I didn’t come here for the game-show/horse-race view of politics – I can get those on the Today programme should I ever bother to start listening to it again. 

I suppose It’s moderately interesting to learn that some of the contestants are, in your expert opinion, too ‘weird’ or too ‘nice’.  Likewise the shuffling of the Primaries & voting rules and all that. But it might have been interesting to include some of the policies on offer from either side or commentary on the lack of them. Perhaps something on such trivialities as the follow-through on promises made in 2020 or the actual standard of living of Iowans or any other Americans since the last election. 

Note to Unherd – how can the views of a prominent BBC Journalist from their ‘flagship’ be considered as anything other than mainstream? Webb is the very personification of Establishment views – he has a massive platform to express them every day with his (tiresome) huffs, hums and performative incredulity in his interviews. At least that’s how I remember his MO from a couple of years ago when I stopped listening – apologies if he’s altered his game much since then.

Horsefeathers. In the view of the author, it would take about three improbable events for Trump not to win in Iowa, from which he extrapolates to saying that a freak loss in Iowa based on a fundamentally local fit of pique might then ripple out across the nation to affect the national poll.
Well, don’t forget to buy a lottery ticket…
First if Iowa mattered as much as the author says, then Joe Biden wouldn’t be president today – we’d have either President Buttigieg, Sanders or Warren – all of whom beat Biden handily in Iowa.
But we don’t because it isn’t. 538 ran a piece back in August which tried to make a similar case. They argued that, although Trump was miles ahead and most candidates who had been that far ahead in previous elections had generally won, Ted Kennedy had lost when he was polling at 66%. So, you know, everything to play for.
And yet, in the entire article, there was no mention of Chappaquiddick – perhaps the most extraordinary presidential scandal of all time. So, a more sensible take on that article and this would be that, to derail Trump at this point would require a Chappaquiddick-scale event.
However, even that probably wouldn’t be enough. Kennedy was, at that point, posing as an all American hero, a white knight with no blot on his escutcheon. When he drove a woman he was not married to off a bridge in the middle of the night and then failed to fetch help until the following morning resulting in her slow death by suffocation, it dramatically changed what people thought of him. Trump, by contrast, comes pre-tarnished and blotted in every conceivable way and he is still polling light years ahead of everyone else. It is hard to imagine any scandal which would substantially alter his supporters’ image of him – short of removing his mask mid-rally to reveal that he’d been Jeffrey Epstein all along.
And finally, if holding the first primaries in the nation were even half as consequential as all that then it would be profoundly undemocratic for it to be held in the same two states each year.
This is a sentimental political fantasy

Strange article. Despite Mr. Webb’s description in his byline, it seems as though his knowledge and experience of America is similar to mine of the UK: I’ve visited a few times but the rest I know about my ancestral homeland is largely gleaned from British publications and entertainment.

Until very recently, I lived in New Hampshire for 30 years. The formerly sane state has gone full Democrat, including its “Republican” nepo baby governor, Chris Sununu. If Biden’s puppeteers were worried about losing NH, it certainly wasn’t because Granite Staters want GOP leadership, and Trump is despised in “hate has no home here” yard sign land.

The typos in this article—omg, where is the editor?!?!?!

It wasn’t the local Democrats who insisted on holding their primary out of turn. The Republicans set the date for both primaries.