If you were to rank the most exciting presidential nomination contests, the 1996 Republican race would be near the bottom. Bob Dole, the “next-in-line” GOP candidate and the Senate majority leader, built up a huge lead in polls and endorsements early in the race and was never seriously challenged for the nomination. Dole did lose the New Hampshire primary by a single point to Pat Buchanan. But the field soon consolidated around him, and he went on to win 44 of 50 states.

And yet, contemporaneous accounts of the sleepy-seeming 1996 campaign portrayed it as incredibly dramatic, full of “unexpected” twists and “unpredictable” turns. Take this March 7, 1996, article from The New York Times, for example — it was written after Dole had won 12 consecutive primaries and caucuses in the previous week. There are four expressions of surprise in a single paragraph: It’s taken as shocking that the early primaries were as competitive as they were, but equally “striking” that Dole rebounded so quickly from them.

After an unpredictable early stretch of primaries, where candidates seemed to flicker out like trick birthday candles, only to re-ignite unexpectedly, Mr. Dole’s return to a commanding lead so early in the voting was striking. The positioning and sorting of the field yesterday was particularly unusual: Almost simultaneously, Mr. Lugar and Mr. Alexander bowed out, as Governor Bush and Mr. Kemp put forth their dueling endorsements.

I don’t mean to pick on this article, which happens to have been written by a terrific journalist,¹ but it’s typical of the breathless fashion in which developments on the campaign trail are reported. There is a constant series of overcorrections in the conventional wisdom. In this case, because the initial threat to Dole was overstated by the press — Buchanan, a factional candidate, had little chance to see his support grow beyond the 27 percent of the vote he won in New Hampshire² — Dole’s “comeback” was incorrectly portrayed as unexpected and dramatic.

These biases hold in coverage of the general election too, of course: There were 68 purported “game changers” in the 2012 general election, most of which turned out to be irrelevant. But for the political observer trying to sift faux game changers from genuine twists in the campaign, the primaries present a couple of additional complications.

Read the article “Keep Calm and Ignore the 2016 ‘Game Changers’” on fivethirtyeight.com.