3 Takeaways from Super Tuesday

The headline on the New York Times Wednesday morning read: “Stop-Trump Forces Regroup After Super Tuesday Rout.” Indeed, anyone who paid attention Tuesday night likely came to the same conclusion: The Republican party is losing control, and Donald Trump is in the driver’s seat.

But it’s never that simple. Marco Rubio, whose only win last night was in Minnesota, claimed that Ted Cruz had a bad night, failing to win the Southern evangelical states he was supposed to be strong in, and that Rubio’s the best option to beat Trump. Cruz, for his part, argued he’s been the most successful against Trump and that if the other candidates would just drop-out, he could take him on.

How to make sense of all this? Here are a few takeaways:

1. Super Tuesday might not have changed anything

An interesting thing happened last night in the prediction markets: they barely reacted. Despite Trump winning a vast majority of the states, his chances at winning the nomination actually went down Tuesday night. Here’s the data from one prediction market, PredictIt:

What this tells us is not necessarily that Trump had a terrible night, but that his expectations for Tuesday were priced-in: In other words, his 80% chance at 6:30pm last night included the expectation that he would perform very well.

If you think of it that way, Tuesday actually wasn’t a great night for Trump. He was expected to win everywhere but Texas and maybe Minnesota, and ended up losing Minnesota, Alaska, and Oklahoma. But how can he only be at 75%? Apparently, traders––those weighing all the factors––believe there is still a relatively strong chance someone comes along and stops Trump, despite the results on Tuesday. But…

2. If you do the math, it’s game-over for Rubio

The pro-Rubio people have been saying that Super Tuesday won’t matter, because there’s still the delegate-rich states of Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Illinois and Rubio’s home-state of Florida, all places where he will theortectically do better than the Southern states featured on Super Tuesday.

Here’s the problem: Due to a very bad showing last night, a night on which Rubio missed the qualifying threshold in many states, Rubio now trails Trump by more than 200 delegates. And while it’s true that a lot of delegate-rich, winner-take-all states are coming up, Trump is leading by a lot in most of those states: He’s heavily favored in Florida, Illinois, and Michigan, narrowly ahead in North Carolina, and tied for the lead with John Kasich in Ohio, where Rubio is barely a factor.

So just to keep pace, Rubio not only needs to pull off a miracle in at least three of those states, but he needs Trump to absolutely collapse, by a lot, to the point of not picking up any delegates over the next few weeks. Unlikely.

So the road forward for Rubio essentially doesn’t exist, but nonetheless…

3. The markets still believe in Rubio

There were musings last night of the establishment getting behind Cruz instead of Rubio as the anti-Trump (Lindsey Graham went ahead and said it). It makes sense: Cruz is not only the only one that has proven he can really stand up and upset Trump, but it’s starting to get late, and Cruz is in a much better position delegate-wise to take on Trump than Rubio is.

Nonetheless, the prediction markets still favor Rubio over Cruz, by a lot, barely having moved since Rubio’s terrible, and Cruz’s surprisingly good, performance on Tuesday night.

So conventional wisdom––the idea that there’s still a path for Rubio to squash Trump––is still winning, despite its bitter loss last night.