A powerful panel of the Democratic National Committee voted on Friday to make South Carolina the first state in the party’s fight for the 2028 presidential nomination, after a lobbying push that at times fractured Democrats along racial, geographic and ideological lines.
Party officials voted on Friday for six states to hold primaries before Super Tuesday, which will be held in early March 2028. The preliminary calendar would go as follows:
The fiercest fight in the 49-person Rules and Bylaws Committee of the D.N.C. had been over which state would go first.
Allies of South Carolina had argued that it would be wrong to move the state from the leadoff spot it occupied for the first time in 2024, and that doing so would send the wrong message to Black voters who have been the party’s most loyal constituency. Backers of Nevada said that it would have made more sense to start in a presidential battleground, and that their state was also diverse, with not just a large share of Hispanic voters but also many Black and Asian American voters.
South Carolina ultimately prevailed, receiving 26 votes to Nevada’s 19. New Hampshire earned four.
“The South is not the past, it is the future,” Christale Spain, the chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, said in her final speech lobbying for her state before the vote.
The vote must still be ratified by members of the full D.N.C. at a meeting next month.
“These are six states, four regions, one coalition, made up of a very unlikely alliance of rural and urban, suburban, red, purple and blue,” said Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and a vice chair of the national party. She added, “The order doesn’t just lead into Super Tuesday. It earns Super Tuesday.”
Political strategists are already picking through the ideological implications of the new order. The first states to vote typically winnow the presidential field — and Democrats are expected to have a sprawling set of candidates in 2028.
In the last open primary, in 2020, South Carolina voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr., while Nevada sided with the more progressive Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. New Hampshire, which allows independent voters to cast ballots, is now set to go third.
New Mexico and Virginia are X factors, having never been among the early states.
Some uncertainty around the selections remained.
New Hampshire has a law requiring that the state hold the first primary. The state did so in 2024 even though the D.N.C. tried to penalize it and strip it of its delegates, and Mr. Biden appeared only as a write-in. It is possible that the party could hold an approved primary in the early window separate from the official state one.
“Many party insiders have learned nothing from 2024,” Raymond Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said in a statement. “This committee’s vote does not change the realities governing New Hampshire’s primary, which are beyond the control of both this committee and our state party.”
Representative Chris Pappas, a New Hampshire Democrat running for the Senate, lashed out the decision with an expletive in a video posted on social media, adding, “New Hampshire’s primary wasn’t handed to us by party insiders, and they can’t take it away, either.”
The four members of New Hampshire’s House delegation, all Democrats, denounced the decision in a joint statement as “wrong for Democrats, wrong for New Hampshire, and wrong for the country.” But they did not suggest how the state should respond.
The D.N.C. has approved financial penalties for any states that try to jump ahead in the calendar, and has threatened to strip their delegates. To deter candidates from campaigning in those states, the party has also approved potentially blocking them from official party debates.
Speaking with reporters on Friday, Ken Martin, the D.N.C. chairman, said, “It is our hope that the New Hampshire Legislature and governor will see that every other state has found a way to work with the other 49 states and seven territories to produce a state-run process.”
“We hope that New Hampshire will do that,” he added. “But if not, we will find a way to deal with it, as we have in the past.”
He highlighted harsher penalties the D.N.C. adopted last month to deter states from trying to jump the line, including a $270,000 fine for states and new consequences for presidential campaigns. If candidates participate in unapproved early primaries, they will be kicked off the ballot of the D.N.C.’s official early states and barred from presidential debates.
“The candidates are going to have to decide whether or not they want to lose all their delegates in the four states, whether they want to lose access to the debate stage,” Mr. Martin said. He added, “Unlike the past, it’s not going to be a wink and a nod, ‘Well, we’ll let you do what you want.’”
For decades, Iowa and New Hampshire kicked off every presidential nomination fight. But in 2024, Mr. Biden, then the president, put South Carolina at the front of the line, after the state helped him win the 2020 nomination.
A dozen states applied for the early window in 2028. The party set rules to choose at least one state each from four regions — the West, the Northeast, the South and the Midwest — and wound up adding two additional states, New Mexico and Virginia.
Committee members huddled in private past midnight on Thursday to try to come up with a calendar. In public, they debated a wide range of issues, including the cost of campaigning in big states, the value of retail politics in small ones, and even the logistics of how states count votes differently.
Stuart Appelbaum, a D.N.C. member and a union president, said he had backed South Carolina over Nevada in part because Nevada allows for the counting of ballots after Primary Day — which could delay the final results in a close race.
“With the stakes so incredibly high in this election, I feel we need certainty in 2028,” he said.
Among the states that felt snubbed was Iowa, whose caucuses had always opened the competition until 2024. The state received no support to represent the Midwest.
“This decision is a slap in the face to Midwesterners,” Rita Hart, the chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, said in a call with reporters after the vote. She suggested that her state party could still hold its traditional caucuses despite any penalties.
“We absolutely cannot be the party of coastal elites,” she said.
