DNC Chair Martin lays out early state checklist for 2028

The boxes prospective early calendar states will have to check are potentially a little different than they were for 2024

Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash

Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, stopped by The Hill Sunday on NewsNation to chat with Chris Stirewalt about an array of issues facing the party on Sunday. One of those topics? The 2028 presidential primary calendar.

While Stirewalt hit with the now-typical retrospective Biden-had-his-thumb-on-the-scale question about the decision-making behind the early states on the 2024 calendar, Martin parried with a line that has become rote for the DNC in 2025 looking ahead to 2028. In summary from The Hill:

“Martin, who was elected chair in February, said he is committed to making the process fair and said any state that wants an early primary date should be permitted to bid for one and be considered.”

Which, again, anyone who has read a calendar story since the November 2024 election has seen some variation of that line.¹ Here is DNC deputy communications director Abhi Rahman in a story on Iowa and the 2028 calendar last month:

“The DNC is committed to running a fair, transparent, and rigorous process for the 2028 primary calendar. All states will have an opportunity to participate.”

Martin, however, took things a step further, outlining a rubric for those state parties that might pitch the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee (DNCRBC) in the next year on being included among the states in the early window of the calendar for 2028.

“Martin also said he anticipates a crowded primary field in 2028 and said he wants to make sure the process for setting the calendar is guided by three principles: ‘One, it has to be rigorous. Two, it has to be efficient. Three, it has to be fair.’

“‘It has to be rigorous, in the sense that it battle tests our nominee and prepares them for the general election,’ he said, expanding on the first principle.

“Martin said it has to be ‘efficient’ in a way that ‘we don’t bankrupt our candidates in the early part of this process.’

“‘We want them to have resources for the general election because the only prize that matters is November.’

“‘And the third thing is that it has to be fair,’ he added. ‘It has to allow all of our candidates, which God knows how many candidates we’re going to have, to actually compete in those early states.’”

— emphasis is FHQ’s

First, that is revealing. It provides some initial insight into what the party, through the DNCRBC, will try to identify in states, the state parties of which will attempt to formally sell the panel on the virtues of their state being early in the 2028 order. And while this is an early set of (likely not all-encompassing) principles for that process next year, it does differ in some subtle ways from the guidelines the DNCRBC operated under when crafting the calendar rules for the 2024 cycle.

Let’s compare…

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2028 vs. 2024 early state principles

Now look, FHQ will not make a mountain out of a molehill here. Martin’s comments should be taken in the spirit in which they were intended: as a rough starting point. But it is a starting point nonetheless. The DNCRBC will certainly put their collective stamp on this process, and it is likely to be inclusive of the chair’s principles. However, the checklist may grow between now and deliberation/decision time on the early states for 2028.

So with that caveat, one should acknowledge that the categories on the two checklists are different. The calendar buzzwords ahead of 2024 were diversity, competitiveness and feasibility. For 2028, at least at this early juncture, they are rigor, efficiency and fairness.

Those are not the same things.

Rigor

Rigor, as Martin defines it, is akin in some ways to the competitiveness principle of the 2024 cycle. Some may argue that the most efficient way to “battle test a nominee and prepare them for the general election” is to put them before early primary voters in a state or states likely to decide the 2028 election in November. That is not the only way, but it is a way that has gained some favor on the DNCRBC in the past. But even with some holdovers from the last cycle, there is a different membership on the body for the 2028 cycle and the DNCRBC may come to an alternate viewpoint either on their own as a panel and/or under Martin’s leadership.

Efficiency

Additionally, whether due to a perceived cultural shift (read: backlash to DEI) or something else, diversity is nowhere to be directly found in Martin’s early checklist. It is not exactly absent, however. It is just pared down some. The chair pinpoints only one particular type of diversity: size of a state.² That is clear in Martin’s comments on his efficiency principle. Not wanting to “bankrupt our candidates in the early part of this process” is code for, if not small states, then those states with affordable media markets.

And that is nothing new. Leveling the ground on which the early part of presidential campaigns are waged has been a longstanding principle in this process for both parties, what the Republican National Committee called an on ramp to the rest of the calendar in its 2013 Growth and Opportunity Project report (the autopsy of the 2012 election). Overall, it is an attempt to prevent (however, futile that effort may be in this modern age of campaign fundraising) giving advantage to only the candidates with the deepest coffers across both formal campaigns and aligned groups.

Taken together, however, rigor and efficiency — again, as Martin defined them to Stirewalt — point toward a certain maintenance of the status quo for 2028. Now, the identity of the early Democratic primary states is unknown at this point and so too is the order. But a mix of states that balance rigor/general election competitiveness (Nevada and Michigan) and smaller/affordable states (roughly ranging in size from, say, New Hampshire to South Carolina) would get the DNC pretty close to what Martin is after.

Granted, it may not be those states! And the order may not be the same as 2024 either. Yet, one can anticipate states like New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — in whole or in part — ending up ahead of larger states like Michigan on the calendar.

That is the path of least resistance.

But why?

There is a certain negative inertia to the formation of a calendar, an inertia that often can often only be broken by an incumbent president. And there is no Biden with his actual or perceived thumb on the scale for 2028. Even if there was, Martin seems intent on a fair — both real and perceived — process to avoid the questions that stemmed from and still linger around the 2024 nomination.

Fairness

Martin’s last principle is not new either. But it is one that is always easier said than done in a process that inevitably boils down to winners and losers. The latter will often cry foul, and the only way to (attempt to) combat that is to devise a set of rules and consequences for the process early on and then stick to them when the rubber hits the road during implementation in the midst of primary season.

And the first part — the setting of rules and consequences — is what the DNCRBC is going to be doing over the 15-16 months. Only, this time the panel will not have an additional overarching layer of a president involved in the decision making.

Feasibility is inescapable

Fairness has no corollary to the 2024 principles. Rather, it constantly hovers over the painstaking process of crafting presidential nomination rules regardless. It is always an aspiration.

Yet, fair or not, the DNCRBC is not unfettered in how it approaches the calendar every four years. An array of state laws, (often conflicting) opposition national party rules and intra-party state party rules constantly serve as constraints.

2028 will be no different.

• South Carolina will still be (relatively) easier to move around as a piece in this puzzle.

• Michigan and Nevada will still have state laws setting February primary dates that Republicans in state legislatures in either or both may balk at changing.

• And New Hampshire. Well, New Hampshire will still be New Hampshire.

It is not an unfamiliar scenario. Just look back four years. Very simply, it is much easier to move states into the early window on the Democratic presidential primary calendar than it is to uproot those that are already there (for a variety of reasons).

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Yes, the presidential nomination process is a dynamic one and yes, things change in three or four years’ time. In other words, one should expect some evolution from one cycle to the next. Martin’s early checklist is no exception. And as noted above, it differs from the guidelines that preceded it in important, albeit subtle ways.

In the end, the one thing the chair left off is the one thing that is probably most important to this process: Given the constraints, can any given state be moved into/out of the early window? Feasibility remains component number one in all of this. It will have the greatest say in how the early calendar lineup comes out late in 2026.

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Related:

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1. FHQ says “some variation,” but it is rare to see a calendar story that requests comment from the DNC that does not get that line verbatim from the party.

2. No, that is not really diversity, not in the sense that it was incorporated into the Democratic process to fill out the early calendar lineup for 2024. Then, diversity came to be about racial, regional, union membership (etc.) diversity. Martin’s early conception here focuses instead on state size, which is often considered — imperfectly, FHQ might add — a proxy for urban/rural diversity.