The 2028 primary calendar and why the order matters more than the dates

The early window

The first four contests award a rounding error's worth of delegates and decide almost everything. A surprise finish converts into a fundraising surge within forty-eight hours, and money is what allows a campaign to compete in the twenty-state cluster that follows.

This is why candidates spend years building county-level organization in states that will contribute almost nothing to the delegate count.

Super Tuesday's real function

Super Tuesday is a resource test. A dozen or more states vote at once, and no campaign can organize all of them from scratch in the four weeks after the early window. Candidates who arrive with money and infrastructure convert momentum into delegates; those without it exit.

Delegate rules decide the length

Democratic contests allocate proportionally with a fifteen percent viability threshold, which makes it slow to build an insurmountable lead and slow to lose one. Several Republican contests award most or all delegates to the statewide winner, which lets a plurality frontrunner build a decisive lead quickly.

The practical effect: Republican nominations tend to resolve earlier than Democratic ones, even when the polling looks similarly close.