DNC restores New Hampshire delegates after second nominating event unfamiliar to many Democrats

WASHINGTON – The legislative arm of the Democratic National Committee voted Tuesday to place all of New Hampshire’s delegates at the party’s convention this summer, ending a bitter dispute with the state because its presidential primary is no longer the first in the country.

The move follows an event last weekend when the New Hampshire Democratic Party invited state committee members to witness “the final steps of the delegate selection process” a few hours before the scheduled State Committee meeting.

In an updated delegate selection plan presented by the State Party and shared by the DNC, the State Party calls what occurred on Saturday a “primary party-directed delegate selection,” although several members of the committee told the Associated Press that it was not they knew it was considered a primary or nomination event – ​​and it was unclear whether the invitation to participate was distributed to anyone who was not a member of the committee.

The state party did not provide the results of the event, although President Ray Buckley said in a statement that “the delegate selection process is complete.”

This meeting effectively circumvents, for partisan purposes, the January 23 vote that President Joe Biden won through a write-in campaign. Ends threats of sanctions against state Democrats for refusing to concede South Carolina, which Biden’s allies wanted early in the calendar to prioritize black voters over majority-white Iowa and New Hampshire, historically the two states that were the first.

Kathy Sullivan, a former state party chair and DNC member who did not attend Saturday’s event, said it involved just a few Democrats voting that listed only Biden.

“No one would call this a primary except the DNC, and trying to say this complies with DNC rules is ridiculous, but I think they needed to save face somehow and needed some Kabuki theater to make it seem like they hadn’t totally capitulated, even if they totally capitulated,” Sullivan wrote in an email. “Despite all the threats, the drama, the waste of time and energy, all our delegates are sitting down. No punishment. No penalties. We won!”

Typically, a primary would require participants to declare their voting preference, while a delegate selection meeting – as the party described the event to committee members before it took place – chooses the actual people who will represent each presidential candidate at the convention. appointments.

Neil Levesque is the director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College, the site of Saturday’s event. “I didn’t know about it until this morning and the details haven’t been released,” Levesque said Monday.

Still, what happened over the weekend was enough for the DNC to move forward with Tuesday night’s vote. Jim Roosevelt, co-chair of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee, applauded the resolution of the matter.

“We as a committee and as a national committee have been through a difficult number of weeks and months to get to this point and I believe New Hampshire has been through a difficult number of weeks and months in which some things that we would have liked to have seen happen, did not ,” said Roosevelt. “It turns out all that is behind us now.”

The fight dates back to December 2022, when President Joe Biden instructed the DNC to reorder its presidential primary calendar to better empower Black voters, who make up the party’s most loyal base.

The committee set up South Carolina’s first primaries for 2024 on Feb. 5 and postponed Iowa, where a caucus had begun since 1972, and New Hampshire, which held the contest’s first primaries in more than a century.

New Hampshire rebelled and held the national party’s unsanctioned January primary, and the DNC threatened the state with sanctions, including that its delegates would not be seated at the national convention in Chicago starting August 19.

Tuesday night’s vote allows the state to attend the convention as normal. DNC rules approved for this cycle suggest punishment for Democratic primary candidates who campaigned in the unsanctioned primary, which included Minnesota Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips and self-help author Marianne Williamson.

That doesn’t matter, since neither won delegates to the convention. Biden did not campaign in New Hampshire or appear on the ballot, but won easily through a write-in campaign organized by some of the state’s top Democrats.

The primary fight overall was largely moot, as Biden is a sitting president seeking re-election and faced only token opposition in the primaries.

Still, ending the rivalry was potentially important for both sides, as the DNC plans to reexamine the order of its 2028 primary calendar after Election Day this fall — which could reignite a fight to be first.

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Associated Press writer Holly Ramer contributed to this report from Concord, New Hampshire.