Please tell this Canadian...why is the Repub. presid. canadidate being decided by a small state?

[Jim Lane]

43. We sort of bumbled into it.

We didn't have James Madison and that crowd meeting in Philadelphia and setting up this system or anything close to it.

Iowa's a good example. A few decades back, the state Democratic Party was planning its state convention. Convention delegates would be chosen at Congressional District caucuses, the delegates to which would be chosen at county caucuses, and the delegates to those would be chosen at precinct caucuses. The party wanted to allow plenty of lead time between each step, so that the people chosen as delegates at one level could make plans to attend the next level. In addition, the date they'd initially selected for the state convention turned out to be a bad one, because that year there was some other event that was filling up a lot of Des Moines hotel rooms. Accordingly, they moved the state convention up to an earlier date. With that decision made, the need to allow time for each of multiple stages of the process pushed the earliest stage (the precinct caucuses) into January. There was no thought of becoming especially influential by being first in the nation. It just happened.

Nevertheless, on the national scale there has been at least some deliberate planning. More and more states were moving their primaries earlier and earlier, seeing the early positions as more influential. There was a concern that competitive pressures would lead to a system of Iowa one week, New Hampshire the next week, and everybody else within a few weeks thereafter. Such a compressed schedule was thought too favorable to candidates with large initial war chests. The parties added South Carolina and Nevada, comparatively small states that would be amenable to low-budget retail campaigning. The parties also made efforts to keep other states from going too early.

You're right that the early states are mostly white -- but every state in the U.S. is mostly white. One reason for selecting South Carolina was that, unlike Iowa or New Hampshire, it has a sizeable black population. There was also consideration for geographical balance, with the early states being in the Midwest, Northeast, South, and West.

I personally favor the rotating regional primary, but the political realities are that our current system will be very difficult to change.