Iowa - first caucus state again?

[woodley park]

Iowa’s past voting history is irrelevant. By that logic, Colorado is a swing state because it voted for Obama twice, Bush twice, once for Clinton, and once for Dole. It isn’t, Biden won it by 13 points and it will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future.

A state that votes 5 points to the right of the nation, like Iowa did this year, isn’t a swing state. It wouldn’t surprise me if the GOP nominee in 2024 carries it by double digits.

Yes, because past voting history is irrelevant when the topic at hand is literally state electoral trends. Wake me up when Iowa votes the same way for over a decade, then it's not a swing state.

Well, Democrats haven’t won Iowa on the presidential level since 2012. Given that current trends are likely to only accelerate and show no signs of stopping, I have a feeling Iowa will be voting the same way for more than just a decade.

And yes, how a state voted in the past is for the most part irrelevant. When a state changes you can’t use how it voted in the past because those past voting patterns are obsolete. Saying Iowa is a swing state because of how Obama did in 2008, is like saying back in 2004, West Virginia will flip back because Clinton won it easily in 1996. 2008/2012 is an entirely different political world than 2020. It will be a long, long time before Democrats are competitive in places that Obama won by massive margins like Howard County or Worth County again. The Iowa of the late 90s/early 2000s is gone.

Iowa just voted for the loser of this election by 8 points, it is not a swing state nor a bellwether.

Yeah, this. I thought maybe 2016 was a fluke given how swingy Iowa used to be. It seemed unfathomable it could birth Obama’s presidency but then also support Trump. Given that it has gone the way of not just the GOP, but a racist authoritarian GOP, I see no reason for the Democratic Party to reward it with “first in the nation” status again. I don’t want the primary candidates racing to the bottom, right out of the gate. Let Nevada go first.

[Lord Halifax]

I don't think the argument should be over whether Iowa is a swing state (South Carolina clearly isn't but it gets no.3)

The argument is frankly what order of states best suits the parties ability to win 270 electoral votes & how it best stress tests those running.

Those two things are inseparable - and the purpose of the two first states is different from the purpose of the third and fourth.

The purpose of the two first states is to find a candidate that can connect with voters in "Middle America" and win in swing states. SC is a corrective to make sure that you don't get a nominee with little appeal to black voters (NV serves the same purpose wrt Hispanics), since that could depress turnout.

If you keep lily-white NH as one of the first two, the second one needs to be a swing state that's at least a bit more diverse and includes a large metro area. On paper WI, MI, NC and GA are the obvious choices, but MI/NC/GA are too big for retail politics (all with roughly twice the population of SC). AZ is a large state with a 7 mio.+ population, which is a also a bit too big, and you already have NV on the calendar. WI is only slightly bigger than SC and in the same region as IA, so that's the obvious replacement even if it's slightly too white, but if you keep NV/SC as correctives that's less of a problem. NH/WI followed by NV/SC is the least radical change that'll still "do the job".

[MT Treasurer]

A state that votes 5 points to the right of the nation, like Iowa did this year, isn’t a swing state. It wouldn’t surprise me if the GOP nominee in 2024 carries it by double digits.

It’ll be more than 10 points to the right of the nation -- almost 15 points, in fact. But Senator Rob Sand in 2023 or whatever.

[Mr. Morden]

If Biden was younger, then I'd say that it would be all but certain, since there wouldn't be a contested primary, with the incumbent Dem. president running for reelection.  In that scenario, with all the action on the GOP side, since the GOP isn't looking to dislodge Iowa, they'd keep it first, and the Dems would just put the Dem. caucuses on the same day, and wait until 2028 for any calendar reform.

But since Biden is old enough that there's speculation that he might not run for a second term, then I guess it's possible that the Dems will make some changes to the calendar this cycle?  I don't know, we'll see.

One thing I'm mostly confident on though is that the "walking caucus" in Iowa (and wherever else they do it, which at this point might just be Nevada?) is dead.  The fiasco in Iowa this past year presumably killed it.  So they'll probably continue to have a "caucus", but there won't be this 15% threshold with reallocation, where there are multiple rounds of voting.  They'll just have a single vote, like the GOP caucus in Iowa.  So it'll still be called a "caucus", but it'll look more like a primary.

[Suburbia]

No---for the GOP, maybe.

Iowa is the GOP.