In an opinion essay for The Hill, the former mayor and presidential candidate argues that the Democratic Party should reform its calendar of presidential primaries. He argues for putting first states that will be battlegrounds in November and have more urban populations. “Organizing the primary calendar around” cities like “Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Las Vegas, Philadelphia and Phoenix” is what he would do.

The premise of his essay is that the procedures the party chooses for its primaries can determine which of the candidates becomes the party’s nominee. The same point applies to both major parties. The feature of the Republican Party’s rules that would make it easier for Trump to win the party’s nomination in a crowded primary field, and much harder if he faces just a two-candidate race (against DeSantis, most likely), is not an inevitable law of nature, like gravity; nor is it even a feature of state or federal law. Instead, it is a choice of the Republican Party itself, one that it could change before 2024, even more easily than the Democrats could change the calendar of their primaries (since when to hold a primary does involve state law, but the choice of allocating convention delegates proportionally or winner-take-all is within the party’s complete control). Maybe the media, when it discusses the crowded field point (as it is increasingly doing), could help the public understand that the Republican Party could solve this problem if it didn’t want Trump to become its nominee through a divide-and-conquer strategy.