By Theodore Bosen, Berlin
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted to switch its FITN presidential primary from New Hampshire to South Carolina – from a state of 1.3 million to one four times larger, from a state with one city barely over 100,000 to one with at least three, from a state a candidate can tour in one day to a state with three times the area, from a state where no media market dominates to one where the only effective way to reach all voters is money-driven mass media, and from a state with the nation’s highest primary participation to a state that is only 18th. The main reason given for the change: “Diversity reflective of the nation as a whole.”
Let’s look at that. True, as much as 89 percent of the New Hampshire electorate is white. In the nation as a whole, it is 62 percent. But white participation in the low-turnout 2020 South Carolina Democratic primary was only 16.4 percent, hardly “reflective of the nation.” Moreover, in South Carolina, anybody can vote in the Democratic primary, so Republicans can sabotage the outcome. That can’t happen in New Hampshire, where the Democratic primary is only open to Democrats and Independents. Furthermore, in New Hampshire, 44 percent of the electorate is Independent, so the results indeed capture the mood of unenrolled voters in swing states, of which New Hampshire is a charter member.
Conversely, South Carolina has never been a swing state. It voted solidly for the party of its leading racist senator, Strom Thurmond, in the 40s and 50s while he was a Democrat, and again in the 60s through 80s when he was a Republican, with the exception that it went with the third party “Dixiecrats” instead of Truman or Dewey in 1948 because “Boss” Thurmond was that party’s candidate. True to form, South Carolinians continue to follow the leader. Today their Democratic “party boss” is Jim Clyburn. Polls for the 2020 South Carolina primary indicated a close race between Biden and Sanders, but when Clyburn announced he was choosing Biden the race was over. No number of handshakes, church visits, or diner and coffee shop appearances could change that.
Not so in New Hampshire. In 2016, every powerful elected Democrat in the state was with Hillary Clinton. They lined up at rallies to endorse her, yet she lost by 22 points! The party did not then take the hint that swing voters no longer wanted her style of centrist politics, so they ganged up to thwart the Sanders juggernaut throughout the country, alienating enough progressives and independents to deliver the general to Trump. Perhaps most tellingly, Biden, who after being handed the lead from Clyburn’s South Carolina in 2020, transformed himself into a progressive from that point on, adopting much of the agenda that the New Hampshire Democratic Primary had set out by its endorsement of Sanders. Biden was aware that the exit polls coming out of the South Carolina primary demonstrated that, despite voters falling in line with “Boss” Clyburn’s choice, they were decisively on the side of all of Sanders’ positions on income inequality, universal healthcare, and the Green New Deal. Biden, determined not to repeat Hillary’s previous failure to budge from the center, and who had witnessed that New Hampshire Democrats and independents, in another historic turnout, had awarded the overwhelming majority of votes to progressives, got on board with their positions. New Hampshire, not South Carolina, had indeed set the winning Democratic agenda for 2020. Biden then not only won as a transformed candidate, but governed accordingly.
What else has the New Hampshire Democratic primary delivered in its history? Well, in 2008, it made clear that the country was ready for either a black or a woman, as Hillary and Barack Obama came within two percentage points of each other at the top of the pack in the largest turnout to date. Meanwhile, in South Carolina that year, Hillary had led Obama in the polls by double digits as late as December, but after the January 8th New Hampshire vote affirming the viability of a black candidate in a predominantly white state, those polls flipped. Obama then won South Carolina decisively to become the candidate of destiny. Had South Carolina voted first, Obama would have lost by those December double-digit poll margins, donors would have abandoned him for failing to win a majority black primary, and Hillary would have won the nomination, giving progressives, independents, and swing voters little reason to come out in the general. That’s what happened in 2016 when the party ignored the message sent by New Hampshire.
What other non-mainstream and minority candidates did the New Hampshire Democratic primary deliver for? To name a few, the obscure peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, the nation’s first Roman Catholic president, Jack Kennedy, anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy, who drove LBJ to drop out, and a New York Jew named Bernie, whose two successive wins transformed the Democratic platform for the future. Until 2020, no one had ever become president in the modern era without either winning or coming in a strong second in their party’s New Hampshire primary. What Biden’s candidacy proved is that it is in fact the agenda set by New Hampshire that is the key to a Democratic victory.
New Hampshire’s Democratic electorate, significantly behind the national average in its proportion of blacks, Jews, and LBGTQs, disproves the presumption that “reflective diversity” in the composition of the electorate is essential to avoid ethnic, racial, gender, or other bias in the results. As for the failure of black candidates to gain traction here in 2020, that had more to do with the fact that Kamala Harris changed positions with every debate, Cory Booker broke his own mold by playing to the center, and Julian Castro didn’t show up. Meanwhile, black liberal Deval Patrick was actually stirring more excitement than any of them until he abandoned the race to support his ill wife. Thus, as Obama demonstrated in 2008, race is not a limiting factor for us. In fact, the mere premise that political success is dependent upon support from birds of a feather is the same faulty, racist rationale used by white supremacists who argue that a majority-minority electorate will result in their victimization. Shame on the DNC for adopting such thinking. The New Hampshire Democratic Primary is the living proof of the moral bankruptcy of such a philosophy.
The DNC threatens to deny our delegates a seat at the convention if we insist on holding the first primary and to deny a place in the debates to all candidates who participate here. But New Hampshire’s clout at the convention is negligible anyway, and who is going to watch a DNC debate when the early leaders out of New Hampshire are holding the real debate on another channel? The real consequence of such a move by the DNC will be to reveal just how arcane and ineffectual it is.
Biden, if he runs, would do respectably here now, because we appreciate his record of pressing a progressive-leaning agenda and his several accomplishments in the face of resistance. But the party is passing Biden by. It anticipates a blue wave led by a progressive agenda, especially on climate change. Indeed, if credible progressive and minority candidates break with the DNC to campaign in New Hampshire, they will succeed in furthering such an agenda and knock out Biden. That’s what the DNC fears, but they will soon be forgotten when a few brave Democrats start to make the rounds here in our living rooms and on our back porches, because we have proven that anybody of any race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or endowment has an even shot before our discerning voters who have demonstrated, time and again, that they have their finger on the pulse of the Democratic electorate. And there’s nothing the DNC can do about it.
Theodore Bosen is a lawyer, innkeeper, and Democratic activist in Berlin, New Hampshire.