Illinois should host the first presidential primaries if the goal is to pick a state that most closely matches the demographics of the country.
And Vermont, the home state of Democratic front-runner Bernie Sanders, should have minimal influence over the process because its makeup is least similar to the entire United States — meaning the results from that state would be hardly at all predictive of the nation's views.
Those are among the conclusions out Thursday from the personal financial services website Wallet Hub, which has been churning out a series of reports this winter hoping to point political leaders toward helpful data for picking candidates in a more democratically sustainable way.
Once again this year, the Democratic Party has taken heat for its decision to hold its first two contests in a pair of states with abnormally high shares of white voters. But Wallet Hub expects the parties want to look beyond racial makeup if they're in search of places to hold potentially dispositive contests in 2024 and beyond.
And so they compiled and weighted an enormous amount of data about the demographics, economies, education levels, religious affiliations, and partisan and public policy attitudes of all 50 states.
Turns out, Iowa is an 89 percent match with the country — a good if not great No. 17 on the national list, highest among the four early voting states. But only seven states are less of a national mirror than New Hampshire, at 82 percent.
South Carolina, which will vote on Saturday, is near the middle. But as its leaders have advertised for decades, it does have the third highest level of political engagement among African Americans by Wallet Hub's calculus.
Unsurprisingly, seven states that are expected to be contested by both parties in the November presidential election end up among the 10 that are the closest match for the country, according to what the company has labeled its 2020 Electorate Representation Index:
- Illinois (95 percent match)
- Florida (94 percent)
- Michigan (93 percent)
- Arizona (92 percent)
- Ohio (92 percent)
- Pennsylvania (92 percent)
- Virginia (92 percent)
- Delaware (92 percent)
- North Carolina (91 percent)
- Indiana (90 percent)
Also unsurprisingly, only two of the 10 states least representative of the entire United States (New Hampshire and Maine) are at all competitive in the general election. Six of the rest can reliably be colored bright red now on the Electoral College map:
- Wyoming (83 percent)
- Arkansas (83 percent)
- New Hampshire (82 percent)
- Maine (82 percent)
- Alabama (81 percent)
- Massachusetts (80 percent)
- West Virginia (80 percent)
- Utah (78 percent)
- Mississippi (78 percent)
- Vermont (only a 77 percent match)
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.