When Iowa Goes Down, New Hampshire Should Too

Democrats are realizing Iowa should lose its privileged status—and it should take the first primary down with it.

A pair of voters at the 2016 New Hampshire primary.Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

As the election results didn’t begin to trickle in Monday night, cable news and Twitter pundits unleashed an onslaught of hate onto the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses. Thanks to snafus from a new app that precincts were asked to use to report results, the Iowa Democratic Party kept the tallies locked away Monday night, leaving even Iowans to say they may have forfeited their privileged status in future elections due to the turmoil. “This fiasco means the end of the caucuses as a significant American political event,” David Yepsen, a former longtime Des Moines Register reporter, told Politico. “The rest of the country was already losing patience with Iowa anyway and this cooks Iowa’s goose. Frankly, it should.”

Will waiting an extra day to learn the final election tallies really hamper American democracy? No—just look at Super Tuesday, whose big prize, California, sometimes doesn’t fully report election results for weeks. But the consensus that the Iowa caucus tradition should die is spot-on, as my colleague Clint Hendler wrote in a prescient article Monday morning explaining how caucuses disenfranchise voters with their tortuous procedures. And as erstwhile presidential candidate Julián Castro noted before he dropped out—and again Monday night, speaking on behalf of his new preferred candidate, Elizabeth Warren—the state is out of step with the demographics of the country, giving too much weight to white voters’ voices in an increasingly diverse country.

So let 2020 be the last year that Iowa gets first say in presidential politics. But if we’re finally going to fix our out-of-whack presidential nomination system, don’t let Iowa be the only casualty.

Any liberal complaints about Iowa should only be magnified when it comes to New Hampshire. Too small? At least Iowa boasts a population of more than 3 million people, and the 101st largest city in the country in the state capital of Des Moines. New Hampshire, on the other hand, is minuscule. Just 1.3 million people live there. Manchester, the state’s largest “city,” has barely 110,000 residents, making it the 259th largest city in the country, just behind Miami Gardens, Florida, and ahead of High Point, North Carolina.

New Hampshire must be more diverse than Iowa, right? Nope. Iowa’s population is 90.7 percent non-Hispanic white, 4 percent black, and 6 percent Latino. New Hampshire is 93 percent white, 1.7 percent black, and 4 percent Latino. Both states have relatively old populations, but Iowa’s has a slightly higher percentage of children, while New Hampshire’s has a higher share of people over 65.

Neither state will likely give up easily, especially since four years from now, Republicans will also hold a competitive primary and will have a say on the operational order. President Donald Trump has tweeted, “As long as I am President, Iowa will stay where it is. Important tradition!” The state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, rushed to defend the process Tuesday morning, saying, “We look forward to Iowa carrying on its bipartisan legacy of service in the presidential nominating process.” 

New Hampshire even has a law on the books that it must be the first primary in the country (that’s one reason Iowa has clung to the outdated caucus model), and when a group of states tried to leapfrog the order in 2008, it set off an arms race to move up the calendar, with the Iowa caucuses that year held just a few days into the new year.

No one wants the first vote for the 2024 contest to happen during the summer of 2023, so any change would require coordination from the national parties and a fair bit of strong-arming against their state counterparts. But it’s a fight worth having, just so long as it doesn’t exclusively target Iowa. Next week should bring the last first-in-the-nation primary for New Hampshire as well. Let’s try something different in four years. Maybe give Georgia a chance.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate