Iowa has taken a lot of heat. Like previous presidential election years, the rest of the country wonders what makes this state so special that it always gets to cast the first votes at its caucus. The same could be said for New Hampshire, home to the first primary.
The importance of these states is also dependent on whether your preferred candidate performs well in one of them. Aides for the winning candidates in these early contests explain how crucial those victories are and argue that the results are a barometer for the rest of the country. The losers do their best to convince the rest of the country that Iowa and New Hampshire don’t matter.
But they do, at least enough to cause a few candidates to soon drop out. Running for office is expensive and donors are less likely to make political contributions to help a presumed loser. Luckily for them, many candidates for higher office are disproportionally rich.
As the Washington Post reported, the median net worth of a member of the House of Representatives more than doubled between 1984 and 2009. And over the last 35 years the amount of money it costs to run for Congress has “quadrupled in inflation-adjusted dollars, to $1.4 million, according to the Federal Election Commission.” Running for president costs hundreds of millions, which makes financing one’s own effort nearly impossible once the spigot runs dry.
Iowa and New Hampshire have argued that’s why they are so important. Because of their small populations – about 3 million and 1.3 million, respectively – they give “the little guy a chance.” It’s retail politics, they say, which requires candidates to convince voters in person that they are the right choice. But that argument shows all sorts of holes.
There are other sparsely populated states that would jump at the chance to vet these underdogs and whose demographics more closely resemble the country as a whole. And, anymore, the amount of time spent glad-handing in an early-voting state coincides less with who wins. With social media and weekly televised debates, retail politics are extremely overrated.
Meanwhile, states like Montana, where the population isn’t that much smaller than New Hampshire, will in all likelihood be completely irrelevant in this year’s GOP presidential primary. Ours is held June 5, after every state except Utah.
In 2008, the state’s Republicans attempted to increase Montana’s prominence by ditching the primary election and choosing their delegates to the national convention via precinct caucuses on Feb. 5 of that year. The move drew a mixed review, with some party members decrying the fact that they couldn’t vote. Mitt Romney won the caucus, but bowed out of the race two days later.
This year, the state’s GOP voters return to the back of the pack, next to other states that get to vote after the field has shrunk or the race has been decided altogether. To Iowa’s credit, its first-in-the-nation presidential vote began in 1972, when the Democratic Party moved the state’s caucus from the middle of the calendar to the start. Republicans did the same four years later. Meanwhile, New Hampshire has been holding the country’s first primary for much longer and state law requires that it remain that way.
When states, most notably Florida, try to cut in line, Iowa and New Hampshire simply hold their nominating contests earlier and retain their outsized influence because we let them. A national survey conducted for The Associated Press in the run-up to the 2008 primaries found that 80 percent of voters would like to see other states get a chance at the front of the line. I doubt the current system has grown in popularity since then.
In presidential primaries, the majority of the country’s voters are delegated to cheerleaders, which is at once sad and undemocratic.