A word about South Carolina

[nexstarman]

CNN is fond of reminding people that since 1980 the winner of the South Carolina Republican Presidential Primary has always gone on to win his party's nomination

Comments

[mmcirvin]

Election analysts are even worse than sports commentators for mining large collections of facts over small series of events for impressive-sounding correlations. Since 1980 (inclusive), there have been, by my count, four past presidential elections in which the Republican nomination was seriously contested. That's not a lot to build an "always" on.

[mmcirvin]

...and, really, one of those (1988) was probably more of a shoo-in than it seemed at the time, which would bring it down to three real contests.