Iowa Nice vs. New Hampshire Ornery: A Tale of Spurned Democrats

When President Biden shook up his party’s presidential nominating calendar, Democrats in the two states that were bounced from the front of the line reacted in far different ways.

New Hampshire Democrats are going down kicking and screaming, insisting on holding a primary as if they hadn’t just lost their opening spot.

Iowa Democrats, ashamed by a 2020 fiasco that included a dayslong wait for results that were nonetheless riddled with errors, have meekly accepted their fate as primary season also-rans.

In what is perhaps a case study in Iowa nice versus live-free-or-die New Hampshire stubbornness, one state is showing that it views its quadrennial parade of visiting presidential candidates as a political birthright, while the other appears to see that spectacle more as a lost perk.

“The Iowa Democrats have made a mistake,” said David Scanlan, the New Hampshire secretary of state, a position that has long been the ex officio guardian of the state’s first-in-the-nation primary status. “They’ve lost it for this year, and now the chain is broken.”

Mr. Scanlan’s flinty resistance to changing New Hampshire’s primary date to suit party bosses in Washington has bipartisan appeal in the Granite State. Anyone involved in politics there can cite the 1975 state law requiring the state to hold the nation’s first presidential primary contest, codifying what is now a century-old tradition.

New Hampshire and the Democratic National Committee are still quarreling over the state’s refusal to move its primary back. On Friday, the national party wrote to New Hampshire Democrats saying that the state’s “meaningless” primary could “disenfranchise and confuse voters.” The New Hampshire attorney general replied on Monday with a cease-and-desist