Since everybody’s minds are already into the 2020 Presidential campaign, I thought I’d go ahead and do this a bit early this cycle. This is an updating of a post originally from back in 2007 that I’ve updated each cycle since.
Q. What is the importance of winning the Iowa caucuses and/or New Hampshire primaries?
Short answer: They effectively narrow the field down to one or two candidates. If one candidate wins both, they’ve all but got a lock on the nomination. Otherwise, they narrow the field down to two candidates: the Iowa and New Hampshire winners.
The longer version:
Iowa first joined the New Hampshire primary as a launching pad for Presidential hopes when Jimmy Carter won the Iowa caucuses in 1976, so we’ll look at 1976 through 2016. That gives us 11 nomination cycles for each party, or 22 altogether.
In five of those cycles, the incumbent President didn’t face significant opposition for the nomination. (Dems 1996, 2012; GOP 1984, 1992, 2004.) So that leaves us with 17 cycles. (You can make a case that Buchanan in 1992 constituted a significant challenge to GHW Bush, but it doesn’t really make a difference in how this analysis plays out.) So we’ll leave them out.
Here’s what it looks like (party year: Iowa winner, NH winner, nomination winner bolded):
R 1976: Ford won both
D 1976: Carter won both
D 1980: Carter won both
D 2000: Gore won both
D 2004: Kerry won both
R 1980: Bush, Reagan
D 1984: Mondale, Hart
R 1988: Dole, Bush
D 1988: Gephardt, Dukakis
D 1992: Harkin, Tsongas (Clinton finished second in NH)
R 1996: Dole, Buchanan
R 2000: Bush, McCain
R 2008: Huckabee, McCain
D 2008: Obama, Clinton
R 2012: Santorum*, Romney
D 2016: Clinton, Sanders
R 2016: Cruz, Trump
The asterisk by Santorum is because Romney was declared the winner at the time, but Santorum eventually turned out to have won. One could argue that effectively Romney won both, and I can go either way on that one.
In every instance where one candidate won both primaries, that candidate ultimately won the nomination. And with the exception of 1992 on the Dem side, the ultimate nominee won at least one of these two primaries. (The deal on 1992 is that everyone skipped Iowa, letting favorite son Tom Harkin have an easy but worthless win there. So for all practical purposes, there was no Iowa that year.)
The results don’t tell us much, though, about whether the IA or the NH winner will win the nomination when it’s a split decision. If there’s any sort of pattern there, I sure don’t see it.