with Michigan It makes its way into the pool of early presidential statesIs it time to sell your ethanol stock and invest in auto parts futures? Stop pretending you like corn dogs and butter cows and start gorging on a deep-dish oblong pizza with pepperoni buried under a torrent of brick cheese?
I’m only partially kidding. There’s a reason Michigan Republicans jumped aboard Rep. Debbie Dingell’s drawn-out quest to beat their state ahead of Iowa in the Democratic nomination calendar, though it presents some potential complications that I’ll get into later.
“It’s a good thing for Michigan,” said Saul Anuzis, a Republican consultant and former chairman of the state party. “When you only have eight states on the battlefield, the presidential races are only in those eight states, and 40 states or more are completely ignored.”
“It’s the states that run early that set the agenda in Washington,” said Dingell, a Democrat. She is doing well The list of reasons Michigan belonged to is among the few early on. Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, she added, “You can’t win the White House without the heart of America.”
It’s also a very good thing for Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. — especially as he accommodates the fact that the other two leaders of his party, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Both are from Brooklyn.
“It’s very comfortable territory for him,” Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist, said of the president.
In fact. It’s hard not to detect a flavor of revenge in Biden’s decision — which he outlined Thursday in a letter to members of the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee — to embrace adding Michigan to the early-state mix along with Georgia, while moving south. Carolina is at the front of the pack.
Biden underperformed in the Iowa caucuses in 2020, finishing in fourth place with distinction Only 15.8 percent of the vote. (It should be noted that Iowa also underperformed—a technological meltdown delayed results and prevented the state Democratic Party from deciding a winner.)
Then he got a rout at New Hampshire, slipping to an ignominious fifth and Only 8.4% of the vote. It wasn’t until South Carolina, which finished third on the primary calendar that year, that Biden picked up a victory, then built momentum on Super Tuesday that would lead him to the nomination.
“That makes a lot of sense.”
But Biden’s bizarre trajectory only served to amplify the indictment many Democrats have launched for years about the first two states in the primary calendar: They were not only grossly unrepresented in terms of racial diversity — 90 percent of Iowans are white — but also the educated voters in the country. Those states developed a taste for the politically exotic, embracing faculty favorites like Paul Tsongas who couldn’t win in the fall.
Biden presidency
This is the president’s position after the midterm elections.
“We must ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee very early in the process and throughout the entire early window,” Biden wrote. “As I said in February 2020, you can’t be the Democratic nominee and win the general election unless you have overwhelming support from voters of color — and that includes Black, Brown, Asian American, and Pacific Islander voters.”
Winning a Democratic primary state as diverse as Michigan requires a candidate who can perform well among black voters in cities like Detroit, but also among union voters and college voters of all races in the inner suburbs, said Adrian Hemond, a Democratic strategist. Based in Lansing.
Someone like Joe Biden added.
“It makes a lot of sense,” said Eric Hiers, who ran the Biden 2020 campaign in Michigan. “Everyone knows Route 270 goes through Michigan.”
For Democratic strategists, Michigan has a lot to offer. In contrast to Iowa, which has become a noncompetitive general election sideshow in recent years, investments in Michigan’s nominating process will likely pay off in the fall.
And with 10 million people, the size is thought to be just about right: not so big that winning becomes an expensive televised arms race, as it does in California, but big enough to have pockets of voters, like the Muslims in Dearborn and Hamtramck, that are a picture. micro-communities elsewhere.
“It’s not like there’s only one media market and it’s very expensive,” Hyers added. “You can also create a powerful and effective organization program.”
Unpredictability on both sides
If Michigan makes the cut, along with Georgia, it would likely change the way presidential candidates run for office in the near future — and not necessarily in predictable ways.
The most obvious effect on the Democratic side could be exactly what Biden mentioned: He elevates the party’s diverse coalition of Black and Brown communities to reflect their true weight in the party.
But it could also lead to some surprising results, especially on the Republican side.
“Instead of a minefield, this is like a field full of holes where you can break your ankle,” said Mark Graebner, the Democratic commissioner of Ingham County, Michigan.
Graebner noted that since Michigan does not require voters to register by party, the presidential primaries are likely to include large amounts of cross-voting.
In the past, this has led to some strange results. In 1972, George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, won the Michigan Democratic primary over George McGovern, the eventual candidate, With the help of Republican voters.
Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans have already closed in on the lineup of early states, with Iowa and New Hampshire first as usual. Under Republican National Committee rules, Michigan can be delegated to a party’s national nominating convention if the state holds its primaries before the Big Four.
Annuzis said Republicans could circumvent the FNC delegate penalty by holding what is known as a “preference primary” at the same time that Democrats hold a full primary.
The results will essentially be a recommendation from the voters to the state party committee, which will then select the nominee through what looks like a nominating convention or state caucus.
Depending on which rules the GOP adopts, given the lock that pro-Trump activists firmly hold on the Michigan Republican grassroots, a process led from within could benefit candidates on the political fringes. This year, the Michigan Republican Party nominated Christina Karamo, a far-right podcast publisher, as its nominee for Secretary of State. It lost by 14 percentage points.
The resistance is waiting
To be clear, Iowa (and New Hampshire) isn’t going down without a fight.
Officials in both states said they plan to hold their presidential contests early, regardless of what the Democratic National Committee agrees to during meetings this weekend. New Hampshire’s status as an early state is enshrined in law, the chairman of the Democratic Party there, Raymond Buckley, noted in an angry statement Thursday.
We’ll see what happens. The rules and regulations committee of the Democratic National Committee announced on Friday issued a letter Demanding that New Hampshire change its laws to accommodate South Carolina’s bid to become the first state primary. There is still a lot of messy negotiation to be done before any decisions can be final.
For now, the Michigan Democrats who prodded, cajoled, and pressured their colleagues to change the calendar aren’t quite ready yet to raise the bar in blue and gold (or green and white) football.
After all, Michigan has been waiting a generation to get the nod. “It’s really important to me that people realize that Carl Levine started this,” Dingell said, noting that she and Levin, the former senator who He passed away last yearMichigan has been pushing to add for three decades.
“We almost won in 2008,” Dingell added. “We got to the finish line, and we finally broke away.”
This time she said, “I won’t believe it’s done until it’s done.”
What are you reading tonight?
Thank you for reading On Politics and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. – Blake
Read previous issues of the newsletter over here.
If you enjoy what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can register over here. Browse all of our subscribers-only newsletters over here.
Do you have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
