This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.

The combined population of Iowa and New Hampshire is 87 percent non-Hispanic white, which is roughly what the United States was in 1870. The states are also disproportionately older and completely lacking in cities with more than 250,000 residents.

And yet Iowa and New Hampshire are treated like a national microcosm every four years and given outsize influence in choosing the president.

This makes no sense. I know the usual justifications — that the states’ citizens take their democratic responsibilities seriously. But when you boil down that argument to its essence, it’s really an argument claiming that Iowans and New Hampshirites are intellectually and morally superior to other Americans.