Matt Yglesias calls for moving the first primary from New Hampshire to Massachusetts:

David Leonhardt has a column today arguing that the undue weight of New Hampshire and Iowa in the presidential nomination process leads to an undue neglect of America’s large metropolitan areas where most people live and that produce a disproportionately large share of our GDP. Note that the issue here isn’t “cities” as such. The action in the United States is largely in the suburbs of big cities, but Iowa and New Hampshire really stand out as not having any of those either.

So why not move the first primary to the Bay State?

Massachusetts is substantially bigger than New Hampshire, but it’s only a bit largely than Iowa or South Carolina. What’s more, campaigning effectively in New Hampshire already required buying TV ads in the Boston media market in order to reach people in Nashua.
If Massachusetts replaced New Hampshire as New England’s entrant into the primary campaign sweepstakes, then we’d probably see candidates saying something about traffic jams, mass transit, regional planning, etc. instead of all farms all the time.

This is an intriguing proposal. If we accept that the first primaries have a more powerful effect than later primaries, it seems that choosing Massachusetts would introduce other complications, e.g., the state’s electorate isn’t terribly balanced, and it’s relatively small Republican primary electorate could prove problematic.

I’d instead consider choosing Georgia as home to the first primary. With its large and growing African American and Latino populations, Georgia is very diverse and it is also more politically balanced than Massachusetts. Indeed, many in President Obama’s reelection campaign believe that they can win Georgia in light of its changing population mix. And if the primary electorate in Georgia would yield more conservative presidential candidates from both parties than their counterparts in Massachusetts, well, we can accept that as a happy coincidence.

(My line of thinking tells you why New Hampshire won’t be dislodged any time soon.)