A no vote on the early primary idea

With all due respect to my co-blogger and an esteemed and valued Australian member of the LGM commenter community, I think the idea proposed here is a bad one. I’ve been making the point in some comments but I think spelling it out here on the front page might be a worthwhile exercise. I will not belabor the logistical and legal challenges, because while they are likely pretty substantial, at the level of kicking around ‘outside the box’ ideas they are not terribly important or interesting. Let’s presume, for the sake of argument, there’s a big red button one could push that would move the primary process, otherwise unchanged, for the 2028 Democratic nominee up 24 months, with the initial state primaries taking place in Jan/Feb 2026, rather than 2028. Do you push the button?

Here’s my case for not pushing the button:

• This is obviously being proposed as an emergency response to the “interesting times” (in the Chinese proverb sense) we find ourselves in. But it’s also a recurring complaint made by partisans of the out-party every four years. I think this complaint is, generally speaking, fundamentally misguided. The lack of a coherent national message may be harmful in some ways, but it is also helpful in others: candidates can craft and emphasize a message tailored to their particular district. There’s something Trump’s doing that’s harmful to people pretty much everywhere; local candidates likely have a better understanding of which one might resonate with the voters they need to win. In some of these districts, Trump is likely to still be somewhat popular, which necessitates a different kind of rhetorical strategy than a national leader would likely take. The lack of a nation message can benefit our local candidates.
• On thing that might override the above analysis would be if this were a turnout election, and higher turnout benefited our side. This has long been a widely held belief among Democratic partisans, and to be fair it was probably true in the past. The evidence that that era has passed, and Democrats are now the party that benefits from lower, rather than higher, turnout, is overwhelming. That’s no reason not to try to goose turnout among specific narrow constituencies likely to support Democrats, of course. But having a national leader with a national message isn’t a narrow turnout strategy, it’s a broad one. In an era where politics is heavily nationalized and negatively polarized, and where Democrats hold a natural advantage in lower-attention, lower-turnout elections, there are very good reasons to suspect this could promote greater turnout in a way that benefitted Republicans more than Democrats.
• One reason to support this plan is if one believed that the key to driving down Trump’s approval is a the right messenger delivering the critique. If we could drive down his approval from low 40’s to mid or low 30’s, we might not have to even worry about candidates winning in still-Trump friendly districts. I think it’s possible Trump’s approval could drop further, creating such conditions. I think believing a leader capable of pulling off a messaging strategy exists among Democratic electeds is overly optimistic, but even if you think such a person exists, believing that person is likely to be selected by an early primary is wildly over-optimistic. I know some people want to chalk up the Democratic party’s near-historic unpopularity at the moment to being merely an artifact of Democratic partisans mad at the party for what they perceive to be insufficiently vigorous resistance to Trump, and that is definitely part of the story, but I think it’s wishful thinking to reduce the party image problem entirely to that dynamic. They key to driving down Trump’s popularity further goes primarily through a segment of the electorate who aren’t full cultists but are open to turning against Trump, but who, for the most part, despise, distrust and/or resent the Democratic party generally. The idea that the process whereby the people who actually like the Democratic party the most in 2025 select their preferred candidate somehow leads to the selection of an effective messenger for the subset of the population that hates Democrats and are iffy on Trump seems wildly overoptimistic to me.
• One thing worth keeping in mind that’s largely unrelated to Trump is that Democratic primaries tend to be ridiculously overwrought, bitter, nasty affairs where some non-trivial number of partisans of the losing candidate(s) are virtually guaranteed to become deeply embittered, and have their worldview badly warped, by the process/outcome, which they will be inclined to take out on the nominee. We still see people, all over the internet and sadly somethimes around these parts, whose worldviews are still at this very late date deeply shaped by their perception of the 2016 primary, nearly a decade later. Meaningful, substantive factional disputes aren’t even necessary for this outcome to occur (our more youthful readers may not remember how nasty the Obama/Clinton one got). One reason this usually doesn’t completely debilitate the party is the timing. The bitter recriminations are largely (but not entirely) counteracted by the temporal urgency of uniting for an imminent general election against a candidate widely recognized as much more bad than the bad party faction that unfairly beat you. Without the grativational pull of that existential urgency, the task of unification post-bitter primary becomes considerably more difficult to surmount. It seems like basic fast that Trump is president right now should be enough to overcome that tendency. But when I look around, I see an awful lot of people who seem to prefer to view politics through “centrists/moderates vs. progresive left” lens first and formost, even while the Trump version of the Republican party is busy winning elections. Given the petty grudges and recriminations that a primary process inevitably produces, allowing for a couple extra years for them to fester is a serious downside risk of this plan.
• One view some people seem to hold in that thread is that there are “natural leaders” for the out-party: The Senate and House minority leaders. It’s easy to see why people make this assumption, but confusing legislative minority leaders in the American system, even very effective ones, with national leaders akin to a presidential candidate, or leader of the opposition in a Westminster system, is a mistake. Pelosi was a mediocre-to-worse national messenger, but Democrats correctly stuck with her for almost 2 decades because she was good at the other, fundamentally more consequential, parts of her job. A similar story could be told about prime Mitch McConnell. Like Pelosi, he was not a particularly effective messenger but (for a while) good enough at legislative maneuvering and counting the votes. If midterm voters strongly associated their local candidates with McConnell in 09-10/13-14, or Pelosi in 17-18, their respective parties almost certainly would have done somewhat worse in those elections. These are just different jobs in American politics, in ways that it’s difficult, particularly for those who understand politics though a Westminster lens, to intuitively grasp.

I appreciate, and feel deeply, the terrifying and volatile nature of the present moment, and am prepared to broadly endorse the call to think outside “normal politics” parameters to address it. But this strikes me as fine example of the dangers of thinking in emergency mode: “We must do something/X is something/lets do X” thinking.