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If you want a fun challenge, here’s an idea for you: Pull out a calendar and try to figure out when, exactly, all the presidential primary contests are going down this year.

I did this recently. I learned the Iowa caucuses are Monday—but just for the Republicans. I learned the New Hampshire primaries are in a couple of weeks—and Joe Biden is not on the ballot. I learned that the South Carolina primary is in early February for Democrats—and three weeks later for Republicans. This year’s primary process is “extremely disorganized compared to past primaries,” according to Ari Berman, who is something of a voting expert. “If there was to be a competitive primary, the whole calendar would be a complete mess.”

Characterizing an election as a “complete mess” before even considering that the leading Republican candidate is charged with dozens of felonies is not what I’d call reassuring. In some cases, Berman says, the primary calendar seems designed to frustrate a casual observer. Take the Republicans’ Iowa caucuses next week. They’re not being held on the usual voting day in this country, Tuesday. They’re being held on Monday, which is a holiday: Martin Luther King Day, to be exact.

“What a fitting way to honor Martin Luther King with Trump winning Iowa. I’m sure this is the full fulfillment of the dream that Martin Luther King had in 1969,” Berman said.

On a recent episode of What Next, we spoke about how the 2024 primary calendar got so confusing. And why, as a result, voting in this country is about to get really weird. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mary Harris: How has the schedule for American primaries usually gone? Like, which dates go first? How did it get there?

Ari Berman: Since the 1970s, it’s been Iowa and New Hampshire. The Iowa caucus kind of emerged by accident. My understanding is Jimmy Carter went there early on during the ’76 campaign and did really well. And then the Iowa caucus started to become a thing.

Why does the order of the primaries and caucuses even matter? How big of a deal is this to candidates? And has it always been that way?

A huge deal. You could very credibly argue that Barack Obama would not have been elected president of the United States had he not won Iowa as his first state in 2008. That showed that he was for real. You also see how it derailed people there. Howard Dean was the Democratic front-runner until he had a disastrous third-place finish in Iowa and then gave this speech that people later thought of as the “Dean scream.” And that almost ended his candidacy.

So, Iowa has played a huge role in terms of potentially elevating long-shot candidates into being front-runners. It’s played a significant role in confirming that people who say they’re front-runners actually are front-runners. And it’s a small enough state that you can actually visit all of the counties, and you can do a lot of retail politicking. That way, the person with the most money or the biggest name or the most endorsements isn’t the person that always necessarily wins.

Let’s just lay out what exactly is happening next week, because it is funny. The Republicans have their caucuses on Monday, MLK Day. The Democrats, are they even doing an in-person caucus?

They might be doing an in-person caucus for some kind of minor offices, but nothing’s going to be decided on Jan. 15 for Democrats.

How did the Republican and Democratic caucuses come to evolve to have such different processes and dates in the first place?

The basic thing is Iowa Republicans wanted to keep Iowa, and Democrats didn’t want to keep Iowa. It’s also reflective of where Iowa is. Iowa used to be a major swing state. Now it’s much more of a Republican state. Republicans are very happy going to Iowa because it solidifies their dominance of the state, whereas national Democrats wanted to move the Democratic Party away from Iowa, because Iowa is not a state they view as a swing state anymore.

Democrats, my understanding is, have been thinking about demoting Iowa for a while now, but they kind of got a very compelling reason to do so in 2020. Can you remind us what happened?

Basically, we didn’t know who won Iowa. The votes took forever to be counted, and they were contested in terms of who won. Was it Bernie Sanders, or was it Pete Buttigieg, or was it Amy Klobuchar? And in the end, it made a lot of people very angry. And no one can argue that they got an Iowa bounce because nobody knew who won the state.

I have been to an Iowa caucus, and the way they add up........

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