Democrats Fight Over Whether Blacks or Latinos Should Have More Power in Presidential Nomination

Politicians and pundits probably overestimate the importance of the order in which states vote for the presidential nomination, but there is obviously some truth to the idea that early momentum in picking up delegates influences how subsequent voters make their choice. 

After all, in 1976 Jimmy Carter got on the map in Iowa by spending every moment there up to the caucuses, and he became president because suddenly everybody knew his name and he became a phenom. Doing well in Iowa and New Hampshire allowed one to rise to the top of the media conversation. 

Iowa had traditionally been at the front of the line in assigning delegates (in caucuses, not a primary), but the Democrats decided the state was too white and too conservative to have such a prominent role anymore. 

Technically, New Hampshire was the first primary in 2024, but it awarded zero delegates anyway. South Carolina, which saved Joe Biden’s bacon in 2020, was the first real primary that mattered. And in South Carolina, the black vote is king in the Democratic Party. 

“If Nevada gets elevated over South Carolina, it would be because of their Latino vote,” says @ChristaleSpain. “So you would then be telling Black voters that you matter less than brown voters. And I refuse to believe that our party wants to send any type of message like that.” https://t.co/FLmzfrAKGl

— Michael Kruse (@michaelkruse) July 22, 2026

For the 2028 primary season, the Democrats are having an internal battle over the first-in-the-nation status, and it has devolved into some nasty racial politics, because of course it has. This is what Democratic Party voters live, breathe, and fight about, because the only way to overcome racism is to think about race every second of the day, and have nightmares about microaggressions at night. 

South Carolina and Nevada have emerged as the two front-runners to begin the 2028 Democratic presidential nominating calendar, but their jockeying has grown acrimonious and pitted Black and Latino party leaders against each other, according to interviews with more than a dozen party officials involved in the discussions.

A powerful panel of 49 insiders of the Democratic National Committee is set to meet this week in Washington to sketch out the order of the early-state calendar. The full party body would then vote next month to finalize the choices.

The order of primary states is deeply consequential. Different states have different upsides and downsides for the party’s potential 2028 contenders — and require the constructing of different political coalitions. The calendar is likely to play a significant role in deciding who ultimately emerges as the next Democratic presidential nominee. And months of private lobbying, backroom discussions and brass-knuckle racial politics are bursting into the open on the eve of the gathering.

“It’s almost like we’re running against Nevada,” Christale Spain, the chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, said in an interview. “That’s what it feels like.”

“If Nevada gets elevated over South Carolina, it would be because of their Latino vote,” added Ms. Spain, who is Black. “So you would then be telling Black voters that you matter less than brown voters. And I refuse to believe that our party wants to send any type of message like that.”

Other new states are jockeying to jump into the influential early window, including Virginia, which also has a sizable Black population.

“If you have the right calendar, you can have the right nominee to prepare you for the general election,” said Terry McAuliffe, a former Virginia governor and D.N.C. chair.

The irony, at least to me, is that for the most important power brokers in the party, the real fight isn’t over whether black voters or latino voters have more say over who the next potential president is—latino voters are less likely to vote on racial issues and have “solidarity” than black voters, who are uniquely concerned with race—but rather the fight between radical labor unions and black voters. 

For decades, the nominating calendar for both Democrats and Republicans had begun in Iowa and New Hampshire, two overwhelmingly white states. But former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. put South Carolina — whose many Black voters helped make him the nominee in 2020 — first in 2024.

Now South Carolina is fighting to kept its premier slot. At the same time, Nevada argues that its status as a diverse and growing battleground state — with a large Latino population and a strong tradition of organized labor — would better position Democrats to win the general election. Nevada is a swing state that Democrats have won in recent years — they currently hold both of its Senate seats — while South Carolina is reliably Republican both in presidential years and at the state level.

Prominent Latino leaders and groups have been instrumental in Nevada’s lobbying charge, including the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and recently Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee to be the first Latino governor of California in modern times.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico sent handwritten notes to every D.N.C. rules committee member lobbying for her state. In an interview, she argued that putting New Mexico in the early window would push Democrats to hone their message to Latino voters who drifted away in 2024.

“It’s pretty critical because we don’t talk to Hispanic voters until the end no matter what we commit to do,” she said of past races.

The key voting bloc for Democrats in Nevada is not some unified “Latino” population who are determined to unite behind one candidate; it’s the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its similarly radical union allies. If you are looking for the most radical single bloc of voters within the Democratic Party, there would be a cage match between the SEIU and the teachers’ unions, with the public employees’ unions a distant third. 

Black voters are economic liberals—they love the welfare state—but they are not economically or socially radical, and aren’t such big fans of illegal immigration either. Joe Biden relied on the black vote in South Carolina to save his butt because Jim Clyburn could deliver them as a bloc; a huge fraction of the Democratic base, believe it or not, saw him as too old and too moderate.

He certainly was the former, and certainly not the latter. 

While South Carolina delegates to the DNC rightly see that the effort to take away their influence as “first in the nation” as a slap on the power of black voters, it’s not because anybody in the DNC wants to deprecate the influence of blacks; it’s because they want, intentionally or not, to elevate the radical-left labor unions to help win a swing state, which South Carolina most certainly is not. 

No doubt the SEIU is demanding the status of “first,” and the Democrats need the SEIU to be happy. 

Now, the 4-D chess: the SEIU is bigger and more powerful than the DSA in the Democratic Party, but among the traditional voting blocs in the Democratic Party, they are the most likely to rush to radical policies alongside the DSA. They are basically communists, too, and embrace illegal immigration, “decolonization,” and all the most radical policies you associate with the DSA. 

It’s because of them that the “billionaire taxes” are suddenly all the rage, and they are in the background of much of the voting shenanigans in places like California. 

And the SEIU has more influence over its members’ voting behavior than the trade unions, which ultimately represent middle-class voters who are less likely to do what they are told than poorly educated Latina maids who likely are as afraid of the union rep as they are of their boss. 

From the outside, the black-Latino framing of the debate may seem to make sense, but it is wrong. The dispute is between black voters in Right to Work/non-competitive South Carolina and radical SEIU union leaders in a very swing state. 

And, as a proxy, a battle between the Bolshevik Democrats and the Organized Crime Democrats. 

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