Julián Castro’s campaign may be running on fumes, but he is right to argue that the role of Iowa and New Hampshire in picking presidents is outdated.
Castro, in an MSNBC appearance he later tweeted out, argued that the demographics of the nation (and especially the Democratic Party) have changed dramatically in the nearly 50 years since Iowa’s first caucuses in 1972 and said the order of both early contests needed to be revisited.
I have long been a critic of the outsize role that Iowa especially plays in presidential politics. Iowans get to have more candidate choices than any other state and enjoy incredible access to candidates. Yet in 2016, turnout was just 15.7% and both parties had wide-open nomination fights. The idea of the informed and engaged Iowa voter that is vetting candidates diligently for the rest of the nation is a myth perpetuated by the media. And its presence as the first state helps enshrine terrible policy, such as ethanol subsidies. The New Hampshire primary is a higher turnout affair, but it’s also difficult to see why, if you were creating a primary system from scratch, you would give voters there such a tremendous advantage over the rest of the nation in picking the president.
All of this having been said, one can argue that when it comes to the Republican Party, the first two states are decently representative of the party as a whole. Iowa is more dominated by social conservatives, and New Hampshire is home to more economic libertarians and social issue moderates (plus independents can vote in the open primary). But taken together, candidates appealing to different factions of the party can generally find an audience.
This argument cannot be made on the Democratic side where the first two states do not look anything like the party as a whole. In 2016, about 4 in 10 those who voted in Democratic nomination contests were nonwhite. In Iowa and New Hampshire, fewer than 1 in 10 were nonwhite. It just seems preposterous that states with Democratic electorates where more than 90% of voters are white would be having so much disproportionate influence within the party.
There is, of course, a counterargument. In 2008, black voters initially didn’t overwhelmingly support Barack Obama, in large part because they were trying to be pragmatic and didn’t think that America would ever elect a black president. But the fact that he won the overwhelmingly white Iowa convinced them otherwise, and overnight, they supported him by significant margins. That said, do Democrats want to maintain a system in which minority candidates are required to prove themselves among a super white electorate before they can campaign among a more diverse group of voters?
I agree there is an advantage in having some smaller states go earlier, which allows candidates with lower name recognition and less money to make their case directly to voters. A single national primary would make this impossible.
But to my mind, a better system would be to have a few states from different regions with different voter profiles go first on the same day. That would allow candidates to tailor their messages to multiple electorates, and some lesser-known candidates to camp out in at least one state where they may stand a better chance. The states themselves could rotate every four years so no state gets a permanent stranglehold on the population and so they can change as the parties change.
There are other ideas worth exploring. But while Castro’s comments may be dismissed as sour grapes from a losing candidate, he still makes a good point.
