Democrats are done picking at the bones of the Iowa carcasses | Guest Opinion

As if to validate the saying that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, the Democratic National Committee actually seems ready to do something right by voting to end Iowa’s role as the first stop along the presidential campaign trail.

When the DNC meets in February, it’s expected to follow President Biden’s advice and award that important role to South Carolina, a state whose Democratic primary voters in 2020 rescued the foundering candidacy of Joe Biden. Under Biden’s plan, New Hampshire and Nevada would go next, followed Georgia and Michigan.

In proposing the change, Biden correctly noted that South Carolina’s electorate is much more diverse than Iowa’s, with a representation of minorities that more closely reflects the nation’s proportion of minority voters.

Granted, this change would be only a baby step forward. Much more needs to be done to reform a presidential nominating process that in recent elections has produced such unappetizing menu choices as Trump vs. Clinton and Trump vs. Biden.

However, any tinkering with the calendar will face several daunting challenges. For instance, New Hampshire has a state law requiring that its primary be the first in the nation. It is committed to leapfrogging any state that dares to get ahead of it.

Iowa got away with going earlier by staging a caucus instead of a primary. The Ethanol Kingdom thus grabbed the key role of winnowing down the field of candidates.

Typically, it’s a large field in the early rounds of an election cycle because so many politicians, talk-show hosts and other public figures now seem to imagine that they’ve heard the nation calling on them to run for the White House.

The field needs pruning, and Iowa has sought to justify its role as Winnower in Chief by touting its caucuses as an example of “retail politics.” Candidates travel the state, shake hands and sample corndogs at the state fair. This is followed by neighbors gathering to discuss the issues and choose the delegates.

Yet many candidates in Iowa, finding themselves in a fight for survival, abandon the retail politics and wind up spending huge sums of money on media buys as they try to gain front-runner status on the way to New Hampshire. Meanwhile, the Iowa laggards often find that their funding has suddenly dried up.

Iowa’s political landscape is also littered with the carcasses of the candidacies of worthy moderates doomed by the strident voices of activists. The true believers tend to have a disproportionate influence in caucuses, where the participants don’t get the kind of confidentiality they’d expect in the voting booth. Instead, their privacy is often compromised amid animated discussions — not a good thing when political polarization can even tear families apart.

Meanwhile, if Iowa were out of the picture for the Democrats while South Carolina and New Hampshire somehow got into a ping-pong match of moving their primary dates ever earlier, voters could conceivably be voting on the 2024 presidential race during the summer of 2023. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

Fortunately, the DNC has some weapons of its own. As The Washington Post reported, “In rules passed this summer, Democrats gave their chair the power to strip delegates, debate access and data access from candidates who campaign in unsanctioned states. The chair also has the power to unseat state delegations from the nominating convention if they defy party rules.”

Granted, for voters unfamiliar with convention lingo, hearing that some of the convention delegates might be stripped may briefly boost the TV ratings, which have tanked in recent years. Given that the identity of the nominee is generally known well before the delegates even arrive, there’s no longer much drama in the delegation-by-delegation announcements.

Other than waiting to see what the chair of the Guam delegation will say during the ceremonial casting of the votes, there’s little to look forward to except a tedious series of speeches and partisan propaganda. The broadcast networks have abandoned gavel-to-gavel coverage, leaving it to the cable-news outlets

Of course, sometimes a fight breaks out over the party platform, and such fights usually gets more media attention than the actual contents of the platforms. Given the Democrats’ penchant for intra-party conflicts and their internal divisions over energy policy, trade and other issues, a platform battle is possible.

So, let the Democrats’ infighting begin. Meanwhile, the GOP has decided to stick with the Iowa-New Hampshire-Nevada-South Carolina sequence, which at least has the virtue of geographic diversity.

All of this, however, is a reminder that one of the most important decisions that we Americans are asked to make — picking a president and putative leader of the free world — requires us to choose between or among options that are the product of a messy process governed by complex mix of state laws and party rules, with all of it covered by media outlets that have an ideological agenda.

We need to do better.

Robert F. Sanchez, of Tallahassee, is a former member of the Miami Herald Editorial Board. He writes for the Herald’s conservative opinion newsletter, Right to the Point. It’s weekly, and it’s free. To subscribe, go to miamiherald.com/righttothepoint.