We’re less than one month away from the Iowa caucuses, which means it’s time for everyone to complain about the Iowa caucuses. But the usual knocks about the outsize role of the first state in picking the president every four years should ring more hollow in 2020. Iowa matters less than ever, and the proof is in the candidates’ travel logs.

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In the new year, with the caucuses rapidly approaching, no candidate (save for Delaney) is embarking on an Iowa-or-bust strategy. Back in 2008, between Dec. 1 and the caucuses on Jan. 3, the top candidates spent at least 23 of the campaign’s final 34 days in Iowa. But this month, Buttigieg isn’t scheduled to return until Jan. 12, and in the meantime has spent three days in the Super Tuesday state of Texas. After a couple of days in Iowa at the start of the year, Klobuchar went to Nevada and New Hampshire. Sanders left last Sunday and won’t be back until this Friday. For the first half of the month, Warren is campaigning in the state only on the weekends, while last Tuesday she held a rally with Julián Castro in New York. Biden hasn’t been to Iowa since Sunday, relying for now on a bus tour of surrogates.

To borrow the language of Drew Magary, a columnist for Medium’s Gen magazine who recently complained about Iowa’s excessive influence in presidential politics, why aren’t Iowa’s “trucker-hat voters who, by now, probably have Jake Tapper on speed dial” being fussed over as much as in the past?

Because the Democratic National Committee wanted it this way, and engineered changes to the process that have sharply reduced the influence of the Iowa caucuses, along with New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary. Beginning in 2008, the first two states have been quickly followed by Nevada and South Carolina, and soon after that, by a quasi-national primary on Super Tuesday.

The belief that Iowa was a must-win state was always overhyped. Most of the time in the modern primary era, going back to the 1980s, the winner of Iowa in either party hasn’t been able to muster enough momentum to win the next contest in New Hampshire. And today, the sheer breadth of the Super Tuesday map, along with the compressed timetable, has persuaded candidates to crisscross the country, hunting for votes as well as dollars.

Advocates of a national primary, rejoice!

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It’s true that Iowa remains the most frequently visited state, even if it’s being visited less. And there’s a serious problem that’s raised many Iowa critics: that the state’s nearly all-white electorate is insufficiently diverse. The chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, Gilberto Hinojosa, blamed Castro’s demise on #IowaSoWhite, telling POLITICO, “How you fare in Iowa and New Hampshire sets the tone for how your campaign continues, and when you have these two states that in no way represent the diversity of the Democratic Party, it makes it very difficult for minority candidates to get momentum.”

Perhaps the first state in the presidential nominating process should look more like America. But Hinojosa’s critique ignores the impact of the DNC’s new polling criteria to earn a spot on the debate stage. Candidates do not necessarily have to perform well in Iowa and New Hampshire. A modicum of support in South Carolina, which has a majority-black Democratic electorate, or in Nevada, which has a significant Latino population, scores you an invite.

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The fact that, at this point, the Democratic Party is almost certain to nominate a white person is not evidence that voters of color outside of Iowa have been silenced. In fact, African American voters are the main reason Biden has been a mostly steady frontrunner, and Latino voters are a big part of why Sanders remains in contention.

None of this should end the debate about Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s placement on the primary calendar. But it should inform the debate. The DNC’s schedule changes have changed the way the candidates have campaigned, and they have increased the influence that nonwhite voters outside of Iowa have on the presidential nominating process. We can debate whether the current arrangement strikes the right balance, but we shouldn’t act as if there isn’t any balance at all.