Is the DNC already shaping the 2028 presidential contest?

Republicans are campaigning in Iowa; Democrats don't know where to go

Pete Buttigieg speaks in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in May 2025

We’re approximately equidistant between the 2024 Iowa caucuses and whatever will be the first contest of the 2028 presidential nomination cycle — the Iowa La Grange point, if you will. There are several Democrats overtly seeking to run for president in 2028. In any other cycle, they would already be visiting diners and eating pork sandwiches and pie and meeting people in coffee shops in Iowa and New Hampshire. But right now, they don’t know where to go to search for supporters and test the waters. Could this be affecting whom the nominee will be?

The Democratic presidential nomination cycle in 2028 will look substantially different from any in the past half century. Not only is there no obvious heir apparent, but the traditional order of contests has been completely upended. Democrats abandoned the Iowa caucuses after the 2020 debacle, and although they had a different system in place for 2024, it got very little attention since Biden was running for reelection largely unopposed within his party.

Now the DNC is sorting through different calendar ideas. They’ve narrowed it down to a dozen states that want to be among the first four contests, and they’ve determined that those first four need to be from the northern, southern, western, and eastern portions of the country. Iowa is among the contenders but very unlikely to get the nod. The DNC could make this determination by April, but it likely will be announced later in the year. So if you’re a Democrat wanting to run for president, where should you be?

You might be saying, Seth, the contest is still two years away. True! And traditionally no one sees the early contests as really beginning in earnest until after the midterm elections. But candidates often test the waters earlier than that. Nikki Haley was visiting with Iowans as early as June of 2021 in the last cycle. And notably, quite a few Republican hopefuls have already shown up in Iowa this cycle. (The Republican calendar will still begin with Iowa in 2028.) Ted Cruz, Glen Youngkin, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Rand Paul, among others, made appearances in Iowa in 2025.

Even a few Democrats have made brief appearances, as well, including Pete Buttigieg, Ruben Gallego, and Rahm Emanuel, although most Democrats are cautious about showing up there too much lest they risk being barred from DNC-sanctioned debates in 2027.

So it’s interesting to think about how this is affecting the contest. Traditionally the positive thing about Iowa and New Hampshire — small, retail-politics states where candidates can meet a high proportion of the electorate in person — is that you can do well with shoe leather. The contest doesn’t automatically go to the most famous or best funded candidate, and you can make a name for yourself with dogged early campaigning, a la Barack Obama or Howard Dean. At least some will tell you it was Bill Clinton’s tireless New Hampshire primary campaign that paved the path to his nomination in 1992.

But at least for now, there’s no such path. It’ll eventually happen, of course, but right now it’s candidates with substantial national name recognition — Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, etc. — who are gaining attention and interest, while lesser known candidates don’t have many ways to break through.

My guess is that this won’t have an enormous impact on the contest, and it won’t be terribly shocking if a nationally-known candidate wins the nomination. But we won’t know what that contest might have looked like if candidates knew where to campaign in 2026.