So what's the long-term effect? The USA typically elects the wrong presidents, and we gradually turn into a larger version of Iowa?

I'm not sure I'm a fan of this idea, since the 50-year-long smoothing window doesn't seem like it would make any given election more fair. With IA as a constant, campaign leaders can at least learn how to deal with whatever "bad" mix of people live in Iowa and plan the best possible campaign. They can learn lessons and improve on past mistakes. If you shuffle the states every time, there's now a new random element each election that makes things harder to predict for the candidates -and- the voting public.

To consider another form extreme, if Iowa was completely backwards from the rest of the states, would we *really* start electing the candidates that 49 states didn't want? I would like to think that we would learn to ignore the IA primary results if they stopped being interesting.