MANCHESTER, N.H. – In Greek mythology, they are Scylla and Charybdis, the terrors that guard the entrance to the straits of Messina and wreck the ships of unwary sailors. In American politics, they are Iowa and New Hampshire, the two states that stand guard over presidential nominations and regularly sink the hopes of unwary candidates.

Whether Iowa and New Hampshire deserve such status is the subject of increasingly acrimonious debate. They surely didn’t get it by design. Each state just decided to stake out dates early in the presidential campaign year for a party nomination election – a caucus in Iowa’s case, a primary here in the Granite State.

They became imbedded in the national political calendar almost without notice. At first, they were of little importance. But that changed as the number of primaries and caucuses grew and displaced the national party conventions as the place where nominations were determined. Now their position is being challenged.

“I’m a fierce advocate of a thorough overhaul of the presidential nominating system, most definitely beginning with the dethroning of Iowa and New Hampshire – the regal duopoly that has outlived its usefulness,” says Larry Sabato, director of the center for politics at the University of Virginia.

He’s not alone. Neither state is remotely representative of a nation increasingly diverse ethnically, economically, socially – even religiously. Each is overwhelmingly non-Hispanic white and non-urban.

Iowa doesn’t even have much of the suburban sprawl that marks a large part of the changing national landscape. The hallmark of the Hawkeye State is the kind of small, one-traffic-light rural town that’s fast vanishing in most of the country.

New Hampshire may be a tad more diverse, but it comes no closer to the national model. Its largest minority – if it can be called that – is probably the French-Canadians in the northern tier of the state and around Manchester. It lacks a dominant industry now that the mills that once operated along its river towns are gone.

Dissatisfaction with the Iowa-New Hampshire role won’t change the process for this election. But the guess here is we’re witnessing the end of the era of disproportionate Iowa-New Hampshire influence on the nomination process.

Both parties did try to address that problem this year, but they misfired. Their answer was to encourage a host of big-vote states – such as New York, California, Ohio and New Jersey – to move their contests to earlier in the year. Though the intent was to divert money and attention from Iowa and New Hampshire, the result was to make them even more important.

In previous years, candidates who lost in Iowa and/or New Hampshire had time to retool their campaigns and perhaps raise enough money to be competitive in the later primaries, usually a month or more after the Iowa-New Hampshire shootout. Not this time.

Michigan will vote a week after New Hampshire, followed by Nevada, South Carolina and Florida within another two weeks. That will be followed by a 22-state “super primary” scheduled for Feb. 5. In short, there will be a sprint to the finish within a month of the New Hampshire vote that will likely decide both nominations and leave little time to reverse the Iowa-New Hampshire decisions.

Both parties realize they’ve lost control. They elect a president nationally but their nomination process is a kind of federalism run amok. Expect that when this election is over, both parties will take steps to impose some order on the nomination process.

Any such change will involve reducing the Iowa-New Hampshire impact, if only because more populous and more electorally important states are demanding it.

They’ve wearied of seeing the two leadoff states earn all that attention and money and, more important, limit their candidate choices before they’ve ever had a chance to vote.

Ideally, the goal should be to reduce, not eliminate, the influence of Iowa and New Hampshire, which currently short-circuit and distort the nomination process but also serve a useful function.

Because they’re small and relatively inexpensive states, they make it possible for lesser-known and poorly funded candidates to make their case. For example, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the surprise of this year’s nomination process, could not have made the same impact in New York, New Jersey or California that he has in Iowa.

In addition, Iowans and those cranky Yankees in New Hampshire feel an obligation to confront candidates up close and personal that voters in larger states apparently don’t. It’s a curious thing, but Americans in larger states seem more remote from one another and from things going on around them, like politics, than do folks in the smaller corners of the country, like Iowa and New Hampshire.

But the big states have awakened to the fact that they’ve been cut out of the nomination process. They’re demanding a changed process and a larger voice, and they’ll likely get it. Iowa and New Hampshire have had a good run, but it’s probably coming to an end.

John Farmer is national political correspondent for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at [email protected].