The Hawkeye State, in case you haven’t heard, is very flat and relatively small. Candidates can travel the length of it in about four hours, and the width in five, making campaigning easy enough. In the span of a single day, a presidential wannabe can tour a farm, kiss babies in a union town, and glad-hand people in a city. TV and radio ads are cheaper in Iowa than in many other states, including neighboring swing states Michigan and Wisconsin. Iowa is perhaps one of the few states in the union where an ambitious politician with few resources and even less name recognition—a junior senator from Illinois, say—can actually compete with a better-funded, better-known candidate. In Iowa, the path for future presidents is well-trod: The kingmakers and party elders and precinct captains have been doing this for decades. They’re practiced in the art of evaluating future presidents and political leaders. “If you choose a new state, it’s like being at the edge of a wilderness and saying, ‘Well, I’ll just dive in and see what happens,’” Meyer said. “In Iowa you have a pathway through the wilderness.”

Democratic Party leaders in the state will make a political case for leaving Iowa alone too. Iowa has become a redder state in recent years, as rural people and non-college-educated white voters side more often with the GOP. Further alienating rural Americans could be a disaster for the Democrats, party officials argue. “To simply discount Iowa by the numbers is an insult to Iowans and it feeds into a narrow-minded view of what’s possible in rural America,” Ross Wilburn, the chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, told me. State GOP leaders are already practicing their talking points: If the DNC “gives up on Iowa, this is literally the middle finger at rural America,” Republican Party Chairman Jeff Kaufmann said last month.

As a born-and-raised Iowan, I’m conflicted. Iowa is not representative of the country, nor even of the Democratic Party, and I’ve seen firsthand how messy the caucus process is and how many Iowans are unable to participate. But that messiness, to me, is also what makes the caucus process great.