When it comes to presidential election campaigns, small states like Iowa and New Hampshire insist on being First.
Since 1952, New Hampshire, the "Live Free or Die” very small state in northern New England which has very few people of color (6%) living there, and only two Members of the U S House of Representatives, has insisted by law that it hold the First in the Nation Presidential Primary. If any other state were to decide to hold its presidential primary earlier than New Hampshire, the New Hampshire Secretary of State is required to schedule the Granite State’s presidential primary ahead of the other state.
Which makes the Granite State’s Secretary of State the most powerful Secretary of State in the country (but let us not forget that current Georgia governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, managed, while Secretary of State of the Peachtree State, to make it really, really hard for African American voters to vote for Democrat Stacey Abrams; Kemp was the champion of voter suppression).
When people run for president, after they receive the nomination of their political parties, they concentrate on the states with the most people living in them. California’s our largest state by population, followed by Texas (who would want to live there?), Florida (too prone to hurricanes such as Dorian), New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, and, Number Ten, Michigan.
This means that to the extent that we still have winter, presidential candidates and their entourages, accompanied by staggeringly large members of the media, traipse through the ice and snow in New Hampshire every four years, hoping for momentum in their quest to be elected to the most powerful office in the world. New Hampshire has an open primary (we here at highly Dem-partisan Apocryphal Press strongly disapprove of those), which means all you have to do is show up to cast your vote in whichever political party you choose, even if you are not registered to vote in that party.
Not to be outdone, Iowa, a state which, like New Hampshire, has very few people of color living there (only nine percent), holds the first Presidential Caucus where people can vote for whom they want to be president, in each of the Hawkeye State’s 99 counties, as long as they show up in the dead of winter, in person.
Iowa has only four members of the U S House of Reprentatives, of whom three are members of the Party of the People, with Republican white nationalist Steve King being the fourth, representing northwest Iowa. King’s not too popular with his fellow Republicans, who have removed him from all his committee assignments in the House because of his white naitonalist and xenophobic rhetoric.
As of last month, the Iowa presidential caucus is scheduled to take place on February 3, 2020.
As we said, in the dead of winter, and it still gets cold in Iowa in the winter.
At the Iowa State Fair — a must stop for presidential canidates — those attending are treated to extraordinarily unhealthy foods such as deep-fried pork chops on a stick. And any presidential candidate who refuses to partake in any of that doesn’t stand a chance in the Iowa Presidential Caucus. That’s probably why sleepy Ben Carson, who ran against Donald Trump in 2016, didn’t get the GOP nomination, because Carson, a Seventh Day Adventist, is a vegetarian.
After considering all these absurdities, the legislatures and governors in both Iowa and New Hampshire have decided to change their laws to repeal their Caucus and Primary, respectively.
Associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones spoke early this morning with Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, and with New Hampshire’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu.
“We’ve decided to ditch that whole falderal known as the Iowa First in the Nation Caucus,” Reynolds told Jones, “and just join up with all the other states — except South Carolina and Nevada — and hold our presidential primary on Super Tuesday.”
Gov. Sununu chimed in. “That’s right, Johanna,” he said. “Our tourist industry, and CNN and Politico and all the major news outlets, as well as the major players in New Hampshire politics, are all very upset with me about this, but I knew it made more more sense from a public policy perspective.”
See also https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/30/politics/iowa-caucus-2020/index.html, where you can learn about why the Democratic National Committee nixed plans by Iowa Democrats to have a virtual caucus, out of concern that, once again, Vladimir Putin and his minions would hack into the results.
That’s because Putin’s no dummy, and he knows that it’s a lot cheaper to interfere in other countries if you just hack into them, as opposed to building more and more nukes.
We must point out that Donald Trump cancelled his visit to Poland’s Andrzej Duda and sent Theocrat-in-Chief Mike Pence in his stead so he can monitor the progress of Hurricane Dorian from Camp David. While there, he will surely tell Defense Secretary Mark Esper to launch several nukes at Dorian, which will greatly distress Oscar Wilde fans, since Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray.