“And the campaign also saw that Iowa was a good match for Carter, at a time when the New Hampshire primary was still considered by the political press to be the first real contest. Carter’s advisers wanted to jump out ahead of the rest of the field before New Hampshire. And in fact, five states held caucuses before New Hampshire’s primary: Iowa, then Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alaska, and Maine. Carter could have chosen to focus on any of those states, and it would have changed the arc of American political history.”