The Diminishing Sway of the Early State Primary

Political veterans in both major parties share the same romantic campaign memory.

Candidates in flannel shirts and jeans, trudging through the snowy towns of Iowa and New Hampshire, chatting up small groups of voters over coffee and cake in someone’s home and flipping pancakes in a church basement. The person-to-person nature of early primary state campaigning offered the hope that anything was possible, that an obscure candidate could gain steam and march to the nomination. And the process weeded out those who did not have the ability to reach voters on a personal level.

That system is unraveling this year, as changes in the primary schedule and an unusual candidate field – where front-runners in both parties are essentially incumbents – shake up a process Democrats and Republicans have used for many decades to settle on their strongest candidates for president.

President Joe Biden won’t even be on the ballot in New Hampshire, which is defying Democratic National Committee rules to go ahead with its traditional first-in-the-nation primary Jan. 25 despite the fact that the DNC awarded South Carolina the distinction of going first.

Florida Democrats appear ready to skip an actual primary, with the party voting in October to put only Biden’s name on the ballot, prompting Rep. Dean Phillips, a Minnesota Democrat challenging Biden for the nomination, to threaten a lawsuit.

Republicans technically have an open race for the nomination, but the dominating presence of former President Donald Trump has turned the GOP contest into something similar to that of an incumbent president. Trump doesn’t do the small, intimate events at coffee shops and pizza parlors that Iowans and Granite Staters are used to. Instead, he holds big rallies and doesn’t take questions from voters afterward.

The other leading GOP contenders – former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie are making those rounds. DeSantis is focusing more on Iowa, where the GOP electorate is socially conservative, and Christie is setting his sights on New Hampshire, where the New Jerseyan is getting a warmer welcome.

But their visits are dwarfed in the news cycle by Trump’s events. And while in the past a candidate’s comments or announcements at local stops in Iowa and New Hampshire would drive the campaign coverage, the 2024 headlines have come more from interviews Trump has given to TV and talk radio shows or from debates. Challengers to Biden, including Phillips and self-help guru Marianne Williamson, have struggled to get media attention even as they campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire.

It’s not that the primaries don’t matter anymore – or even that early states aren’t important, analysts say. But the days of Iowa and New Hampshire claiming outsized power in determining the presidential nominees are fading fast.

“I do think it’s a lot more difficult to gain momentum out of Iowa and New Hampshire,” which in the past have given essential boosts to candidates like 1976 Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter, little known nationally until he won the New Hampshire primary, says Dante Scala, a University of New Hampshire political science professor and longtime follower of Granite State primary campaigns.

“Nowadays, to build a campaign, you’ve got to do it months and months ahead of time. The old plan of surprising in Iowa and surprising in New Hampshire and then raising money off of that to compete later – that’s a long time behind us, I think,” Scala adds.

New Hampshire and Iowa (which holds caucuses instead of a primary) have served as unique testing sites for candidates over the years. The media markets are small, so a candidate can’t win just by flooding the airwaves. Voters in both states take their roles seriously, as though they are doing jury duty, and many try to see each contender in person at some point during the nominating contest.

But the decisive impact of those states is fading – a trend punctuated by the fact that Democrats this year kicked New Hampshire and Iowa out of their first-place spots in the primary calendar.

Much of the shift has to do with the early nationalization of presidential campaigns, Scala and others note, meaning candidates’ brands are set well before the first contests.

“You have to become much better known and you have to become viable much earlier than you used to because of all the attention paid to candidates before Iowa and New Hampshire,” Scala says.

The old system has been evolving for several election cycles, making early-contest states less inherently powerful. In 2008, Michigan and Florida got fed up with being later in the primary process and decided to move up their nominating contest in violation of DNC rules.

Ironically, that year, contenders Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were so closely matched that it was later states that ended up with more power.

“Pennsylvania was all of a sudden the center of the universe” in that Democratic primary, even though its contest was in April 2008, says David Redlawsk, a University of Delaware political scientist who is an expert on the primary system.

And in 2020, Biden tanked in both Iowa and New Hampshire, finishing fifth in the Granite State and getting no delegates in a state that once had the distinction of holding a must-win primary to capture the presidency. Until 1992, no person had become president without also winning his party’s New Hampshire primary.

But with a big national profile (and stronger polling in national surveys), Biden won the South Carolina primary and went on to win the nomination and general election that year.

“The early primaries remain winnowers” of weak candidates, but “they may not winnow everybody they used to,” Redlawsk says.

Changes in fundraising, too, have helped diminish the impact of early states, analysts say. Candidates can raise a lot of money – fast – online, extending a campaign that might have ended after New Hampshire years ago.

“It was absolutely cash flow,” back when candidates had to do well in a primary to get donations to go on – but sometimes the checks didn’t arrive in time to fund the flight to the next primary state, says John Geer, who has written extensively about the presidential campaign process and now serves as senior adviser to the chancellor of Vanderbilt University.

Further, “small donations weren’t cost effective,” as they are now, when donations are made electronically, he adds, “By the time you processed a $10 check, you were out of money.”

Further, both front-runners, Biden and Trump, are so well-known to the public that they don’t need to do the glad-handing lesser-known White House hopefuls have done in early primary states in the past.

“There’s really nothing we don’t know about them,” Redlawsk says.

Fans of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary aren’t giving up, however, and say the contests will always play a special and critical role in America’s selection of a president.

In New Hampshire, prominent Democrats are launching a grassroots campaign to get people to write in Biden, who did not file in New Hampshire because the state was determined to violate the DNC’s scheduling rules.

That could help Biden, who doesn’t need the bad publicity of a loss in New Hampshire, even though it’s not likely to affect his expected renomination. But the move also promotes New Hampshire, says veteran Democratic strategist Jim Demers, one of the organizers of the write-in campaign.

“I personally feel strongly that the write-in effort – hopefully it’s successful – will give the New Hampshire Democrats a story to tell the DNC when they look at the calendar again for 2028, which is something they’re going to do,” Demers says.

“We’re hearing from a lot of people who are telling us, ‘I want to write this guy’s name in,'” Demers says, referring to Biden. “I think most Democrats are disappointed that the calendar changed, but we feel very strongly that this election is probably the most critical of our lifetimes.”

In Iowa, despite Trump’s dominance, there are still signs of the grassroots, through the snow-trudging campaign of old, says Bob Beatty, whose documentary on the Iowa caucuses will show on PBS stations early next year.

“I think Democrats made a huge mistake” in booting Iowa out of its longtime spot as host of the first caucuses (which differ from primaries), Beatty says, but he suspects the party may rethink it for 2028.

With Trump in the driver’s seat, “everything’s bigger this year – the buses are bigger, the super PACs are bigger, there are more TV ads,” Beatty says. But beneath that, “they’ve still got to go to the Pizza Ranches,” and that will likely be even more true in 2028, he says.

And New Hampshire, Demers says, will always be there to take a close, even-handed look at those who want to be president.

“I have never come across a former presidential candidate who hasn’t said to me, ‘I became a better candidate and I understand a lot of what other people face because of the direct connection I had with people in New Hampshire.’ It makes candidates better,” Demers says.

Whether it makes them winners, however, is less certain.