Democrats’ Southern Strategy Is About Keeping Power in Hands of Party Establishment

• August 22, 2026

Two people in business attire sit side by side, smiling and laughing. The person on the left wears a dark suit and patterned tie; the person on the right wears a purple outfit. They are holding hands and appear to be enjoying a light moment.

Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, pictured in 2016. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

Don’t believe the Democratic National Committee’s official storyline—the DNC’s decision to make South Carolina the first Democrat presidential primary in 2028 isn’t about introducing more racial diversity into the early contests.

It’s actually about keeping power in the hands of the party establishment, the people who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, and who are likely to wind up supporting Kamala Harris in 2028.

The fix is in.

South Carolina was the establishment’s firewall against Bernie Sanders’ left-wing insurgency twice over.

In 2016, Sanders nearly beat Clinton in the first caucus, in Iowa, and went on to defeat her in the New Hampshire primary.

Four years later, there was a brief moment when Sanders looked like the front-runner—until he got clobbered by Biden in South Carolina.

It’s true that the black voters who make South Carolina’s primaries more racially diverse than the contests in Iowa or New Hampshire are also less politically radical, so it’s easy for the DNC to say it’s not trying to choke off support for the socialist wing of the party, it’s just giving black voters more of a say.

The Democratic Socialists of America, the left fringe of the party, is disproportionately white—even its New York City chapter is 60% white, according to DSA’s own membership polling.

That’s astonishing, considering New York City itself is only 34% white.

This racial split between the Democrats’ most ideologically intense faction and the party’s elite, which only holds onto power thanks to black voters’ loyalty, is a fault line with the potential to reshape American politics.

South Carolina doesn’t just lean toward establishment Democrats, it backs them overwhelmingly—nearly three-quarters of the state’s Dem primary voters chose Clinton over Sanders in ’16, while Biden beat Sanders in ’20 by a ratio of more than 2 to 1.

A candidate like Harris or her fellow Californian Gavin Newsom fits the profile, and Harris’ unbeatable name recognition—as a former vice president and ’24 nominee—and race-and-sex diversity qualifications likely give her an edge.

DSA members won’t stay home and let another Republican succeed Donald Trump rather than turn out to vote for Harris or Newsom, but if the establishment candidate goes on to lose in November ’28, the party will be ripe for a revolution.

Will black voters who have so far resisted Sanders-style socialism be just as content with a DSA-led party as they have been with the Democrats’ old guard?

With Republican states growing while blue states like California shed population and businesses, the Democrats face a terminal problem in the Electoral College and U.S. House of Representatives.

With each decennial census, Republicans stand to gain House seats and electoral votes.

But Democrats can offset the GOP’s growth advantages if they start flipping Southern states back into the blue column.

Georgia is the test case—the state has prospered under Republican leadership, but that prosperity has fueled the growth of Atlanta and turned many of the city’s suburbs blue.

Virginia, of course, has already become a purple state, if not a reliably Democrat one, and while Washington, D.C., is a unique influence as the center of the federal government, the growth of the state’s deep-blue D.C. suburbs—which keep extending further into Virginia’s interior—is not so different from the effect Atlanta is having on Georgia.

North Carolina is another weak link in the Republican Party’s Southern wall.

Despite backing a string of losers—Clinton a decade ago, Biden and Harris both in the last election—the Democrat establishment thinks it’s hit upon a strategy both for keeping control of the party and wresting the South away from Republicans.

And it’s confident the DSA will fall in line. After all, the elite Democrats are more allergic to the socialist label than they are to socialistic policies.

They can give DSA much of what it wants, while DSA is just as devoted to identity politics as the establishment is.

Yet a plan is one thing—the reality is there’s a knife fight for control of the party, and these pieces won’t fit together easily.

That gives Republicans a chance to stop socialism and the Democrats’ racial spoils system.

But to do it they’ll have to win the South anew—thinking of it as a battleground region, rather than taking it for granted.

Republicans will also have to slow, if they can’t immediately reverse, the leftward drift of urban politics.

South Carolina might not be in play anytime soon, but by holding their first 2028 presidential primaries there, Democrats are executing the first move in a grand strategy Republicans have to be prepared to counter.

Daniel McCarthy | Contributor

Daniel McCarthy is the distinguished fellow in conservative thought in B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation and editor of Modern Age.

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