U.S. presidential primaries: success rate of Iowa and New Hampshire primary winners 2016

Although much is said about the momentum a presidential candidate can gain from winning the Iowa and New Hampshire presidential primaries, in less than a quarter of cases between 1976 and 2016 has the winner gone on to beat the incumbent and become the new president of the United States. Over this time, New Hampshire has been a better indicator of success than Iowa, selecting the new U.S. president 25 percent of the time for Republican candidates and 22.2 percent of the time for the Democrats. This compares to 12.5 percent and 11.1 percent respectively for Iowa.

These calculations do not include those primaries where an incumbent president ran unopposed.

Success rate of winners of the Iowa and New Hampshire presidential primaries in presidential elections in the United States between 1976 and 2016, by party

Characteristic	Chosen candidate became the new president	Chosen candidate became the party nominee but lost the presidential election	Chosen candidate was not nominated by the party
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Release date

November 2016

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Region

United States

Survey time period

1976 to 2016

Supplementary notes

Percentages calculated by Statista using values provided by the sources.
2016 Iowa values available here, and New Hampshire values here.
Calculations do not include years where an incumbent president ran unopposed in their party primary. This means that, even though he was the incumbent president at the time, Jimmy Carter's election in the 1980 Democratic Party primaries is included as he faced opposition.

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