Black voters are no more than one-quarter of Democratic primary voters. They do have an especially high representation in South Carolina, but that’s one of a very few states that is true. Hispanics are less than half the size of blacks. Non-Hispanic whites run about 60%. I looked at several sites for figures. Here is a Brookings survey with 2018 numbers.
Despite the delusions of Sanders voters, he had approximately zero chance of winning the 2016 nomination. Clinton won in states that had mostly white voters and states that were diverse. She certainly had more support from blacks, but to say they had more influence on who the final nominee would be remains, let us say, unsubstantiated. Heck, Barack Obama won SC with only 55% of the vote.
Does it really matter? If a candidate is counting on minority voters to win and they do poorly in these States, they could just, like, not drop out until they see how they do in diverse States.
In the case of this particular election, for example, it appears Joe Biden could do poorly in the first two States, but quickly catch up once the more diverse States begin voting.
It seems like the only real problem here is the ingrained notion that results in those States are highly predictive of results in other States, and the easiest solution would be to stop believing that, rather than to move the primary calendar around.
Paraphrasing… “The winner of the minority vote has won the last two competitive Democratic primary contests over the winner of the white vote, except in the more recent one of those two.”
“States with significant minority populations” correlates very strongly with “highly populous states”. This is overwhelmingly true when looking at absolute numbers (Which state has the most hispanics? California. Which state has the most left-handed redheaded twins? California.), but it’s also true when looking at percentages.
So, yeah, the winner of states that have lots of people in them is a lot more likely to win. That doesn’t remotely support a claim that “minority voters have more influence on the who the candidate is”.
Maybe the DNC and RNC should both front-load the swing states. Have the primaries begin with Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Arizona, etc. Start with the battleground general-election states at the very beginning. Either you can perform and resonate well with those states, or you can’t.
Sure, it would have the undesirable effect of magnifying those states’ power even more, but that’s life - until the EC is abolished.
I’m confused; the article you linked to is about a Congressional race in Iowa; what does that have to do with changing the schedule for presidential primaries?
Seems obvious to me. If Iowa is out of reach for Dems across the board (or becoming so), is it still a good place to hold the first caucuses of each presidential election year?
I’m not sure how you stop them. The caucuses are organized by the state parties, who are adamant about maintaining their “first in the nation” status. The most the DNC could do is threaten not to recognize their delegates but they’ve backed off on that threat before.
I don’t understand. What is the Iowa Democratic Party going to do but stamp their feet and throw a useless tantrum if a potential presidential candidate does, in fact, suggest that some other state should go first? They’d be pretty powerless.
Personally, I’d love to see those state laws that they must be first in the nation examined by a court, because they’re patently absurd. What happens if two different states pass such a law? Do Iowa and New Hampshire really think that their laws are binding on other states?
They are binding on the states of Iowa and NH. All they can do is move their own caucus and primary dates. If another state moves theirs then Iowa and NH are bound to respond. How long this game of chicken goes on is up to the states.
Yep. Iowa and New Hampshire will (and have when other states have tried to leapfrog them) move their contests up as early as they need in order to ensure they go first. Doesn’t matter if they end up taking place a full year before the election – being first is a matter of first principles for them.
And presidential candidates don’t want to lobby for other states to go first because IA and NH will end up being first anyway, and they’ll finish in 9th place because they dared challenge their “first in the nation” sacrament. So they’ll be back-of-the-pack losers coming out of the first two contests, and some other candidate who spent months frowning at rusting farm equipment and drinking endless cups of coffee in crowded diners will have all the momentum.
The natural evolution is that Iowa and New Hampshire just won’t matter to Democrats much longer. Sure, those states can go first, but it will be a historical footnote rather than a leading indicator for the nomination. We need to get out of thinking that going first is important (that and the whole horserace/gamescore narratives the media keeps pushing).
What will happen is that some candidate that comes in third or fourth in both Iowa and New Hampshire will have a great showing in the first state with a more representative population. And then the next one, and the next, and so on. And then future Democratic candidates for president won’t feel a need to spend much time or money in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Maybe this has already happened; 2024 will be interesting.
The laws aren’t binding on other states, just on when the primary is held in that state. But you are correct. If two states had similar laws, they would act to spiral against each other, leapfrogging to earlier primary dates such that the primary must be held tomorrow, and that would still violate each state law because they weren’t the first, just tied for first.