The D.N.C. Has a Primary Problem – https://celebspop.site/

Biden has the entire party establishment on his side. The D.N.C. has formally endorsed him, which means that the organization, in addition to rubber-stamping a primary calendar that is far more favorable to him, will not sponsor any debates. Normally, this wouldn’t matter much; incumbent presidents enjoy such deference. But Biden is already the oldest president in history and would be 86 if he finishes a second term. Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Democrats don’t want him to run again (though this doesn’t mean they won’t vote for him). His approval ratings consistently hover around 40 percent.

At the same time, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a son of the slain senator and attorney general and a nephew of the slain president, has polled at 20 percent nationally among Democratic voters and has begun a campaign blitz in New Hampshire, where voters and politicians alike are aggrieved over the D.N.C.’s revision of the primary calendar, with the secretary of state, David Scanlan, a Republican, calling the first-in-the-nation status a defining part of the state’s “culture.” It is also enshrined in state law. Iowa’s reaction has been more muted because there are so few Democrats of note left in the state after successive Republican electoral waves. Still, Iowa Democrats may sync their caucuses with the Republicans anyway, defying the D.N.C.

Kennedy was once widely respected as an environmentalist; he has since drawn condemnation for his anti-vaccine advocacy, taste for conspiracy theories and incendiary statements — including invoking “Hitler Germany” in a speech about American vaccine mandates — but may hold appeal for the large base of libertarian voters in New Hampshire. (Marianne Williamson, the author and spiritual figure who dropped out of the 2020 race, is running again as well.) Democrats there are alarmed.

“The reality is that New Hampshire is going to keep the first-in-the-nation primary,” Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party and a longtime D.N.C. member, told me, “and the question only is whether or not the president is going to put his name on the ballot. They’re trying to come after New Hampshire, but it’s not going to be successful. So why go through all that pain?”

D. Arnie Arnesen, a left-leaning New Hampshire talk-show host and former Democratic state representative, understands the arguments against her state: “We’re too white, too rich, too privileged,” she conceded. New Hampshire has two Democratic senators but a Republican-controlled state government (including a governor, Chris Sununu, who once considered his own presidential challenge this cycle). On the question of the 2024 primaries, however, Arnesen sides with Buckley. “They knew the Republicans were going to Iowa and New Hampshire anyway. Why change now? There’s no upside. Not one iota of benefit for Joe Biden. Nothing. No benefit to Joe, no benefit to the Democrats. They shot themselves in the foot.”

As chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison, a 47-year-old who rose to his position two years ago from statewide politics in South Carolina and whose profile has risen along with his state’s, has to try to play mediator between angered state Democrats and a White House that expects fealty from the national organization. For now, Harrison is sanguine about all of it. The New Hampshire situation. Biden’s advanced age. The party’s declining share of many demographic groups, especially Latino voters and those without college degrees. A dire Senate map, where Democratic incumbents in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia could fall, along with the formerly Democratic senator in Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema, plunging Democrats into an indefinite minority.

In Harrison’s office at D.N.C. headquarters, which looks out on the dome of the Capitol, there hangs a portrait of Biden with Jim Clyburn, the 82-year-old South Carolina congressman whose endorsement and championing of Biden in 2020 is credited with rescuing his candidacy. Displayed over Harrison’s desk is a vintage sign for Ron Brown, who in 1989 became the first Black chairman of the D.N.C. Brown and Clyburn are both heroes to Harrison, who was Clyburn’s intern and, later, his director of floor operations when the congressman served as majority whip. A lucrative private-sector career followed as a lobbyist at the Podesta Group. With Clyburn’s blessing, he became chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. Harrison then ran a very high-profile, extremely expensive and ultimately unsuccessful campaign in 2020 for the Senate seat held by Lindsey Graham. Now Clyburn’s protégé heads a D.N.C. that has put their home state, where Harrison still lives with his family, quite literally first.