comment: >
  
  Have we ever had the "small unknown candidate" break through to win a party nomination for president?
context: This makes me happy. I've never understood Iowa's outsized importance in determining the outcome  of a race by establishing early momentum. >
  
  Seems odd that an incredibly red state will now have outsized importance instead. South Carolina hasn’t gone blue in nearly 50 years.
  They should’ve picked a democratic stronghold like California where a large representative sample of their voters would have first say. It makes no sense to give priority to small constituencies in red states because it’ll just skew the results to be more right wing. There is no need for us to operate our primaries with a disproportionally weighted metric unless the party leadership/major donors are scared of the voters pushing them to the left. >
  
  You understand this much more than others in this thread. 
  This is a big win for corporate / right leaning dems as it reduces the probability of anyone truly left from gaining momentum early on. The media will be able to throw even more weight behind corporate dems with these early results and squash anyone who is running on a Bernie like platform.
  If you support medicare for all, free early childcare, etc. then you need to understand how significant this change is and how much it hurts the ideas you support! >
  
  Why does moving a white,  rural conservative state out of first place hurt progressives? >
  
  Because they're moving to an even more conservative state. The right thing to do would be to move the first primary to a purple state like Pennsylvania >
  
  I think PA is too large.  And SC Democratic electorate isn’t that conservative.  Progressives need to find a way to connect with black democrats or they won’t be successful regardless of the order >
  
  Ehh the whole primary thing is stupid.  My state is late in the primaries and the canitdate has only not been decided for one party or the other by the time we vote in like 2 or 3 of the last 20 presidential primaries. >
  
  Yea we need to move to a national primary day or short of that a few weeks where every state has to hold their primary. It's absurd that most of the country gets no say since the field is down to nothing after a handful of states vote. >
  
  The problem with that is only the wealthy candidates would probably win as they can spread their advertising dollars. The advantage of having single, smaller states go first is a less well known candidate can break through. It's not a perfect system, but I'm not sure a national primary would be any better.