But buried in all of this home-team cheerleading is an accurate point. The "Never Trump" movement may — despite the fact that it arrived well after Donald Trump had jumped out to a big delegate lead — actually end up working, and the nominee may very well be someone who so far hasn't won a vote. In fact, the timing of the Never Trump movement may have been about perfect.

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The credit for that lies in part with the Republican operatives, insiders and purists who created the loose-knit organization whose strategic goal has all of the complexity of a stop sign. But it lies much more with the evolution of the race. There's still voting, of course, random Tuesdays on which Trump's tweeting and CNNing and rallying comes down to Joe and Suzie Registeredrepublican. But most of the action is happening on terrain that is not only hostile to Trump, it's terrain where he's shown a complete inability to figure out how to maneuver.

Here we're talking about things like North Dakota.

The state's small slate of 25 delegates to the national convention are unbound, meaning that they can vote for whomever they want. Over the weekend, Ted Cruz's campaign identified a slate of 23 people who it asserted would back him in the voting for a nominee in Cleveland. Eighteen of those people won convention slots. They're not bound, and several said their support for Cruz was soft. But it's better than how Trump did. According to our Dave Weigel, Trump left North Dakota with a grand total of one committed supporter out of the 25.

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What's important to take away from this isn't that Cruz's 18 delegates are helping him creep up on Trump; they are, but there's almost no way Cruz can actually get a majority of delegates before the convention. What's important is that those delegates didn't go to Trump, making it that much harder for him to hit the 1,237-delegate mark he needs to clinch.

Cruz outworked Trump in Arizona, too, just as he'd outworked him in Louisiana. The delegates in Arizona are bound to Trump, after he won the state easily last month. But they're only bound to him for the first vote at the convention. So, as the Washington Examiner reports, Cruz has been making sure that the delegates that go to Cleveland bound to vote for Trump the first time around are planning to vote for Cruz on a second vote — a vote that will happen if Trump doesn't hit 1,237.

"Trump has no real organization in Arizona," strategist Sean Noble told the Examiner. "Cruz will get most/all Arizona delegates on second ballot."

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Cruz's success in working the delegate system is certainly a function of his ability to organize. But it also helps that the process for deciding the actual delegates is happening at a moment when Trump is being battered by his party and by voters.

These delegates, many of them longtime activists within the Republican Party, are being asked how deep is their commitment to Trump. That's an increasingly loaded question, particularly with a slew of (well-justified) reports about Trump's general-election challenges swirling.

Cruz is much better positioned than Trump and John Kasich on a second ballot at the convention — but if Trump doesn't get the nomination in early votes, more and more of those delegates will not be bound to anyone, Cruz included. Which is how you get to the Ryan scenario.

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Trump's team has proven effective at keeping its hand on the steering wheel as Trump barrels down the straight, wide highway of primary voting. But it has no apparent ability to actually organize, much less out-organize the party.

Take the memo leaked to our Robert Costa. In it, senior Trump adviser Barry Bennett argues that all of this talk about Trump having a bad week is nonsense.

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"Five days ago Mr. Trump led Mr. Cruz 39% to 33%" in Reuters's national tracking poll, Bennett wrote. "Each day all week long we continued to gain support contrary to what the Washington Establishment would have you believe. This morning we lead Cruz by a margin of 45 to 31."

It's hard to think of a worse metric to point to. National polling averages are very, very far from the votes that matter. The potential delegates may consider Reuters's numbers — or they may consider the glut of polls showing Trump getting trounced by either Democrat in November. The process is no longer only about winning elections.

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That's where the NeverTrumpers would like them to look. It's what they won't stop talking about. They may not have much sway over the voters heading to the polls these days, but they have sway over the process. So the NeverTrumpers, many of whom are products of the same process that birthed the delegate system, are poised to win this round of the fight by a wide margin.

Leaving Trump with only one option: Hit 1,237. As Nate Silver put it on Friday, it's probably first-ballot-or-bust for Trump. And if he misses on the first ballot, Cruz doesn't have much time to cobble together a majority of his own. After all, the partisans lined up against Trump right now would happily turn their fire on him on the convention floor.

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Which is why, while it is dumb to say that Ryan has a "54 percent chance" of being the nominee, it is not dumb to say that he has some chance. As do any number of other people.