LIKE MANY A gambler on a losing streak, America’s Democrats have decided to take their chances on Vegas. Last weekend, the panjandrums who run the party met in Chicago and approved the biggest shake-up in the presidential election process in more than three decades.

Ever since primary elections became the decisive part of the US presidential nominating system in the 1960s and 1970s, the two main parties have observed a sacred tradition. Though other states may jostle for their place in the calendar of primary contests between January and July of an election year, two have been guaranteed preferential treatment.

Iowa, the midwestern farm state, would always go first, holding its caucuses; tight-knit gatherings where party activists meet to vote. Then, a week or two later, the whole circus would move to New Hampshire, in the northeast, for the nation’s first primary, where all registered voters could take part. Hosting the first contests has given these two states outsized influence in the ultimate selection of the candidates.

But last week the Democrats chose a new timetable for 2008. Iowa will still go first in mid-January, but it will be followed, five days later, by caucuses in Nevada, the western state that is home to the gambling capital. Three days after that comes New Hampshire, followed, almost immediately, by South Carolina’s primary.

The big loser is New Hampshire. Though it will still host the first primary, attention will inevitably be diluted by the focus on other contests. Be honest, what genteel town in New Hampshire is going to compete in a deadline-stressed reporter’s head with Las Vegas for a clichéd political metaphor (cf, my introductory paragraph)?

Indeed New Hampshire Democrats are so angry that they are threatening to move their primary forward unilaterally to leapfrog Nevada. But the national leaders calculate that the dividends from the move will be well worth the price of irritating one state.

The official reason for the change is that the current system gives too much of a role to states that don’t look much like the rest of the country. New Hampshire and Iowa are about as representative of America as Cheshire and Lincolnshire are of England. One is a comparatively wealthy, post-industrial small state, full of affluent commuter towns and charming villages. The other is a sparsely populated landscape of farms and grain silos.

Hispanics are harder to find in Iowa than Mel Gibson fans at a bar mitzvah. Blacks are more elusive in New Hampshire than Tom Cruise at a self-help seminar for postnatal depression. Nevada, on the other hand, is home to millions of Latino voters. In South Carolina, more than a quarter of registered Democrats are black.

By introducing these two states into a four-cornered primary over two weeks, the hope is that the early contests will elevate candidates better able to appeal to Americans as whole than four of the last five Democratic presidential nominees who lost in November to a Republican.

But there’s another reason that has special relevance to 2008. By partly nationalising the early campaign, it is less likely that the whole process can be held hostage by some outside candidate who can propel himself to the forefront of his party’s nominating process. New Hampshire and Iowa are models of “retail politics” — where candidates spend months going, almost literally, from door to door to meet almost all the likely voters.

The late Mo Udall, probably the greatest American never to have been president, who lost the Democratic party’s 1976 nomination in New Hampshire, liked to tell a story that made the case well: He once overheard a man in a barber’s shop chatting with another: “Are you going to vote for Jimmy Carter?” the first said. “I haven’t made up my mind yet,” came the reply. “I’ve only met him four times.”

If you’re campaigning cross-country from Nevada to South Carolina, the campaign becomes wholesale, not retail; much more likely to be dominated by candidates with the resources and fame to spread themselves across the country. Who, you innocently ask, might be the beneficiary of this? Could it be Hillary Rodham Clinton?

Mrs Clinton’s strongest admirers don’t claim she’s good at retail politics. Though few doubt her intellectual skills, she connects with ordinary voters about as well as Marie Antoinette connected with the Paris mob. But even if Mrs Clinton does not benefit directly herself, the hope among the Democratic establishment is that a national campaign will make it harder for the radical grassroots of the party to get real traction in the election.

In a state-by-state early primary process, activists can run guerrilla campaigns against frontrunners; in more widely spread, nearly simultaneous contests, their efforts are diluted. This is now acutely relevant to Democratic bosses. Even as they begin to contemplate the possibility of a rare victory in this year’s mid-term elections, they are fearful of a civil war within the party in the run-up to 2008.

Anti-Iraq-war fervour is now rampant among motivated Democrats. They have already cast off Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut senator, who lost his primary election earlier this month to an anti-war candidate. Though President Bush and the war are unpopular nationally, Democrats are terrified that voters will get the wrong message. Just as the anti-war Left of Jane Fonda became the face of the party towards the end of the Vietnam War, so the anti-war Left of Michael Moore could harm it in 2008.

Many voters simply still do not trust the Democrats to run foreign policy or national security, a truth that explains the remarkable irony at the heart of these historic changes to the Democratic electoral calendar. The Republican Party’s stewardship of the nation’s security in the past few years may have made Americans feel so unsafe that they feel they can’t entrust their defence to the Democratic Party.

That logic is enough to drive anyone to seek answers in Las Vegas.

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden