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Following a brief (by rules meetings standards) conference call on Tuesday, July 17, Unity Reform Commission Chair Jennifer O'Malley-Dillon and Vice Chair Larry Cohen released the following statement ( via the DNC ): “We are proud to fully support the Rules and Bylaws Committee’s proposals for substantially adopting the Unity Reform Commission’s recommendations. Following the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the URC was established by party members with a mandate to review our party’s presidential nominating process and make meaningful reforms to strengthen our party and expand its reach. After several meetings, we proposed our recommendations for making our party more accessible, transparent, and inclusive. Since delivering our recommendations to the DNC last December, DNC Chair Tom Perez and the members of the Rules and Bylaws Committee have worked diligently to develop the new processes through which we will select our presidential nominees in future election cycles.   “Th...

Last week the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) once again reconvened in Washington, DC to finalize its proposed package of recommended changes to the delegate selection rules, call for the convention, and bylaws for the 2020 cycle. Despite some of the headlines trumpeting what a momentous occasion it was, the meeting was, in reality, another incremental step in the process of finalizing the amendment proposals. It was a meeting intended to polish one final time the changes the panel would send to the full DNC for consideration in August. Now, that is not to minimize the work of the RBC over the last six months. Indeed, from a macro perspective the changes the members of the Democratic National Committee will vote on at its Chicago meeting next month represent some fairly significant potential changes to the Democratic presidential nomination process. But the RBC arrived at those decisions in fits and starts over a series of meetings during the first half of 2018. In other words, t...

Betsy Z. Russell writing for the Idaho Press: Idaho Democrats will switch to a presidential primary, rather than a caucus, for the next presidential election in 2020.    The party announced the change during its state party convention Saturday at the College of Idaho in Caldwell.    “We’re looking to move to a system that we have a primary, so that everybody can vote,” said Van Beechler, the party’s first vice chair.    Party Chairman Bert Marley said, “It’s been obvious the last couple presidential elections that the caucus system for us, in most parts of the state, is pretty unwieldy.” And it is exactly that "pretty unwieldy" part that has been a common bond among those states that have either moved to primaries or have signaled that such a move was on the way for the 2020 cycle. Colorado , Maine , and Minnesota all made the change in 2016, the legislature in Utah added funding for a presidential primary to the budget, and Democrats in Nebraska and Was...

At each voting stage along the way to superdelegate rules reform for the 2020 cycle, the final tally has seemingly demonstrated consensus. And there has been consensus on the Unity Reform Commission and now during the Rules and Bylaws Committee consideration of changes. But it has been hard-won consensus often following multiple hours-long meetings over the last 13 months spent exploring various contingencies in the hopes of avoiding some unintended consequence while also planning for the future. Like the Unity Reform Commission before it , the Rules and Bylaws Committee gave the go-ahead today to a reform proposal to curb the influence of superdelegates with just a couple of dissenting votes (27 ayes, 1 nay, 1 abstention). However, unlike the URC, the RBC called an audible and devised an alternate proposal not prescribed it in the preceding step. The URC was given strict guidelines on superdelegates by the 2016 convention resolution that created the group. What the resolution called...

The Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) once again took up the issue of superdelegates and 2020 at its recent meeting in Providence (the one on June 8 that ran concurrent with the DNC Executive Committee meeting). On some level, one could argue that battle lines were drawn. However, it was yet another incremental push toward an altered treatment of the fraction of Democratic national convention delegates who have been unpledged in past cycles. Much of the work of the previous four 2018 meetings of the RBC have centered on the two plans that emerged from the Unity Reform Commission report . But both the complexity of those two reform proposals and the fact that the changes required to implement either of them would require an amendment to the charter of the Democratic Party -- and thus a two-thirds supermajority vote of the full DNC -- set the bar for passage quite high. As those plans have lost steam another gained traction. First raised at the first of two March RBC meetings , the plan...

From the Omaha World-Herald : Nebraska Democrats are weighing whether to scrap their decade-old practice of holding presidential caucuses.    The Nebraska Democratic Party’s platform committee voted with no dissent Friday at Southeast Community College to advance a resolution calling for the elimination of presidential caucuses before the 2020 election.    When the resolution was introduced, there were cheers from the group, and several people exclaimed that they dislike the caucuses. The unanimously passed resolution to abandon the caucuses for a primary to allocate national convention delegates will now go before the state convention. Win or lose there, the decision will likely not be finalized by the state central committee until 2019 after the Democratic National Committee has set its rules for delegate selection for the 2020 cycle. Related: Nebraska Democrats Signal Caucus-to-Primary Switch for 2020 March Presidential Primary Bill Dies as Nebraska Legislature Ad...

North Carolina governor, Roy Cooper (D), made quick work of SB 655 . The bill came to the Tar Heel state chief executive on June 14 and was signed today (June 22). The bill untethers the North Carolina presidential primary from carve-out South Carolina and schedules a consolidated primary -- presidential and state/local offices -- for the first Tuesday after the first Monday in March. North Carolina now joins California as the only two states to have officially moved up (and to the same earliest allowed date) on the 2020 presidential primary calendar . The Tar Heel state also shifts up the allocation of its delegates to coincide with a number of its neighbors; mainly the leftovers from the 2016 SEC primary. Importantly, the change represents a shift of another large group of delegates toward the beginning of the 2020 primary calendar. The 2020 calendar is not 2008 yet, but it is moving in that direction. ...and before the most intense period for primary movement in any cycle: the yea...