Two political economists, writing in the Journal of Political Economy, have concluded that being a voter in the primaries in New Hampshire or Iowa makes you essentially as powerful as five voters on Super Tuesday — the date on which the most states hold simultaneous primaries in a presidential election year, which in 2008 was a total of 24, including California. That means that two states, each with arguably centrist tendencies, and with a combined population of 4.4 million (per 2010 Census data), wield enormous political power when it comes to choosing presidential candidates. In 2012, given that California has one of the most racially, religiously, politically, and ethnically diverse populations in the nation — not to mention being the most populous state in the country with 37.3 million residents — why shouldn't we be an early primary state?

If you compare Marin, Alameda, San Francisco, Fresno, Mendocino, San Bernardino, Kern, San Diego, and Los Angeles Counties, you're going to see about the most diverse cross-section of American culture as you're ever going to see. Why should we have to accept a presidential candidate chosen by a relative handful of people in New Hampshire and Iowa who, at some point in the past, were chosen for their centrism? We can't decide whether we want a Republican or a Democrat as governor, and we can barely get anything done in the State House since things are so diverse. NH and IA, along with the next two primary states on the schedule, Nevada and South Carolina, don't have a single big city that ranks among the country’s 25 largest, and this is basically a huge a Fuck You to the nation's enormous urban population, which the 2010 census is likely to show is only growing rapidly larger. Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economist, calls this the "anti-urban policy bias." Shouldn't big cities matter too?? Isn't it asinine of our government to continue to ignore cities, like they're just too liberal or confusing to focus on during an election year?