A Seat at the Table

Yesterday's Comic Strip of the Day included a cartoon of mine that I had posted to my Facebook and Xitter pages after this week's New Hampshire primary:

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Feb. 1988

I'm honored and flattered, and accept the mild criticism leveled at it. The thing, however, is that it's a 36-year-old cartoon.

The first-in-the-nation status of Iowa's presidential caucus and New Hampshire's presidential primary are cherished among media types and natives of those two states, but have long been resented elsewhere. The states are predominantly rural and overwhelmingly white, and rather unrepresentative of the nation at large. The candidates have months to meet and mingle with the hoi polloi there, who talk jokingly of deciding against a particular candidate because they got to meet him or her only once.

In years when the race is still competitive after New Hampshire, the candidates dash through the ensuing states — blink and they're gone. This year, of course, the media have declared the race over and are impatiently tapping their toes for Trump and Biden to give their nomination acceptance speeches, the other 48 states rendered irrelevant to having any say in who will be on the November ballot (take that, Colorado and Maine!).

I was a college student in Minnesota in 1980 when that state tried to move its presidential caucuses to the same date as New Hampshire's primary. The Democratic Party punished Minnesota for that effrontery, warning that the delegates Minnesota caucus-goers selected that night would not be seated at the national convention — since it had been the 1976 New Hampshire that vaulted Jimmy Carter from obscurity to front-runner status, the incumbent president owed the Granite State that much consideration.

If one were to pick some state to replace Iowa and New Hampshire at the front of the line, which one is more representative of the nation at large?

How about Illinois?

It's got urban. It's got rural. It's got Chicago and Cairo. It's got Blacks, Latinos, Italians, Poles, Irish, Swedes, Serbs, and Lithuanians. It's got corn and coastline. It's got baseball, football, basketball and hockey. It's got hundreds of undocumented immigrants stuck at O'Hare. It's got weekend hunters and career criminals, both of whom cherish their stockpile of guns and screw the rest of Illinoisans who get in their way. It's got Boystown and Cardinal Cupich.

Let's see Iowa or New Hampshire top that!