Global Courant
CONCORD, NH – President Biden’s changes to the 2024 presidential primary calendar are heading for a clash with New Hampshire’s cherished, generation-old position as the nation’s first presidential primary.
“New Hampshire has a law that says we will go at least seven days for a similar event,” New Hampshire Secretary of State Dave Scanlan told Fox News Digital in his Statehouse office.
Scanlan is determined that “the Secretary of State plans the date of the first New Hampshire primaries.”
New Hampshire has held the first primaries in both the Democratic and Republican nomination calendars for a century. And for the past 50 years, it has held the second overall game, after the Iowa primary. While the Republican National Committee maintains its order — with Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada as their first four states to vote in the schedule — Democrats turned that lineup upside down earlier this year.
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President Joe Biden speaks at the Winter Meeting of the Democratic National Committee on Friday, February 3, 2023 in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) (AP)
The Democratic National Committee in early February overwhelmingly approved President Biden’s plan to move New Hampshire down the primary schedule. New Hampshire will vote second on the DNC’s calendar, along with Nevada, three days behind South Carolina. The DNC completely removed Iowa from their early ballot lineup — or breakdown of states — that hold nominating contests for the rest of the country.
Many Democrats have for years dismissed Iowa and New Hampshire as unrepresentative of the party as a whole because they are largely white with few major metropolitan areas. Nevada and South Carolina, which have voted third and fourth on the calendar in recent cycles, are much more diverse than Iowa or New Hampshire.
The DNC emphasized that its effort to drastically change the top of its presidential nomination calendar for the 2024 election cycle was a move to give black and Hispanic voters at the top of the list more representation in a party that has become increasingly diverse in recent decades. And the president and supporters of the new nomination calendar argued that it would empower voters from a minority that Democrats have long relied on but are sometimes taken for granted.
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“This committee has created a calendar proposal that reflects our values and will strengthen our party. This calendar does what is long overdue. It increases early window votes. And it elevates diverse communities that are at the heart of the Democratic Party .” said DNC President Jaime Harrison earlier this year.
New Hampshire has held the nation’s first presidential primaries for over a century. A sign outside the state capitol in Concord, NH marks the state’s cherished primary status. (Fox news)
But New Hampshire Democrats fought vigorously to keep their primary position. Ray Buckley, longtime chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, called the DNC’s move “mind-boggling” and a “self-inflicted wound” that would hurt the chances of Democratic candidates in 2024 in the main northeastern general election battle state.
The DNC is urging that to maintain its early voting in the new calendar, New Hampshire must scrap its decades-old state law protecting its first-in-the-nation primary status and expand legislation to restrict access to early elections expand. to vote. But with Republicans in control of the New Hampshire governor’s office and both houses of the state legislature, the Granite State Democrats argue that this is a non-starter.
The DNC gave New Hampshire an extension a month ago to come to terms, but that just kicked the can down the road. The national party’s rules and bylaws are expected to determine the state’s non-compliance later this summer or early fall.
New Hampshire Secretary of State Dave Scanlan speaks to Fox News Digital on July 6, 2023 in Concord, NH (Fox News – Paul Steinhauser)
Enter Scanlan, who will follow state law when planning the date of the primary.
“If South Carolina is scheduled as the first primary, it would be at least seven days before that,” Scanlan said.
That would likely move the date of the New Hampshire primary to the end of January.
As for his timetable, Scanlan said that “we will schedule the filing period, which will be sometime this fall, and then I expect to announce the date of the primaries. However, we are just going to watch developments as they come and make decisions take according to what happens. We still have enough time in this process.”
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With New Hampshire almost certain to push back the date of their game, President Biden will likely stay off the New Hampshire ballot to avoid an unsanctioned primary. And with Biden’s two main challengers — environmental lawyer and high-profile vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and best-selling author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson — targeting the president and the DNC while repeatedly campaigning in New Hampshire — trouble could arise. brewing for president in the Granite State primaries.
Democratic presidential nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stands next to a bust of his late uncle, President John F. Kennedy, outside City Hall in Nashua, New Hampshire, on June 20, 2023. (Fox News (Paul Steinhauser))
“President Biden will not run in the New Hampshire primary, which will still go first,” Buckley predicted earlier this year. “This, in our view, will prepare him for an embarrassing situation where the first primary in the country will be won by someone other than the president. This will only fuel the chatter about the Democrats’ division.”
While leading the polls for the Democratic presidential nomination, the 80-year-old Biden has faced many concerns from Democrats about his age and physical and mental stamina, and his approval ratings among all Americans are in the negative territory for nearly two years.
But most Democrats argue that potential setbacks in unsanctioned contests in New Hampshire or Iowa won’t sideline Biden’s anticipated sweeping re-nomination.
“The Democratic primaries in re-election of a president are never about a single state. It’s about the opportunity to tout how that president helped the American people with policies that put the working class and middle class first.” veteran Democratic strategist Maria Cardona told Fox News.
Cardona, a member of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee, argued that “The Democratic Party adopted a primary calendar that reflects the country and gives all communities a strong voice and voice. President Biden will walk away with this primary calendar and be our party’s nominee who will then go to a second term in the White House. And that is nothing to be ashamed of. ‘
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Back in New Hampshire, Scanlan says the battle for the primary has had a unifying effect by transcending the swing state’s increasingly bitter partisan politics.
“This is a battlefield state, and our House of Representatives is almost evenly split between Republicans and Democrats right now,” said Scanlan, a Republican who succeeds longtime Democratic Secretary of State Bill Gardner. “It’s polarized. And we’re having some great debates based on political ideology, but I can tell you there’s one issue where the state is united — Republicans and Democrats alike — and that’s the first in the nation state of the primaries in New Hampshire.”
Paul Steinhauser is a political reporter from New Hampshire.
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