If you are from the state of Iowa, you have the privilege of meeting every presidential candidate you wish to meet, and your vote is more powerful than any other primary vote in the country. Why? Because since 1972 your state has gone first in the primaries, giving the people of Iowa a profound impact on who becomes the nominees for each party. There is no reason whatsoever for this, yet the tradition persists and I’m going to explain why this tradition is damaging to American democracy.

To start, let’s look at the origins of Iowa-first. The current U.S. primary system doesn’t appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. Instead, it came about after the infamous Democratic Convention that took place in Chicago in August of 1968. It was a heady time: the Vietnam War had dragged on for 14 years at that point and Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy had just been assassinated. Party leaders had traditionally chosen the candidates, but party supporters did vote in some states in what were then, just symbolic primaries. This was further complicated because the sitting president Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, had announced in March that he wouldn’t run. Kennedy had been in the lead before he was shot.

To make a long story short: party leaders chose Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey as the candidate even though he had not won a single primary. As part of the Johnson administration, Humphrey was behind the Vietnam war while one of the losing candidates, Senator Eugene McCarthy, had run on an anti-Vietnam War platform. This decision brought on violent protests which were met with police crackdowns. Wanting to avoid such debacles in the future, the party created the McGovern-Fraser Commission to come up with a nominating process that would give voters a more direct say in choosing the presidential candidate.

Enter Iowa, which traditionally had a long nominating process complete with caucuses (a process where voters gather in-person to discuss and vote on candidates), local and state-wide events, so they needed to go early in the new nominating process in 1972 and ended up going first. But it wasn’t until 1976 that the media, the public and the campaigns started to take notice because a fairly unknown candidate named Jimmy Carter won the Iowa caucuses. With this attention came money, not only from the candidates themselves and their parties eager to influence these important early voters via events as well as state and local media buys, but also the droves of reporters who followed them around, pollsters trying to measure and predict which way votes might go and let’s not forget that all of these people need to be sheltered and fed. For a small state like Iowa, all this is quite a significant boost to its economy. 

Beyond money, holding the first caucus gives the Iowa national (hell, international) notoriety and influence. The same is true for New Hampshire with its first primary. One study found that voters in Iowa have 20 times more influence than the suckers in states that hold their primaries later. They have successfully chosen the Democratic candidate in seven of ten contested primaries since 1972 and to a much lesser extent with Republicans, only three of eight competitive races. Who would give this up? Leaders from both Iowa and New Hampshire have therefore fought to maintain this first-in-country status. Both states have laws that enshrine this status and state leaders aggressively lobby both parties because, after all, the primaries are internal processes that the party’s control.

Advantaging these two states makes the United States presidential nominating process less democratic for two main reasons: first, it is just plain unfair to voters in other states and second, it favors the preferences of white voters.

Leaders and citizens alike from Iowa and New Hampshire have come to believe the story they tell to justify their privileged position: that they take this vote very seriously, they attend events and scrutinize the candidates in order to come to informed decisions. Yet who’s to say that the people of any other state would take such an opportunity any less seriously? One of the advantages of stretching the nomination process across six months is to give candidates the time to travel the country and get to know citizens and allow the citizens to get to know them. But this requires money, so some justify starting the campaign off in smaller states where it costs less money to run a campaign than it would in, say, California. If they do well, the money will come, and they can continue.

However, if a candidate can’t win or place towards the top in Iowa or New Hampshire, their campaign is over. Yet neither state comes even close to being representative of the country. Both are predominantly white and also skew older. Further, neither state has any large urban cities. This is a much bigger problem for Democrats than for Republicans because their base of voters is mostly non-white, younger and lives in urban areas.

This does indeed have an impact on who gets nominated. The Democratic field started off as the most diverse in history and is now mostly seen as a four-way race between, Senator Bernie Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Two older white men, a white woman and a younger white man. Candidates like Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, both African Americans, have since dropped out in no small part because they weren’t able to gain any traction in Iowa or New Hampshire. This certainly isn’t to say that the people of these states are racists, they are simply just not representative of the whole country. It’s worth noting that Barrack Obama famously won Iowa in 2008 and came in a close second to Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.

The results of today’s caucuses in Iowa will have an enormous impact on this fractured Democratic primary in which the ultimate stakes couldn’t higher: bringing an end to the Trump nightmare. Yet the process is deeply flawed and undemocratic. Until the leaders both parties find their spines and remake the process, Americans are stuck with it.

This op-ed was published in Spanish in El Español.