The D.N.C. Has a Major Drawback

As chairman of the Democratic Nationwide Committee, Jaime Harrison, a 47-year-old who rose to his place two years in the past from statewide politics in South Carolina and whose profile has risen alongside together with his state’s, has to attempt to play mediator between angered state Democrats and a White Home that expects fealty from the nationwide group. For now, Harrison is sanguine about all of it. The New Hampshire state of affairs. Biden’s superior age. The get together’s declining share of many demographic teams, particularly Latino voters and people with out faculty levels. A dire Senate map, the place Democratic incumbents in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia might fall, together with the previously Democratic senator in Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema, plunging Democrats into an indefinite minority.

In Harrison’s workplace at D.N.C. headquarters, which appears to be like out on the dome of the Capitol, there hangs a portrait of Biden with Jim Clyburn, the 82-year-old South Carolina congressman whose endorsement and championing of Biden in 2020 is credited with rescuing his candidacy. Displayed over Harrison’s desk is a classic signal for Ron Brown, who in 1989 grew to become the primary Black chairman of the D.N.C. Brown and Clyburn are each heroes to Harrison, who was Clyburn’s intern and, later, his director of ground operations when the congressman served as majority whip. A profitable private-sector profession adopted as a lobbyist on the Podesta Group. With Clyburn’s blessing, he grew to become chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Occasion. Harrison then ran a really high-profile, extraordinarily costly and finally unsuccessful marketing campaign in 2020 for the Senate seat held by Lindsey Graham. Now Clyburn’s protégé heads a D.N.C. that has put their residence state, the place Harrison nonetheless lives together with his household, fairly actually first.

Harrison insisted that Clyburn by no means advocated for South Carolina because the very first state — just for it to retain its standing as the primary of the Southern states. “I believe, for him, he all the time wished South Carolina — and I felt the identical manner — we loved and took a variety of pleasure in being the primary within the South,” Harrison advised me on a June afternoon, sitting beneath that portrait. “Folks thought early on, Oh, God, Jaime’s the chair of the D.N.C., so due to this fact he’s going to place his finger on the dimensions for South Carolina. And everyone will let you know, I used to be evenhanded on this. The one factor that I wished was that South Carolina would stay, as a result of I believe it’s earned its spot as an early state.” However South Carolina, in fact, moved up, and Harrison is now thrilled. “Nationwide Geographic mentioned that 90 % of African Individuals can hint one among their ancestors to South Carolina. In our major, 50 to 60 % of the individuals who vote within the Democratic major can be Black people. Take into consideration how highly effective that is, that the descendants of these enslaved individuals would be the very first individuals on this nation to find out probably the most highly effective particular person on the face of this planet. That’s transformative.”

A number of dissidents within the D.N.C., made up of New Hampshirites and a few Iowans, progressives and union members, see it in a different way: Biden is elevating a state {that a} Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t carried since 1976. Past Clyburn, there are few Democrats of observe in South Carolina, and the state has the bottom share of union membership in America. Progressive candidates might, cycle after cycle, meet a wall of opposition there.

The persistent quandary, which no model of the first calendar might resolve, is the way to account for the assorted long-range challenges of the Democratic Occasion. A primary-in-the-nation South Carolina major lends Black moderates, a pivotal Democratic constituency, the sort of clout that many consider they deserve. White rural voters — the type who should be courted in Iowa and New Hampshire — haven’t proved loyal to the Democratic model. However there are solely so a lot of them that Democrats can afford to lose in a common election. New Hampshire, which Biden carried by lower than 10 factors in 2020, is just not assured to be eternally blue.