Would You Let New Mexico Pick the President?
After the Democratic National Committee announced that it would host a meeting, in late May, to hear pitches from different states hoping to move up in the Presidential-primary calendar, Michelle Lujan Grisham, the governor of New Mexico, decided she wanted to make her state’s case in person. New Mexico, she believed, had lessons to offer on how to court minority and rural voters, how to develop a good message about border security, and how to talk about public safety. “The mistake we’ve made as a party,” she told me, “is that we don’t give people something to vote for.” Her competitive edge sharpened after hearing the news that a nearby state, Nevada, was a top contender for the first slot on the calendar. “If Nevada gets to be identified as that early Western state,” she recalled thinking, “why isn’t New Mexico given a chance to talk about why we could be an even better choice?” Then she looked at the date of the D.N.C. meeting she was supposed to attend, in Washington: May 28th. Oh, no, she thought. It was her fourth wedding anniversary. “If my husband did that to me,” she said, “I’d be really mad. I am a hopeless romantic.”
Lujan Grisham asked the D.N.C.’s Rules and Bylaws Committee—the forty-nine-person group tasked with setting the primary calendar—to rearrange the meeting’s agenda so that she could make it back to Santa Fe by that evening. “This job is enough to get you divorced every day,” she told the committee members, who ultimately agreed to her request. The meeting room was in the Washington Hilton, the same hotel where, a month earlier, a gunman had attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump during the White House Correspondents’ dinner. When it was the New Mexico delegation’s turn to speak, Lujan Grisham helped extoll the virtues of her state, which frequently ranks among the poorest in the nation: seventy-six per cent of the voting population lives within an hour of Albuquerque, making it easy for candidates to meet voters. Democratic roots run so deep that some homes have framed photos of John F. Kennedy, Jr., next to portraits of Jesus Christ; and the anger there over Trump’s deportation program is so profound that it might be enough to turn Republican Hispanic voters into Democratic ones. “New Mexico,” she told the committee, “is the entire story.”
One of the committee members thanked the Governor and her team for bringing Latino members of their delegation who could talk about issues that affected the community. Applause followed. But, as far as New Mexico’s place on the primary calendar was concerned, the committee member had a different idea. “Would you consider going last?” he asked.
Democrats are deciding what kind of party they want to be, but first they have to decide who gets to decide. Since January, twelve states have been trying to court the Rules and Bylaws Committee, insisting that their primary is the one that will determine a Democratic Presidential candidate who can beat the Republican heir to the MAGA movement. This has turned the discussion, at least in part, into a competition over which state is most like the rest of the nation, as several officials and party chairs told me. “Nevada is a microcosm of the United States, with its diverse population,” the Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto said. “I think you get a microcosm of the Democratic Party here,” Representative Sarah McBride, one of Delaware’s biggest boosters since the Bidens, said of the literal First State. “We are a state, I think, that is the melting pot for the country,” Anderson Clayton, the chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, said. “We look like America,” Curtis Hertel, the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, said. “It’s a country of fifty states, but Georgia is the best representation of the diversity of our party,” Charlie Bailey, who chairs the Georgia Democrats, said.
But the contest over the first-in-the-nation primaries has also become a proxy war over the future of the Party. The D.N.C.’s decision, expected by late summer, could have a significant effect on the 2028 cycle—from the crop of campaign staffers who can afford to relocate to the ability of small campaigns to break through in large media markets. Although Iowa and New Hampshire haven’t always picked candidates that go on to win the Presidency, the early victors get to fly out of Des Moines and Manchester with an extremely valuable spoil: momentum, the type that an inert political party might need against a major popular movement. “The issue here is about the stakes in this election, in 2028,” the New Hampshire senator Maggie Hassan, who won her seat in 2016 by a thousand and seventeen votes, told me. “We have to win. We have to reverse Trumpism.”
For more than a century, New Hampshire was the entire story—since 1920, it hosted the first primary, and, beginning in 1972, Iowa hosted the first Presidential caucuses. But over time, many Democrats came to believe that those early, white-majority states no longer represented the Party’s base. The reckoning came at an opportune moment for Joe Biden, who’d called himself a “bridge” to future generations but had left the window open to running again. In December, 2022, Biden wrote to the D.N.C. expressing his concern that, although Black voters were the “backbone” of the Democratic Party, the Party had not “recognized their importance in our nominating calendar.” The letter prompted the committee to select South Carolina, the state where Biden’s flagging 2020 Presidential campaign had recovered—with the endorsement of a powerful, longtime ally, Representative Jim Clyburn—as the new starting point of the primaries. “That was kind of what elevated South Carolina to be first, was the Biden letter,” Christale Spain, now the chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, told me. On February 4, 2023, the D.N.C. selected South Carolina as the first primary; Biden announced his fateful rëelection campaign about two months later.
During this cycle, according to the D.N.C.’s rules, any state can apply for an early slot. Spain praised Biden’s “foresight” in trying to win back the South, but she’s told the committee members that her state is not “asking for nostalgia”—in other words, that it’s not asking to go first to follow the precedent from 2024, or out of some loyalty to Biden’s legacy. “If we ever, ever want to get another Jimmy Carter, another Barack Obama, another Pete Buttigieg, we have to have states like South Carolina in the window, because if we don’t, and we start putting in states like Virginia and starting with these super expensive, these large states, these candidates will never be able to get off the ground,” she told me.
How do you campaign to be first? “Everybody’s lining up,” Minyon Moore, a co-chair of the Rules and Bylaws Committee, said in an interview. “Everybody is doing their own set of lobbying.” By the committee’s rubric, merely looking like America isn’t enough; states also need to show that campaigning there is affordable, and that they can, as a practical matter, run fair and transparent elections. But relationships and human interaction also matter—after all, this is Washington. The presentations at the D.N.C. meeting had the feeling of a science fair mixed with a trade show: The Illinois delegation showed a video that featured Governor J. B. Pritzker apparently taking a shot of Malört, the Chicago liqueur famous for making people recoil in disgust, with a voice-over declaring, “Illinois can handle the tough stuff—no explanation needed!” When New Mexico’s presentation was finished, Lujan Grisham walked around and shook everyone’s hand, and then she jogged out of the room in her stilettos, presumably to catch her flight. Clayton, the North Carolina chair, told me her party had made T-shirts for the members of the committee that read “We represent a new South.”
Among all the delegations, Nevada’s appears to be the most eager. “Why shouldn’t Nevada be first in the nation, is my question,” Cortez Masto, the senator, told me. The state, which is typically third on the nation’s primary calendar, has been trying to move up for several cycles. Its culinary-workers’ union has developed a canvassing operation that historically has helped Democrats turn out Latino voters—although, in 2024, the Hispanic vote broke for Trump there. “We know that, going into 2028, if we want to win, we have to be successful among diverse voters, specifically working to earn back the support of Latino voters,” Molly Forgey, a senior adviser for the Nevada Democratic Party, told me. “So, starting the calendar in Nevada is a decision and a message that we are taking Latino voters, Black voters, A.A.P.I. voters, working-class voters seriously in this election, and we’re beginning that work.” The culinary workers’ parent union and national Latino groups have endorsed the effort. The delegation had also produced all manner of memorabilia to present to members of the committee: holiday cards, gift bags with coffee, chocolate-chip cookies, local chocolate, a biography of Senator Harry Reid, poker chips that read “ALL IN ON NEVADA,” and plastic cups printed with “NEVADA FIRST.”
Julie Chávez Rodríguez, who worked in Biden’s White House and went on to manage his and Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaigns, has been making calls to advocate for Nevada as part of an informal group of alumni from the Harris, Biden, Obama, and Hillary Clinton universes. “This is not an effort to position Nevada just because, or to have a new state as first in the nation,” she told me, “but to really understand and underscore why the coalition of voters that exists in Nevada—and has been core to our efforts—is again core to our strategy to win in this next cycle.” I wondered if her endorsement of the state wasn’t a play for a specific candidate, such as Harris. “I definitely think that Kamala would do well in Nevada,” Chávez Rodríguez said. “I also believe that J. B. Pritzker would do well in Nevada. Gavin Newsom, Andy Beshear, especially given the makeup of Kentucky and the rural sort of components that he could speak effectively to . . . Trying to think of the cast that I know—or that I anticipate.” (Newsom is campaigning in Nevada this week.)
Yet, even if many of the states are explicitly arguing that their primaries could boost the Party’s standing with specific demographics, Moore, the committee’s co-chair, told me that the Party can’t exclude rural communities and “soccer moms.” “I know a lot of people would like to just narrow it down to ethnicity and nationality and diversity as in color,” she said, “but really, you have to broaden your definition of what that means.”
Hassan, the senator from New Hampshire, is preoccupied not with how many candidates can do well in one state, but, rather, which candidate will do well in every state. “No state checks every box,” she told me, last month. She acknowledged that there were concerns about the racial diversity of her state, but said that New Hampshire residents were uniquely qualified to vet candidates early on: they were “people who are very used to saying to political leaders from all political perspectives—‘I disagree with you, you haven’t answered my question, I don’t think you really know why you want to run.’ ” There’s another element to consider: by law, New Hampshire has to host the first primary in the nation, regardless of what the Party says. (Iowans historically choose first, but they host caucuses, not primaries.) In June, the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the D.N.C. voted to slap a two-hundred-and-seventy-thousand dollar fine on any state that staged an unauthorized competition, as New Hampshire did in 2024.
I called Ray Buckley, the longtime chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, who also sits on the Rules and Bylaws Committee. He sounded even and calm, and he said he had “faith” in his fellow committee members—his delegation didn’t want to “pressure” people or make them feel uncomfortable. Still, he wouldn’t be recusing himself from the final vote. “I recused myself from voting for president of the ninth-grade class, and I lost by one vote,” he told me. “So I learned that lesson many, many years ago.” ♦