It’s the time of year to make predictions. Over the next week, I will lay out a number of different scenarios for the primaries. This is the first one.
Suppose, for purposes of argument, the last three serious candidates left standing are Rubio, Cruz, and Trump. One way to predict the outcome of the election is to look at the constituents of the departed candidates and assign them to one of the three survivors. How does that look?
In my opinion, Trump has reached his ceiling, Cruz would get Carson’s voters, and Rubio would get the rest. If you add those numbers to their existing polling, what you wind up with is all three candidates with between 30 and 40 percent of the vote. It is hard to imagine any of them having a majority going into the convention under those circumstances. My best guess is that Cruz would be the most acceptable compromise candidate and would win the nomination.