Enough with Iowa and New Hampshire

Moses was mad.

Our bus was rolling to a pancake breakfast being held to support the 1996 presidential campaign of Phil Gramm. The Republican Senator from Texas was energized by his delusion that America wanted a corporate tax cutter with a drawl and tortured 19th century metaphors about who “pulls the wagon” for the nation. On this cold and snowy morning, Charlton Heston, the actor, had for reasons known only to himself, agreed to speak at the dawn meal to fire up support for Gramm.

I do not remember what Heston told the surprisingly large crowd in the Boone, Iowa community center that morning but I assume his baritone was as persuasive as when he was reading the Ten Commandments on film. His celebrity was probably all that mattered to the audience, that and the pancakes, of course. I did notice that Mose’s toupee was tilted slightly to the side throughout his speech and seemed a touch more off center as he signed autographs. Heston apparently did not notice his aesthetic comportment was slightly askew until he visited a restroom and when he came out an unmistakable scowl added dark definition to his already serious countenance.

Back outside in the snow after some satisfying bacon and flapjacks, I saw Heston towering over a diminutive campaign assistant, emphatically communicating her shortcomings, most likely for not taking him aside and delicately explaining his rug was tilted and people were not hearing a word he said because of the lack of hirsute symmetry. Maybe that’s why Sen. Gramm finished fifth in Iowa that year with a little over 9,000 votes. I do not know, but I am confident that we did not see Moses again that day and he was supposed to be present and sonorous at every event.

Every bit of every Iowa caucus is as much absurdist folly as that event with Charlton Heston. Why does a state with a tiny percentage of the nation’s population at 3,200,000 people, 90 percent of whom are white, get outsized influence on a critical national decision? I am sure everyone knows the story about the unknown governor from Georgia who decided to go to Iowa and jump start his campaign prior to New Hampshire’s primary. Jimmy Carter ran around the state in rental cars and probably shook 3 million hands, and won, which set him on a course to the White House. But that was 1976 and voters across the country knew far less about Iowa than they do in 2024, and it is a state that is not representative of the larger country’s diversity. What the overwhelmingly conservative Whites of Iowa desire can hardly be considered reflective of the national preference.

The cause of this silliness is the media. Yeah, I’m a long time ex-TV news guy and I’m blaming the media. Trump’s victory in this week’s caucuses is being treated like an inaugural parade and a coronation all rolled into one big hype show. But what did he win? Iowa has about 752,000 registered Republicans and only 15 percent of them went to a caucus and voted, which is approximately half of normal turnout. Trump got a whopping 55,000 of their votes. Mr. Excitement, even exercising the Adderral advantage, could not get them out of their houses to play voter in the cold. Only 110,000 turned up their fur collars and bent into the wind to serve their future dictator, but now the narrative is Trump has taken the first step in his restoration to president.

Like piss he has. Iowa means almost nothing, and certainly has less influence every four years. Just ask President Ted Cruz, who won there in 2016 and defeated the man from Mar a Lardo. President Rick Santorum can also tell you about how his 2012 win in Iowa got him into the White House just like it helped President Mike Huckabee realize his cornpone dreams of putting his hand on the Bible for the inaugural. Remember President Bob Dole? No? Nobody does, but he won the caucus in the land between two rivers and learned campaign tactics from President Phil Gramm. Iowa is a predictor of nothing in the national political process and needs to permanently return to being a state that grows corn and stops trying to grow presidents. Hell, according to the Des Moines Register, 25 percent of Iowa’s caucus goers said they will not vote for Trump in the general election, eight percent would seek a third party candidate, and six percent preferred to support Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Lop those percentages off Trumpie’s 55,000 total and he’s down to just over 30,000. Not exactly a bigly win.

Watching reporters, inexplicably, standing in the cold and explaining the dangers of Iowa’s wind chills, prompted me to recall a story I reported during the 1988 New Hampshire primary. Democrat Dick Gephardt from Missouri was trying hard to win and was getting to every event and function on the party’s agenda. My crew and I happened to get caught out in a New England blizzard and discovered Gephardt was nearby shaking hands in the driving snow during a day of dog sled racing. The visuals were too tempting to sit in the rental car with our fingers curled around the heater vents. Barking dogs and blinding snow and sleds leaving tracks that were quickly covered by new snow as we taped the race provided great b-roll so I interviewed a man who would be president while snowflakes accumulated on his bushy eyebrows, and he kept brushing them off.

Gephardt, who had a commendable legislative record of meaningful policy, possessed a pleasing voice and the look but he could not win over New Hampshire voters. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis defeated the Missouri congressman by an almost 2-1 margin before driving his campaign off the cliff in a tank. But why do the political parties give New Hampshire importance in the primary campaign for president? The state presently has about a million registered voters, divided almost equally between the GOP and Dems while 40 percent claim to be independent. Even back then, though, standing in snow almost to my knees, I was confounded by the silliness of my interview about politics and policy in a blizzard with a sled race and yapping dogs in the background to see if a stranger from Missouri could win over White folks in a state full of ‘em. A colleague on the press bus had come to refer to New Hampshire as the “NASCAR state of the North,” which might have spoken to its politics but not its diversity. Southern states have demonstrably larger populations of persons of color.

New Hampshire’s 1.4 million residents are whiter than Iowa, and I am not talking about the snow. Figures from the Census Bureau indicate 92.6 percent are White, 2 percent are Black, and 4.6 percent Hispanic or Latino. Again, not exactly a diverse population for determining the nation’s leadership, and in many ways, the fates of the wider world since American escapades tend to impact global economies and politics. When New Hampshire and Iowa are finished putting their imprimatur on the presidential nominating races, there is often a fatalist sense of inevitability regarding outcomes in the subsequent states, and we end up with Presidents who ought to be greeters at Walmart instead of sitting at the Resolute Desk.

We need to stop the madness and find a new methodology for picking presidential nominees. Maybe the best approach is to select 25 states with diverse populations and have two or three Super Tuesdays. It would give candidates time to raise money and then campaign and deliver a real reading of what American voters want because the demographic includes people other than Whites acting cranky in the snow or at home. By holding caucuses and a primary in two small states on the front end of the process, we also give underfunded candidates a chance to make an impact. That’s probably a good thing, but they are achieving among an almost homogenous population cohort. Let’s move on, or maybe we won’t have to worry about elections in 2028.

Cuz God gave us a dictator.