DNC Panel Puts South Carolina First Again in the 2028 Democratic Primary Calendar

The Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws Committee voted Friday to keep South Carolina at the front of the party's 2028 presidential nominating calendar, ending a months-long lobbying fight between two states that each argued they were the truest test of the modern Democratic coalition.

Under the slate the committee approved, South Carolina votes first on January 22, 2028. Nevada follows on February 1, New Hampshire on February 8, New Mexico on February 15, Michigan on February 22 and Virginia on February 29. The rest of the country is barred from voting until Super Tuesday on March 7. The order preserves the shake-up Democrats first adopted for 2024, when President Joe Biden pushed South Carolina ahead of Iowa and New Hampshire as repayment for the state that revived his 2020 campaign.

The decisive argument was demographic. South Carolina's backers told the committee that with voting-rights protections under sustained legal attack, the party could not afford to open its nominating process anywhere that did not center Black voters, the single most reliable bloc in the Democratic coalition. "Since the early 2000s, South Carolina has been the first in the South contest, and our party's most reliable read on Black voter sentiment," state Democratic Party chair Christale Spain told the panel, pledging that "you can depend on South Carolina. You can depend on us to deliver election results on election day."

Nevada's delegation made the opposing case: that a state with large Latino, Black, Asian American and Pacific Islander populations, a powerful union culture and genuine swing-state status is a better dress rehearsal for a general election than a state Democrats have not carried in a presidential race since 1976. The committee was unpersuaded, though it moved Nevada into the second slot, ten days ahead of New Hampshire.

DNC Chair Ken Martin framed the outcome as a win for the process rather than for any one state. "Because of this calendar, our candidates will be tested and millions more Americans will be heard," Martin said after the vote. The committee also advanced tougher penalties for states and candidates that jump the line — a direct response to 2024, when New Hampshire held an unsanctioned primary in defiance of the DNC and Biden's name did not appear on the ballot. State parties can avoid sanctions by showing they tried in good faith to comply where state law blocks them, a carve-out aimed squarely at New Hampshire's century-old first-in-the-nation statute.

Nothing is final yet. The full Democratic National Committee must ratify the calendar at its summer meeting in Austin, Texas, next month, and the fight over New Hampshire's demotion is expected to resurface there. Republicans, meanwhile, plan to keep their existing order, with Iowa's caucuses and New Hampshire's primary leading off — meaning the two parties will once again begin choosing nominees in different states, on different dates, in front of different electorates.