Democrats in the United States have approved a shakeup to their 2028 presidential primary calendar as the party looks to take back the White House.
During a meeting on Saturday in Austin, Texas, Democratic National Committee (DNC) members voted to overhaul which states have the first say in picking the party’s presidential nominee.
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South Carolina will once again take centre stage as the party’s first official nominating contest, with its Democratic primary scheduled for January 22, 2028.
Nevada will go second on February 1, followed by New Hampshire on February 8. New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia will round out the early states over the course of that month.
The new calendar formalises a change that began during the last presidential election cycle in 2024, when the national Democratic Party similarly put South Carolina at the front of its primary lineup.
The 2028 primaries set up a more competitive calendar for Democrats, giving greater influence to states with more racial diversity, in an effort to better represent the party’s key constituencies.
But plans to reshape the primary calendar have been met with controversy in the past.
In 2024, for instance, local leaders in New Hampshire defied party leaders by holding a state-run primary ahead of the first party-led vote in South Carolina. As justification, New Hampshire officials cited a state law requiring their primary to be the first in the nation.
There was also pushback in Iowa, whose state caucus had ushered in the primary season for decades.
Iowa Democrats warned that moving the state lower in the party’s calendar could send the wrong signal to rural voters, who often feel overlooked in national politics and tend to lean rightward.
Still, proponents of the calendar change argue that it will help the Democratic primaries better mirror the overall population of the US.
South Carolina has normally been Democrats’ first contest in the southern US, and it has a significant population of Black voters. Roughly a quarter of the state identifies as Black, according to census estimates.
Nevada and New Mexico, meanwhile, have large Latino or Hispanic populations, with 31 percent and 49 percent of their residents identifying as such, respectively. All three states will be at the forefront of the primary calendar, come 2028.
DNC Chairman Ken Martin took to social media on Saturday to tout the changes as capturing the demographic shifts in the country.
“These states reflect the diversity of America and will help ensure our nominee is best positioned to take back the White House in 2028,” Martin wrote on X.
Iowa and New Hampshire both have overwhelmingly white electorates, and critics have long argued the two states have played outsized roles in shaping presidential elections.
Notching early victories in the party primaries can help a candidate build momentum, and that, in turn, can help presidential hopefuls secure party nominations.
Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who led the DNC from 2005 to 2009, told The Associated Press (AP) news agency that the calendar changes will make for a more representative nominating process.
“These states look more like the country,” Dean said, pointing to places like South Carolina and Nevada, “whereas Iowa and New Hampshire don’t”.
But it remains uncertain how the new calendar could affect the growing intra-party feud between progressive and more moderate, establishment candidates.
Democrats in Michigan, one of the states given a boost in the calendar shakeup, narrowly voted earlier this month to select progressive Abdul El-Sayed as their Senate nominee.
Given that Michigan will now have an earlier say in the voting process, some experts have speculated that the swing state could help progressives assert greater influence over the party overall.
But other states given more prominence in the 2028 lineup have a more moderate streak.
South Carolina, for instance, favoured then-candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries over his more progressive opponents, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
“I think our primary voters up north are probably a little different than primary voters in South Carolina,” Boyd Brown, a former DNC member from South Carolina, told AP.
Here is the full list of the six states that will have the first say in Democrats’ 2028 presidential primaries:
AUSTIN, Texas — Democrats seeking the party’s presidential nomination in 2028 will need to prove themselves early on in states where Black and Latino voters and union members are key supporters, under an election year calendar approved Saturday.
The primary lineup pushes Iowa from the traditional top spot and makes South Carolina the leadoff state, voting on Jan. 22, 2028, followed by Nevada on Feb. 1. New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia round out the early states, throughout February, according to the plan endorsed by the Democratic National Committee at its meeting in Texas.
DNC Chairman Ken Martin said that to win the general election, “you have to be battle-tested in a way that you already have campaigned in front of and for the support of various communities throughout the country.” That is why the calendar designed by the party matters, he said in an interview.
Some potential candidates in what is expected to be a large field have visited early-voting states such as South Carolina. Party leaders have said the order gives candidates the best shot at winning back the White House after President Trump’s final term.
“They have to show that they can go to the South and talk to Black voters and rural voters, as well as out west, talking ranching and mining issues, to a border state, to union members,” said party strategist Karen Finney, who has worked on multiple presidential campaigns. “Whoever survives will be battle-tested.”
Former presidential candidate Howard Dean, a onetime Vermont governor, recalled his tenure as national party chairman, when Democrats solidified Nevada and South Carolina as early states behind Iowa and New Hampshire. The latest change is even better, he said.
“These states look more like the country” as a whole, he said, “whereas Iowa and New Hampshire don’t.”
Rita Hart, chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, said bypassing her state in the early going would sideline important voter voices and give a political edge to Republicans, who are expected to keep Iowa atop their calendar.
As the first-in-the-South primary, South Carolina was more decisive than Iowa and New Hampshire for nominees Barack Obama in 2008, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. All three dominated among South Carolina’s large Black population, which can yield more than half the state’s Democratic primary electorate.
With Nevada and New Mexico following, that will require candidates to court more Latino voters early in the process.
Shifting from Iowa and New Hampshire does not mean little-known candidates cannot catch fire, as Pete Buttigieg did in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2020, when he was a 37-year-old former mayor. They just will not be able to do it with an almost entirely white audience.
“If you can’t go to every part of this country and make your case, you should not be running for president,” Finney said.
There is disagreement over how Democrats’ split between progressives and mainstream liberals may or may not surface in the nominating calendar.
“I think our primary voters up north are probably a little different than primary voters in South Carolina,” said Boyd Brown, a former DNC member from South Carolina. “It’s not the woke ideologies that we just can’t get away from” in other places, Brown said.
Nina Smith, a former Buttigieg advisor who works closely with progressive causes, disagreed. Smith said Black South Carolinians, especially, have gravitated to more moderate candidates — twice rejecting Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in favor of Clinton and Biden.
But, she said, “Southern Black voters are more progressive than they’re given credit for” on policy but also “realists” about what is possible.
“Living through Jim Crow and other oppressive structures will force you to take that approach,” she said.
Smith said that with South Carolina leading off and many Southern states following on Super Tuesday soon after the early lineup concludes, progressives will have to take the time to listen and then tailor their messages.
“A lot of Black voters don’t necessarily see themselves in the ideas and arguments that progressives put forward,” she said.
Nevada has the service industry unions because of Las Vegas; Michigan has the auto industry and associated manufacturing support industries; Virginia is home to more federal workers than any other state.
“Labor is still so important,” Dean said.
Beyond seeking the backing of organized labor, the campaigns and the party will look to unions for help in spreading Democrats’ message to voters and getting people to the polls.
Campaigns struggle to balance many demands such as meeting voters in person, raising money and the logistics of travel. As a result, places such as Nevada have gotten short shrift in the past because candidates, most from the eastern part of the country, have concluded the investment of time is not worth it.
An expanded calendar offers more clustering opportunities.
A swing to the West could hit two early states — Nevada and New Mexico — and include a fundraising stop in California, full of Democratic donors. A South Carolina trip could mean fundraisers and public appearances in Atlanta along with Charlotte and Raleigh, both in North Carolina. Virginia offers proximity to donors and national TV studios in Washington; the same options are available by adding a New York City stop on the way to New Hampshire.
Bre Maxwell is a DNC member from South Carolina who said the state’s smaller size and lower media costs are a financial equalizer, allowing not only the best-funded candidates to have an impact.
“They can campaign from the top to the bottom in a day,” Maxwell said.
Of the six early states, all but South Carolina have been competitive in general elections.
That means that even before Super Tuesday, the Democratic candidates will have spent significant time and resources in states worth a combined 43 electoral college votes. That is not insignificant on the way to the 270 needed to win.
Television ads and news coverage can spill over, as well. Markets targeting parts of South Carolina also reach portions of North Carolina and Georgia.
After all, Brown said, the point is to put a Democrat in the White House.
“This is not a social or a debate club. It is a political party,” he said.
Catalini and Barrow write for the Associated Press. Barrow reported from Atlanta. AP writer Meg Kinnard in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report.
Jaylen Brown and Giannis Antetokounmpo will play homecoming games a week apart in January.
The 2026-27 NBA schedule was released Thursday, setting the dates for the two former NBA Finals MVPs to return to face the teams that traded them this summer.
The schedules for opening night and Christmas already were unveiled this week, so those two games were among the most intriguing matchups not yet known. Brown, who was dealt from the Celtics to the rival Philadelphia 76ers in a stunning move, will play his first game back in Boston on Jan. 21.
Antetokounmpo was expected to be traded by Milwaukee this offseason — at one point speculation was that he might be swapped for Brown — and eventually was dealt to Miami. The Heat will travel to face the Bucks for the first time on Jan. 28.
Both of those games, which will be on Thursday nights, will stream on Prime Video.
Other details about the schedule:
The season will open Oct. 20 with a tripleheader, highlighted by LeBron James, Brown and the 76ers visiting the New York Knicks, who will receive their rings after winning the franchise’s first championship since 1973.
The regular season ends April 11. All-Star weekend is set for Feb. 19-21 in Phoenix.
Every team will play on Monday, Nov. 2, and there will then be no games the following night, which is election day in the U.S. The league is leaving that first Tuesday in November as an open day in hopes that fans and members of the NBA community will participate in the voting process.
No teams will play on Saturday, April 10, the second-to-last day of the regular season. Every team is then in action on the final day, with all the games matching Eastern Conference teams and the one interconference matchup scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. EDT. The games involving West teams are set for 8:30 p.m.
There will be 90 regular-season games televised nationally on ABC or NBC, up from 79 last season. Every team will be scheduled to appear on national TV at least twice.
Throughout the season, games will stream on Peacock on Monday nights, be shown on NBC and Peacock on Tuesdays, be televised by ESPN on Wednesdays, and stream on Prime Video on Fridays.
Saturday night primetime games on ABC begin Dec. 12 with the Knicks visiting the Heat, while NBC’s “Sunday Night Basketball” returns Jan. 24 with Oklahoma City visiting Golden State.
Prime Video will begin streaming Thursday night doubleheaders in January and some Saturday afternoon games starting Feb. 6 with Portland at Memphis, when Ja Morant returns to face the Grizzlies for the first time.
The NBA champion Knicks have the most appearances on ABC with six, while the Lakers, 76ers, San Antonio Spurs and Minnesota Timberwolves all are featured on ESPN eight times.
The Knicks, Spurs, 76ers, Thunder, Warriors, Lakers, Denver Nuggets and Houston Rockets all get the maximum 11 appearances on NBC.
Teams will average 14.2 sets of back-to-back games, the lowest total since the NBA Cup was added to the schedule, and no team will have more than 16. No team will play eight games in 12 nights, or 18 in 30.
There are 59 back-to-back games involving at least 750 miles of travel, down from 74 last season.
No team will be scheduled to play the night before games in the NBA Cup, or if they are in nationally televised games on Christmas Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents Day, Sunday nights on NBC or Saturday nights on ABC.
If Kevin Durant averages 26 points, as he did in his first season in Houston, he could move past Kobe Bryant into fourth place on the career scoring list sometime around Jan. 16, when the Rockets would be at the midpoint of their schedule.
Indiana’s Rick Carlisle is set to become the eighth man to coach 2,000 NBA games on March 8.
For all but one of the past 58 years, horse racing’s Triple Crown arrived at the same time on the calendar. The Kentucky Derby was run on the first Saturday in May, followed two weeks later by the Preakness and three weeks after that by the Belmont.
Three races for 3-year-olds in five weeks. Win them all and enter racing’s pantheon.
Those last two sentences remain true. But after 48 hours of upheaval this week, the times — and in particular the calendar — are changing. (The only exception since 1969 came in the pandemic year of 2020 when two of the three races were held in September.)
On Monday, Churchill Downs Inc. and the New York Racing Assn., which host the Derby and Belmont, respectively, announced a new six-race series for 3-year-olds that includes those two races on their traditional dates, but not the Preakness. The Thoroughbred Championship Series will feature a points system, with horses who compete in at least four races eligible to share a $5-million bonus pool that will pay down to the top eight finishers.
Then on Wednesday, the Maryland Jockey Club announced the Preakness would be moved back eight days, to the fourth Sunday in May. That date usually falls on Memorial Day weekend, though 2027 is an exception.
The goal is to get more Derby horses to run in the Preakness after more than 85% of the entrants in the last five years, including three winners — Rich Strike (2022), Sovereignty (2025) and Golden Tempo (2026) — skipped the Maryland race. Their trainers cited the short turnaround between the two events; very few horses these days compete in races two weeks apart.
“This extra week between the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness opens the Preakness to potential participants who use modern training methods,” said Bill Knauf, president and general manager of the Maryland Jockey Club.
“I think it’s a great idea,” Bob Baffert, the only trainer to win the Triple Crown since 1978, with American Pharoah (2015) and Justify (2018), said via text message. “Extra week and on a Sunday. Triple Crown tradition stays intact. Win-win for all because you have a choice to go for it if you think you have the right horse after winning the Derby.”
Baffert had said in a post Monday on X that the “greatest achievement in racing will always be winning the Triple Crown.”
But if horses were skipping the Preakness because of a 14-day turnaround, how many will run a week later knowing it’s just 13 days before the Belmont, especially since the latter race is part of the new series?
This year, no horse competed in all three races. Last year, there was one: Journalism, who sandwiched a win in the Preakness around runner-up finishes in the Derby and Belmont.
“As a traditionalist, sentimentally it’s difficult to see the timing and structure of the Triple Crown being adjusted,” Aron Wellman, president of Eclipse Thoroughbred Partners, which co-owns Journalism, said in a phone interview. “However, as a proponent of innovation and recognizing that the industry at large has fallen behind the times in so many respects, I applaud the innovation of Churchill Downs Inc. and NYRA.”
Did those outfits just put a dagger in the Triple Crown?
“I don’t know how much more of a dagger Churchill and NYRA should be blamed for putting into the Triple Crown when in the last two years, the winner of the Kentucky Derby has skipped the Preakness and waited for the Belmont,” Wellman said.
He also noted that Churchill Downs made an $85-million offer this spring to purchase the intellectual property rights to the Preakness, but the state of Maryland matched it.
“If anything, Churchill’s move to secure the IP [intellectual property rights] for the Preakness was a gesture on their part to try to save the Triple Crown because the daggers have already proven, if not fatal, then close to it,” Wellman said.
“So I don’t place any blame on Churchill and NYRA for the steady decline or demise of the Triple Crown. … And now knowing that they [can’t] institute whatever changes they were going to make, they’ve taken it upon themselves to try to do something positive for the industry and their respective brands. Which I applaud them for.”
The other races in the new series are the Matt Winn Stakes in July at Churchill Downs, the Jim Dandy in late July or early August at Saratoga, the Travers in late August at Saratoga, and a new “championship race” that will be scheduled in September at Churchill. Each race will have a minimum purse of $1 million (the Derby is worth $5 million; the Belmont and Preakness $2 million each).
NBC will televise the Churchill races, with Fox handling those in New York. NBC also announced a new deal to carry the Preakness through 2032, the same year its rights to the Derby expire.
Come 2028, the Democratic presidential campaign promises to be a banger, with all sorts of intrigue and subplots layered within a wide-open fight for the nomination.
There’s the prospect of same-state rivals going at it. (California’s Gavin Newsom vs. Kamala Harris; Georgia’s Sen. Jon Ossoff vs. Sen. Raphael Warnock.)
There’s sure to be a generational divide, a split over how much time and energy Democrats should spend rehashing the Trump era, and, inevitably, a clash between standard-bearers of the left, the far left and the party’s increasingly small center-left.
All that remains in the offing, however, as none of the major prospects have formally declared their candidacies. Political tradition, and self-preservation, require waiting at least until after November’s midterm election to jump into the race.
In the meantime, Democrats have seemingly resolved at least one 2028 fight, a fracas marked by snarking, backbiting and plenty of acrimony — all the things that make our politics such a grand and glorious endeavor.
We speak of the contest to determine which state will hold the first vote of the 2028 nominating process. And the winner is … South Carolina!
This was a blow to Nevada, the runner-up in the calendar sweepstakes, and not a very sporting one at that. The state Democratic Party issued a huffy news release, insisting Nevada will be the candidates’ first true test of 2028 — emphasis added — reprising the argument over which state offers the best starting path to reclaim the White House and, thus, deserves the coveted lead voting slot.
(California, a perennially frustrated onlooker, is not set to vote until March 7, several weeks into the balloting, which is supposed to start Jan. 22.)
For decades, the political calendar was unchanged and, mostly, unchallenged.
Iowa went first, holding its quaint and quirky precinct caucuses — neighbors gathered in church halls, school libraries and the like as they worked through arcane rules involving “realignment” and “viability thresholds” — followed by New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary.
In 2024, President Biden shook things up.
He’d failed miserably in Iowa in his runs for president, so Biden had no problem slotting South Carolina first after the state resurrected his lifeless 2020 candidacy. (Iowa didn’t help itself by making a thorough mess of its 2020 caucuses, taking nearly a month to certify a winner.)
The change set off a free-for-all this time around, as a dozen states bid for the chance to vote first.
(The two major political parties set the rules for choosing their presidential nominees, independent of one another. Republicans are expected to stick to the traditional lineup, starting with the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, followed by contests in Nevada and South Carolina.)
Last month, after nearly a year of consideration, the Democratic Party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee voted for six states to hold their contests in a window between late January and the end of February. They are, in order, South Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia. The lineup will be presented to the full Democratic National Committee to be voted on and finalized later this month.
Doubtless, you — a normal person — have paid little or no attention to any of this. You’ve got more important things to do, like binge-watching “Widow’s Bay,” or not melting.
But party leaders and political insiders take the process extremely seriously. At stake: bragging rights, a modest economic boost and the chance for local analysts and office-holders to make frequent appearances as experts on the cable-TV chat shows.
The jostling grew particularly fierce between South Carolina and Nevada.
More than 50% of the Democratic primary electorate in South Carolina is Black. In Nevada, Latinos are a substantial and increasingly powerful voting bloc. So, naturally, the competition between the two states assumed fraught racial overtones, which is unfortunate but not surprising, given Democrats’ penchant for picking at sore spots and turning on each other at the slightest provocation.
It was also rather pointless. The order of the presidential calendar is consequential, but far from determinative.
South Carolina was vital to Biden’s success. But so, too, was the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which sharply curtailed the Democratic nominating fight. Barack Obama’s 2008 victory in Iowa gave him a huge lift, but he lost to Hillary Clinton the following week in New Hampshire and had to fight another six months before winning the nomination.
Presidential campaigns have changed drastically in the 50 years since a little-known Jimmy Carter quietly burrowed into Iowa, spent months bunking in folks’ extra bedrooms, then burst to national fame by outperforming his more prominent rivals. Today, the race is a 24/7 affair, followed by voters in all 50 states.
While local concerns may come up here and there — the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada, beach erosion in South Carolina’s Lowcountry — the same issues and controversies confront candidates and animate the contest regardless of whether a field of soybeans, a white church steeple or a Southern fish fry serves as the backdrop.
Obviously, the voting has to begin somewhere and the competition between states is well and good. But the trash-talking and, especially, antagonism over race and ethnicity is gratuitous and needlessly divisive. Candidates will show they have the stuff to win the nomination, or not, by building their best case and pitching it to voters.
No matter if it’s a Black church in Las Vegas or a Latino neighborhood in North Charleston. Any location will do.
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