It's possible, just possible, that the final battle to become the 2016 GOP standard-bearer will come down to a pair of first-generation Cuban-American, first-term senators. Yes, I'm talking about the same Republican Party that has proven so incompetent in reaching out to Hispanic voters that it followed up its 2012 post-mortem determination to get better at it by, arguably, getting worse. Not that a final showdown between Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida will necessarily help on that score, but more on that later.
How does this scenario play out? It starts with the assumption that the three current front-runners, according to RealClearPolitics' average of polls – former reality TV star Donald Trump (23.3 percent), neurosurgeon Ben Carson (16.3) and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina (11.8) – will all fade.
There are good reasons to expect this both in general and specific to each candidate. Trump's have been repeated and recycled for months: He's an egomaniacal, serially insulting, loud-mouth and while that might not sink him in a GOP primary, his ideological incoherence and departures from standard Republican policy positions probably will. After being endlessly foretold since his announcement the great Trump decline appears to finally be under way: He still leads but his share of supporters has dropped from 30.6 percent on the night of the second debate to 23.3 percent, more than a 7 percentage point drop in two weeks. That is, as the man might say, yuuuuge.
Carson too, while presenting a contrastingly lower-key mien, has been a gaffe-machine, suggesting that prisons make convicts gay, comparing the U.S. to Nazi Germany....
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