WHAT IF WE HAD A NEW IOWA EVERY ELECTION?

The debacle for Democrats caused by a faulty vote-recording app in the Iowa caucuses brought into sharp focus the question that we ask ourselves every four years: Why give a few thousand residents of a state that does not reflect our nation’s diversity so much power to pick the next president, anyway?

And while voting went more smoothly in the New Hampshire primary, the nature of that state’s contest raises the same list of compelling objections to our current method of nominating presidential candidates. Each party’s process begins with elections in small states that are in no way microcosms of the nation.

New Hampshire set a turnout record this year with more than 300,000 voters participating — that’s a number smaller than the electorate in most California state Senate race — given the power to set the agenda to select the next leader of the free world. Even in the Democratic primary in the Granite State, nine out of every 10 voters are white. The number of votes cast in Iowa is about half that large, with only 15% of Iowans braving the snow to show up at an evening caucus that requires a commitment of at least an hour. Because of how demanding it is to cast a ballot there, the participants in Iowa’s caucuses do not even reflect the population of that state, doubling down on the lack of representativeness in these earlier contests.

Yet election after election, we turn to these two states to set the stage — and determine the players — for our presidential contests. Why? This was not part of some grand plan hatched by the founders in the Constitution, nor a conscious decision by modern reform groups. These two states simply pushed their way to the head of the line. New Hampshire has long had a state law guaranteeing that it would hold the nation’s first primary, and Iowa, partly because its caucus rules are so complex, got its place at the start of the schedule in the 1970s when national reforms aimed at opening up the nominating process made primaries and caucuses so important.

Those reforms succeeded in transferring the power to pick nominees from party leaders at conventions to Kousser is a professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at UC San Diego.

regular voters in each state. But the obvious flaw is that some states are more equal than others in this process, since they come first.

Because it dilutes the power of voters in states with later nominating contests, empowering instead small electorates that are unrepresentative of each party’s full range of supporters, the elevation of Iowa and New Hampshire is hard to defend.

Yet some aspects of the slanted process that we have accidentally stumbled into actually make sense, accomplishing goals that we could not achieve through, for example, a single national primary. Pointing out these advantages helps us understand why a manifestly unfair system has persisted, and points the way toward a replacement that could balance these benefits against changes that restore equity to the voting power of all Americans.

The first advantage of today’s system is that we can rely on the Iowa and New Hampshire voters who work so hard to engage with candidates to vet them for us, effectively outsourcing our political attention. When they show up in smelly high school gyms to watch rallies and stump speeches, they are standing in as proxies for our most engaged and attentive selves. That gives us the luxury of not watching C-SPAN, or turning off free-for-all debates as they drag into their second hour, until at least the election year. Voters in these small states are checking out the candidates close up and, through their votes, reporting back to us.

Holding early contests in these small states also makes

money less important to determining the winners. Candidates can fund their campaign buses and staffers with mere millions of dollars, rather than the hundreds of millions that would be required to run TV ads in a national primary or in a state like California if it came first.

Finally, sequencing our nominating process through a series of early contests spaced a week apart give voters in one state the chance to learn from those in another about the strength of candidates, narrowing their choices and allowing them to coordinate on a consensus. If Super Tuesday came first, with so many states rushing in at once, it would be hard to know which candidates were truly viable and which votes would end up wasted.

Recognizing these benefits provides a road map to a potential reform: hold early contests in a set of small states, just as we do today, but rotate which states come first every election and ensure that their electorates are more representative of America. Instead of giving Iowa and New Hampshire primacy every year, let Arkansas, New Mexico and Washington go first one year, with Delaware, Virginia and Hawaii leading off the next election cycle.

Moving to this system would require party chieftains to invest their attention and political capital into muscling Iowa and New Hampshire out of their positions, through tough delegate eligibility rules. Even more challenging, the two parties would have to work together. But the payoff — a system that equalized voting power and promoted representativeness, while preserving the benefits of today’s process brings — would be worth it.