New Hampshire residents may like to pat themselves on the back while saying those things, but there’s no reason to think any other state wouldn’t take it just as seriously and do just as well.
Well, Iowa didn’t.
And most states are too large to mount a significant campaign without it being all about the money. Nearby Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey all require a lot more money, and are really too large for a candidate to meet any significant fraction of the electorate. I think there are some advantages to having an early state that can be campaigned in person, and not via media, or limited to paid-entry events.
People say this to support iowa and New Hampshire. I look at it from the opposite view. Allowing rural whites to be privileged to meet and spend time personally with candidates over urban blacks and all the other groups in the country is a travesty. It’s political apartheid. If we’re not out there demanding an end to this policy, doing so which costs absolutely nothing and doesn’t require country-wide agreement, then what else can we expect to accomplish.
I didn’t expect to see even this bare minimum change, which should be a clue to my cynicism about other necessary changes.
Maybe the first state to vote should be Hawaii. It’s a lot more diverse than most small states.
In practice, SOMEONE gets the privilege of having excessive influence over the start of the race. If we start in large states, the someone is people with lots of money. I’m not convinced it’s better to privilege massive wealth over rural whites.
(and, fwiw, i am not a rural voter, but i do have enough money to have been courted by campaigns, and to have attended events that have a large implicit price tag. So I’m not arguing for my personal interests here.)
Money has been involved in politics for 200 hundred years. It’s not coming out.
Complaints about the rich having too much influence also go back 200 years. The Democratic Party was formed in large part by workers angry at the eastern financiers, but then got taken over by August Belmont, one of the wealthiest men in the U.S. A generation went by before he stepped down.
As soon as television took over media, political ads became dominant over personal appearances. Today ads flood every commercial break, but they are secondary to the internet, which spreads political messages in multiple forms, not all of them requiring money. That trend will only intensify in the future.
Complain all you want but personal appearances are like newspapers. A case can be made for their necessity, but they are fading rapidly. Imagine a world in which newspapers were critical first influencers but sold only to white rural voters. People would be marching in the streets.
The Iowa caucuses are that world. Kill them.
Probably more so than Warren and Manchin (or Sanders, but he only caucuses with the Democrats).
Can’t have Hawaii, it’s the wrong kind of diversity for the Democrats activist base.
What the hell does that mean? What are you hinting at?
Opinion piece by Lucy Van Pelt: “Charlie Brown will regret no longer playing football with me”