CHANGE THE COVERAGE, NOT THE CALENDAR

Our presidential nomination system is far from perfect. It seems particularly problematic that a handful of small, unrepresentative states have an outsized impact on who the parties nominate for president. But even if you think the current system is unfair, rules changes would not help that much. What we really need is for the news media to change its behavior to cover the contest more responsibly.

In reality, Iowa and New Hampshire, which together comprise about 1% of the U.S. population, do not have terribly outsized influence on the nomination contest. According to party rules, a candidate will win the presidential nomination when he or she wins a majority of the 3,979 delegate votes at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee this summer. Together, Iowa and New Hampshire contests choose 65 delegates, or about 3% of the total needed to win. Their delegate share is not wildly unfair.

However, that is not the picture that the media paints for voters. On primary night, the news media loudly proclaims who “won” each primary or caucus. Such headlines are inaccurate, at best. In presidential nomination contests, the delegates are allocated proportionally to the share of the primary vote. So when Bernie Sanders came in “first” in New Hampshire, he did not win all 24 pledged convention delegates. Instead, Sanders and Pete Buttegieg each won 9 delegates in New Hampshire, a resounding 0.4% of the total delegates each would need to win the nomination. After the first three contests this year, Sanders had accumulated 45 pledged delegates, Buttegieg had accumulated 26, Joe Biden 15, Elizabeth Warren 8, Amy Klobuchar 7. All are far short of the 1,991 majority they would need.

Such meager totals do not have to be interpreted as predicting a certain result at the convention in July. Let’s be clear here — no one has locked up the nomination at this point, and no one will accumulate the necessary number of delegates for many months. If anything, the results point to a f luid contest. The public would benefit if the news media doubled down on informing

Dominguez is professor of political science and international relations at the University of San Diego and co-editor of “Making of the Presidential Candidates 2020.”

the voters about the pros and cons of all of their candidate choices, and the process by which they are chosen. But instead, the news media often hype a simplified story about the results of the early contests, and Iowa and New Hampshire voters are given disproportionate power over voters elsewhere.

The news media’s goal is to sell information to the public, not to inform the public as citizens and voters. During election season, those in the media mostly tell us about polls. To add interest, they frame such stories in terms of who is “winning” and “losing” the ‘horse race.’ Then they extend such horse race analysis into speculation about the future, based on unstated assumptions. They have decided that people will tune in for punditry and prognostication. But this choice — and it is a choice — has consequences.

The content of the media’s campaign coverage matters. It affects voters. When the media mentions a candidate’s name, often by discussing their “wins” (that are really small advantages in accumulated delegates) and their poll standing (which partly reflects how much attention they get from the media), they give attention to that candidate.

That attention is a valuable campaign contribution. Republicans in 2016 were flummoxed by the ability of a newcomer to the party, Donald Trump, to beat longtime party stalwarts like Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush. Most scholars have concluded that the media’s attention to Trump, which highlighted his standing in the polls, propelled him to win his party’s nomination. Trump’s rise is only one example of the same phenomenon that gives Iowa and New Hampshire their seemingly outsized power over the nomination contest. When the news media proclaims that Biden’s campaign is in trouble, while he is actually behind Sanders by a mere 30 out of 1,991 delegates each would need for the nomination, the media is helping to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

No changes to the primary calendar — moving to a national primary, or letting more demographically representative states go first — will reduce the news media’s outsized role in determining the outcome of presidential nomination contests.

The news media can and should do better.

Let primary voters vote, informed about the candidates’ pasts and plans, and the processes by which their votes will matter. Then each state’s voters can have their say, and what happens in Iowa can stay in Iowa.