When Politics is Too Much Like Sports But Not Enough: Iowa

So, the Iowa caucuses are a big mess.  Woot!  It reveals to all the farce it is to have one or two (NH) unrepresentative states feeling entitled about shaping the choices the rest of the country faces when it comes to Presidential elections.

All of this reminds me of a tendency in sports coverage: that in any playoff series, the commentators must come up with a new narrative after every game.  Things often swing 180 degrees after each game when the, alas, yes, fundamentals haven't changed.  It makes for good drama, but it is highly annoying when the narratives become so predictably swingy.

Which brings us to the modern Presidential primary campaign.  It has seemed like it has been going on forever in part because we can count the number of narratives over time as if they were rings in a very old tree.  Most candidates (sorry for the most forgettable Dems) had their week or two in the sun, being treated as a potential front-runner, only to find the next week the media swinging to cover someone else.  Remember when Kamala Harris was presented as the candidate to beat?  That was a fun week way back when.

I raise this because my strongest preference would be for the media to stop privileging Iowa and New Hampshire and to stop trying to create narratives rather than just covering what the candidates are saying and promising.  I understand that is not going to happen.  So, instead, I suggest we borrow from the NBA reformers.

The NBA problem is this: each year, there is a draft of the next generation of players, and whoever goes first gets to pick the player perceived to be the best.  Of course, this is screwed up all the time, but the key dynamic is this: it creates a temptation to tank--to lose lots of games--so that one can draft earlier.  The NBA instituted a lottery so that all of the non-playoff teams get a chance at the first pick.  But then a series of not-so-bad teams managed to win the lottery.  So, instead, they created a weighted lottery and then a lottery where the worst team could do no worse than fourth.  The key reform being discussed now is the wheel:

each of the 30 teams would pick in a specific first-round draft slot once — and exactly once — every 30 years. Each team would simply cycle through the 30 draft slots, year by year, in a predetermined order designed so that teams pick in different areas of the draft each year. Teams would know with 100 percent certainty in which draft slots they would pick every year, up to 30 years out from the start of every 30-year cycle. The practice of protecting picks would disappear; there would never be a Harrison Barnes–Golden State situation again, and it wouldn’t require a law degree to track ownership of every traded pick leaguewide.

For primaries, this would work a bit differently: arrange groups of five states so that the primary process has ten separate election periods with each group being a mix of states so that a group of five together is representative enough.  Then have each group of five being in a different spot in each election so that each group of five is first, last, fifth, and so on over the course of ten cycles.  Would be the most fair thing to do.

But then again, politics isn't fair nor is path dependence.  So, I don't anything to change except maybe folks either dump apps or actually, you know, develop ones and test them way ahead of time.  And,yes, we are stuck with Iowa and New Hampshire because politicians are cowards.