The case for Texas being the first primary state

Texas Monthly:

Texas Should Be the First Primary State, Obviously

Iowa and New Hampshire don’t look like the rest of America, while Texas is a microcosm of the nation.

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And all of this happens because, eventually, maybe 175,000 people will gather in hours-long meetings around the nation’s thirty-second most populous state, with no secret ballots, with one of America’s least diverse electorates.
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Roughly 9 percent of the U.S. population lives in Texas. That’s a hefty chunk of the country, but not such a large percentage that you’d lose the advantages that come with a staggered primary calendar. Texas represents the ideal balance: large enough that candidates would have to prove their mettle among a wide swath of voters from different ethnic and regional backgrounds, but not so large that it would amount to a de facto national primary, which would tend to favor deep-pocketed candidates like Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer in the current race, or flavors of the month like Ben Carson in late 2015, or Rick Perry for a brief moment in 2011.

But wouldn’t candidates spend all of the time in Texas’s big cities? After all, Texas is an urban state, and it would be easy to campaign in the urban triangle formed by San Antonio, Austin, Dallas–Fort Worth, and Houston. However, the 19 million or so Texans in the big four metro areas still represent only about 65 percent of the state, which means there are a whole lot of voters to be found elsewhere in Texas. There are large population centers in Iowa, too, and that doesn’t stop candidates from visiting coffee shops in towns like Corydon (pop. 1,585) or working the grill at Shaggy’s Gourmet Burgers in Wapello (pop. 2,067).

Certainly, presidential hopefuls would be common sights in Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio, but successful candidates would also need to spend a lot of time in El Paso, Lubbock, Corpus Christi, East Texas, the Panhandle, the Permian Basin, and the Rio Grande Valley as they looked to put together a coalition that could win them a primary. Would every single voter in the state get to ask every single candidate a question while they choked down a corn dog? Probably not, but the republic will survive. There simply isn’t much value in a tiny, nonrepresentative slice of the electorate hogging so much of the candidates’ time.
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There is more.

I suspect we will continue to have smaller states go first to give the longshot liberals a better chance of making a run.