, and his campaign was sinking. And he was rescued by Black voters in South Carolina, and the dean of the U.S. House delegation there, Jim Clyburn, is widely seen as delivering not just the primary but likely the presidency to Joe Biden.
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But you could also argue that South Carolina is a solidly red state. A Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t won there since 1976.
That’s a very legitimate critique. If you want to have a more diverse state, why don’t you have Michigan or Georgia go first?
Which are real swing states.
Yeah. There are benefits from having South Carolina go first in terms of the concentration of Black voters there. That is the largest and most loyal Democratic voting bloc. And it makes sense that they’re finally getting the acknowledgment of their power, but there are also states in which Black voters have a lot of power, like Georgia, like Michigan, where their states are actually competitive in November. And there would be a lot of benefits to Democrats campaigning there, compared to campaigning in South Carolina, which everyone knows is going to go red and doesn’t even have a single competitive congressional district right now.
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So Democrats, they decided they wanted to start with South Carolina. They said Feb. 24 is the day. But that is not actually what’s happening, because New Hampshire essentially muscled in and said, “Not so fast.”
New Hampshire is basically holding a rogue primary.
Totally normal.
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They have a state law that says they’re the first primary. And so they have to hold it. But none of the votes in New Hampshire are going to count towards the actual result of the primary. And not only that, but Biden is not even on the ballot. He’s mounting a write-in campaign to try to win the state, so he doesn’t get embarrassed by whatever other Democrat is running a nominal campaign against him.
This seems not functional. How does New Hampshire explain itself here?
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New Hampshire explains itself that basically, Democrats knew when they moved South Carolina ahead of New Hampshire that New Hampshire still was going to be the first primary in the nation. They’re essentially rebelling against the moves by the national party. This has happened in the past, but I don’t know if it’s ever happened this early, that there’s fights over which state comes first and are the votes even going to be counted there? But, according to the Democrats, the New Hampshire primary is completely irrelevant. It doesn’t actually count.
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Have the Democrats really processed what happened here? It seems to me like this setup that they arranged, it’s a “solution” that seems to have pissed off everyone and been very embarrassing all around and resulted in a lot of confusion.
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Yeah, and all of that would matter a lot more if there was a competitive Democratic primary and Donald Trump wasn’t the likely Republican nominee, because people right now have bigger fish to fry. But it is an important issue. And it’s something that had there been a more competitive election and had the primary mattered more, it would have been a much bigger issue. And of course, it’s a conversation for another day of whether Biden should have had a more competitive primary, given concerns about his age and his seeming weakness against Trump in the polls.
While the Democrats are busy dealing with a messy primary calendar of their own design, the Republicans have their own challenges. Take what’s about to happen in Nevada. In early February, that state will hold both a Republican primary and a Republican caucus.
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Here’s why: A couple of years back, local legislators passed a law requiring a primary election. But that made GOP operatives balk. Eventually, they decided they’d simply have a caucus anyway and ignore the primary results altogether. That allowed the GOP to write their own electoral rules—requiring people to show up in person and bring a state ID with them.
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Oh! And there’s one more thing: Candidates can only be on the ballot for the caucus or the primary, not both. That means half the candidates are competing in the Feb. 8 caucus and the other half are competing in the primary, two days earlier.
Trump is competing in the caucus, but Nikki Haley is competing in the primary. It’s so confusing. I don’t even know how Republicans can keep track of this and which one they’re going to vote in. But it’s kind of like election denialism to its most extreme: “OK, we’re going to hold an entirely different election because we don’t like the way that our state votes.” That’s insane. You can’t do that in November.
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Republicans are totally able to, like, slip out of the way the state wanted to run the election. Nevada is a pretty blue state. And my understanding is that the Legislature passed rules basically being like, We want our primaries to be run like this. Here’s how we’re doing it. And the Republicans just said no. But then because our primary system is set up so the state parties run it, it’s like, Oh, well, uh, yeah, we have that rule. But I guess the Republican Party locally is running it. So it’s a caucus now.
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They’ve had caucuses in years past, so it’s not totally unprecedented. But the reason for it now is totally unprecedented. And caucuses shut out many more people than primaries because of the way they operate. And so the caucus is going to disenfranchise a lot of people just by the fact that they’re holding a caucus. And it’s also held to much stricter voting laws than would have existed in the primary. And they’re days apart, which is even more confusing.
If I was a Republican in Nevada, what do I do?
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Well, that’s what Republicans are going to have to figure out. And again, they just elected a Republican governor in Nevada. So, it’s a Democratic-leaning state, but Republicans have won elections there. And not only that, they have a number of competitive congressional elections potentially. So, the Republican Party doesn’t want to be in a position where it’s screwing everything up in a place like Nevada. But that’s what it seems like they’re doing. And Nevada was one of those states where you had extreme MAGA election deniers who lost elections for things like secretary of state and attorney general that they otherwise could have won. And now those same election deniers that lost in 2022 seem to be running the party in 2024.
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It’s funny because as we talk, you’re making this point, which I think is well taken, which is that people are just assuming it’s going to be a Trump-Biden rematch, so actually all this chaos, it would have mattered more in a different kind of year. And I think that’s true. But I also think that arguably the parties are diluting the voter pool even further by making this confusing system where it’s very hard to understand what should I be doing here? When should I be voting? Who should I be voting for? Why isn’t the president on the ballot? Do you worry about that?
Yes. Especially if you’re a first-time voter and you’re confused or you’re disenfranchised, you’re going to be less likely to vote in the November election. Getting people to vote in primaries is a great warmup to getting them to vote in the main event, which is the general election. And if they can’t vote in the primary or the caucus, or if they don’t think their vote will matter in the primary or caucus, that cynicism could extend toward November. And also a lot of people are unhappy about the two candidates. So, it would actually be a lot better if there were clear rules. And there were also a meaningful debate on both sides. From a small-d democratic perspective, it’s unfortunate that there weren’t more alternatives on both sides to the two major front-runners. If the public is unhappy about a Trump-Biden rematch, which it seems like they are if you look at the polling—75 percent of Americans want a different kind of contest, or something to that effect—then how come more choices didn’t emerge in the primaries? Because that’s the only way to get a different candidate to emerge in the general election.
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We haven’t even talked about another huge element at play in the primaries, which is that Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, has been kicked off the ballot in Colorado and Maine.
Yeah, that thing too.
How is uncertainty around Trump’s status causing chaos for election workers? How’s that going to trickle down?
Election officials in general have been put in a very, very difficult position because of the uncertainty over the calendar, because of the uncertainty of who’s going to be on the ballot, because of the threats that they’re facing. The decision to take Trump off the ballot has dramatically escalated the threats that the election officials in those states were already facing, and the real prospect of political violence in America, of threats being sent into state capitols, of threats being sent against judges and election workers—the 2024 election is taking place amongst a very, very scary backdrop. The concerns about voting just intensify what is already a very unpredictable atmosphere in this country right now as we head into a presidential election year.
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I’m thinking back to the 2020 election, when, of course, so many election workers faced people banging on their doors, questioning their work. And I do feel like the chaos in the calendar, the chaos about who’s on the ballot where, it actually creates a much higher degree of difficulty for maintaining that trust with election workers.
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Yeah. And I have another concern, which is that a lot of those people that were banging on the doors in 2020 to try to overturn votes might be in charge of counting votes in the next election, or might be Republican poll watchers, or might be Republican Party chairs, and that a lot of the people that were insurrectionists or supporters of the insurrection or did insurrection-y things have been promoted in the Republican Party. Things like political violence and overturning elections, far from being repudiated, have been legitimized among very key aspects of the Republican base.
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Is there a solution for this chaos we’re about to see in the primary process? Is the solution more centralized control of the elections process or control that comes not from the parties, but some other entity?
One could argue that the whole idea of the parties structuring the elections is in and of itself a conflict of interest, right? Whoever is the front-runner of the party, if it’s a sitting president, they’re going to control the process. They’re going to control the institutions, the state parties, and the national party in particular that make these kind of decisions. And that’s an inherent conflict if you want some alternative. It would be nice if the calendar was standardized for both sides. It would be good if things like caucuses were abolished and primaries were opened up so that more people participated. It would be good if these kind of decisions were made with more buy-in from the public compared to feeling like it’s being done in smoke-filled back rooms. A lot of it could change.
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View Transcript You’ve said how in some ways you anticipate this election’s chaos is just going to skate by this year because there’s so much other chaos layered on top of it. One of the major candidates is in and out of court, etc. Is there any pressure to fix this system before the next big election?
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Well, they’re going to see how it goes. If Nevada is a total laughingstock because of the dueling primaries and caucuses, there’s going to be a lot of pressure to try to standardize that for the next election. If Biden were somehow to lose New Hampshire, or Democrats were to lose critical races in New Hampshire, and they could point back to the fact that they’re no longer the first state primary, then there might be more pressure to put New Hampshire back in. And we’re also going to have to see how this thing unfolds in terms of South Carolina, Michigan, and other states going first on the Democratic side.
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All of these decisions can be revisited. Nothing is really set in stone here. This is going to be a test run, and people are going to see how it goes. But my guess is a lot of other events are going to overtake it.
Oh, but that seems like a problem to me, because the next round of this, it won’t be Trump and Biden. And these processes will need to be strong so that whoever is there, it’s not a total disaster.
Yeah. It’s like when you’re dealing with your kids, and you have to compartmentalize the level of messes, and what is the biggest one? And this is a mess. But in the eyes of others, there’s bigger messes that need to be solved first.
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