Via TNR's Michael Crowley, the New York Times published a short item (backed up by TPM) finding that the Politico story alleging Rudy Giuliani hid security expenses for his affair was misleading. This is bad no matter what. However, Crowley attributes Giuliani's decline in the polls to the story:
Rudy Giuliani's candidacy has been derailed largely thanks to a media frenzy around charges that he used city budgeting tricks to cover up his extramarital Hamptons excursions...
[I]t's stunning when you think about it how much damage this story seems to have done to him. Perhaps it was just a vehicle for voters who knew little except for his 9/11 performance to learn that there's a big messy underside to the guy.
Crowley is right that Giuliani's decline in the polls roughly coincides with the publication of the story:
However, if you take a closer look at the pollster.com graphic above or the archive of polls at pollingreport.com, it appears that Giuliani was already declining in the polls by the time of the story's publication on Nov. 28. Did the story contribute to his decline? Sure. But it's far more likely that Giuliani was declining because Republican primary voters began to realize that he's a social liberal. (How many of them have even heard of the story? I'd say not that many.)
You can tell a similar story, as John Sides notes on The Monkey Cage, about the importance of the "macaca" incident in the Virginia Senate race of 2006, which was only part of the story of the race, but has been elevated to being the determinative incident.
To take yet another example, the famous JFK-Nixon debate has become a trite anecdote about Kennedy winning due to the newfound importance of television. But the outcome of the race was essentially a statistical tie.
All of these events "matter," but we should be wary about neat event-based explanations of campaign outcomes. Humans -- and especially journalists -- are skilled at constructing narratives after the fact. But it doesn't mean that those stories are right.
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