In early February 2020, the state of Iowa will once again cap months of straw polls, earnest paeans to “heartland” values, and reluctant nibbles on State Fair corn dogs to offer its ranking of the major party presidential candidates.

This quadrennial exercise (and especially the Democratic Party’s caucuses) carries the patina of participatory democracy, but it is hard to defend the state’s outsized importance in the nomination process. Iowa voters are not representative of the rest of the country, and the party activists that run the caucuses are not representative of Iowa voters. The Iowa vote is first not because it is important; it is important because it is first — an accident of history that has John Delaney or Michael Bennet defending ethanol subsidies to a huddle of CNN producers on the edge of Wapello County cornfields more than a year and a half before any real votes are cast.

That said, the Iowa caucuses are not just about the winners and the losers, the front-runners and the wannabes — they are also about the economics, the demographics, and the politics of Iowa itself.