Perhaps the most potent factor, though, is the warm spotlight of positive publicity.
Mr. Kaine's early endorsement of Mr. Obama was a potent factor in his remarkable 28-point landslide on Tuesday.
Felicia Blake, though, had another theory: that the presence of a new police substation, which opened in April, was the most potent factor.
Labour's unpopularity is the most potent factor in the national mood rather than any tangible surge of enthusiasm for the Conservatives.
"Tobacco use is such an enormously potent factor that it contaminates the findings," said Professor Tom Sanders, head of the nutritional sciences research division at King's College London.
"Jumping from the bridge is seen as sure, quick, clean, and available — which is the most potent factor," Dr. Jerome Motto, a local psychiatrist and suicide expert, says.
Her predicament also evokes a Caribbean and African world in which fertility is prized and in which fate is a potent factor.
Talks, at length, about the negative effects of the strict separation of the sexes; claims it's a potent factor in terrorist fantasies.
The doctrine of natural rights was a potent factor in the reshaping of the constitutions of Western countries in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
So we are only a month away from a general election in which Johnson's electoral reach will be tested as never before, and perhaps from a Conservative leadership contest in which his presumed popularity would be a potent factor.
A more potent factor than date or place in producing divergences in the style of writing is the purpose for which a manuscript was designed and what type of scribe wrote it.
