The evidence at hand suggests that neither of these theories would actually be successful — and, accordingly, that Trump cannot be stopped.

Theory No. 1: Consolidation

Again, theory 1 has been the default position for a while now. The establishment's stages of Trump's candidacy were denial, followed by skepticism, followed by apprehension, followed by fear, followed by terror. It was somewhere around the skepticism-to-apprehension stage that the consolidation idea really took hold.

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This is surprisingly tough to evaluate, because the gauzy blanket lying over all of this is the impossible-to-grasp primary system. Fifty different states using many different methods to allocate 50 different quantities of delegates adds a degree of uncertainty to the proceedings — and allows both theories to flourish.

We know three things, though.

As people have dropped out, outsider candidates have actually benefited

Over the course of the campaign, the consolidation of the field nationally has mostly meant more votes for Donald Trump, Ben Carson (for a while) and Ted Cruz. Rubio has benefited some, and there's clearly reason to think that more of the support for a candidate like John Kasich would go to Rubio than Cruz or Trump — but that's all the consolidation that's left for Rubio. Ben Carson's support would probably go mostly to the other two.



It's not clear what would happen if the field narrowed to two people

Pollsters have started asking voters whom they'd prefer in a head-to-head match-up between Trump and Rubio or Trump and Cruz.

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In January, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal found that Trump beat Rubio by seven points and Cruz by eight. In a poll by the same pollsters last month, Cruz and Rubio both beat Trump, by 16 points each — a huge swing.

In an Internet-based survey of Super Tuesday states a few weeks ago, Bloomberg found that Trump beat Cruz by nine points and Rubio by four.

Consolidation so far doesn't seem to have helped Rubio much

We keep going back to this poll from Florida last week. Rubio insists he'll win Florida, his home state; at this point, he has to. But this poll from Quinnipiac University showed him down 16 points to Trump — and that's after Jeb Bush dropped out of the race.

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If Rubio were going to consolidate support anywhere, one would think that it would be in his home state. That doesn't mean he'll lose when Florida votes on Mar. 15 — Rubio's done well at closing the gap closer to the day of an election — but it again suggests that a one-to-one transfer of votes between similarly focused candidates is not how this works.

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Rubio's gain in national polling, seen in the first graph above, mostly came after Iowa — as people dropped out, yes, but also after his strong performance in that state. He has long been the second choice of a number of voters, and in Fox News's poll from the middle of February, a quarter of voters said that he was their second choice.

Adding that to those who said he was their first choice gave him 42 percent. Trump's combined total was 47 percent.

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Here's the clincher. When Donald Trump held his Super Tuesday press conference, the main news story to emerge was moderate blue-state governor Chris Christie standing behind him. How about that consolidation! And yet, this is still the better operating stop-Trump theory.

Theory No. 2: Fragmentation

So the other theory, again, is that Trump can't be stopped through regular people voting but can be stopped by delegate voting, once the race gets to the convention. If Trump doesn't have a majority of delegates by the time the convention starts, the scene will soon devolve into a free-for-all attempt by candidates to cobble a majority together, the theory goes.

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At Roll Call, Nathan Gonzales argues that the key would be to "keep Trump from winning the primary’s biggest prizes." Kasich and Rubio should stay in the race, he argues, to keep Trump from collecting the 66 delegates that the winner of Ohio will get and the 99 that will go to the winner in Florida. Who better to win those states than their sitting governor or senator!

The catch, as Jim Newell pointed out this week, is that the states that remain include a lot of winner-take-all states like Ohio and Florida. Just under a quarter of the remaining 1,678 delegates are allocated to the winner of a winner-take-all state — a total that, added to Trump's current count, leaves him about 520 delegates shy of a majority. And with a splintered field, he doesn't need 50 percent to collect them. Win Florida with the 44 percent Trump got in that Quinnipiac poll, and you get the 99 delegates. Or, a better example: Win South Carolina with 32.5 percent of the vote and get all 50 of its delegates.

Meanwhile, the other 1,200-plus delegates that are out there will continue to be split up among the candidates, with the front-running Trump collecting the most. Even in proportional-distribution states, the person who wins usually ends up with far more delegates by virtue of it being hard to fairly divvy up the three delegates given to each congressional district. The winner should get more delegates than the runner-up, the thinking goes, but the only way to do that is to give the winner twice as many (2 versus 1). In Texas, Ted Cruz had a moderate margin of victory, but he gained three times as many delegates because he won the congressional districts.

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You'll notice that we're having it both ways here. We argue that a consolidated field likely wouldn't help Rubio win, given the evidence at hand, and we argue that a splintered field also helps Trump moving forward. That's precisely the point. There are really three options at play here, not two. There's consolidation (a long shot) and fragmentation (a longer shot) — and there's Trump wins the nomination.