In a poll at the end of 2014, Monmouth University asked voters about 15 possible Republican candidates who might seek the nomination two years later. The potential candidate viewed the most positively was House Speaker (then just plain ol' Rep.) Paul Ryan, followed by Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz. Coming in 15th was Mike Pence, mostly because no one had ever heard of him. That held a week later when CNN/ORC asked for actual voter preferences.

A month before, Pence had earned 1 percent of the vote; in that December 2014 poll, he didn't get enough interest to round up to 1 percent. Instead, he got the dreaded asterisk: More than zero people picked him, but it's otherwise not worth reporting. (The leader was Jeb Bush; the CNN report on the poll includes a now-bleak video of Bush happily tip-toeing around the question of whether or not he'd run.)

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It's a poll from April 2015, though, that offers perhaps the most insight into what's happened over the past few years.

Bloomberg asked voters a number of questions about the candidates, including getting feedback on Rand Paul's "woman problem." (Remember that? Paul kept interrupting news anchors and this powered a few news cycles. We were so young.) They also threw 18 names of possible candidates at people and asked them to say if they would strongly consider supporting that person's candidacy, might consider it or flatly would never consider it. There was also a "not sure" option, which is a polite way of saying, "Who?"

The results:

Sixty-two percent of Republicans and independents assured Bloomberg that they would never consider supporting Donald Trump for president. Not gonna happen. The guy from TV? Get real.

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Meanwhile, Pence got as little support as former New York governor George Pataki — who ended up actually running and getting asterisk-level support. No one was less well-known than Pence with the exception of Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. Consider that more people had opinions on Pataki than Pence. More people had opinions on former U.N. ambassador John Bolton.

So assuming the Pence rumors are correct, the 2016 Republican ticket is a combination of the guy who was considered totally unacceptable by Republicans 15 months ago and the guy that the fewest people had heard of.