Democrats in the United States have approved a shakeup to their 2028 presidential primary calendar as the party looks to take back the White House. During a meeting on Saturday in Austin, Texas, Democratic National Committee (DNC) members voted to overhaul which states have the first say in picking the party’s presidential nominee. South Carolina will once again take centre stage as the party’s first official nominating contest, with its Democratic primary scheduled for January 22, 2028.
Nevada will go second on February 1, followed by New Hampshire on February 8. New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia will round out the early states over the course of that month. The new calendar formalises a change that began during the last presidential election cycle in 2024, when the national Democratic Party similarly put South Carolina at the front of its primary lineup.
The 2028 primaries set up a more competitive calendar for Democrats, giving greater influence to states with more racial diversity, in an effort to better represent the party’s key constituencies. But plans to reshape the primary calendar have been met with controversy in the past. In 2024, for instance, local leaders in New Hampshire defied party leaders by holding a state-run primary ahead of the first party-led vote in South Carolina.
As justification, New Hampshire officials cited a state law requiring their primary to be the first in the nation. There was also pushback in Iowa, whose state caucus had ushered in the primary season for decades. Iowa Democrats warned that moving the state lower in the party’s calendar could send the wrong signal to rural voters, who often feel overlooked in national politics and tend to lean rightward.
Still, proponents of the calendar change argue that it will help the Democratic primaries better mirror the overall population of the US. South Carolina has normally been Democrats’ first contest in the southern US, and it has a significant population of Black voters. Roughly a quarter of the state identifies as Black, according to census estimates.
Nevada and New Mexico, meanwhile, have large Latino or Hispanic populations, with 31 percent and 49 percent of their residents identifying as such, respectively. All three states will be at the forefront of the primary calendar, come 2028. DNC Chairman Ken Martin took to social media on Saturday to tout the changes as capturing the demographic shifts in the country.
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