Virginia set to become an early primary state in 2028. Here’s why it matters (and also why it may not matter much).

Sir Isaac Newton wrote down three immutable laws of physics, which we know today as Newton’s Three Laws of Motion.

In politics, as well as many other aspects of life, there’s another law we need to consider: the law of unintended consequences.

Democrats are moving nationally to rejigger the presidential primary schedule, to give more weight to ethnically diverse states and less weight to more racially homogenous ones. The proposal that a party committee recently ratified, and sent to the Democratic National Committee for a vote next month, would demote New Hampshire from its traditional first-in-the-nation primary and instead give the first spot to South Carolina. It would authorize certain other states to hold their primaries before Super Tuesday. Among those states that would be allowed closer to the head of the line is Virginia.

Here’s the catch: Parties may have preferences, but parties don’t make the law. State legislatures do. Virginia was picked as an additional Southern state, winning out over Georgia and North Carolina, because Virginia has a Democratic legislature that can be counted on to pass the enabling legislation and a Democratic governor who will sign it. Georgia and North Carolina don’t.

Virginia Democrats quite rightly hailed this committee recommendation and said it would give the state more of a say in picking the party’s 2028 presidential nominee. That may be true, but here come the unintended consequences: It will also give Virginia Republicans more of a say in picking their party’s 2028 presidential nominee.

While an early primary date will undoubtedly put Virginia in more of a spotlight than it’s been in years past, it may not be as intense a spotlight as some might think — or hope. At the risk of being a killjoy, here’s why.

Part 1: What Virginia’s early status means for the state

1. Virginia’s early status will elevate the role of every Virginia politician and party activist

Virginia’s early status will make endorsements by Virginia office-holders more valuable, maybe not as valuable as those in South Carolina, but certainly more valuable than in the past. Office-holders and key party activists on both sides will likely get courted more assiduously than they have been before. However, before anyone gets too excited that Virginia will become a king-maker, or at least a president-maker, consider these other things:

2. Virginia would vote sixth (or maybe seventh); we usually don’t have many states vote before Super Tuesday

Right now, we don’t know what the exact primary schedule will be. It’s unclear how the Iowa caucuses fit into this; Iowa typically goes before all the other states. What the Democrats’ Rules and Bylaws Committee approved deals only with primaries. We don’t know how New Hampshire will react, either. It’s unhappy at being bumped from first to third and could take action to make sure its primary still comes first. Democrats could say the results don’t count toward delegate selection (the party has done that before), but you can bet that whichever candidate thinks a win in New Hampshire will boost their chances — regardless of whether any delegates are at stake — will invest time there. For now, let’s not worry about the precise order of those states. The Democrats proposed that Virginia be the sixth state to hold a primary, with the vote on Feb. 29, a week before Super Tuesday. If you want to count Iowa, then Virginia would be the seventh state to hold a presidential contest of some sort.

Now, here’s the thing: In the most recent cycles, we’ve had only four states hold contests before Super Tuesday: the Iowa caucuses, followed by New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.

That means we can’t find a good recent historical analogy to work off of. The ideal thing would be to see what kind of role the sixth or seventh state before Super Tuesday has played in the past, except we haven’t had those in the 2012, 2016, 2020 or 2024 cycles. In 2008, some states moved their primaries early; Democrats said they wouldn’t count for delegate selection, and so some candidates felt pressured not to take part. Those don’t seem good examples. We have to go back to 2004, when there were 19 states before Super Tuesday, with Virginia tied for 13^th. With George W. Bush in the presidency, Republicans had no primaries that year, so we just have the Democratic side to look at. In 2000, Virginia held no Democratic primary (it was a caucus state then). Republicans did have a primary, and Virginia was tied for the 10^th state to vote, a week before Super Tuesday. 

If the proposed primary schedule comes off, Virginia would vote earlier than it ever has, but we don’t have any historical analogy to compare 2028 with. The closest comparisons would be those 2000 and 2004 races, which had a lot more states vote before Super Tuesday, but that’s reaching back almost a quarter-century or more — back before the advent of social media — so we really don’t know what the dynamics will be. However, here’s what we know from the past:

3. The winner is almost always known after the first two states

In modern political history, whoever has won either of the first two states — Iowa or New Hampshire — has gone on to win the party nomination every time except once. That was 2024, when Joe Biden lost those two states, then lost Nevada to go 0-for-3, but then won the fourth state, South Carolina, and romped to wins on Super Tuesday. That was a case of Biden having strong support among Black voters, who weren’t present in large numbers in those first three states. That’s one reason Democrats want to demote Iowa and New Hampshire — they’re not representative of the nation as a whole. However, the point is, it’s unusual to have a long struggle for the nomination. The 2008 contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was the exception, although Obama established himself as the front-runner early on. Generally, after the first few states, there’s a front-runner and then other candidates fighting rear-guard actions. If you need a pop culture reference, those first states weed out candidates like the Cornucopia does in “Hunger Games.” Iowa and New Hampshire have done that in the past; surely other states will do that in the future if the order changes.

We don’t know what the dynamics will be with a calendar where New Hampshire isn’t the first primary state and some other state is. However, it seems likely that no matter who is first, second and third, presidential candidates from both parties will need to concentrate on those states, because if they don’t win there, they may not win at all. Virginia may be in a position to deliver a coup de grace, but it would be unlikely for the nominating contest to still be close once the sixth (or seventh) state comes up on the calendar.

4. Virginia should not count on a lot of candidate visits

In that 2000 Republican primary, when Virginia voted 10^th, but ahead of Super Tuesday, George W. Bush visited just one day, according to CNN. It’s unclear how many times McCain visited that year, but it doesn’t appear to have been many.

Once the primaries start producing winners (and losers), those runners-up often need to pick their spots. In that 2000 primary, The Virginian-Pilot reported at the time that “stung by defeat in South Carolina, Sen. John McCain is forgoing an aggressive presidential campaign in Virginia to refocus his energies on the West Coast.”

If Virginia votes just a week ahead of Super Tuesday, some candidates may already have their eyes on a much bigger delegate haul the week following. A candidate who is trailing, but thinks he or she might fare better on Super Tuesday, might be well advised to concede Virginia and focus on other states.

Democrats in Southwest and Southside, in particular, should not get their hopes up. Think back to last year’s statewide races: How often did the candidates for governor, lieutenant governor or attorney general visit those parts of the state? Not much — and they only had one state to focus on. The Democratic vote is anchored in the eastern part of the state, so that’s where the candidates spent their time. The presidential candidates likely will, too. Southwest and Southside may see more action from Republican contenders because the rural vote is a bigger part of the Republican base in Virginia than of the Democratic one. However, note that in 2000, when Bush made his single visit to Virginia, he stayed in the urban crescent. I’d be happy to make the case why candidates of both parties should come to Southwest and Southside, but I don’t have much faith they’ll listen.

One notable exception: In the run-up to the 2020 presidential campaign, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke visited Bland County and Blacksburg in 2019 to make the case that Democrats should pay more attention to rural areas. His brief campaign also came to an end before the calendar even turned to 2020.

Now we turn to a different aspect of Virginia’s early primary status:

Part II: Who does a new primary schedule benefit?

1. Democrats: We don’t know

Democrats wrangled over whether South Carolina or Nevada should go first. The argument for South Carolina was to elevate the importance of Black voters; the argument for Nevada was to elevate the importance of Latino voters. The latter also played a role in New Mexico getting the fourth slot. Michigan got fifth because it’s a big industrial state with a lot of union voters. Some wanted North Carolina and Georgia because they, too, have a lot of Black voters, but Virginia won out for more practical reasons — the law could actually get changed here. Virginia will be an unusual primary state because of Northern Virginia and all of its federal workers (or, the case nowadays, lots of former federal workers); that’s where a lot of Democratic votes are.

It seems safe to say that any Democrat who wants to do well in South Carolina must do well with Black voters; whoever wants to do well in Nevada must do well with Latino voters. After that, it’s anybody’s guess. The current Democratic field is too large and too ill-formed to make any coherent guesses at this point. Chuck Todd, the former “Meet the Press” moderator, says that Virginia’s early status “provides the center left’s last stand to make a case against a Bernie-like progressive frontrunner or it becomes a state to stop a Bernie-like progressive frontrunner or it becomes a state the Bernie-like progressive uses to beat a ‘less electable’ narrative. Either way, Virginia’s addition is a fascinating insurance policy for those Dems skeptical of this rising new left.”

That seems a good assessment to me — assuming the race is effectively a two-person race by the time it comes to Virginia. In 2016, Clinton won Virginia in a landslide over Sanders (64.3% to 35.2%). In 2020, Biden also bested Sanders in Virginia (53.3% to 23.1%). In a multicandidate field, though, dynamics shift. Remember that Virginia’s first Democratic presidential primary was 1988; centrist party leaders thought that would help pull the national party back to the middle. Instead, Jesse Jackson won Virginia in a split field. Across the South, the vote was split enough to deny Al Gore the boost he was hoping for; instead, the Super Tuesday primary — which was largely a Southern primary then — wound up helping Michael Dukakis. There’s your law of unintended consequences at work.

2. Republicans: We don’t know, but Rubio may get a small boost

The Republican field for 2028 is probably more known than the Democratic field. If the current political chatter is on target, we can probably count on Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and, well, others. There are always others. Will one of those others be former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin? If so, Virginia’s early status could be good news for him — but he’d have to survive five or six other states to get here.

We do know one thing, though: When Rubio ran for president in 2016, Virginia was his best primary state. By that year’s Super Tuesday, Trump was starting to run away with the nomination — and benefited because Rubio and Ted Cruz were splitting the opposition. Rubio came close to winning Virginia, just not close enough: Trump took 34.8% of the vote, Rubio 31.98%, Cruz 16.7%. Rubio carried Northern Virginia and the Richmond area, while Trump ran up big margins in the rural part of the state. Cruz pretty much ditched Virginia to focus on states elsewhere. If Rubio had won Virginia, he might have had some reason to continue his campaign; when he didn’t, he dropped out. 

That may wind up meaning absolutely nothing in 2028 — the Republican Party today is not what it was then, and Rubio today may not be the Rubio he was then, when he was seen as the ideal Republican candidate for suburbs that were trending away from the party. However, of all the candidates in the field on either side, only Rubio has actual experience running in a Virginia primary. That gives him some advantage if Virginia winds up being a decisive state in the 2028 Republican contest; we just have no idea how much of an advantage.

Before we get to 2028, we have a lot of other elections to get through. The first of those is the Aug. 4 primaries for various congressional and local nominations in Virginia. Early voting for that is underway now. Our Voter Guide lists who’s running. For those who want even more political news, sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out on Fridays. I’ll assess the latest early voting trends and deal with other political news of the week.