Let's Rethink the Primary Process for 2028

Primary season is closer than you think—can Democrats avoid their most damaging mistakes of 2020?

Time sometimes moves so slowly during Donald Trump’s agonizing second term that it may come as a surprise to learn that we are only about a year away from when Democrats have traditionally held their first televised presidential primary debate, and likely mere months away from the first flurry of announcement videos from what is likely to be a preposterously crowded field of aspirants. Yet with the party’s focus understandably elsewhere, and given the roiling crisis of Ken Martin’s tenure atop the Democratic National Committee, little attention has been paid to how the party plans to conduct its presidential nominating process in an election whose stakes could not possibly be more existential.

Since Democrats pioneered the binding primary process in 1972, the two most contentious issues have been in which order the states should conduct their contests and whether party elites should have any role beyond certifying the verdict of the voters at the party convention. The second question was answered decisively following the bruising 2016 primary when so-called “superdelegates” were dramatically decreased in number and stripped of the ability to vote on the first ballot, meaning they could only weigh in if there was an unprecedented and highly unlikely brokered convention without a clear winner. And while the party can’t mandate it, their preferences are no longer reported as part of candidate delegate tallies, in an effort to address one of the 2016 Sanders’ campaign’s persistent complaints.

As for the order of the states, party leaders deserve some credit for successfully and quietly performing an end-run around self-appointed bellwethers Iowa and New Hampshire. …

Continue reading this article by David Faris, “Let’s Rethink the Primary Process for 2028,” here: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/its-time-to-rethink-the-2028-primary-process/