We’ve spent nearly a year in this incredibly lengthened election season, started early because Donald Trump tried to forestall his criminal indictments. We still have more than nine months to go before election day. And all along, we’ve heard the politicians and pundits telling us the only thing that matters is the votes on November 5 (plus all the early voting and absentee ballots).

But now, as a dozen Republicans have already decided they have no chance, we’re hearing so many saying Nikki Haley, too, should quit, because she has no chance to beat Trump for the nomination.

Mind you, today is just the first primary (in New Hampshire), and the only voters who’ve already expressed their opinions were the 110,272 who participated in the Iowa caucuses. Those 110,272 represent just 0.07% of the 158 million who cast votes in 2020—that is, a rounding error. They don’t even represent a majority of Iowa voters (1,690,871 voted in 2020). Indeed, they’re only 14.6% of the registered Republicans in the state. We’ve spent a year waiting to see the outcome of the primaries, but just as they’re starting, we’re told the rest of them don’t matter, because one in fourteen Republicans in Iowa (56,243) expressed a preference for Trump.

Major news outlets stopped reporting election results while the polls were still open after 1980, when there was great consternation that doing so might have suppressed the vote in the western states. But now we’re told that we don’t even have to wait for the polls to open in the other 99+% of the country: the few Iowans who cared to join the caucuses are enough. No, just no. I say, let ’em run until the end.