I'm on what I presume is my final rewatch of The West Wing before it goes bye-bye this Christmas and I wanted to point out something that makes no sense: Hartsfield's Landing is a sidestory utterly outside of time.

They're a small town that votes early and correctly predicts the winner of every presidential election in the West Wing's divergent political world. That's fair - that has real life analogues! I get that! But in the place it's set in the series, it would be shortly after the Iowa Caucuses and Richie had not even gone through the primaries yet.

So the only way it could make sense is if they were voting in the primaries - in which Bartlett was unopposed and also correctly picking the winner doesn't actually mean anything - or they were holding some kind of mock election in February/March?

To be clear, this isn't show ruining or maddening. It is probably an idea Sorkin had and just wanted to stick the C-story in there somewhere without wanting to think too hard about it. But it's weird just how not-hard you have think about it to realize it doesn't make sense.