What is interesting–in retrospect–is that Biden appeared to be dead in the water after IA and NH and his campaign was revived in SC. So being first doesn’t really seem so important.
I’m not sure if you did this on purpose, but that is exactly what Joe Biden did. 4th in Iowa, 5th in New Hampshire.
Then 2nd in NV and then won South Carolina. Leading into the other “non-Bernie” candidates dropping out right before Super Tuesday and most of them endorsing Biden.
See the last sentence of my previous post. 
What remains to be seen is how much future Democratic candidates for president care about Iowa and New Hampshire. If the next Democrat (not Biden) who wins the White House also “skips” the two states, then it’ll be more or less de facto that Democrats don’t need to campaign there.
Neither state has ever really been decisive and the actual delegates awarded are negligible. Mostly, they present an opportunity for lesser-known candidates to spin a surprise showing and use the media attention to help build their fundraising and showing in later states. Remember, Bill Clinton finished second in NH but was still able to spin his stronger-than-expected showing as making him the “Comeback Kid.”
Perhaps, but it still remains true that it is the exception rather than the rule that a loser in NH and/or IA goes on to win the nomination. Any candidate who ignores those states would do so at his/her own peril. It is free advertising and the momentum is worth something.
Since 1972, only three candidates have failed to win either IA or NH and gone on to secure the nomination – McGovern, Bill Clinton and Biden. But McGovern finished second in both contests, and Clinton finished third in IA and a strong second in NH. Biden coming back from a fourth place finish in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire was unprecedented.
As so many other things are about American politics these days.
It hasn’t been signed yet but…
Will be interesting to see how this is received in New Hampshire.
I didn’t read the 2019 posts, so this might have been said, but… Many of us have been screaming to kick Iowa and NH out of first place for years. The optics of Democrats pandering to nearly all-white, mostly rural voters is hugely damaging to the party. The candidates waste months of time and millions in money appearing with the wrong voters. South Carolina changed everything in 2020, but nobody can guarantee that will happen again as it was a happy confluence between Clyburn and Biden.
If the Dems don’t acknowledge that the times and the country have changed, nobody will, and that’s always fatal.
And in any case, the delegates don’t matter a whole lot. The momentum from winning is worth many more delegates in other states, and the Iowa/New Hampshire delegates are diluted anyways since the also-rans are still in the race and the final two or three usually haven’t fully consolidated their support yet.
I guess I still don’t understand a couple of things preventing either political party from devising a nominating process giving it the best strategical advantage it can generate.
Why do state legislatures, and state party organizations, have so much say over how the parties choose their one candidate for the nation’s highest political office? What would prevent the Democratic Party from deciding to hold an orderly primary on the dates and with the criteria of its own choosing? Do they fear losing New Hampshire if they take away its curious need to be first?
If I were the King of the Party with unfettered powers, I would hold five presidential primaries, each containing 10 or 11 states, from smallest to largest. I would limit participation to my party members and unaffiliateds, no jungle primaries; there’s no reason to give your opponents any say in your candidates. I’d rely extensively on mail and internet voting and I’d use approval voting to get to my ultimate candidate. I think Americans would love this system and enjoy participating in it. Our current system would be laughed out of existence if a major sports league emulated it, for instance.
The states should be told to pound sand. They can decide how to conduct primaries for their own statewide offices.
Because status quo bias is very strong. Lots of politicians and reporters and hardcore activists are primed to think The Iowa Caucus and The New Hampshire Primary are very important, and you can’t just force them to think differently by changing a rulebook somewhere. Iowa and New Hampshire can take advantage of this by continuing to hold The Iowa Caucus (please see fine print) and The New Hampshire Primary (terms and conditions apply) regardless of what any other entities say. Maybe they would fade out eventually, as people started to realize that they actually weren’t part of the process at all, but it probably wouldn’t be immediate. If one of the parties had an octopus in a tub that dropped pingpong balls with candidates names on them, people would still keep going to see the damn octopus even after it was removed from the process.
I like to think that my main purpose for being on message boards is to urge people to re-think the status quo. So that’s what I’m doing – US elections are a mess and I’m trying to get the word out to people that they don’t have to be. It may only take a couple of influential people in the party to get the ball rolling (none of whom currently hold senior party leadership positions).
[red wiggler places Conspiracy Theorist hat upon his head]
I also think that much of the opposition – or refusal to simply give election reform any airspace at all --stems from the small but powerful election industry in this country. These are the people who do the actual work of getting candidates elected and who make their living doing so. They are in a powerful position of influence and they are never going to upset the apple cart.
Because the state parties are the party. The DNC – Democratic National Committee – is precisely that: a committee composed of the chairs of the state Democratic parties and others elected by state party conventions. So the DNC can’t tell the state parties to pound sand and that “this is how it’s going to be” because they’d be saying it to themselves.
I’m afraid you’re just saying “because that’s how it is.” My question is along the lines of “why IS it this way and isn’t there a better way?”
This is the sort of statistic that sounds impressive but really isn’t
Since McGovern, (which is the first time that primaries started being a deal rather than smoky rooms) there have been 13 presidential elections. If you expect the eventual winner to have at least a 50/50 chance of winning a given race, and assume that NH and IA wins are independent then there is only a 1/4 chance of losing both. 13/4 =3.25 or just about what you observed.
The fact that you make those assumptions merely underscores the importance of those states. There is no reason to think that out of the 16 Republican candidates in 2016 that the eventual winner has a 50% chance of winning either of those states, or that they are independent of one another.
Why are they so important? Why can’t a candidate lose those two states and take the other 48? As noted, these states are small and largely white. They don’t represent the rest of the nation and certainly not the Democratic Party. The fact that those states are first offers the winner a big momentum boost and national recognition which far outweighs the delegates they receive. Yes, that didn’t happen for the Dems in 2020. Whether that is a new normal or a blip remains to be seen.
There is also, I think, a value in relatively unknown or insurgent candidates (think Gary Hart in New Hampshire in 1984, or Mayor Pete in Iowa in 2020, among others) being able to engage in effective grassroots campaigning and really connect with voters in small states through retail politics early on, before the primary season moves on to bigger and bigger states where it’s pretty much all about your (very expensive) TV ads.
Didn`t the Democrats initially choose these early states to avoid having the nomination dominated by the left? If you moved the first primaries to California or Vermont, it will be much harder for centrist candidates to gain a foothold.
I understand that may be what a lot of you here want, but I would question the electoral strategy behind that. Progressives still make up a small proportion of Americans, and if you run a slate of progressive candidates you’re going to give Republicans an advantage.
I think a better case could be made for Republiocans to move their first primaries and caucuses to someplace like California on the same theory - the Republicans might be more successful if they had slightly more liberal candidates, or at least didn’t let wackos from the far right win in a couple of tiny states early and stick around for far too long wasting everyone’s time.
On the other hand, you could argue that having small states go early is more Democratic in the sense that it doesn’t take nearly as much money to win in New Hampshire than it would in California. Having small states go first allows less-wealthy candidates to bootstrap a campaign based on small early wins. The right and left should both like that.
The 11 smallest states(counting DC) consist of six fair-strong blue states and five very conservative ones. The opening primary in a smallest -to-largest system would seem to be a pretty fair test.
The answer is that you think there is such a thing as the Democratic Party and you are wrong.
Neither the Democrats or the Republicans have a national organization that controls the party. The parties are run by the city, county, and state organizations. They are mostly not merely separate but contentious, each looking out for their own interests. They have very little actual power, however, as can be seen by the number of people who defeat the party-backed nominees in primaries.
The one power they have is at the legislative level. It’s a historical oddity that the states hold, run, control, and fund official elections for private organizations. Odd or not, it backed with millions of dollars of public investment. Therefore, they get to make all the rules for those elections. Again, there is no national organization over them to set rules for primaries. If the Democrats want to take control over the primaries, the legislatures can tell them to pound sand. Go set up a statewide parallel election system. You can call it a caucus. See how well that works. [derisive laughter]
Yes, that’s the status quo. It could be changed. But that could happen only by mutual agreement. No group has power over all the state legislatures. I’m not sure if even Congress could legally pass laws that would change the states’ systems governing primaries.