There seem to me to be two dominant scenarios for what happens next in the Republican presidential race. For now I’ll just sketch them out, in the interest of stimulating thought and commentary rather than asserting a conclusion.
Scenario #1: Trump wins.
Why not? He’s been second (Iowa), first (N.H.) and first (S.C.) so far, and no one has ever lost after that kind of start. The only state he’s lost is a caucus, and there aren’t that many more of them. He’s won both of the primaries by 10 percentage points or more; he’ll probably win Nevada easily Tuesday; and he’ll most likely win a strong plurality of the vote and a majority of the delegates when 12 states vote on March 1. Maybe at that point there’s a real consolidation against him and someone, presumably Rubio, starts to defeat him in some states—but that will most likely be too little and too late, sort of like the efforts to stop Jimmy Carter late in 1976 or Bill Clinton late in 1992.
What’s more, Trump won in South Carolina despite committing all kinds of offenses against Republican orthodoxy. He was also massively outspent by at least three other campaigns, each of whom (Cruz, Rubio, and Bush) thought South Carolina was their best chance for a breakthrough. His victory in South Carolina will have a normalizing effect, and strengthen him going forward. Doesn’t his one-third of the vote in South Carolina look more like a floor going forward than a ceiling?
So Trump will have his challenges, but he’s the frontrunner, and frontrunners at this point almost always win the nomination.
Scenario #2: Trump loses.
Here’s the contrary argument: Trump lost ground over the final week in South Carolina, and also did a little less well than he’d done in New Hampshire. He doesn’t have real momentum, and the ceiling at around a third of the vote looks real. Trump also did relatively poorly in the parts of South Carolina that look more like the big voting areas in Ohio, Florida and other major states going forward—he lost Charleston and Richmond Counties to Rubio, despite Bush and Kasich poaching 20 percent of the moderate vote, and only won Greenville narrowly. Bush is finally out of the race, and Rubio (presumably) picks up most of that vote and a ton of money; and as Carson fades further and then gets out after March 1, and Kasich perhaps after that, most of that vote goes to Rubio, some to Cruz, and not much to Trump. So Trump seems likely to fall short when the contest becomes a two-way race, and—based on history—it will become that sooner rather than later. In addition, we still haven’t seen what happens when real money is spent on the air attacking Trump.
So Trump’s vulnerable, and the most significant thing to happen in South Carolina was not Trump’s victory but Rubio’s comeback. It showed candidate skills and resiliency, and it very much increases the odds of a Trump-Rubio showdown. If you allocate the other candidates’ votes in South Carolina, and try to adjust the South Carolina results to the socio-economic demographics of the other states, that matchup looks like a Rubio victory. So “all” Cruz and Rubio need to do is keep Trump’s margins down on March 1—and then on March 15 Trump gets defeated in the big winner take all states, either by one candidate (presumably Rubio) or by a couple of candidates who focus on different states and deny Trump major victories. So at the end of the day, with the field narrowing, money being spent against Trump, and the other states weighing in, Trump is heading toward a third or maybe two-fifths of the vote and the delegates—not a majority.
It’s of course possible that neither of these scenarios will play out—that either Cruz and/or Kasich will re-emerge, and/or that Trump will finally start to collapse because of something he says or is revealed to have done, or that something even more unlikely happens, and the whole race goes in a different direction.
Some version of these two scenarios seems the most likely. Conventional wisdom probably tilts toward scenario #1—but I suspect that it could well be that intelligent and determined efforts by candidates and elected officials and donors could tilt the outcome to scenario #2.
