"Dear Couch"
[National Review] The Democratic primary campaign started in January, but it already feels as if it began in the late Jurassic period, and the first votes are still three months away.
Primaries are a lot like Christmas: The shopping season begins way before, and things rarely live up to expectations. (I mean this in the secular sense. I’m not talking about celebrating the birth of Jesus; I’m talking about pretending to be psyched about new socks or, say, Joe Biden.)
I still like Christmas, but I’m happy to play the Grinch with the primaries. We should get rid of them. If I could, I’d sneak into the Whovilles of Iowa and New Hampshire and steal the voting machines, ballots, and bad coffee.
In the past, my Grinchiness was mostly reserved for the "first in the nation" Iowa and New Hampshire votes. Why should these two states have so much power? Two generations of political consultants have made their careers by knowing how to fill hotel rooms in Des Moines and whose palms to grease in Nashua. Scour the Federalist Papers and the Constitution and you’ll find no mention of primaries, never mind the Hawkeye and Granite State Hegemony. And yet, if you win in either or both, you’re statistically likely to become your party’s nominee.
The Iowa caucuses are a particular affront. If it weren’t for them, there’d be no ethanol subsidies, which are bad for your car, the economy, and the environment. If such things bother you, Iowa and New Hampshire are also very white places, and I don’t mean in the "white Christmas" sense.
But the proposed remedies ‐ rotating the primary states every four years, nuking Iowa from orbit, etc. ‐ don’t really fix the underlying problem. We shouldn’t have primaries at all ‐ and that goes for Senate and House primaries, too. 
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