A Revolution in How Democrats Pick a President (2023)

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

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For the past 50 years, how the Democratic Party picks its presidential nominee has been profoundly shaped by the state where the process begins — Iowa. Today, why, in the coming days, Democrats are poised to abandon that tradition? My colleague, Adam Nagourney, explains.

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It’s Thursday, February 2.

Adam, tell us about this meeting that’s about to get underway in Philadelphia.

So the Democratic National Committee, which is essentially the governing body of the Democratic Party, is about to gather in Philadelphia for its annual meeting. And these meetings tend to be kind of boring, if I may say so —

— but there is something really contentious and, I would argue, historically important on the agenda this time. And that is that the Democratic National Committee is going to debate and vote on a proposal put forward by President Biden to do a pretty major overhaul of the presidential nominating calendar for 2024.

And while that might make your eyes glaze over, it’s pretty meaningful and important. Because what it means is that Iowa, which has been the first state in this process since 1972, is about to get knocked out of that spot.

Wow.

Yeah, there’s nothing more constant in American politics than Iowa going first. It’s just what you do. For someone like me, who’s been covering this stuff for a long time, it’s really kind of striking. It’s a real moment of transition.

And it reflects the reality, which has become more and more true over the years, that Iowa just does not represent the Democratic Party anymore. It just doesn’t make sense anymore for the Democratic Party to start the whole nominating process that’s going to end up choosing a candidate for president in a place like Iowa.

Well, Adam, how did we get to this system — this Iowa-first system — that many in the party now think doesn’t make sense and needs to be massively overhauled? What’s the back story?

You know, as in many things in politics, this was a solution to a previous problem.

To understand why we are where we are today, you have to go back to 1968.

So that was the year that the Democratic National Convention was being held in Chicago.

And the country was convulsed with unrest.

There was anger over the Vietnam War.

And a lot of Democratic voters wanted the party to nominate a candidate who would end the war in Vietnam.

But back then, voters didn’t really have much of a say in the process. It was party bosses who met behind the scenes to choose the nominee. So all those jokes about smoke-filled backrooms where deals are cut and decisions are made — well, that was kind of true. It really happened, and that’s how the party ended up with Hubert Humphrey.

And Hubert Humphrey was not a candidate who was about to end the war.

Humphrey goes on and loses the election to Richard Nixon, and the backlash against the Democratic establishment was intense. People were really upset that the party chose someone that didn’t represent the sentiment of a lot of voters, and the party responded by creating a commission to rewrite the nominating process. And that’s what resulted in a series of state-by-state contests, where voters, and not party bosses, would have a say over who the nominee would be.

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And why was Iowa chosen to go first?

It was never a decision that we, the Democratic Party, should start in Iowa. It wasn’t as if the committee took a look at the whole country and said, ha, Iowa is the most representative state of the Democratic Party, and therefore, we should do this first. No, it just was a matter of logistics. And that’s because Iowa has a very time-consuming and, dare I say, convoluted process for choosing its presidential nominee.

Mm-hmm.

Most states have a primary. On a certain day, voters go to a voting booth, cast their ballot for whoever they want, and go home. That’s it. But not Iowa. Iowa has something called a caucus.

Right, and just remind us how that works — a caucus.

On a Monday night, voters who want to have a say in the choice of their party’s nominee have to go to local places, churches, schoolhouses, sometimes even people’s living rooms. And you go in there, and you are gathered in clusters of people who support the various candidates, right? And you make your case for why you’re voting for who you’re voting.

And each candidate has to reach a certain threshold of support. And if he or she doesn’t, then the candidate falls out, and the voters sort of shuffle around the room, and after some debate and discussion, end up with one of the other candidates. So it’s a long process.

Right.

So therefore, in order to be part of the calendar — to fit into the calendar — Iowa had to start early. And starting early meant being first to make sure it got done in time. It just kind of happened. And then, once it happened, it was hard to un-happen.

Got it. So this is really a matter of logistics, and, in a sense, Iowa’s inefficiency.

That’s correct. And the first time it happens is 1972. But the first time it really matters is 1976, because that’s when something really remarkable took place in the Democratic Party.

There were 17 candidates who were seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. And one of them was a little-known former peanut farmer from Georgia, the governor —

— named Jimmy Carter. And Carter realized that if he did well in Iowa, the first state in this relatively new nominating process, he could show to the party and to the world that he was a really viable candidate.

And he also realized that Iowa was a place that you could win by just churning it out.

By just going door to door, by meeting people —

He understood that by doing that, you would build the kind of personal connection and loyalty that you would need to get your voters to show up in the caucus system that we talked about and participate in this back-and-forth.

So lo and behold, Carter beat all the other candidates, with a level of support that just shocked many Democrats with how well he did. And people would look back on that and never forget the lesson of Iowa from 1976. It shows that somebody who isn’t really well-known can use the state’s nominating system to become a national figure in politics.

Right. So suddenly, Iowa, this kind of accidental first-in-the-nation nominating contest, shows that it can be a decisive kingmaker, because, of course, that former peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, goes on to not only become the Democratic nominee, but to win the presidency itself.

That’s correct.

And then, Iowa showed again how it could help catapult a candidate to the front of the Democratic nominating process.

In this case, it was a relatively new senator from Illinois, named Barack Obama.

What’s important to remember about Obama that year was that certainly, at the end of 2007, leading into 2008, very few people thought that he could win the nomination.

He was very untested.

let me get some water, guys. [COUGHS]

He was not, frankly, at least early on, a particularly good candidate, as I can attest from watching him in those early days.

He was a little aloof. He was a little professorial. All those raps on him that used to make him annoyed were kind of true.

But he took a page from Jimmy Carter.

And he spent months going to all these small events in Iowa, in living rooms and churches.

He took advantage of this period to learn what was important and to learn how to say what he believed.

Right.

And then —

— there was a very, very famous political dinner that is on the Iowa calendar. And he went there, and he just blew the roof off the place.

And it just totally, dramatically shifted the dynamics of the race.

And he went on to win.

It was candidate training school, right? That’s an important thing to remember about small states like Iowa. It made him a better candidate.

Right. As I recall, Adam, during this period, there isn’t much question that Iowa’s place as first in the nation is locked in. But questions do start to crop up more and more about whether Iowa being first is a good idea.

And I say that, because by the next presidential election, 2012, I end up joining you in Iowa as a political reporter for “The Times,” and I remember those questions becoming very top of mind.

Yeah. It was kind of striking, because Iowa, this overwhelmingly white state, had just voted for a Black man to be the Democratic presidential nomination. But it was hard to get around the fact that this state was not representative of the Democratic Party, that, how much sense did it make to have a state like this be such a critical part of the Democratic nominating process?

The other thing that was going on was that Iowa was slipping away from the Democratic Party in general elections. There was a time when it was at least a purple state, a state that was in play. But more and more, it was becoming a Republican state.

Right.

The Democrats were still going through the motions of going there. Every now and then, you’ll get a Democratic candidate who will say, I’m not going to campaign there, and then they lose.

So it became something that you just did, because you did it, right? And then, comes 2020.

And we see an implosion in Iowa’s caucus system.

Right, there was this total meltdown. I was there. I watched it. Election officials in the state had tried to modernize the process by using an app to report the results, but they hadn’t really tested out the app beforehand, and it just didn’t work.

And so things just totally failed that night.

That’s right. And the state became a laughingstock, right?

It took, what, three weeks before they could finally decide a winner? The person who eventually did win the Iowa caucuses, in fact, was another fairly unknown candidate — a mayor from Indiana named Pete Buttigieg. No one really thought he had a shot of actually winning the Democratic nomination, and this time, they were right.

Right. In 2020, Iowa was the last thing from a kingmaker once all the counting was done. Like you said, the person who won the nomination was Joe Biden, who, as I recall, placed fourth in Iowa. So the conclusion of just about every Democrat, except, perhaps, those who won the caucuses in Iowa, is that not only is Iowa incompetent when it comes to counting votes, it’s just totally out of sync with the rest of the party.

That’s right, Michael. And I think the other part of that was they realized that, with few exceptions — Barack Obama being one — it had been out of sync for a long time. I mean, for all the hype that reporters invested in it, talking about how important it is, the fact of the matter is that it was not a barometer of where the party was.

Every now and then, it lived up to its hype, but more often than not, it did not. And then, in 2020, it just was like this accumulation of all these reasons why, enough already. And that’s how you get to this moment in Philadelphia where the Democratic National Committee is about to close the door on the Iowa caucuses.

We’ll be right back.

So Adam, what exactly is the Democratic Party’s proposal for replacing Iowa as the first nominating contest in the nation?

Well, so first of all, this is President Biden’s idea and his recommendation to the Democratic committee. So the plan that is being considered now would have South Carolina be the first state in the country to vote on the Democratic presidential candidates.

And what’s the rationale for choosing South Carolina, of all the possible options in the country?

Well, the top reason is because it is just more representative of the Democratic Party and more representative, I would argue, of the country. It’s got a much larger Black population, and that makes a lot of sense to a party like the Democratic Party, where Black voters are a big part of their base.

The second reason is that South Carolina holds a primary. It’s not a caucus, which means that the results will be more efficient and clearer. You don’t have the issue — or you probably won’t have the issue — that we had in Iowa, where it just takes weeks to find out who actually won. And I think all of that was very appealing to President Biden and the Democratic National Committee.

Right. That all makes a certain sense. But it seems worth saying, Adam, that President Biden might have another reason to pick South Carolina, which is that it really resuscitated his 2020 candidacy, which was doing quite poorly in places like Iowa during the nomination process. In fact, many people would argue that without South Carolina, Joe Biden could never have become the nominee or become president.

That’s right. I think part of it is that he’s rewarding South Carolina for what happened in 2020. But part of it is that this is something he’s always believed — that the Democratic Party was much more diverse, and that a state like South Carolina represented it more.

So it’s a combination of political pragmatism, rewarding a state that served him well, but just understanding the way the party and the country is changing, and that it made much more sense, in his view, not only for him, but for the party, to have the nomination start in a state that was as diverse as South Carolina.

Mm-hmm. So of course, I’m reminded of what happened in 1968, when the party was trying to fix a problem. That effort to fix a problem inevitably created a new problem, which was Iowa, this largely white state, that had a lot of trouble counting votes. Do Democrats fear that this new effort to solve a problem might create even newer problems?

Yeah, I think what you’re referring to here is the law of unintended consequences, which is that anything a party does has some consequence that you and I can never imagine. I’ll tell you what I think is a fair thing to think about here.

There were problems with Iowa. There’s no question about that. But there was something about it that allowed for the unexpected to happen, and the obvious example is Jimmy Carter catapulting onto the national stage, or Barack Obama becoming the Barack Obama that we know.

And obviously, it doesn’t happen with every candidate, but the possibility was always there, and I think that’s what attracted Democrats to go there. And I think we might lose that in a state like South Carolina.

Why? Why are we likely to lose that in South Carolina?

Well, a couple of reasons. One is, South Carolina is a bigger state in terms of population. There are two million more people in South Carolina. So the idea of the kind of intimate campaigning, getting to know voters, getting to issues, that we saw in Iowa, just can’t happen in South Carolina.

And this is another point I would make about Iowa here — it’s a caucus. It’s not a primary. And it requires a certain level of commitment on the part of voters, because they have to turn out at a certain time for two hours on a Monday night, and they have to stand up and say why they’re supporting who they’re supporting — or at least stand up and say who they’re supporting.

So that requires a certain level of connection and commitment. And a lot of candidates will tell you that that will only happen if you meet voters in person, not once, but several times, right? And that’s a big part of the culture of Iowa.

And that’s not going to be the case in South Carolina. Even if you want to do it, it’s just too big. And that is the downside of South Carolina.

Fascinating. And what exactly do we think losing all of that might mean, practically speaking, for the candidates who seek the nomination? I mean, if they don’t achieve that level of intimacy with voters in a place like Iowa, what does it actually practically mean?

I mean, it might mean that the world is just changing, and that people like me who’ve been covering politics in the past should just get over it. But —

— a candidate in Iowa can spend months building up steam, coming in unknown, and just methodically working his or her way around across the state, so by the end, they have name recognition, right? And they’re a strong candidate, at least in terms of people knowing who they are.

That’s not going to be the case in South Carolina. I think there’s going to be a real premium on candidates coming in who have name recognition, who are already known. And that also means candidates who have money, who can buy name recognition, who can put their ads on television and get people to know who they are. That’s the price of being in South Carolina.

So the risk here is that this changed schedule might limit the type of candidate who has a serious chance of winning the Democratic nomination. You’re saying if that candidate doesn’t have a lot of name recognition and a lot of money, their chances now, in this new system, are just lower.

That’s right. Politics is very random. You never know what’s going to happen. I wouldn’t rule it out completely. But it’s going to be much harder for an unknown candidate to come from the back of the pack, and all of a sudden, win a primary. Because if you’re not well-known, you’re going to need to have money to get known by voters. And that’s an obstacle. That’s a real obstacle.

Right. But of course, the kind of candidate this change very clearly benefits is a candidate like Joe Biden, right? I mean, he’s an incumbent president seeking reelection — we think — and he has all these things that this schedule advantages — huge name recognition — no one has more name recognition than the sitting president — and a huge campaign war chest for the same reason — lots of Democrats have given lots of money to him, which is why some people, no doubt, see this new schedule as a kind of Biden incumbency protection program.

Yes, in a way. But I think you want to give Biden’s due. I’m not sure that’s what’s motivating him here. I mean, I think that he really does believe that the system is unfair and doesn’t represent the Democratic Party.

But I think he talked about reevaluating this every four years. Considering how difficult it’s been for this to happen — this is the first time in, what, 50 years? I wouldn’t count on that happening. Let’s just say that. Once it’s done, it’s done, at least for a couple of cycles. That’s for sure.

Mm-hmm. It feels, Adam, that there’s a certain kind of irony to where this is all landing. Because the party has been having this internal debate, for decades now, over who picks its nominee. And in ‘68, the decision was to take that power from party bosses, as you described it to us, and give it to Democratic Party voters.

But then, the voters they gave a lot of power to, in places like Iowa, ended up being largely white and rural, which leads to this latest reform, again, over who picks the nominee. And the answer this time is to open the door to a more diverse set of voters that’s more reflective of the party.

But in doing that, based on everything you just told us, we could end up with a system that leaves that more diverse set of voters with — and this is the irony part — less choice, right? Potentially fewer candidates, or at the very least, fewer kinds of candidates, right?

Yeah. I mean, I think that’s exactly right. And I think that is the tradeoff that the Democratic Party, at this point, is willing to make — that it finds the idea of Iowa as the start of the nominating process so problematic, that it is willing to make compromises like this in order to get a nominating process that starts in a state like South Carolina. And we’ll see what works. It might work, it might not. But it’s a tradeoff they’re willing to make.

And if it doesn’t work, they’ll change it, and we’ll have you back.

That’s right. I’ll be back for the next one.

Well, Adam, thank you very much.

Thank you, Michael. I appreciate your time today. That was a pleasure. [MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

In Memphis, on Wednesday, Tyre Nichols, the 29-year-old who died after he was brutally beaten by police, was eulogized by members of his family and by Vice President Kamala Harris.

In emotional remarks, Nichols’ mother and stepfather recalled the trauma of learning that their son had died at the hands of police, and later watching video footage that contradicted what officers said had happened at the scene.

it was very, very difficult. It was surrounded by lies, deceit, trying to cover it up. But as they say, what’s done in the dark will always come to the light.

And the light of day is justice for Tyre.

Today’s episode was produced by Alex Stern, Stella Tan, and Nina Feldman. It was edited by Rachel Quester, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, Diane Wong, and Chris Wood, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.