As we wait for the returns to come in from Michigan and other points of interest, I thought I might conduct a provisional pundit audit, revisit the most detailed of my various “it won’t be Trump” predictions, and compare what I foresaw to what’s actually transpired. Here, from early January, was my description of Trump’s likely path to defeat if he didn’t collapse early (as, obviously, he hasn’t):

Yes, Trump leads all the national polls, and he keeps busting through what look like ceilings. But … he doesn’t lead in Iowa, and his ceiling there looks very stable: He’s been hovering around 25 percent since September, and he’s never broken 30 percent. He does lead in New Hampshire, but there, too, his poll numbers have been relatively flat since August, and he tops out around 30 percent. Likewise South Carolina, where his polling has hovered in the 30 percent to 35 percent range since he grabbed the spotlight last summer. There is no credible scenario in which a consistent 30 percent of the vote will deliver the delegates required to be the Republican nominee. So for Trump to lose, he doesn’t actually have to collapse; he just has to fail to expand his support. And in the states where candidates are actually campaigning, voters are paying the most attention, and the polling screens for likely voters are tightening, he hasn’t expanded his support meaningfully since he first climbed into the lead. Foolish pundit that I may be, I don’t think he will. Instead, I think that Ted Cruz will continue to consolidate evangelicals as Ben Carson fades, and someone (probably Marco Rubio) will eventually consolidate the moderate-conservative vote — which is currently splintered among five candidates in New Hampshire, but which if it were consolidated would very easily beat Trump’s total in that state. At which point — again, assuming that Trump doesn’t fade or collapse — we’ll have a three-way race, one in which the Donald could still win some states, could still pile up delegates, could even have a chance of pushing the race all the way to the convention — but would not, could not, emerge as the nominee.

So: As a description of Trump’s trajectory alone, this still seems pretty close to right, and closer to what’s actually happened than the various “Trump is inevitable!!” arguments that started cropping up after a few national polls showed him in the forties. There was a lot of talk (including from Trump himself) about how he would take a big chunk of Chris Christie voters and Jeb Bush voters and Ben Carson voters when each of them dropped out; so far that simply hasn’t happened. And if I had made a list back in January of the forces that I thought would likely keep Trump from breaking through his ceiling, it would have mapped pretty well onto what’s actually happened: I wouldn’t have specifically predicted the KKK business and the “bragging about his endowment” moment, but they’re the kind of things you could see that Trump was prone to, and everything else (his weak ground game, his shift to defense in the debates, the emergence of a vocal #neverTrump coalition, the emergence — at last — of anti-Trump ad campaigns) was relatively predictable two months ago.

However, I did underestimate Trump’s ceiling in a multi-candidate race, pegging it around 30 percent rather the 33-34 percent he’s actually been winning. That’s made a modest but important difference, since if his average were just a few points lower he would have lost Virginia to Rubio, Arkansas to Cruz, Vermont to Kasich, and South Carolina might have been a lot tighter. In which case the delegate count wouldn’t be that different, but the overall narrative might be.

Still, the difference between 30 percent and 33 percent isn’t that large — within the pundit’s margin of error, you might say. What I really got wrong was my too-confident prediction that we’d have a three-man field at this point, and the fact that we have a four-man race instead is what’s really kept Trump’s path to the nomination open. If the field had been winnowed down to Trump, Cruz and Rubio by Super Tuesday, Rubio would have won Virginia, cleared more delegate thresholds, and possibly won Vermont as well, while Cruz might have pulled out Arkansas and maybe even Kentucky and also would have won more delegates overall. If the field had been winnowed down to Trump, Cruz and Kasich, Cruz would have swept up a lot of Rubio voters and done much better across the South, while Kasich would have won Vermont, competed more strongly in Virginia, and would probably be poised to beat Trump outright in states like Michigan and Illinois. In either scenario, Trump would have a smaller delegate lead or none at all, a smaller chance of winning Florida and Ohio, and no practical chance of coming out with 1,237 delegates — and instead of talking about the desperate race to stop the Donald, we’d probably be talking about a race between the two not-Trumps to build a clear delegate lead for the convention.

So clearly I should have given more weight to the four-man pileup possibility, and hedged a little more on my “no credible scenario” analysis. What I didn’t adequately anticipate was what you might call the elasticity of each of the not-Trump candidates — their mix of weakness and resilience, their failure to launch and failure to collapse.

For instance, I thought that if Rubio did well in Iowa it would push him above Kasich and Jeb Bush in New Hampshire, which could have happened but didn’t because of his debate performance … but then despite that disaster he rebounded in South Carolina to an extent that kept him looking relatively strong through Super Tuesday … only to collapse again the following week, and into this one. (We’ll find out in Florida if he has one more bounce-back in him.)

Or again, I thought (and wrote, at the time) that Ted Cruz’s Iowa victory would enable him to consolidate the Huckabee-esque share of the vote he would need to win a lot of Southern states, which would have left him as the delegate leader had it happened … but then he didn’t, he flopped in South Carolina, bled support to Rubio and Trump and only won in Oklahoma and Texas, which narrowed his path to a delegate majority and seemed to leave him with a weak hand and an unfavorable map … but then he bounced back with big wins in Maine and Kansas that have left him in a relatively strong position once again (albeit much weaker than he might have reasonably hoped).

Or finally, I thought that Kasich would either get a surge out of his New Hampshire showing and start doing really well in states like Massachusetts and Minnesota and Maine or (more plausibly) that he would simply disappear from the campaign after losing state after state after state by double digits. But instead, despite having finished higher than fourth in only three out of twenty-one contests, he has taken advantage of Rubio’s (second) collapse to challenge in Michigan and Illinois in addition to his last bastion of Ohio.

This weird up and down (and up and … down?) is part of why, reacting to Super Tuesday, I described Trump as having “the devil’s luck.” In fairness such luck is not-infrequently part of a successful campaign: To pick a recent Republican example, John McCain’s path to the nomination in 2008 involved a series of fortuitous events (the rise of Mike Huckabee, the timely persistence of Fred Thompson, the weird campaign of Rudy Giuliani) that enabled him to come back from the political dead, win through the early primaries with a Trump-like share of the vote, and then benefit from winner-take-all rules to consolidate thereafter. But still, for Trump to win through would require a far more fortuitous series of events — a McCain-style sequence, except twice over and against far fiercer opposition.

Which is not impossible, since we’ve clearly come part of the necessary distance. And yet I still do not believe it will happen. After Florida and Ohio we’ll either finally have a three-man field (because Rubio will have lost), or we’ll finally have a two-man field (because Rubio and Kasich will have lost), or Rubio and Kasich will both have won and Trump will be badly wounded by their victories … and all three of those scenarios, in different ways, seem likely to keep the current delegate leader from reaching 1,237. So although I’ve wavered, and entertained other possibilities, right now I still, still think we’re headed to a contested convention where (for reasons that would take a separate post to explain) Trump is very unlikely to prevail.

And so, a few hours before another round of voting scrambles all our prognostications anew, I’ll stick with my original, if then too-confident prediction: Despite all the evidence that fortune favors him, Donald Trump will not be the Republican nominee.