(The Center Square) — New Hampshire Democrats are making the case to national party leaders to restore the state’s first-in-the-nation primary status ahead of the next presidential election.
In a memo to the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley argues that the Granite State should kick off the presidential nominating process ahead of the 2028 election.
“We believe that we should go first because we are a small, purple state with unmatched civic participation,” Buckley wrote in the memo, released Monday ahead of meetings with DNC officials. “In other words, there is no other state that better meets the efficiency, rigorousness, and fairness criteria needed in our presidential nominating process.”
Buckley told the committee, which begins its review of the calendar for the 2028 presidential election cycle this week, that New Hampshire “truly does democracy better than anywhere else – we show up for town meetings, elect a 424-member volunteer legislature, and most importantly, we vote.”
“We were among the first states to decide that voters – not party bosses – should get to weigh in on who should be president,” he wrote. “Moreover, New Hampshire had the single highest voter turnout of any presidential primary in 2024.”
For more than a century, New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary has given the 11th-smallest state by population an outsized influence on presidential politics. The early primary status is enshrined in a state law.
But DNC members have long argued the predominantly White electorate in New Hampshire isn’t representative of Democratic voters or the nation as a whole.
In 2022, the DNC dramatically upended the presidential nominating schedule by making South Carolina the first state to hold a primary, followed by Nevada and New Hampshire, and later Georgia and Michigan, before the multi-state Super Tuesday contests. The panel also bumped Iowa, which holds its presidential caucuses ahead of New Hampshire’s primary, further down in the primary calendar.
The changes were requested by then-President Joe Biden, who asked DNC leaders last week to approve the early state lineup. South Carolina, a most racially diverse state, was a key battleground state in Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential elections.
While Buckley said he believes diversity “should play a role” in determining which states go first in the primary process, he said New Hampshire “offers diversity in a number of key areas, but also that the early primary states should be considered as a whole – not just individually – in terms of providing strong racial and geographic diversity.
“New Hampshire’s racial diversity continues to increase, especially among our youngest Granite Staters,” he wrote. “Our union density roughly mirrors the country as a whole. New Hampshire includes rural, suburban, and urban regions.”
