Anti-Trump Republicans were confident in the weeks leading up to last night’s primary that New Hampshire would consolidate the “establishment” vote behind one of the candidates, and that would create a three-way race in later states that would eventually lead to the defeat of both Trump and Cruz. Invariably, the candidate cast for this role was Rubio, and the governors running against him were dismissed as hopeless and soon to drop out. One major flaw in all this was that it depended on absolutely everything going right for only one of the “establishment” candidates while everything had to go wrong for the rest. The bigger flaw was that even if it “worked” as planned it probably wouldn’t succeed anyway.

Like Rubio’s bad gamble of a campaign strategy, it took for granted that multiple candidates would fail and/or act against their own interests to produce the desired outcome, and that they would all do so on schedule. As it turned out, Kasich and Bush did better than most people (especially the Rubio campaign) thought they would, and Rubio flopped at the critical moment. That guarantees that the already limited “establishment” vote will remain fragmented for at least several more weeks, by which time it will probably be too late to stop both Trump and Cruz. Kasich and Bush are hardly going to defer to the less experienced candidate whom they just beat in the first primary, and Rubio’s boosters have already invested too much in his faltering campaign to abandon him now.

The GOP “establishment” was repudiated last night by almost half of the voters, and the best chance to slow down Trump’s progress towards the nomination was squandered. Party leaders are now facing their worst-case scenario. They are facing it in large part because they made the mistake of believing they had the luxury of time, and only now are they realizing that they didn’t.