It's All Fun and Games Until a Fascist Wins

A Lot of Democrat Blue and Orangutan Orange

I am guilty of two political sins this election season.  First, I underestimated Trump's chance of being the nominee.  Once the field of candidates was more or less set, Nate Silver said that the GOP field was four roughly equal quadrants: one each for Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker and the fourth for everybody else.  I was even more heavily slanted toward the conventional candidates. I only left about 10% chance for anyone other than Bush, Rubio or Walker. I didn't make Trump the favorite until after New Hampshire.

Donald Trump has swallowed more than 3/4 of the field's chances, with only Rubio still sanding among the conventional candidates. The exact numbers at the moment are 80% for Trump, 16% for Rubio, 2% each for John Kasich and Ted Cruz.  (Here I will pause for one brief moment of celebration: we have almost certainly been spared the specter of Ted Cruz becoming President of the United States.)

I am about not enthused for a Hillary Clinton presidency.  I happen to prefer her over Bernie Sanders in about the same proportion that I prefer beige to taupe. I'm not going to go out and flip a police car over to prove it. But there is one thing I can get enthused about, and that is preventing a fascist president.  And that, it seems, will be our national task for the next eight months.


Schadenfreude Turns to Anxiety.
I am not alone in underestimating Trump's chance of being the nominee. That sin is easily forgiven. What I''m more troubled by is that I have enjoyed the process too much.  I think that Donald Trump is the natural product of a right-wing media that for seven years peddled and incessant flow of lies about Barack Obama, undocumented workers and a slew of nontroversies best embodied by their shameful exploitation of the attacks on the outpost Benghazi. Trump also used some brilliant jujitsu to point out that Citizens United corrupted our political system. Moreover, he promised to strengthen popular and necessary pieces of the social safety net, especially Social Security and Medicare.

It was fun to watch someone trounce  the hollow patriotism and phony "conservative values" of Walker, Bush, Rubio, Chrsistie and Cruz. Those sentiments were always a phony shell game and it was nice to have an actual WWE Hall of Famer tear down that facade.  I was also glad that Trump brought a streak of populism to the Republican race. At the last debate Cruz and Rubio were still attacking him for supporting an individual mandate. He defended his position as not wanting people to die in the streets and they called that socialism. That mentality has been dominant in politics because of the false narrative that this is a "conservative" country that hates government and loves the free market even to the detriment of our own well being. No we are not. We are a rich country that is skeptical of political philosophies. We like winners and we like the little guy. The trick is to win by convincing the little guy that you're on his side.

 But the time for enjoying the train wreck that has been the 2016 GOP nomination has to be cleared off the tracks even before the bodies get cold. In 72 hours, Donald Trump is going to have the silly half of this process sewn up. As the calendar turns to the general election, we can't mix words: Donald Trump is not merely a demagogue. He is a  fascist.

Fascism is a big charge. I do not lob it around lightly. I rest this assertion on his below statements, all of which have been well documented. I provide links to each one because I recognize the gravity of my accusation.

- Characterizing immigrants from Mexico as "rapists". Source.
-  Promising to bring back "waterboarding and worse" of terrorists because "they deserve it".
Source.
- Promising to murder the relatives of suspected terrorists.  Source.
- Declaring that he will ban all Muslims from entering the country.  Source.

This isn't just nuts.  It's a call to fascism. And we have to do whatever it takes to prevent him from winning the White House.

But Can it Happen?

Let's put it this way: all of the reasons why it can't happen are the same reasons we all thought he couldn't be the nominee. In the past two weeks, as a Trump nomination became more and more likely, the predictions market for who will win the general election barely budge.  Now that Trump is about to be the presumptive nominee, we need to look at a few specific things that will determine the shape of the general election.

A. His opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Bernie can not be the Democratic nominee without substantial report from black voters. Yesterday's result in South Carolina shows that he has not made that sale. His campaign schedule this week proves that he is not trying to anymore. He might win heavily white states like Minnesota, Vermont, West Virginia and Oklahoma. He will keep winning delegates throughout the spring. But he will not be the nominee.

This leaves Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump has obvious lines of attack against her. First he will claim that she is in the pocket of all the Wall Street banks that have given her so much money over recent years. Hillary foolishly avoided releasing the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs. She will not have that luxury in the fall because Trump will call her a fraud.  She needs to release them early and get it over with. More importantly Trump will attack her on free-trade, immigration and the Muslim world.  Hillary can and should win all of those arguments on the substance but Donald is very capable of winning on style by just flat-out insulting her.

Hillary is also perceived as too ambitious and insufficiently honest. Those are traits that can kill a politician, especially against an opponent who can claim with a straight face to be making a personal sacrifice by running and when the public often confuses the lack of a filter for truthfulness.

I have written repeatedly that I think the predictions markets underestimate the Democrats' chances of winning the next election.  In the past 2 weeks the probability of a Trump-Clinton match-up nearly doubled from 41% to 78%. And the prediction markets have barely budged.  The Democrats were a 61% chance of winning then and they are a 63% favorite now.  That's right, the prospects of a Trump nomination have reaped all of a 2% jump for the Democrats.

This means that the betting public thinks Trump can beat Hillary. One scenario is equally horrible and plausible. We know that Hillary is a lousy presidential candidate. If she wasn't the Democratic race would be Bernie taking on Vice-President Obama.  And we know that Donald is a good candidate, because he's already gobbled up a deep field of Republicans that were more likely to win than him.

So we will get into September and October with the race too close to call. What if, in the middle of October two young men with Arab last names decide to shoot up a movie theater. Or a high school cafeteria. Or the parking lot of a major college football stadium right after a game. Does anyone doubt that people will bend towards the candidate promising to do something rash in response?

B.  His Party and its Appratchicks.

This is a fun mental concept. Can you imagine Bernie Sanders giving a full-throated endorsement of Hillary at the Democratic convention?  It's easy.  But what about Rubio or Cruz or Kasich endorsing Trump?  It's a little trickier, isn't it?

Sometime in March the GOP race will effectively be over. Kasich and Rubio have already said they will drop out if they do not win the race in their home states on March 15th, they will drop out. Cruz is likely to win his home state of Texas on March 1st, but it's hard to imagine him winning anywhere else.  So as the candidates drop out, what will they do?  I can't imagine Lindsay Graham endorsing Trump. Jeb Bush is hard to imagine also. But Rubio and Cruz have a future to worry about and they will be left with a choice-be loyal to the party and hope to win in four years or repudiate him and hope to say "I told you so" next time around.

Then there is the pundit class.  Does George Will hate Hillary Clinton enough to debase himself by banging the drum for Donald Trump? What about Charles Krauthamer? I don't think these guys have much influence over rank and file voters but they too will have to choose between a unified front and their need to oppose fascism.

C.  Third Party Candidates?
I think if Trump has the nomination sewn up by April 1st, someone will emerge to run as a third party candidate from the right.  This person will not win, but they can give intelligent Republicans an excuse to not vote for Hillary Clinton. But if the election is close, I don't think that candidate will get more than a blip on election night.  If however Hillary runs up a good lead, and current events don't jolt the race dramatically, this candidate might attract enough voters to throw all of the swing states to the Democrats and also some not-so contested states, like Missouri, Indiana and even Montana. Even Texas might be contested by Hillary. And the GOP could lose in the Electoral College by a 2 to 1 margin.

Then the Republicans will lick their wounds and try to get used to having lost the popular vote in six out of seven general elections. A few months later, the 2020 field will begin to ooze into a loose, murky condition. And the conventional wisdom will be that they screwed up by not nominating a true conservative.

South Carolina & Nevada

The Republican primary is underway in South Carolina and Democrats are caucusing in Nevada. The markets today have seen a continued drop in Senator Cruz' numbers and a surge in support for Rubio. The Democratic race seems largely unchanged.

A few days ago Nate Silver's website published a post about Republican delegate math that made the argument that Ted Cruz had a very tough road to the nomination.  The thrust of the thesis was that most of the states he is likely to win do not award all of their delegates to the statewide winner. His home state of Texas only awards all of its delegates to the statewide winner if that candidate gets more than 50% of the vote. In a fractured field, that seems unlikely.

The other bad piece of news is that Marco Rubio is once again the darling of the media.  Several reporters embarrassed themselves this week by writing incredibly upbeat articles about Senator Rubio of a "comeback kid" nature.  Now that his tormentor Chris Christie has left the field he seems to be doing much better on the campaign trail. And Jeb Bush continues to set new standards for how not to run for president in 2016. I don't know if Marco is ready for prime time, but there are large segments of the party ready to give him the benefit of the doubt.

We'll know in a few hours whether Rubio's comeback is for real or just another figment of the mainstream media's natural instinct to over rate conventional, telegenic candidates.  I'm somewhat skeptical but the implosion of Jeb's campaign can't hurt him, especially if Jeb takes the hint and exits the race.

My official predictions for South Carolina GOP are:  Trump 31, Cruz 24, Rubio 21, Bush 10, Kasich 9, Carson 5.  The most interesting numbers and story lines to look for are these:

1. The race for 2nd place.  If Rubio passes Cruz then there will be more pressure on Bush and Kasich to clear the field for Rubio.  But if he finishes behind Rubio for the 3rd straight time I think those guys can justify staying in a little while longer.  The Republican caucuses are on Tuesday and that's supposed to be a good state for Bush. I think he has too much money and too big of an organization to not give it one more try.

2. Trump's ceiling.  A few days ago it looked like Trump was going to beat his New Hampshire mark of 35 percent. But his trend has been downward for a few days and I think a more realistic goal is 30 percent.

3. Trump's margin of victory.  If Trump wins by 10 points or more, he is likely to get all 50 SC delegates. I suspect Cruz will win at least one congressional district which would net him 3 delegates and maybe Rubio will come on strong to win 3 also.  The over/'under for Trump to have a truly successful night is 44 delegates.

4. How far does Jeb fall?  For almost 20 years the word on him was that it's such a shame he lost his first run for governor. If he had won in 1992, he would have had seniority over his brother and been the nominee/president in 2000. The past few weeks have exposed that myth. He lost in 1992 because he's a lousy politician. If he had won, then John McCain probably would have beat him in the 2000 primaries.

He can not do better than a distant 4th place tonight. The honorable thing would be to bow out immediately. But much like his older brother, he's not big on exit plans and I expect him to soldier on through Super Tuesday at least. If he doesn't, it's because the party bigwigs have figured out that his candidacy can only help Trump and hurt them.

5. How many dead-enders vote for Carson?  I think he has a rump of supporters who just feel good about voting for him.  This demographic can probably keep him in the mid single digits for the foreseeable future and the institutional party is probably okay with that because Cruz is the main person hurt by that.

6. Who wins Nevada for the Democrats?  Polling has been all but impossible in this race so my prediction is that Hillary's organizational ties out muscle any youthful enthusiasm on Bernie's side. If Hillary exceeds 52% of the vote, she can call it a good night. If not, Bernie will declare a tie to be a victory.  Official Predictions:  Hillary 52.2%, Bernie 47.8%

Two Sudden Developments, Very Little Movement

Two significant news stories have transpired since I wrote yesterday's post about the state of the race. The first is the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scali and the other is the descent of the Republican debate in South Carolina into WWE levels of chaos at times.

I.  The Death of Scalia: Which Poison with the GOP Pick?.

The sudden passing of Justice Scalia will change the composition of the court. The most likely outcome is that President Obama will name a replacement, that replacement will get confirmed and he or she will take the bench sometime this summer.  But of course the Republican party is taking another approach. They claim that the vacancy should be filled not by the current president but by the next one.  I may be overestimating them, but I think this is a bluff.  Let's consider both scenarios.

A. Obama Names the Next Justice.
Barack Obama will nominate a judge in the next few weeks.  He will do so knowing that the senate is controlled by the Republicans and that the Republicans are trying to run out the clock on the last year of his presidency. So he will have to pick someone that is mainstream. He will be tempted to choose someone who Republicans will look silly for attempting to block.

The first name to become a focus of speculation is Judge Sri Srinivasan.  He would be an interesting tactical choice for President Obama.  First, he clerked for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a Reagan appointee. Secondly he was confirmed to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals by the Senate in 2012 by a vote of 97-0. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were both among the senators who voted for him. Lastly, he would be the first Indian justice on the Supreme Court. Another similarly situated contender is Judge Jane Kelley. She was a classmate of the President at Harvard Law School and was unanimously voted to the 8th circuit judge, 96-0 to 2013. Jane Kelly is also an Iowan which could make the decision to not hearings thorny for the Judiciary chair, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for obvious reasons.

So Barack Obama will soon have the ability to put forth a centrist judge with impeccable credentials who very recently sailed through the Senate on unanimous confirmation votes.  This candidate might be a minority or female.   There will be enormous pressure on the Republicans to at least hold hearings. (If only because the media loves these hearings and so do senators. There's no better way to get face time on the nightly news.)  If the hearings fail to produce any bomb shells from the nominee's past, then it will be hard for the senate to vote them down without looking like partisan hacks.  But that might be a price they are willing to pay.

B. The GOP Obstructs the Nominee.

The GOP will see things quite differently. Their presidential candidates all agreed that no vote should take place on the very principled reason that the President is in his last year and they do not like him. The moderator of last night's debate had to correct Ted Cruz' false claim that it had been 80 years since a Supreme Court Justice was confirmed in an election year. (Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in February, 1988.)  Mitch McConnell the senate majority leader quickly said that no vote should be held this year.

Liberals on social media erupted in derision. This morning's Sunday news shows were filled with Democrats mocking the idea and warning about a 15 or 16 month vacancy on the court. But the Republicans are probably just bluffing. Unlike a lot of Democrats they know that the best way to start a negotiation is by being completely unreasonable and obstinate. That way when they eventually do what they pretty much had to do anyway, they look like they are being magnanimous.

If the Republicans are serious about obstructing this nomination than they will put the issue right at the heart of the campaign. The Democratic nominee will have a brown and or female face to point to and say "See, the Republicans just want to obstruct. They can not be reasoned with. And oh yeah, their real goal is to overturn Roe vs. Wade.  Do you want that?"

This is a political loser for them. It will all but guarantee a democratic win and might just cost them the senate. Then 11 months from now President Clinton, Sanders or Warren can appoint almost anyone and get it through the Senate.

So my prediction is this: Obama nominates a candidate the first week of March. The GOP huffs and puffs about holding hearings, but they will give in on that when the politics of this become clearer. They will still try to slow walk it and maybe get to the August recess without a vote but when the Supreme Court begins its new term in October, there will be nine judges on it and William Kennedy's reign as the 2nd most important person on Earth will officially be over.

II.  WWE Winter Slam.

Last night's Republican debate in Greenville, SC was a  half dozen men mostly screaming at each other with one nearly silent black guy off to the side and one obnoxious accent from Queens dominating the proceedings.  This was a much more fitting to tribute to Antonin Scalia than the moment of silence they held to open the night's events.

The most significant line of attack was, of course from Donald Trump. He openly accused George W. Bush of lying about WMD in Iraq and of failing to keep America safe on 9/11. These are not controversial thoughts in most places, but the room was packed with Rubio and Bush supporters who loudly booed him.  This of course gave him the best chance to do his Bobby the Brain Hennan act and insult the crowd for being a bunch of dullards in the pocket of his rivals.

I think his real motivation was to boost up Jeb Bush as the expense of Ted Cruz.  Trump knows he's going to win SC and he wants to run up the score on the most likely 2nd place finisher. As for Cruz he got baited into speaking Spanish by Marco Rubio in the one moment that suggested maybe Rubio learned something from his disaster in New Hampshire. (For the rest of the night Rubio kept repeating his stupid scripted talking points.  I am not optimistic about his future this year.)

John Kasich might be the biggest beneficiary of it all.  He stayed above the fray and coolly pointed out how silly the others were.  Jeb couldn't help but take some offense at things said about his family. That will earn him some sympathy but not much in the way of actual votes.

The predictions markets didn't move that much.  Trump and Rubio each gained 2 points, which came at the expense of Cruz who lost 4.  Kasich went from 2 to 3 percent, which was offset by Bush sliding from 12 to 11 percent.

Updated Two-Step Predict Wise Market.
(Election Column reflects the party's chance of winning the election. The "President" column multiplies their shot at the nomination by their party's chance of winning the general election.)

The lower half of the chart lists the probabilities of the general election match-ups. (From Clinton vs. Trump, which is 41% chance to Sanders vs. Kasich, which is 200 to 1 shot at the moment.)

Candidate	Nomination	Election	President
Clinton	83.0%	61.0%	50.6%
Trump	49.0%	39.0%	19.1%
Sanders	17.0%	61.0%	10.4%
Rubio	24.0%	39.0%	9.4%
Cruz	12.0%	39.0%	4.7%
Bush	11.0%	39.0%	4.3%
Kasich	3.0%	39.0%	1.2%
Match-up	Probabilities
Clinton	Trump	40.7%
Clinton	Rubio	19.9%
Sanders	Trump	8.3%
Sanders	Rubio	4.1%
Clinton	Cruz	10.0%
Sanders	Cruz	2.0%
Clinton	Bush	9.1%
Sanders	Bush	1.9%
Clinton	Kasich	2.5%
Sanders	Kasich	0.5%

Good News, Hillary (I Think)

Only three presidents have been elected without benefit of having won the New Hampshire primary: Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.  So the only three presidents to pull of this feat are the last three presidents. It looks very likely that that streak will run to four now that the 2016 New Hampshire Primaries were won by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.


I.  The Big Picture: Hillary is More Likely Than Not to be the Next President.

Bernie beat Hillary lost by 22 points.  That is an ass-whopping and coming off of their virtual tie in Iowa, there is much reason for Sanders to be encouraged.  The next states to vote for the Democrats are Nevada, which should be very close and South Carolina, which Hillary is expected to win comfortably. The early states are likely to result in two ties and two blowouts in opposite directions.

Hillary is likely to survive that.  The predictions market at predictwise.com gives here an 82% chance of being the nominee. And they give the Democratic nominee a 61% chance of winning the general election.  If you multiply those possibilities, she has a 50.002% chance of being the next elected president of the United States.

I like her chances even better than that. The theory of my 2016 posts has been that the prediction markets are underestimating the Democrats' prospects.  Instead of being a 60% favorite, I think the Democratic nominee should be more like a 2 to 1 favorite at about 66%.  I think the market is about right on her being the nominee, so .82 *. 67 is right about 55 percent. But a lot has to happen before then and we have two very interesting races unfolding for the weeks and months ahead.

So here's some fun with math.  Here are the probabilities of each candidate becoming president, based solely on the two prediction markets on predictwise.com:

Clinton 51%, Trump 22%, Sanders 10%, Rubio 9% Cruz 6%, Bush 5%, Kasich 1%.

And here are the most likely candidate match-ups for the general election:

Match-up Probability	Clinton	Sanders
Trump vs.....	39.0%	8.0%
Rubio  vs....	18.3%	3.7%
Cruz    vs....	13.3%	2.7%
Bush	10.0%	2.0%
Kasich	1.7%	0.3%

II.   The GOP State of the Race.

Trump dominated New Hampshire. Before the primary I was not sure if he could get over 30% of the vote. He blew that away with 35.3%.  He more than doubled his nearest competitor, John Kasich. Kasich had a great night too, but only got 16% of the vote in a state that he campaigned in almost full time. Ted Cruz also had reason to be happy with a third place finish.

Perhaps the most significant result is that Jeb Bush beat out Marco Rubio for 4th place by just over 1,000 votes. I don't think Jeb would have dropped out if he finished 5th, but the 5th place finish cemented the image of Rubio coming off the rails because of his terrible debate performance.

South Carolina will decide a lot for the Republicans. Trump is very likely to win and that will mean that his appeal is not just a quirk of New Hampshire. Cruz seems like a lock to finish second, but if Rubio somehow passes him, then the narrative will be that he overcame his New Hampshire slip up. He will then head into Nevada and Super Tuesday with some momentum.

But Jeb Bush is the most interesting story.  He did terribly in Iowa and middling in New Hampshire. Between the two states he has received less than nine percent of the votes. But he is doubling-down on this effort and has recruited his brother George W. Bush to record commercials and campaign for him. This is a classic short-term decision based on W's inexplicably high approval ratings among South Carolina Republican voters.  So they seem to think he can be of help in the SC primary. But who is really persuaded by learning that a candidate is supported by his sibling?  And if Bush somehow does well enough in SC to continue his campaign and be nominated, those commercials will just be used against him by the Democrats. So yes, a Bush has once again committed to a strategy without contemplating an exit strategy.


III.  My Updated Forecast.

I remain bullish on Rubio, relative to the predictions market.  But I think this has now become a pretty close race between Trump, Cruz and Rubio.  Kasich is also in better shape because I think he benefits from Rubio's stumble.  I give Bush a 5% chance mostly because he has the resources to compete.

This chart lists some relevant numbers for the Republican race. The IA&NH column reflects the share of each candidate's votes among the remaining candidates. (Votes for Paul, Huckabee, etc are not included in the math.)  The Predictwise column is their current marketshare to be the nominee.  The last two columns refer to my personal forecast. The yellow column reflects where it was before New Hampshire and the orange is my current forecast.

New Hampshire Forecast

After a three month break from blogging about the Republican race I updated my forecast last night just as the GOP debate was getting underway.  Nothing in the debate has caused me to adjust that latest prediction.  Rubio had a bad night but I don't think it will do any long term damage to him. He remains the favorite to be nominated.

The New Hampshire dynamic is sort of odd. Everyone knows the winner will be Donald Trump. The most intriguing questions are what percentage of the vote he will get, who the other top candidates from Iowa will do and who will emerge as the establishment alternative to all three of them. The most likely outcome is that Trump will win, and the 2nd through 7th spot will be a jumbled mix of establishment types, Rubio and Cruz.  Probably four or five of those six candidates will be bunched within a few points of each other.  So I'm going to focus on a range of possibilities.

What we know:
1. Trump will finish first.  If he doesn't, then his campaign is in free fall and he will quit by Wednesday.
2. Gilmore will finish 9th.
3. Fiorina will finish 8th.  If she somehow sneaks up to 7th, then Ben Carson really crashed hard.
4. Carson will finish 7th.  It's more and more obvious that he's not serious about winning and he's not qualified and he's not always lucid.  He will stick around for SC, if only to spite Ted Cruz for his dirty Iowa tricks.

What I'm Pretty Sure of:
1. Rubio and Cruz will be in the middle of the pack. If either of them comes 2nd, they will rightly declare victory. Short of that, the goal is to beat the other one> I give Rubio the inside track there. I think he's good for 3rd place at least and Cruz will probably not do better than 4th.
2.  Kasich might finish 2nd, and that would change the race. If Kasich finishes second, there are definitely four viable candidates heading to South Carolina. If he narrowly beats out Rubio for 2nd, then the conventional wisdom will be that the debate put him over the top.
3. Jeb will be in the middle of the pack but won't drop out. He could finish as bad as sixth place so he can craft anything higher than that as a semi-victory.  I think he presses on to SC now matter what and take the triple bank shot of hoping that his family name, quasi-southern background and the support of Lindsey Graham are enough to make him a contender there.

What We'll Learn on Tuesday Night.
1. Christie is probably toast.  If he finishes 5th or 6th, he will probably drop out. He finished 8th in Iowa and doesn't seem likely to do well in SC. But if he's top four in NH, he will try to soldier on as the establishment alternative.
2. Will Carson benefit from a Cruz backlash?  If he finishes higher than 7th it probably means that Cruz cratered and a lot of that will be blamed on the stunt that Cruz pulled in Iowa.
3. How big will Trump's win be?  Anything over 30% is big news. It means there is a very really swath of the party that buys his message and that he can compete anywhere that's not too heavily evangelical.

So my official predictions are this: Trump wins with 31%. Kasich and Rubio in a virtual tie (but with slightly more votes for Kasich than Rubio) for second at 16% ahead of Cruz in 4th and Bush in 5th.  Christie gets about 7% for sixth place and he bows out by Thursday. Carson gets around 5% of dead enders, Fiorina 3% and Gilmore (rounding up) gets 1%.

Oh yeah, the Democrats.
Bernie will win.  I'll put my official prediction at 56-44.  If it's much bigger than that, there will be panic in Clintonville.

Scoreboard.
In some ways, vote share is a bigger deal tomorrow night than the order in which the candidates finish. Both winners are all but certain. Here are the numbers to watch for:

1. Can Trump get over 30%
2. Can Rubio get close to 20%
3. Can Bernie approach 60%

Whoever hits the number above with the most to spare will be the biggest story of the night.  Other important numbers:

1. Whoever finishes last among Kasich, Christie and Bush is toast. If that person is Christie, he'll drop out. Bush will stick around for SC and Kasich probably will try to hang on for Super Tuesday though.
2. Any candidate who fails to break double digits tomorrow night is in trouble.
3. Cruz can treat 4th as a victory if he gets there.
4. Hillary will need to spin her defeat someway.  I remember Carville's line from 1992 was that Clinton won the Primary if you didn't count the counties that share a border with Paul Tsongas' home state of Massachusetts. Someone is juking the expected stats to come up with a new version of that silver lining.

Nine Candidates, 5 Losers, 5 Possibilities (Updated GOP Handicap)

       Some endorsement, Rick.

Where does the time go?  I haven't blogged about the Republican race in almost three months.  What's most remarkable is how little has happened in that time. Of course there's been a steady stream of gossip and gaffes but the only changes have been the elimination of candidates who were never going to win the nomination.  (For the record, I thought Huckabee and Santorum might over perform in Iowa, but they very much did not and now they are gone.)

What we have left is nine candidates that are pretty easily divided into three tiers of three candidates. Each candidate is listed by their chance of winning the nomination. (With the change from December in parenthesis.)

I. Three Contenders.
1. Marco Rubio 55%. (Up 1 from 54%).
The establishment has clearly rallied to him.  He now has the most significant nomination in the field, although as the video above shows they haven't all been very helpful. Most impressively he got the media to believe that his third place finish in Iowa was somehow a bigger story than Ted Cruz winning or Trump coming second.  If he comes 2nd in NH, the establishment will do black flips to line up behind him.

2.. Donald Trump 20% (Up 3 from 17%).
Six months ago a 2nd place finish in Iowa would have seemed like an unbelievable accomplishment. But he underperformed slightly and I do think there's something to the idea that he has a ceiling for how many people are willing to vote for him.  He will win New Hampshire, but the most important number will be what percentage of the vote he gets.  If he gets under 30% in a state that is his best chance for a win will not be a good sign.


3. Ted Cruz 15% (Down 2 from 17%)
Winning Iowa should be a boost but it has become very clear in the last few months that the establishment doesn't merely dislike him, they loathe him and they worry about him becoming the face of their party.  If he comes in the top three in NH and wins South Carolina, then he will bill be around for months.  But NH has a history of rebuking the Iowa winner and I thin he is going to be somewhere in the middle of the pack on Tuesday.

II. Three Middlers.
4. John Kasich  5% (Up 4 from 1%)
I've always been a little bullish on Kasich.  I think he's the best candidate for the GOP because he will carry Ohio and it will be harder for the Democratic nominee to portray him as an extremist.  He has placed all of his chips on New Hampshire.  If he doesn't finish 2nd or 3rd, then he will probably drop out.  But a second place finish will be an enormous boost to his campaign and it would probably prevent the rest of the establishment from rushing to endorse Rubio. He also has a winner take all primary in Ohio that has 99 winner-take-all delegates waiting to be won by someone. He's a long shot, but he has a chance of being the big story on Wednesday morning.

5. Jeb Bush 1% (Down 1 from 1%)
I never thought I could feel sorry for a member of the Bush clan but the repudiation of this man's campaign is painful to any observer. He is much smarter than George W. Bush and it must be very frustrating to know that he will never be the political equal of his idiot older brother, but that's life.

6. Chris Christie 0% (Push).
His greatest contribution to the race is the above video.  His second best contribution would be to do poorly on Tuesday and get the hell out of the race.  He's an abrasive jerk but even in a year of abrasive jerks, I am glad to watch him flame out.

III. Three Also-Rans.
7. Carly Fiorina: I think the GOP made a mistake by excluding her from the last debate but I for one am glad to never have to hear her voice again.  She might have been a decent stealth VP candidate, but her grating style and her willingness to lie about anything under the sun are disqualifiers. She will not be missed.

8. Ben Carson: I'm still not sure if he ran for President because he wanted to win or because he wanted to make money by elevating his public profile.  Either way, he will not be president. But I think he is angry at Ted Cruz' stunt in Iowa and that might make him hang around a little longer to split the evangelical vote. If that tips the nomination away from Cruz, the party will be grateful to him.

9.  Jim Gilmore. Twelve votes in Iowa, surely hundreds to come in New Hampshire.

New Hampshire predictions.
Trump will win.  I think he will get about 32%.  If Rubio comes second, he heads south as the heavy favorite. If Kasich comes 2nd, the race will be re-oriented.  Cruz just needs third place.

The upshot of NH will be that four candidates will be left: Trump, Rubio, Cruz and whoever does best among Bush, Kasich and Christie. I think Bush and Carson will stay in, no matter how poorly they do in NH.  SC should be a good state for them. Christie will drop out unless he finishes in the top four.  I hope that Fiorina also drops out, but she probably doesn't have much else to do with her days so maybe she'll hang around for awhile.

Whoever wins SC and or NV will be very strong going into Super Tuesday. But I think those states will not be won by the same person and mostly likely there will be three or four candidates winning states well into the spring months.  I think a brokered convention is a real possibility.  If you add up the probabilities of the candidates above you get 96%.  I'm leaving a little wriggle room for a brokered convention that turns to a consensus compromise candidate that all remaining camps can live with. Right now the only name that I can think of filling that role is Mitt Romney.

Five possible nominees, in order:  Rubio, Trump, Cruz, Kasich and Romney.