Vermin Supreme, 2024 New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary candidate
It’s hard to believe, but the first 2024 presidential primary contest is just 11 days away. Specifically, on January 15, Iowa will hold its Republican presidential caucus. In advance of the Iowa GOP caucus, CNN is holding another Republican presidential debate just five days beforehand, on January 10. However, only three candidates qualified for the CNN debate: Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Nimarata Nikki Haley. Since Trump previously announced that he was skipping these debates, it will be just DeSantis and Haley, who are dead even in the Republican polls (though both are way behind Trump), flinging mud at each other. Both DeSantis and Haley are spending millions of dollars (either directly or via supportive PACs) to attack the other.
Eight days after the Iowa caucus, on January 23, comes the New Hampshire primaries, both on the Democratic and Republican side. Here’s where the controversy begins, and it’s with the Democrats. At the urging of President Joe Biden and his campaign, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted in favor of asking New Hampshire and Iowa to move their primary and caucus, respectively, to a later date, after that of South Carolina (which holds its 2024 Democratic primary on February 3), in order to “increase diversity” at the front end of the primary process. However, while Iowa agreed to move its Democratic caucus back to March 5, New Hampshire closely holds onto its first-in-the-nation primary status, which is written into state law, and both New Hampshire Democrats and Republicans (including Republican Governor Chris Sununu and Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan) opposed any such change.
As a result, President Biden announced that he would not file to run in the 2024 New Hampshire Democratic primary. Some 21 other Democratic candidates will appear on the ballot, some with names such as “President” R. Boddie, Paperboy Prince, and Vermin Supreme (see photo above). At the same time, New Hampshire Democrats are organizing a write-in campaign for Biden in the primary, so he might still win the contest.
President Biden’s concern about “diversity” in the first several Democratic presidential contests is a valid one. In recent elections, the first three state contests were Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. As we have mentioned, none of these states were representative of the country as a whole, and especially the Democratic electorate, which is heavily represented by black voters. In particular, New Hampshire is too white, Nevada held undemocratic caucuses (where many voters were too intimidated to show up, either because of the hours required to stand around, or by the requirement to stand under a sign with their candidate’s name in full view of their neighbors, or both), and Iowa is both too white and a caucus state. For 2024, Nevada changed its contest from a caucus to a primary, and South Carolina (with a large black population) was able to schedule its primary ahead of Nevada. Along with the aforementioned Iowa Democratic caucus move to March 5, this mostly solved the diversification concerns raised by President Biden and the DNC, other than in New Hampshire.
In reality, even if President Biden doesn’t win the New Hampshire Democratic primary because not enough voters write in his name, Biden is in no danger of failing to win enough delegates in the remaining states to win the Democratic presidential nomination decisively. Even the notoriously anti-Democratic mainstream media will have a tough time spinning the Democratic nomination contest as some kind of close horse race.
Photo by Marc Nozell, used under Creative Commons license. https://shorturl.at/lmoOR
