ABSTRACT
Many are the unremembered candidates who have found their money and their desire evaporating after Iowa and New Hampshire. For the major candidates, a great deal of coverage turns on expectations and surprises in caucus and primary performances. The media try to tell a simple story with a protagonist, antagonist, and possibly a minor figure for human interest. To measure stability, people have analyzed how the correlation between one week's averages and the next week's have changed over time. For well-known candidates with stable images we expected that one week's traits would be highly correlated with those of the next week while for less well-known candidates the correlations would be lower as their images changed from week to week. The equation is derived from a model which assumes normally distributed prior beliefs and normally distributed information with each line of coverage considered a separate piece of information. People do learn about candidates from the media.
