It’s not too early to think about the 2024 race

Follow Us Get the newsletter Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Let's talk about the presidential nomination calendar. After all, the 2024 presidential cycle has been going on, more or less, for three months now, even if at this stage the invisible primary is even more invisible than it will be next year. Indeed, public campaigning is frozen for now — on the Democratic side because President Joe Biden will be eligible to run for re-election, and on the Republican side because former President Donald Trump may well run again.  In fact, the parties and state officials may have to agree on the calendar of primaries and caucuses before knowing for sure which, if any, nominations will be fully contested. That's certainly different from any cycle of the modern era.  That said, the big questions appear to be whether the current plan — early events in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada (with the latter two switched in order for Democrats), followed by a large Super Tuesday — will remain in place. Remember: While the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary go back the the beginning of the modern era in 1972, the rest of the calendar only stabilized very recently, in 2012.  Ed Kilgore and Josh Putnam have items up about the key issues in retaining that plan. There are a number of them: Collapse of support for caucuses among Democrats Repeated failures by the Iowa parties in administering the caucuses Long-standing dissatisfaction among Democrats about holding the first two events in Iowa and New Hampshire The possibility of Nevada switching to a primary, and moving up on the calendar The calendar is only somewhat centrally organized. The national party organizations can set rules for the states (Democrats are far more aggressive about this), but primaries are set by state governments, not the parties. The media and the candidates have agency, too, that the national parties can't control. Early events matter mainly because they generate positive and negative stories about campaigns, and in this sense early states are important to whatever extent the candidates and the news media pay attention to them. Suppose, for example, that the parties recognized a new Nevada primary as the first event, but New Hampshire set its primary a week earlier anyway. Democrats in that situation might declare the New Hampshire primary void and strip the state of its delegates … but if the media continued to cover the event, and the candidates contested it, then it would "really" be first after all.  My position on all of this is that stability is undervalued by most of those who discuss these things, while the particular order of the states and methods of conducting the contests are overvalued. Stability allows party actors to work around whatever weird distortions the calendar sets up and form coalitions. We saw that dramatically in 2020 when candidates with little support among Black and Latino Democrats did well in Iowa and New Hampshire, but party actors discounted those successes and rushed to Biden when he proved, with a second place finish in Nevada and a win in South Carolina, that he was the only candidate capable of appealing to the entire party.  So I would be reluctant to mess with the process. After all, it seems to be working reasonably well on the Democratic side in the sense that party actors have been able to choose the nominee, and it only failed by that standard on the Republican side in 2016 (and probably not because of the calendar of primaries and caucuses).  It's hard to justify keeping Iowa first when it doesn't seem capable of running its caucuses smoothly. But rearranging the early calendar is easier said than done, and without a strong consensus — preferably one shared by both national parties — the chances of successfully changing things up are not strong at all. I'm not confident any such consensus will emerge.  Of course, one thing Biden and Trump have in common is that neither of them won in Iowa. But they did both win their nominations with the current calendar in place, and so they may be reluctant to mess with the status quo even to lower the profile of states they didn't win. Which could mean the Iowa caucuses somehow manage to survive for another cycle. 1. Ceren Budak, Ashley Muddiman and Natalie (Talia) Stroud at the Monkey Cage on television news coverage of the pandemic. 2. Julia Azari on post-presidency Trump and the Republican Party. 3. Frank O. Bowman III on the Constitution and post-presidency impeachment trials. 4. Lindsay Chervinsky on impeachment history. 5. Bloomberg's Peter Coy on Arindrajit Dube and the economics of the minimum wage. 6. Annie Lowrey on earmarks and winning Joe Manchin's vote. 7. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Conor Sen makes the case for New York. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. 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