Don’t believe the Democratic National Committee’s official storyline: The DNC’s decision to make South Carolina the first Democratic presidential primary in 2028 isn’t about introducing more racial diversity into the early contests.
It’s actually about keeping power in the hands of the party establishment — the people who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, and who are likely to wind up supporting Kamala Harris in 2028.
The fix is in.
South Carolina was the establishment’s firewall against Bernie Sanders’ left-wing insurgency twice over.
In 2016, Sanders nearly beat Hillary Clinton in the first caucus, in Iowa, and went on to defeat her in the New Hampshire primary.
Four years later, there was a brief moment when Sanders looked like the frontrunner — until he got clobbered by Joe Biden in South Carolina.
It’s true that the black voters who make South Carolina’s primaries more racially diverse than the contests in Iowa or New Hampshire are also less politically radical.
So it’s easy for the DNC to say it’s not trying to choke off support for the socialist wing of the party; it’s just giving black voters more of a say.
The Democratic Socialists of America, the left fringe of the party, is disproportionately white — even its New York City chapter is 60% white, according to DSA’s own membership polling.
That’s astonishing, considering NYC itself is only 34% white.
This racial split between the Democrats’ most ideologically intense faction and the party’s elite, which only holds on to power thanks to black voters’ loyalty, is a fault line with the potential to reshape American politics.
South Carolina doesn’t just lean toward establishment Democrats, it backs them overwhelmingly — nearly three-quarters of the state’s Dem primary voters chose Clinton over Sanders in ’16, while Biden beat Sanders there in ’20 by a ratio of more than two-to-one.
A candidate like Harris or her fellow Californian Gavin Newsom fits that profile, and Harris’ unbeatable name recognition — as a former VP and 2024 nominee — and race-and-sex diversity qualifications likely give her an edge.
DSA members won’t stay home and let another Republican succeed Donald Trump, rather than turn out to vote for Harris or Newsom — but if the establishment candidate goes on to lose in November ’28, the party will be ripe for a revolution.
Will black voters who have so far resisted Sanders-style socialism be just as content with a DSA-led party as they have been with the Democrats’ old guard?
Meanwhile, with Republican states growing while blue states like California shed population and businesses, the Democrats face a terminal problem in the Electoral College and in the US House of Representatives.
With each decennial census, Republicans stand to gain House seats and electoral votes.
But Democrats can offset the GOP’s growth advantages if they start flipping southern states back into the blue column.
Georgia is the test case: The state has prospered under Republican leadership, but that prosperity has fueled the growth of Atlanta, and has turned many of the city’s suburbs blue.
Virginia, of course, has already become a purple state, if not a reliably Democratic one.
And while Washington, DC, is a unique influence as the center of the federal government, the growth of the Old Dominion’s deep-blue DC suburbs — which keep extending further into Virginia’s interior — is not so different from the effect Atlanta is having on Georgia.
North Carolina is another weak link in the Republican Party’s southern wall.
So despite backing recent losers — Hillary Clinton a decade ago, Biden and Harris both in the last election — the Democratic establishment thinks it’s hit upon a strategy both for keeping control of the party and wresting the South away from Republicans.
And it’s confident the DSA will fall in with the party line: After all, the elite Democrats are more allergic to the socialist label than they are to socialistic policies.
They can give DSA much of what it wants.
Yet a plan is one thing — the reality is there’s a knife fight for control of the Democratic Party, and these pieces won’t fit together easily.
And while the Democrats’ emerging opportunities are in the South, the party’s ideologically ascendant faction is the least suited to capitalize on them.
That gives Republicans a chance to stop both the Democrats’ socialism and their racial spoils system.
To do it the GOP will have to campaign for the South like it’s a battleground region — and slow, even if it can’t immediately reverse, the drift of America’s cities to the left.
Republicans need the South and the Rust Belt — the combination that led to victory in 2016 and 2024.
If the GOP can’t compete in cities, even those in flourishing red states, the party is on the road to extinction.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
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