Democrats May Finally Be Ready to Demote the Iowa Caucuses

Almost as predictably as the sun
rising in the morning, when it’s not a presidential year, there’s always discussion of some state or other losing
its coveted spot in the early primary calendar. More often than not those
discussions fizzle out (look back to 2021 when the momentum to cut Iowa and
New Hampshire, the other very white early state many Democrats grouse about, faded away). This time though, party elders think some
kind of change is inevitable. “This is going to happen,” former Democratic
National Committee chairman Howard Dean said in an interview. “The problem has
been for many years that you have had two states that don’t reflect the
Democratic constituency who go first, and I don’t know that that makes a lot of
sense.”

There have been hordes of lawmakers
who have overtly or covertly worked to try and dethrone the earliest states
from their positions. They’ve always failed. But this time looks to be
different. Beyond the widespread frustration among Democratic officials with
Iowa’s clumsy administration of the last caucuses, the current president does
not feel any kind of debt or obligation to Iowa or New Hampshire. President Biden
is the first Democratic president since the early 1990s to become president
despite not winning either the Iowa or New Hampshire primaries (Biden did beat
Trump in New Hampshire in the general, though). South Carolina was Biden’s turning point, forcing a
massive dramatic shift in the course of the 2020 presidential primary.

States have already begun lobbying
for consideration to be at the front of the primary calendar. The New Jersey
Democratic Party chairman has written a letter to DNC chairman Jaime Harrison
advocating for New Jersey to get bumped up to the front of the pack. Nevada
Senator Jacky Rosen has also pushed DNC officials for Nevada to go first, saying, “We’re diverse.
We’re a battleground state that matters to who becomes the next president.”