How important are Iowa and New Hampshire in selecting the final presidential nominee?

It used to be conventional wisdom that for a candidate to have any chance of winning the presidential nomination they had to do well in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states who vote to elect their party’s nominee. As you can see below it was certainly the case for the Democratic Party that a candidate winning in Iowa tends to secure the nomination, though this is not necessarily the case for the Republican Party.

A better argument is that a candidate needs to show momentum in Iowa and New Hampshire. This was most famously the case in 1992 when the Democratic candidate Bill Clinton came from nowhere to take third place soon after a series of allegations had rocked his campaign. Clinton quickly declared himself the ‘comeback kid’ and started to build the momentum he needed to win the nomination.

The importance of Iowa and New Hampshire was completely turned on its head in 2020 however when Joe Biden came a lowly 4^th place in Iowa and 5^th in New Hampshire. Biden demonstrated that a successful candidate could afford to place poorly in both opening states. Biden had put much more emphasis on winning South Carolina, a state with a large black population whom felt favourably towards him and when he won South Carolina with over 50% of the vote he was back in the race and now had the momentum to win the Super Tuesday states that followed soon after.

Are Iowa and New Hampshire important? Quite simply, yes. Biden’s victory following his poor showing in both the opening states was an anomaly given that he was the first candidate to win the Presidency having placed lower that 3^rd in Iowa since 1972. Given that Biden was already the front runner in terms of name recognition and fundraising meant that he could afford a poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire. So, Biden is clearly unique and most other candidates would not survive a similar performance.