What can Iowa tell us about New Hampshire?
I heard a quip the other day from a friend of mine in the Northeast. After Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton were finally announced as the winners of the Republican and Democratic Iowa Caucuses, I had asked him what the results were to mean for the rest of the nomination races.
“Iowa picks corn,” he said, “New Hampshire picks presidents.”
With the bluster of last week’s first caucus now firmly behind us, it’s easy to ask ourselves — what was the point? The winners of Iowa still find themselves in shaky lead positions, and the only thing that political commentators have been saying is that the New Hampshire Primary will give us more insight. But what did winning Iowa mean? And what can the results tell us of the future?
To answer those questions, and to see whether Iowa’s presidential picks are more corn starch than concrete, I compiled a list of results of the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary since 1972.
The Democratic Party began having the Iowa Caucus at the beginning of the year in 1972, while the Republican Party followed suit in the next election, 1976. New Hampshire actually passed a state law in the 1970s, stating:
“The presidential primary election shall be held on the second Tuesday in March or on a date selected by the secretary of state which is 7 days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election, whichever is earlier, of each year when a president of the United States is to be elected or the year previous.” (63 NH R.S.A. § 653:9)
Predictably, the “second Tuesday in March” date gave way pretty quickly, as other states moved up their primaries and New Hampshire kept pushing its date forward to stay at the helm. From 1952–2012, the New Hampshire primary kept being buoyed up by other state events, until this year, when South Carolina and Nevada decided to move their primaries back a month, allowing New Hampshire to de-escalate to Tuesday, February 9th.
(Side Note: The Iowa Caucus doesn’t technically count as a “similar election” in New Hampshire state law, which is why it’s allowed to be earlier. The reasoning here is that a Caucus is a method for publicly voicing support for regional delegates, who then get to decide who their vote should represent. A Primary is a direct, statewide vote by secret ballot, where the popular vote wins.)
So what does four decades of election results tell us?
Well, since the 1970s, Iowa and New Hampshire have both correctly picked the Democratic nominee with about 75% accuracy. Not bad! But for the GOP, there is a huge difference, where the winner of Iowa has only gone on to win the nomination 37% of the time, while the winner of New Hampshire has won 62% of the time — almost twice as often.
Does Iowa really just pick corn? Why do GOP candidates who win Iowa tend to do poorly in the rest of the primaries?
To understand the reasoning, we should take a look at Iowa’s demographics, starting with this excerpt from Nate Cohn’s NYTimes article on Iowa’s politics:
“Iowa’s politics often split between the state’s east and west. The eastern part of the state is more liberal, with cities like Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, which have relatively well-educated citizens, and liberal college towns like Iowa City, Ames and Cedar Falls.
…the eastern half of the state, especially in the so-called driftless region along the Mississippi River, has fewer evangelical Christians than just about anywhere in the country outside the Northeast…Republicans fare far better in the rural, western part of the state. The number of evangelical Christians generally is near the national average, which gives Republicans an edge.
These same divides show up in partisan primaries. Liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans tend to fare best in the eastern part of Iowa, while conservative Republicans and moderate Democrats excel farther west.” (New York Times; Iowa Caucuses, the Political Divides to Watch Out For)
A large evangelical base in the western half of the state, where voters tend to be more rural and GOP-friendly, means that winning Iowa often means carrying that area. Since that area has some of the most reliable GOP voters, republican candidates often focus on appealing to the evangelical base to win Iowa.
However, most states with evangelical bases outside of western Iowa aren’t really battleground states, which means that a GOP candidate who wins Iowa by appealing primarily to evangelical voters, while neglecting to gather support from non-evangelical republicans, is likely doomed to failure — see Rick Santorum in 2012, or Mike Huckabee in 2008. In fact, the winner of Sioux County, the most self-identified evangelical county in Iowa, and a stronghold for the evangelical Dutch Reformed Church in America, has not won the Republican nomination since the 70s.
So if winning Iowa doesn’t mean automatically winning the nomination, what can we predict for Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire this Tuesday? Well, if history holds up, we can predict that both of them will do worse in New Hampshire than in Iowa. In the last 44 years, only one republican candidate and one democratic candidate have done substantially better in New Hampshire after winning Iowa, and 10 candidates have done substantially worse.
And what else? New Hampshire might be a better indication of who wins the exceedingly-crowded GOP race, but how does it really do at picking presidents?
It turns out that both Iowa and New Hampshire are tied in picking presidents in the past four decades. Both have a 50% correct pick rate out of the six previous contests that didn’t face unopposed incumbents, but incumbency has trumped over all.
In this race, you might do well to just flip a coin.
