And as you can see, well-known candidates who polled in the double digits tended to win a higher share of the primary vote. But candidates who had high name recognition while only polling in the single digits were generally in trouble. Of the 84 highly recognized candidates who polled below 10 percent in surveys from the first half of the year before the primaries, only President Trump went on to win his party’s nomination. And Trump was an unusual case — Republicans started out with strongly negative views of him but quickly changed their tune even though they were already familiar with him. Meanwhile, candidates with lower name recognition in the first half of the year only occasionally advanced to the general election, and in each case, it was on the Democratic side — George McGovern in 1972, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1992.

In fact, we can use a logistic regression to estimate a high- and low-name-recognition candidate’s chance of winning the nomination based on their polling average (much like we did above, but last time we didn’t sort candidates into categories based on name recognition). And as you can see in the chart below, a low-name-recognition candidate didn’t stand much of a chance of winning unless they were able to climb past 10 percent in the polls in the first half of the year before the primaries. If they were able to hit that mark, then their odds of winning were slightly less than 1 in 4, which put them ahead of a high-name-recognition candidate polling at the same level.