The selection process this year -- Here’s how we got here.

From The New York Times:

In 2000 and 2004, the votes of white men and women in two relatively small states determined the Democratic presidential nominee.

The party’s financiers do not live in Iowa or New Hampshire. Democratic interest groups felt as if their votes and generous donations were being taken for granted. So in 2004, the chairman of the party, Terry McAuliffe, appointed a calendar commission to serve his successor, Howard Dean.

Mr. Dean’s experience as a small-state governor whose underdog presidential race had been derailed by Iowa influenced the commission. Its members decided to add two early states: Nevada, with its high population of Hispanics and its service-oriented labor unions, and South Carolina, where half the Democratic vote is black.

If Democrats in any of the remaining 46 states scheduled their contests earlier than Feb. 5, they would lose their ability to send delegations to the national convention in Denver. Mr. Dean and his committee believed that the voting in the four early states would determine a front-runner quickly — yet still ensure that the nominee had been vetted by a diverse subsection of the party.

However, the exuberance of American democracy intervened. Republicans in Michigan and Florida last year came up with the idea of moving their states’ primaries into January. Democrats in those states eagerly agreed and dared the national party to disenfranchise them — two states that were vital to the Democrats’ chance of winning the fall election.

The Democrats went ahead and enforced their rules. And because party leaders in Florida and Michigan shared the assumption that the new calendar would produce an early front-runner, they didn’t really mind. Surely the party’s nominee, decided well in advance of the convention, would seat the delegations — and Florida and Michigan, by voting early, would have had a larger say in ratifying the consensus that emerged around that nominee.

Once more, democracy has interfered with the plan. Had Michigan remained on Feb. 9 and Florida on March 4, their influence would have been considerable. Instead, their haste to go first wound up lessening their influence, rather than giving them a louder voice.

Now, an array of new states and their tens of millions of voters will find their interests well represented in this campaign: Maryland, Virginia, Wisconsin, Texas, Ohio and maybe even Pennsylvania, whose voters go to the polls on April 22.

Democrats in the larger states are loath to admit it, but the secret to a well-vetted nominee is a diverse gantlet of small states followed by a national primary — which is exactly what is happening this year. Smaller states help neutralize the advantages conferred by money-raising and name identification. In such a setting, the better candidates tend to rise to the top. (Of course, this logic holds for any small state, not just Iowa or New Hampshire.)