How Iowa and New Hampshire Democrats Have Reacted to Getting Pushed Back

In Iowa, Democrats politely accepted President Biden’s decision to push them back on the presidential nominating calendar. In New Hampshire, they’re fighting it with live-free-or-die stubbornness.

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By Reid J. Epstein

Reid J. Epstein has covered each presidential primary election since 2008. His editor is from New Hampshire.

Jan. 10, 2024, 9:46 a.m. ETImageA caucus location at Drake Fieldhouse in Des Moines in February 2020.Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York TimesImageVoters casting their ballots in a primary election in Hancock, N.H., in February 2020.Credit…Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

When President Biden shook up his party’s presidential nominating calendar, Democrats in the two states that were bounced from the front of the line reacted in far different ways.

New Hampshire Democrats are going down kicking and screaming, insisting on holding a primary as if they hadn’t just lost their opening spot.

Iowa Democrats, ashamed by a 2020 fiasco that included a dayslong wait for results that were nonetheless riddled with errors, have meekly accepted their fate as primary season also-rans.

In what is perhaps a case study in Iowa nice versus live-free-or-die New Hampshire stubbornness, one state is showing that it views its quadrennial parade of visiting presidential candidates as a political birthright, while the other appears to see that spectacle more as a lost perk.

“The Iowa Democrats have made a mistake,” said David Scanlan, the New Hampshire secretary of state, a position that has long been the ex officio guardian of the state’s first-in-the-nation primary status. “They’ve lost it for this year, and now the chain is broken.”

Mr. Scanlan’s flinty resistance to changing New Hampshire’s primary date to suit party bosses in Washington has bipartisan appeal in the Granite State. Anyone involved in politics there can cite the 1975 state law requiring the state to hold the nation’s first presidential primary contest, codifying what is now a century-old tradition.

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