So, what are primaries and caucuses? What purpose do they serve? Does it matter what order they occur in? And, perhaps the most burning question of all: why do Iowa and New Hampshire always go first?
What are caucuses and primaries?
In both primaries and caucuses for presidential candidates, voters begin a process that ends with the election of delegates to national party conventions, where the candidate is formally nominated. Every political party has its own rules that dictate how many total delegates are available in a campaign season, and thus how many delegates constitute a majority at the convention.
A presidential primary is straightforward: voters go to their polling station on the specified day and vote for the candidate of their choice. Some primaries are closed, meaning the voter has to be a registered member of that party to participate in that party’s primary contest. In open primaries, any qualified voter can vote for a candidate of any party on the ballot. For the presidential election, voters are choosing delegates to attend the national convention.
The presidential caucus is a more complicated event. A caucus is held at the local precinct level by party, often in a school gymnasium, or town hall. Registered party members attend the meeting with other members of the party, and they spend time discussing and debating the merits of the candidates. Over the course of the caucus, attendees assemble into groups that support candidates. When the caucus time ends, the candidates win delegates based on the size of the group, the number of people attending the caucus, and the number of delegates available in that precinct. Local caucus-goers elect delegates for higher-level jurisdictions such as congressional districts and counties, which in turn select delegates for state-level conventions.
Over time, primaries have eclipsed caucuses as the way the parties pick delegates for the presidential nominating conventions. Caucuses are time-consuming for participants, are usually not conducted in secret, are often not held at voters’ usual polling locations, and tend to attract the most ideologically-motivated partisans. In 2020, the Democratic Party will have caucuses in only four states—Iowa, Nevada, North Dakota (in modified form), and Wyoming—in addition to the U.S. territories American Samoa, Guam, Northern Marianas, and U.S. Virgin Islands. The Republican Party has scheduled primaries and caucuses in 2020, but incumbent President Donald Trump may not face much of a challenge to his renomination.
Why do Iowa and New Hampshire always go first?
Iowa political parties have picked candidates using the caucus method since it became a state in 1846, except once in 1916 after the legislature changed the state’s election laws. But the governor called the primary a "farce" after the event’s low turnout, high cost, and low participation by the major presidential candidates. Iowa returned to the caucus.
In 1972, at the dawn of the reform era in presidential nomination politics, the number of delegate-selection contests and those eligible to participate in them (i.e., the public) expanded rapidly. Iowa Democrats scheduled their caucuses ahead of all other delegate selection contests to account for the complexity of their state’s process (Republicans followed suit in 1976). And the state has zealously held on to that position ever since. But critics—especially Democrats—have charged that because Iowa is unrepresentative in its size and demographics (it currently ranks 30th among U.S. states in terms of population size and is nearly 90 percent white), the state has an unwarranted and outsized role in picking the party’s nominee.
New Hampshire has held the first-in-the-nation primary since 1920 (Leonard Wood, a former U.S. Army general and the Republican winner, was a native son); through 1948 the state’s ballot listed only aspiring convention delegates, not the candidates themselves. For a while thereafter, as Elaine Kamarck explains in Primary Politics, the New Hampshire contest was merely "an early warning system for party elders," and "in the pre-reform system its role was usually not big enough to make other states envy its position."
However, in the post-reform era of the presidential nominating process—that is, from 1972 on—the primary electorate expanded, and media attention lavished on the winners, losers, and underperformers skyrocketed. Momentum from wins in these early contests became all-important. The first contests have also served to narrow the field of candidates, further enhancing their role. New Hampshire thereafter sought to protect its first place in the calendar. Under current state law, the New Hampshire secretary of state may change the date of the primary to occur at least seven days prior to a "similar election" in any other state—similar meaning another primary.
The "Window Rule"
But, can’t other states just move their primaries, or caucuses, to a slot on the calendar earlier than New Hampshire and Iowa? They have certainly tried. In January 1977, the Democratic National Committee established a new commission on presidential primaries led by Michigan party chairman Morley Winograd. When the Winograd Commission proposed a "window rule" to condense the long primary and caucus season, and to prohibit any activities before the second Tuesday in March of a presidential election year, New Hampshire and Iowa saw their first-in-the-nation positions as under threat. Despite initial support of the window rule from the White House—whose occupant had benefited greatly from winning in both Iowa and New Hampshire despite being at 1 percent in the January Gallup poll—Kamarck notes that "President Carter and his advisers realized what most candidates in both parties have since grasped: voters in these two early states care deeply about being early." The Commission adopted a modified rule, approved by the DNC, that grandfathered in Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s privileged positions.
Some additional challenges arose during and after the 1980 contest on the Democratic side, but by 1982, another Democratic commission (led by North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt), instituted a new rule that gave Iowa and New Hampshire official exemption from the window rule, which by the 1984 contests was effectively dead.
The two states have held on to their positions ever since, though other states moved their contests to early in the year, causing a "frontloading" of delegates—over half of both Republican and Democratic delegates in 2016 were selected in contests held during or before March. This topic will be explored in Lesson 3 of the course. But continuing concern about the outsized roles of Iowa and New Hampshire in the nominating process, especially from Michigan Democrats, spurred a new Democratic Party commission, in 2006, to add South Carolina and Nevada (to Michigan’s chagrin) to the early calendar—after Iowa and New Hampshire, but before all the rest.
NEXT UP:Lesson 3 - Who are the delegates? What is a superdelegate? What is "sequencing" and why does it matter in the hunt for delegates?
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