Jim Gilmore is out, and both of his supporters are said to be heartbroken: Jim Gilmore suspends his 2016 GOP presidential campaign
I don’t buy it. Rubio has always seemed to me to be seriously inexperienced and in over his head. The debate performance and his concession speech in NH just reinforce how unprepared he is at this point in time to be President. He reeks of panic and desperation the higher the stakes get and I honestly was waiting for him to burst into tears during his concession speech the other night.
And the sense he is robotic and simply regurgitating previously digested talking points when he speaks is not going away any time soon.
Trump and Cruz have won primaries, but they don’t have much of a lead in delegates. 17 for Trump, 11 for Cruz, 10 for Rubio, 5 for Kaisch, 4 for Bush, 3 for Carson, and a few more with 1. If the support for the establishment lane coalesced they would be tied or even leading trump.
Rubio, assuming he’s the establishment guy, has an enormous advantage because Flordia is winner take all. In a proportional primary, which most states are, winning doesn’t mean that much if the margin is low. The net is tiny. Cruz got 8 delegates in Iowa while Rubio and Trump got 7. That’s essentially a meaningless difference. Whoever wins Florida gets 99 delegates and everyone else gets 0. That’s huge and Florida’s impact on the delegate count will (probably) be more important than all other previous primaries combined.
Delegate counts are pretty much meaningless at this point. What the early primaries are about is getting a real definition of how much support each candidate has and of what sort, and a sense of what their real prospects are.
And in the Establishment lane, these guys are pretty much defined. Bush is a weenie, Rubio’s a kid who’s in way over his head who can only repeat stock phrases, and Kasich has little appeal beyond what’s left of the GOP’s moderate wing.
I saw a header somewhere yesterday, “The Establishment lane is the kiddie table,” and it rings true, doesn’t it?
And we have some South Carolina polls!
One, commissioned by the SC House GOP Caucus, conducted Thursday and Friday, with a sample size of 1200 LV’s, has Trump 35, Cruz 16, Bush and Rubio 13, Kasich 9, Carson 5.
The other, by Opinion Savvy, was conducted Wednesday and Thursday, 779 LV’s, Trump 36, Cruz 20, Rubio 15, Bush 11, Kasich 9, Carson 5.
Both polls are seeing pretty much the same thing, so even absent any idea of how reputable the pollsters in question are, their mutual reinforcement suggests that they’re seeing what’s actually there.
I love those numbers. There’s no way any of the three remaining Establishment lane candidates are going to conclude from them that he’s the one who should throw in the towel so that the others can succeed.
I love the smell of confusion among my enemies in the morning.
It’s a little more complicated than that. Bush, despite his weenie image, is running an intensely negative campaign against his opponents. I figured it was just his sense of entitlement leading him to be willing to destroy the party’s chances of regaining the White House unless he’s the nominee(and that is a part of it), but it actually might be working. There’s now a path to the nomination for him.
Rubio is actually throwing caution to the wind now and ignoring his script and campaigning very aggressively. So it’s sink or swim for him. I think he actually does have the talent to “let Rubio be Rubio” and he was constricted by a too conservative campaign strategy of just sort of waiting around for the field to winnow. Well, now the field is winnowing and he could be the next to go.
Kasich is following a very unusual strategy of trying to just accumulate delegates. He’s committed to competing until Ohio and plans to make a big push in Michigan. The way the race is structured right now, Kasich could have more delegates than any other establishment candidate after Mar. 15, although he’ll still trail Cruz and Trump. But by then, it might be Cruz-Trump-Kasich, in which case pretty much every reasonable Republican has only one option left.
But do the Democrats have the ability to take in so many refugees?
Kasich isn’t going to make it to Ohio. He’s going to be done in by the SEC primary. The Marcobot lost his mojo and isn’t getting it back. Toto pulled back the curtain and we see very little man behind the machine. That leaves us with Bush, Cruz, and Trump. The masses (or them asses, if you prefer) have spoken. They want Trump, and Trump they shall have.
Kasich is committed to staying in until Mar. 15 no matter what. He expects to do badly in the SEC primary(although he could win a state like Vermont, which I believe votes on the same day), so that’s not going to force him out. He has no reason to leave at this point until Bush-Rubio is settled in Florida. Only one of those candidates comes out of Florida, and that’s Kasich’s establishment lane opponent in Michigan and Ohio.
No politician ever admits that he’s about to step out of the race. Your party has Trump and is stuck with Trump and is going to get thumped. Not to worry, I’m sure they’ve already booked a hotel conference room for next Jan 20 to plan their strategy of opposing every move President Clinton will want to make.
Luxembourg is next to go,
and who knows, maybe Monaco… 
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*At most *one of those candidates comes out of Florida. Watch Trump take Florida’s entire haul of delegates with 35% of the vote. Winner-take-all is going to give Trump a big boost - Ohio is also WTA.
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Given the unidirectionality of time, the Florida outcome can’t determine who Kasich’s establishment-lane opponent in Michigan and Ohio will be. Florida votes on March 15, as does Ohio; Michigan is a week earlier, March 8. (Primary calendar.)
That’s the problem with you. Facts.
That and thinking small!
Bolding mine. I think you’re on to something here. But probably not quite the same thing you’re thinking.
Imagine you (any you) are an Establishment Republican, be that as a candidate, an RNC insider, an elected official at any level, or a voter. And you’re a thoughtful character; one able to play chess, not just checkers. Or tic-tac-toe!
Here are two likely scenarios. Pick your preferred outcome.
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Trump gains the nomination and wins the general. As current polls predict, there is a decent R majority in Congress. Trump craziness dominates the next 4 years headlines and deeply tarnishes the R brand, perhaps even leading to the formation of a Peronist Trump party splitting the Rs along the obvious ideological fissure.
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Trump gains the nomination and loses the general. As current polls predict, there is a decent R majority in Congress. Hillary proves generally adequate in the executive role, avoiding major crises with long-term adverse consequences for the US. Screw-ups happen, but no more than in a typical presidency.
Legislatively, the R Congress successfully repeats its 2012-2016 performance and limits the damage to the R agenda to just nibbles around the edges, plus 4 years more delay.
The Rs enter the 2020 race after 12 years of arguably ineffectual D presidencies and a D field with a tired old woman incumbent and maybe some revolutionaries.
If I’m one of those thinking Republicans I strongly prefer scenario 2. The Rs who might not are current candidates who’ll age out by 2020, and the non-thinking Rs. Jeb! and his inner circle are neither of those things.
So Jeb! and others like him are going for broke. They’d rather Hillary win than Trump. So if they play crabs-in-a-bucket, it doesn’t really harm their long term interests. And who knows; they might be the crab that escapes over the bucket lip.
Separate related point:
In every primary season with a crowded field there is the inevitable tension between winning the nomination by sliming your opponents versus winning the general by extolling your party’s brand and people.
The argument that negative primary season campaigning is ultimately self-defeating is made every 4 years. And yet it occurs every 4 years. IMO that’s a clue the argument, though logical sounding, isn’t valid in the real world.
One problem for all of the Establishment lane candidates is that most of the states that aren’t WTA have qualifying thresholds: if you don’t get 10% or 15% or 20% of the vote, depending on the state, you come away empty-handed. So if you have a state that allocates proportionally statewide with a 10% or 15% cutoff where three Establishment candidates come in at 15%, 9%, and 8%, while Trump and Cruz get 38% and 30% of the vote, then Trump gets 46% of the delegates, Cruz gets 36%, and the Establishment leader gets 18%, while the other two get nothing. But if the cutoff is 20%, then Trump and Cruz are the only ones who get delegates.
That will kick in in a big way on March 1. I look forward to the anguished screams of operatives for the Establishment lane candidates when they realize how many states their guys have missed thresholds in.
Yes, I’m wicked. Have I mentioned that I’m enjoying the hell out of this primary season? 
Honest question, is he actually going to accumulate delgates though? I ask because while the States before March 15th are proportional some of them have pretty high % thresholds. March 1st: Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, and Vermont all have a 20% threshold for getting delegates. Arkansas and Oklahoma are 15%. Some others have 10-13%. ISTM, a lot of the “establishment lane” candidates are going to be effectively shut out of these primaries.
Ninja’d ya. 
South Carolina should be the most hostile state for him and he’s currently at 9%, and that’s just the first poll. He might not have peaked yet. But if he does actually score delegates in SC, he probably scores them in other Super Tuesday states as well.
:shakes tiny fist:
Have you looked at the delegate rules for South Carolina? It’s actually pretty unproportional for a proportional State. 10% might not get you anything. As I understand it, the Statewide winner gets 29, and then each of the 7 districts hands out their 3 delegates proportionally.
So in my inexpert reckoning, if Trump can manage around 30% across all districts (polling at 36% right now) he’s walking away with at least 36 of the 50 delegates. If Cruz maintains a solid second (polling 20%) across all districts then he’s taking 7. That leaves at most 7 to divide up amongst the establishment with Kasich at the back of that middle pack.
That’s mostly right, AFAICT. 29 state-level delegates that are WTA at the state level, and each of the 7 CDs has 3 delegates, but they’re WTA, not proportional, based on the vote within the CD.
Per Frontloading HQ or you can go to the SC GOP rules (scroll down to p.33 at the link).
So SC isn’t quite WTA overall, but it’s pretty close, and can wind up that way depending on how things break at the district level.
That was further into the weeds than I’d intended to go, but the weeds for SC and other upcoming primaries and caucuses are going to be very important in the coming weeks. So it was worth the dive, I think.
ETA: For example, if Trump wins statewide, he’ll likely win most if not all CDs as well. So if he wins the state and 5 CDs, he gets 44 delegates. And the winners of the other two get 3 each. Everyone else? Bupkis.
Yeah I had just double checked the SC GOP rules. I was just looking up if there was a threshold% for SC and went down the rabbit hole. Lol
You’re right. The districts are each WTA. My mistake. So Kasich is screwed there.