The winds of selfishness still blow

                So it is March 4^th. Last night was the GOP debate. We are down to four candidates.  Donald Trump is the clear frontrunner, the winner of 10 of the first 15 contests and holder of a roughly 100-delegate lead over his closest rival Ted Cruz, who holds about a 120-delegate lead over his closest challenger Marco Rubio. John Kasich is only an Ohio-win and some change behind Rubio.

In  theory, the best play for all of these candidates is to come up with a blocking action as Mitt Romney advocated in his speech yesterday.

The truth of the math is that even if Trump were to win everything on March 15^th, he could not claim the nomination based off of that result alone. Thus each candidate can maintain a what-is-good-for-me strategy through March 15^th without mathematically ending the race.  Because of this fact each of the three other candidates have terrible incentives to unite and all the incentives not to.

              For Cruz, losses by Rubio in Florida and Kasich in Ohio, combined with his delegate margin so far, basically leave him as the last man standing. While his path to defeat Trump is winding and difficult, it is not in fact impossible.

If Kasich wins Ohio and Rubio loses Florida, Kasich can go forward, particularly with Rubio out of the race (which he will be if he loses Florida). Kasich’s strong second-place showing in Vermont to Trump’s first-place, gives him hope that he can compete against Trump. 

Likewise for Rubio, if he wins Florida and Kasich loses Ohio his odds of being the nominee go up considerably.    

So while in theory everyone should be thinking about how to keep delegates out of Trump’s hands (whatever size they may be), the reality remains that each candidate and campaign still has reasons to focus on winning against candidates not named Trump.

This becomes an even greater problem as we are likely to see in Michigan on Tuesday.  The Michigan delegate allocation rules mean Trump is not likely to have much of an edge in terms of delegates, but the continued splintering of the vote among four candidates seems exceptionally likely to lead to a Trump win. The drum beat of Trump wins will pound on. It also seems clear that a three-person race favors Trump and a four-person one gives him almost a lock on the nomination. 

But a united strategy has the effect of decreasing each of the individual candidate’s chances of winning even as it hurts Trump. Thus, they will continue to maximize their own odds at the expense of the team goal and Trump will continue to look strong.