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Iowa is quite prototypical as a Midwestern state- it's hard to get more conventionally Middle American than there, niceness culture and slightly liberal-leaning and all that. New Hampshire is conservative and cranky- they like putting candidates through the wringer. They counterbalance temperamentally. The pieties that get a substance-free candidate through one of the two won't get her/him through the other.
They are also quite small- this at a point in the process when all the campaigns are for the most part still pretty small. That gives seemingly minor candidates a good shot at achieving sufficient exposure.
The only seriously wrong thing with the two, as I see it, is that neither of them has sufficiently large numbers of non-white caucus or primary voters.
And low primary turnout is evidence that much of the population is willing to let others do the preliminary work, trusting that a few million voters nationwide who feel invested enough will select the most relevant and convincing of the lot on each side.
Of course, it's always the process that is wrong and unfair. It's never that your favorite candidate wasn't smart enough or capable enough or a second-rater in the game, unable to deliver material that persuades enough of this small but nationally quite representative set of voters to vote for her or him. The Electoral College never seemed a problem before November 2000 to a lot of people and in the past year doesn't seem to strike people as worth altering again.
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