Oh, Nikki, you're so fine, you're so fine, you blow my mind...

In the horse race coverage of GOP primary, the big story over the past few days has been the stunning rise of Nikki Haley, suggesting that Trump is not only vulnerable, but vulnerable to a traditional Republican.

 

 

This certainly is exciting news. Let's check in with 538 to see how much she has narrowed the gap.

Hmmm... That doesn't seem t be much to write home about. Perhaps we need to drill down further. After all, in her Nov. 8th NYT piece ("Nikki Haley Is Gaining Ground"), Katherine Miller tells us "[Haley] is gaining in the places that matter." As an example, Miller links to this story about polls in New Hampshire.

 Funny thing about that USA Today article, it was over a month old when Miller posted her piece. That doesn't really support the narrative that recent gains show growing momentum behind Haley.

Let's take a closer look.

A new poll from Suffolk University, The Boston Globe, and USA TODAY found that likely New Hampshire Republican primary voters overwhelmingly favor former president Donald Trump as their party’s nominee for the 2024 presidential election.

Respondents also weighed in on issues like climate change, immigration, and Trump’s legal woes. The poll of 500 likely New Hampshire Republican presidential primary voters was conducted between Sept. 28 and Oct. 2., with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

 

Given that even a month ago, Haley had already spent enough time in New Hampshire that she might legally be allowed to vote there, a distant second is not all that impressive. Trump, by comparison, had been focusing most of his campaign on a golf course in Florida, but that appears to be changing. 

Trump’s rally on Saturday is one of several trips he’s making to New Hampshire this month as part of a strategic effort by his campaign to ensure he doesn’t lose momentum heading into the early months of 2024 as his rivals campaign relentlessly in the first-in-the-nation primary state, his advisers told CNN. 

Nonetheless, Miller argues, "A win in Iowa or New Hampshire for Ms. Haley would reset the entire primary contest" and it was a recent Iowa poll that set off this latest round of Nikki-mania. The next day the NYT ran another pro-Haley piece, this time without the cover of the opinion section, focused more on Iowa.

 A close second-place finish — or even capturing the biggest vote share in Iowa after Mr. Trump — could catapult Ms. Haley into New Hampshire and the contests that follow, attracting fresh support and prompting some rivals to bow out, her aides and surrogates argued.

 "[C]apturing the biggest vote share in Iowa after Mr. Trump" would include a distant second, which is unlikely to do a great deal  of catapulting, regardless of what aides and surrogates tell gullible reporters from back East, but putting that aside. Let's take a closer look at that Iowa poll. 

From the Des Moines Register:

Also from the Register:

The one place Iowa does have a potentially important and useful role is with politicians who don't yet have a big national presence. The state functions, in a sense, as a search committee, looking over candidates who may not have been on our radar. If Asa Hutchinson were to significantly outperform his polling numbers and come in third or even fourth, that could indicate that he has real potential, but Nikki Haley has been a prominent figure on the national stage for years and is currently experiencing a wave of coverage.

As we've talked about before, there is a certain ebb and flow you expect to see in a primary, particularly among alternatives to a controversial front runner. Voters unhappy with their party's likely choice will look around for a broadly acceptable candidate to converge on. This can produce some rapid and in some cases surprisingly large surges which tend to go away as quickly as they came. If you go back and look at the 2012 and 2016 Republican primaries, you will see this happening repeatedly and far more dramatically than what we're seeing here.

There are certainly scenarios where Haley could get the nomination (almost all involving Trump's health or legal issues), but with this story as with so many we've seen over the past eight years, the main driver of political journalism seems to be wishful thinking.

Three years ago at the blog -- The Myth of the Wright Brothers

Having covered yesterday the lies we tell ourselves about the Apollo program, let's take a look at another favorite.

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Wrong about the Wright brothers

Following up on yesterday's post, the standard narrative about the Wright brothers was they were two nobodies laboring in obscurity. When the breakthrough came, no one could believe it. 

To support this account you'll often see this quote from Scientific American:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This would seem to be another of those "man will never fly" anecdotes, but context matters.  For starters, the Wright brothers weren't unknowns; they weren't even particularly long shots. They were known to anyone who had been seriously following advances in heavier than air flight. Samuel Langley had reached out to them. Scientific American had given them positive write-ups in 1902 and this in 1903:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Even with the disputed flights, the magazine initially took a more guarded tone:

 The Wright Brothers,  in this  country, who in 1903 made the first successful flight  with an aeroplane, self-propelled and carrying its operator, have recently made a  flight, the particulars of  which have not been given to  the public. 

So if the Wright brothers were recognized as leading pioneers in the field, why was the press so skeptical, even hostile? One reason was that, due to fear of their ideas being stolen, the brothers had become extremely secretive, but the bigger factor was the astounding magnitude of the breakthrough. The brothers claimed to have made one of the all time great advances in transportation technology, but they offered no proof and no explanation for why no one had noticed the airplanes making multiple half-hour flights over the skies of Ohio.

The skepticism was justified. It was also short lived. As soon as confirmation came in, the brothers were hailed as having "already solved the  problem of  the century." Here was the lede of the Scientific American article that appeared less than four months after the "fabled performance" piece:

We love stories about how innocent and clueless our forefathers were about technology, particularly compared with how sophisticated we are today. At least with respect to the turn of the century, I think we may have gotten it exactly backwards.