In Democratic circles, especially progressive ones, it has become something close to axiomatic that the long-running state cycle of Democratic primary presidential preference votes is obsolete and needs to be updated.
Indeed, a preliminary panel of the Democratic National Committee, prodded by President Biden, has now taken preliminary steps to revise the order of early preference votes for 2024, ousting the Iowa caucus altogether, dropping the New Hampshire primary from second to third in the order, and beginning the preference-vote series with South Carolina.
Although the DNC’s reason for dropping Iowa could be blamed on the confusion in determining vote counts that followed the 2020 caucus there, the real reason for discontinuing it and demoting New Hampshire is that both states have virtually homogeneous white populations and as such are alleged to be poor barometers for adjudging the mood of the nation’s highly diverse Democratic constituency.
That’s the reason given for the proposed switch, but it’s a poor reason, and it misses the point of recent history badly. Recall only the Iowa caucus of 2008, which saw Democratic favorite Hillary Clinton overlooked in favor of the party’s unanticipated new sensation, Barack Obama. It is hardly irrelevant that Obama, an African American, was the choice of the nearly all-white Iowa voting population.
He might well have triumphed in South Carolina that year had the Palmetto State, with its large Black vote, gone first, as Biden and the DNC wish it to in 2024. (Obama did win South Carolina in its accustomed down-the-line vote in 2008.) But such a first-shot win in 2008 would have merely conformed to local demographics, it would not have signaled, as Iowa did, that Barack Obama’s appeal as a presidential candidate overrode matters of race — the real (and truly progressive) underlying basis for his ultimate victory.
As it happened, Hillary Clinton’s credentials no doubt entitled her to a second look, and she got it a week later, upsetting Obama via an electorate in New Hampshire, famously a swing state, that presumably evaluated both candidates for other than demographic reasons.
The either-or conundrum of Obama vs. Clinton held for much of the 2008 primary year. Tennessee was one of several states that opted for Clinton, helping keep the nation’s deliberative mind open for a profitably longish while.
As a matter of historical interest, it should be noted that two of the state’s Democratic legislators — Rep. Jason Powell of Nashville and Memphis’ own state Senator Raumesh Akbari — introduced a bill in 2020 that would have put Tennessee first in the list for subsequent primary years, but the bill went nowhere, probably due to pressures from the national party.
There is and was no clear case for letting Tennessee kick off a presidential primary year — at least not for the Democratic race. The state’s Democratic infrastructure is in a shambles and is virtually nonexistent except in Memphis and Nashville, both of which are urban areas that still have Democratic majorities. A GOP primary here might be another story, but even there it would be hard to make a case for Tennessee, no longer a swing state or a suitable harbinger for a national outcome.
Tennessee’s role in the scheme of things envisioned by the DNC for 2024 would seem to be unchanged, with the Volunteer State once again presumably to be scheduled in mid-March or so, along with a whole passel of other “Super Tuesday” states.
But the state will probably not, as it arguably did in 2008, have an influence on the ultimate presidential choice. The proposed new order of Democratic presidential primaries will almost certainly have long since predetermined a candidate acceptable to the party’s established interest groups, and there will likely be no contest to speak of by the time Tennessee votes.
Crucially, whatever preference might be harbored by the nation’s Independents could well remain obscure or unknown until the decisive November election.
