Democrats have decided to move their first primaries from Iowa and New Hampshire, now to South Carolina. 

According to Axios's Mike Allen in his daily emailed newsletter, it came as a surprise, and it was all about shoring up the black vote. Allen cited this report from the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats voted Friday to remove Iowa as the leadoff state on the presidential nominating calendar and replace it with South Carolina starting in 2024, a dramatic shakeup championed by President Joe Biden to better reflect the party’s deeply diverse electorate.

The Democratic National Committee’s rule-making arm made the move to strip Iowa from the position it has held for five decades after technical meltdowns sparked chaos and marred results of the state’s 2020 caucus. The change also comes after a long push by some of the party’s top leaders to start choosing a president in states that are less white, especially given the importance of Black voters as Democrats’ most loyal electoral base.

AP cited these lugubrious tears and flapdoodle from cynical longtime Democrat operative Donna Brazile:

Discussion on prioritizing diversity drew such impassioned reaction at the committee gathering in Washington that DNC chair Jaime Harrison wiped away tears as committee member Donna Brazile suggested that Democrats had spent years failing to fight for Black voters: “Do you know what it’s like to live on a dirt road? Do you know what it’s like to try to find running water that is clean?”

Yeah, sure.

Now, it's likely that there's some truth to the statement that Democrats are losing black voters, and placing the first primary in a state whose Democrat base would make sense from that point of view. Among Democrats such as those in the Kamala Harris campaign of 2020, there was a lot of loud grumbling about the "whiteness" of the Democrat voting base in both Iowa and New Hampshire, during the primaries, and both states preceded South Carolina which served as the lead state by the Super-Tuesday that followed. 

But it's probably not the entire story.

First, there are several states with that profile, so picking South Carolina as the first state, which often decides the direction of the election for the primary winner, as well as winnows out the candidates before they can get to Super Tuesday, probably means something to Democrats.

Wasn't South Carolina the state of Rep. James Clyburn, the kingmaker among Democrats who somehow forced the sudden dropout of numerous Democrat candidates in favor of Joe Biden just as Super Tuesday beckoned? Prior to Super Tuesday, the Democrat who was winning primaries was Bernie Sanders and despite the leftist orientation of all the Democrats, they didn't like Bernie Sanders. Either he was too much of an outsider (he often played independent in electoral off years), he was too crazy for them, or Democrats believed that the self-described socialist was too unelectable among the voters in the general election. They really didn't want Bernie Sanders at the top of their ticket. 

Meanwhile, candidates such as Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and others were not attracting the support Democrats had expected they would, and they weren't winning in Iowa, either. Clyburn stepped in for Super Tuesday, tilted his hand towards Joe Biden, and the rest is history. Joe didn't even have to campaign for the Democrat machine to secure the general election for him -- through mail balloting, ballot harvesting, dead voter rolls, election season, counting season, Zuckerbucks, Twitter censorship and other electoral sleights of hand. They were an amazingly well oiled machine.

Well, now it looks as though the Clyburn machine, with all its Democrat operatives, has gotten the upper hand to halt the primary activity in states like Iowa and New Hampshire, making them just run of the mill states like any other, with the South Carolina machine calling the shots.

In a way it makes sense for the Democrats, from their own point of view, to do this -- to see their establishment machine consolidate power so that they pick who becomes president. That ends Democrat voter insurgencies like the Bernie Sanders phenomena, and Bernie being Bernie, he won't say a thing. 

But it's likely to leave a lot of unhappy Democrat voters, now that the Democrat nominee will always been some part of the Biden-Clyburn machine and no outsiders will be welcome. Basically, Democrats have now rigged their own primaries. Bernie Sanders upsurges have been shut down.

You can bet they're now happy they've got all they want in the bag and they'll do all they can to rig 2024 in the general election, too.

Maybe the GOP has an opportunity among at least some of those undoubtedly disgruntled Democrats.

Image:  Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of two images by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // both CC BY-SA 2.0