Today’s Republican Nevada caucuses offer Rubio a chance to do something unusual by winning a race:

“Rubio needs to win somewhere,” Michael Bowers, a professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. “He cannot continue to declare victory when he’s coming in second or third. Nevada could be a good state for him to start doing that.”

A few months ago, the Rubio campaign was being touted as having “the most organized and impressive operation of the Republican field.” Now that it has been reduced to spinning second and third-place finishes as triumphs, the campaign doesn’t want anyone to think that Rubio should or must win Nevada. Then again, no one would expect that to happen since he lags in third in every poll that has been conducted in the state. According to the RCP average, Rubio trails Trump by 20 points and remains four points behind Cruz.

Before we go on, a few words about polling in Nevada. Nevada’s caucuses are infamously difficult to poll, and polling there has been very inaccurate in the past. There are reports that none of the campaigns has a clear picture of what’s going to happen. Caucuses in Nevada are still new enough to the state and the state party is in such disarray that it isn’t even guaranteed that they will be run well:

Republican campaigns and state operatives point to a number of factors creating the cloud of confusion: a cash-poor state party in disarray, a public unaccustomed to the caucus process and a state that’s notoriously difficult to poll. Nevada doesn’t have a lot of experience running caucuses — the state picked up its first-in-the-West status in 2008, but it has yet to run smoothly, and some campaigns are bracing for possible chaos again.

FiveThirtyEight’s Clare Malone notes that polling in Nevada has been unreliable for years:

For starters, when it comes to surveying public opinion, Nevada is still very much the Wild West, and pollsters may be unwilling to gamble their reputations on the state: Nevada is among the hardest places to poll in the nation, with a spotty track record to prove it. Going into the 2008 Republican caucuses, the polling average gave Mitt Romney just a 5-point advantage over John McCain; Romney ended up winning by 38 points. In 2010 when Republican Sharron Angle challenged Harry Reid, then Senate majority leader, for his seat, the polling average showed her beating the incumbent by a 3-point margin; she lost to Reid by nearly 6 points.

It would be safe to assume that Trump will fall short of his polling in Nevada just as he did in Iowa. His results in primaries have tracked closely with his poll numbers, but we shouldn’t assume the same about caucuses. Caucuses reward campaign organization, which Cruz is supposed to have and Trump mostly doesn’t. Rubio’s campaign is reportedly the best-organized of all, and we’ll see if that claim is borne out.

Will superior organization be enough to deliver a victory to one of the other two? We won’t know until later today. Trump has a large enough lead that he should win easily if the polls are even close to being right. Three consecutive Trump wins would confirm that he is clearly the front-runner and can compete and win in any part of the country. A Cruz win would be a good way to change the subject from the Texan’s underwhelming performance in South Carolina. A Rubio win, while the least likely outcome of the three, would be significant in that it would finally notch a win for the Floridian that he desperately needs.

Trump can afford a second-place finish after his two double-digit primary wins, but he has to be considered the favorite to win Nevada. Cruz would benefit from a win, if only to interrupt the incessant Rubio boosterism in the press, but he doesn’t actually need it nearly as much as Rubio. Anything less than a victory for Rubio would leave him with four straight losses, and it would be very bad if he lost in both states (Nevada and South Carolina) where his campaign was supposed to have major advantages.

My guess is that Rubio and Cruz will be neck-and-neck again, but this time it will be Rubio edged out by a small margin. Trump will win, albeit not by as large a margin as the polls suggested, and he will head into Super Tuesday with three big victories behind him.

P.S. Predictions:

Trump 33%

Cruz 26%

Rubio 23%

Kasich 10%

Carson 8%