| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. After 12 quiet years for the presidential-nomination calendar, we may soon be in for a serious fight. The Nevada legislature on Monday passed a bill that would kick off the nomination process in that state, ahead of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Easier said than done, of course. New Hampshire will reschedule its first-in-the-nation primary ahead of any other state's, and Iowa will schedule its first-in-the-nation caucuses eight days before that. Unless the federal government acts — and that's unlikely — the national political parties have very limited ability to regulate the process. They can penalize states for violating their guidelines, and they can penalize candidates for campaigning in those states. But the only real leverage the parties have is refusing to seat a state's delegates, and no one cares about delegates in the early caucus and primary states; the reason candidates campaign in those states is because of the enormous publicity the early contests receive, and no one can order the media to simply ignore such an event.
That said, if the national parties really do want Nevada (or some other state) at the front of the line, it's possible that they could persuade candidates and the media that any renegade state contest was a nonevent. There are some examples. In 1996, Alaska and Louisiana jumped the gun and held caucuses before Iowa, which the media covered as sort of pre-events, not the real thing. Granted, it probably helped that not too many journalists wanted to hang out in Alaska in January! Also perhaps relevant is the 1992 contest, in which Democrats decided to ignore Iowa because home-state Senator Tom Harkin was running there. Republicans, with an incumbent president, held no event there at all. The story about the caucus results ran on page A23 of the New York Times. So it is possible to largely ignore a first-in-the-nation event that everyone has decided doesn't really count.
That said, Nevada doesn't need any reason beyond self-interest for wanting to go first. Attention from the national political establishment is worth real money in direct spending by campaigns and reporters. There are also policy advantages — candidates in Iowa typically pledge support for various uses of corn, for example, while candidates in New Hampshire support subsidies for low-income home-heating assistance.
However, the claim, popular among Democratic activists, that it's important for the first state to be demographically representative of the party as a whole continues to be a weak one. Not because diversity is unimportant, but because the complaints about the very Anglo Iowa and New Hampshire electorates miss the point of what those states do. They don't select the nominee; indeed, Donald Trump lost in Iowa in 2016, Hillary Clinton lost badly in New Hampshire in 2016, and Joe Biden didn't come close in either Iowa or New Hampshire in 2020. Yes, those contests help winnow the field. But more Democratic candidates were eliminated before Iowa in 2016 than were ousted by either of the first two events.
In fact, both parties' nominations are national contests. The pre-Iowa debates focus on national constituencies, not the particular interests of the first two states. National resources such as money, endorsements and campaign staff are crucial. Yes, in 1976, Jimmy Carter was able to run a gimmicky Iowa-centric campaign and make it work, but now such efforts always fall flat, often embarrassingly so. In part, this is because parties and the media have learned to interpret early-state results in context, so that everyone knows winning an atypical state doesn't prove much. In part, it's because the candidates themselves have learned how to deal with atypical states that don't play to their strengths.
Of course, there are other issues involved. Iowa's repeated failure to properly administer its caucuses is a real problem for the Democratic Party (although Nevada, which has had plenty of its own challenges, is an odd choice if that's the rationale). And it's possible that Democrats will care about the symbolic value of which state goes first regardless of how much substantive difference it makes.
Still, it would take real effort by the national party to dislodge Iowa and New Hampshire from their positions, and it's far from clear that the Democrats want to take on that fight, or that they would win if they tried.
1. Dave Hopkins on diversity in the Biden administration.
2. Lucy Britt at the Monkey Cage on Memorial Day.
3. Also at the Monkey Cage: Sarah Binder on the defeat by filibuster of a Jan. 6 commission. I still think the Democrats would've been smart to force at least a few days of extended debate on the issue — with the caveat that the party's leadership may know more than they're saying about what path they think is most likely to find 50 senators fed up with the Senate's rules and ready to change them.
4. Harry Enten on children and the vaccine.
5. Binyamin Appelbaum on unemployment benefits.
6. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Matt Yglesias on what's actually working in Congress.
7. And happy birthday to the great Lawyers, Guns & Money. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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