Democrats set 2024 presidential primary plan; South Carolina to lead - Des Moines Register

Instead, South Carolina — a state with a substantial Black population that helped deliver the nomination to Biden in 2020 — will lead an early voting window that will be significantly more diverse than in years past.

To be seen,” said committee member Donna Brazile, a former acting chair of the DNC.The calendar “is going to speak to all of us, because we know that our role in this party and our role as Democrats and as Americans is to open doors.”.

Under the proposal, South Carolina will vote first, and Nevada and New Hampshire will share a second primary date.

MoreLive Democratic primary updates: DNC votes to bump Iowa, move South Carolina to 1st in the nation.

The Iowa Democratic Party chairman, Ross Wilburn, said Iowa will continue holding its caucuses ahead of others.

committee member Mo Elleithee said the changes give the DNC “more teeth than I think it ever has before" as it seeks to enforce its rules.

He and Carol Fowler, the committee member from South Carolina, questioned whether the five-state calendar was too condensed — particularly among the first three states, which would all vote within a week.

DNC Chair Jaime Harrison of South Carolina apologized for growing emotional as he spoke about the racist history of his home state, which is now poised to hold such a politically powerful place on the Democrats' calendar.

"South Carolina is a state where 40% of enslaved people came through the Port of Charleston.

"You can go anywhere in this country, you talk to Black folks, and I guarantee you they got a cousin in South Carolina.

The job of the committee, noted member Stuart Appelbaum of New York, is “not just to choose states and the order in which they go, but to tell the story of who we are as a party and who we are as a nation.”.

“Our early states must reflect the overall diversity of our party and our nation, economically, geographically, demographically,” he said.

Wilburn, the first Black Iowan to chair the state party, said he was deeply disappointed with the president’s recommendations.

He noted that, with the exceptions of a few counties in Michigan, there is no early state on the proposed calendar that will fall in the Central or Mountain time zones, which cover the vast central part of the country.

In his letter to the rules committee, Biden said, “Our party should no longer allow caucuses as part of our nominating process,” and that, “It should be our party's goal to rid the nominating process of restrictive, anti-worker caucuses.”.

“Regardless of what the DNC says, I encourage the Iowa Democratic Party to move forward with its plan to follow Iowa law and hold Iowa’s First-in-the-Nation Caucuses just as the Republican Party of Iowa is doing," U.S.

Petersen, Stonewall Caucus chair of the Iowa Democratic Party and a voting member of the state central committee, said in a statement to the Des Moines Register that he disagreed with Wilburn

I will vote to accept the DNC recommendation when it comes before us" at the state central committee

"I want folks in Iowa also to understand that this does not diminish your value as a state and what you bring to America and what you bring to this party," he said

“Without the tradition, without the type of retail politics, without the type of vigorous examination that the people in Iowa would often give to these candidates, we would not have enjoyed the type of electoral success the party has,” she told the Des Moines Register