Opinion

There were fireworks in New Hampshire on Wednesday night at CNN's town hall with former president Donald Trump. But there's a slow-burning fuse in the Granite State that has the potential to blow up Democratic Party primary politics next year.

Back in February, the Democratic National Committee overwhelmingly voted to adopt a schedule suggested by President Biden, making South Carolina the first contest and moving New Hampshire to second, sharing its primary date with Nevada. Unsurprisingly, just about everyone in the Granite State has been opposed to this idea with the raw fury of a sun going supernova.

The first consequence is that New Hampshire officials, including Democrats who have few other beefs with Biden, are, in effect, declaring: "To heck with you, we’re going to hold our primary first anyway."

State law requires New Hampshire to hold its presidential primary "7 days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election." The DNC's calendar has South Carolina holding its presidential primary on Saturday, Feb. 3, 2024, meaning that New Hampshire would have to hold its primary no later than Jan. 27, probably on Tuesday, Jan. 23.

Even if New Hampshire Democrats changed their mind and agreed to the later date — a supremely unlikely scenario — they would need the cooperation of the state's Republican state legislature and GOP governor, Chris Sununu, and the governor is literally telling the DNC to go "pound sand."

"The state does not do what the Democrat Party says," Sununu scoffed in March. "Our primary will be likely the third week in January. What [the DNC will] do is say, ‘Oh, well, we’re not going to see seat your delegates.’ Who cares? Nobody cares about that. New Hampshire is about coming, working, getting all the media attention, all the name ID that you need, all the really political momentum that you need."

In 2008, the DNC punished the delegations of Florida and Michigan because those states had moved up their primaries earlier than the Feb. 5 date allowed by the party. The DNC declared that each delegate from those states would get half a vote, while all the other states and territories would get one full vote per delegate. The DNC may well do the same to New Hampshire this cycle; the state is slated to have 33 delegates.

Here's the big question for Biden: Does he compete in a New Hampshire primary held against the DNC's rules, violating a schedule that the committee adopted at Biden's request? Or does he skip it? And if Biden doesn't compete … does he end up dramatically underperforming, or perhaps even losing the New Hampshire primary to anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or spiritual author Marianne Williamson? Those two have already committed to running in New Hampshire; others might follow if Biden's polling numbers continue to look dire.

At first glance, Biden must ignore the rogue early primary. The whole reason the DNC changed the schedule was because Biden wanted South Carolina — the state pivotal to his winning the 2020 nomination — to go earlier and New Hampshire and Iowa (where he lost badly in 2020) to go later.

But other Democrats, such as Rep. Ro Khanna of California, argue that Biden's skipping the primary would amount to penalizing New Hampshire voters "for failing to do something that its state Democratic Party has no control over." Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire warns that Biden could jeopardize his prospects in the general election and those of down-ballot Democrats in 2024 if he snubs the state.

In the past week, Michael Graham, managing editor of InsideSources.com, noticed that when the Biden campaign announced that "50 Prominent Voices from Across the Democratic Party Will Take a Leadership Role in Delivering the Campaign's Message and Engaging Voters Across the Country," none of them were from New Hampshire.

The state's Democrats are in something of a political cold war with Biden for changing the primary schedule. Then again, they’ve never felt particularly warm and fuzzy toward him; Biden finished fifth in the 2020 primary, with just 8.4 percent.

In that light, is it really so unthinkable that the morning after the New Hampshire primary, America wakes up to the flashback-inducing headline "KENNEDY WINS"?