There is no defense for letting Iowa and New Hampshire lead the primary process

Take it from New Hampshirite Dylan Matthews:

But the system needs to end. There is no good reason why Iowa and New Hampshire should go first. That matters regardless of your broader views on the primary system.

I’d personally like both parties to have a national mail-in primary using ranked pairs voting, but even if you think it’s important for a couple of small states to go first, or if you want to do rotating regional primaries, or think states’ voting order should be determined randomly, you should want Iowa and New Hampshire to lose their privileged status. There’s just no justification for it.

The United States is a diverse place. Iowa and New Hampshire are not.

I think that national primary with ranked pairs voting > rotating regional primaries > random order > randomly selected small states to start it the right preference order, with a strong preference for the first two. The defenses for a long-drawn out primary process starting with small states tend to be very weak. “But you need to give dark horse candidates a chance to win with retail campaigning!” 1)There’s no inherent virtue to”dark horse candidates; 2)dark horse candidates generally don’t win under the current rules anyway; 3)the ability to do retail campaigning in a small state is almost completely irrelevant to running a modern national presidential campaign. The endless primary produces a lot of rancor and consumes an enormous amount of resources for benefits that are at best speculative and dubious. Just end it with a fair vote in one fell swoop or get it over with more quickly without tiny nearly all-white states given a disproportionate influence.