Democratic Party approves rules allowing states to compete for first-in-the-nation status

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After a long, long period of knowing there was a problem but not doing much about it, the Democratic National Committee is finally allowing other states to challenge Iowa and New Hampshire for their “first in the nation” positions at the front of each presidential election’s Democratic nomination campaign. On Wednesday the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee kicked off an “application” process inviting states to make their own cases for “first in the nation” status.

Up to five such states will be selected, up from the current four, and there’s nothing here that says Iowa and New Hampshire won’t be chosen to fill two of those slots. But they also aren’t guaranteed those spots, which is a ground-shaking change and one that the two states have resisted with all their might and more than a little vitriol.

There are several reasons for the reform. The Iowa Democratic Party did itself no favors with some truly spectacular technical screw-ups during the last caucuses, and even without those disasters other Democratic-leaning states have long complained that the Iowa-New Hampshire lock on kicking off primary season is unfair and that at the least, those first slots should be rotated so that more state Democratic parties can benefit from the national political coverage those first contests bring in.

There’s a far more pernicious problem with Iowa and New Hampshire’s special status, however.

The two states are among the most white states in the Democratic camp, making them increasingly unrepresentative of the Democratic Party’s national coalitions. That lack of diversity means the two states’ positions as Democratic bellwethers are tenuous at best; Joe Biden was reduced to an also-ran in both states during the 2020 primaries, only to go on to dominate his opponents once the voting moved to more diverse southern states.

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That reversal of fortune was predicted by polling and came as no great surprise to campaign experts, but it again demonstrated that Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t great choices if the party wants the first positions to give insight as to how the rest of the race might play out. The two states don’t have such predictive power, and it can even be argued that by skewing media coverage toward whatever candidates 1) have mastered the unique campaign requirements of those two states, and 2) are most favored by mostly-white Democrats, that guaranteed-first status is reliably confusing the status of the race rather than clarifying it.

A more sensible approach would choose the five “first” states to be representative of their regions, and would offer true “first” status to none of them. Most state parties would be glad to have national reporters descend on their diners for the omnipresent stories about how things look on the ground; it allows downballot candidates to get a minor boost of attention earlier in the race than they otherwise might, and allows state party functionaries to boost their own profiles so as to better support those state candidates later on.

In theory, that’s likely the approach the DNC will now take. But it’s also pretty likely the DNC will ease into any such transition in a way that keeps Iowa and New Hampshire near the front of the line because Politics (for now). So don’t be surprised if both states end up among the five for purely, ahem, “traditional” reasons.