In the New Hampshire primary, Donald Trump benefitted from a cluster of his rivals competing for second place. Polling showed that no one among Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Jeb Bush was poised to surge on election day and come within shouting distance of the frontrunner. As a result, Trump won by nearly 20 percentage points — and one of the biggest storylines was what one of the candidates, Rubio, didn’t do.
The field now finds itself in a similar state, statistically speaking: South Carolina. Although the electorate there bears little resemblance to New Hampshire’s, the polling circumstances are comparable, with one notable exception. In the final RealClearPolitics average of polls before Granite State voting, Trump led by 17.2 points. In South Carolina, he leads by 14.8 points, and he finds himself in as comfortable a position as he’s had since August, Jay Cost observes. Additionally, there was a battle for second place in New Hampshire with no obvious favorite, the same as it is in the Palmetto State primary.
The big difference is that Cruz and Rubio appear to have large enough shares of the vote to make news with a strong showing Saturday.
Both candidates have broken 20 percent in one of the gumball globe of polls in recent days: Cruz (23 percent) in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist survey performed from Feb. 15-17, and Rubio (22) in an ARG tally measured the last two days. In New Hampshire, Kasich was the only Trump rival to sniff 20 percent in a poll — and that was a distant three weeks before the actual vote.
What’s more, Cruz and Rubio are the clear occupants of the second tier. Bush is behind the two of them by an average of 7 points, which is well outside the margin of error and inviting constant questions about how long he’ll remain the race. Although Kasich’s performance in New Hampshire helped boost his standing in South Carolina — a state in which he was between 1 and 3 percent at the start of February — he is polling near Bush. In New Hampshire, Cruz, Rubio, Kasich and Bush were within 2.5 points of each other prior to election day.
As such, the headliners of Saturday’s primary are the three candidates who seemed destined after the Iowa caucuses to be the last ones standing. But unless one of the two men not named “Trump” bolts to a solid runner-up finish, the story of the broader campaign will remain the same: It’s Trump and then it’s everybody else, and “everybody else” includes too many people.
