Democrats’ intra-party feud: DNC set to back Biden plan to upend

PHILADELPHIA – The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is expected to vote Saturday to dramatically alter the top of its presidential nominating calendar for the 2024 election cycle, bumping Iowa and New Hampshire from their longtime leadoff positions.

The push by the DNC — to alter its primary calendar to give more representation at the top of the schedule to Black and Hispanic voters in a party that’s become increasingly diverse in recent decades — has been vigorously fought by New Hampshire, which for a century has held the first primary in the race for the White House.

Longtime New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley, on the eve of the vote, called the move by the DNC “mind-boggling” and a “self-inflicted wound” that would hurt the chances of Democratic candidates in 2024 in the key northeastern general election battleground state.

The DNC’s nearly 500 voting members gathered for the party’s winter meeting in Philadelphia are expected to overwhelmingly approve a proposal by President Biden to move South Carolina to the lead position in the Democrats’ primary calendar. Under Biden’s plan, South Carolina would hold its primary on Feb. 3, 2024, with New Hampshire and Nevada holding primaries three days later, followed by Georgia on Feb. 13 and Michigan two weeks later.

SPARKS FLY AS DNC BLASTS NEW HAMPSHIRE DEMOCRATS 

That’s a dramatic switch from the current calendar, which has seen the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary lead off the process for five decades. But both states have been knocked by many Democrats for years as unrepresentative of the party as a whole, for being largely White with few major urban areas. Nevada and South Carolina, which in recent cycles have voted third and fourth in the calendar, are much more diverse than either Iowa or New Hampshire.

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