President Biden Wants to End the New Hampshire Primary’s First-in-the-Nation Status. Is He Just Trying to Benefit Himself?

In every United States presidential contest since 1920, New Hampshire has held the first primary. That tradition of over 100 years is in President Joe Biden’s sights for elimination. Why?

Norman Solomon argues in a Friday Salon article that the reason Biden is calling on the Democratic National Committee to vote on Saturday to replace New Hampshire with South Carolina in the first-in-the-nation primary slot for the Democratic presidential race is to help ensure Biden is reelected — not to advance Biden’s purported rationale related to South Carolina having more “diversity.”

Back in the 2020 presidential election, Solomon recalls, Biden came in fifth in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary with just eight percent of the vote. Later, the South Carolina primary, where Biden won first, “rescued his electoral hopes … sending Biden on his way to the Democratic nomination.”

For the 2024 presidential election, the situation in New Hampshire for Biden appears again to be bad, especially considering that being the incumbent president normally provides a big boost. Solomon writes:
New polling underscores why Biden is so eager to bump New Hampshire from the first-in-the-nation spot it has held for more than 100 years. In the Granite State, ‘two-thirds of likely Democratic primary voters don’t want President Joe Biden to seek re-election,’ the UNH Survey Center found. ‘Biden is statistically tied with several 2020 rivals, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, all of whom are more personally popular than Biden among likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire.’
Read Solomon’s article here.