02 March 2016

Ben Carson Out of GOP Presidential Race

Ben Carson has dropped out of the race for the GOP Presidential nomination that he hasn't had any shot of winning since at least the South Carolina primary.  I guess the donors finally stopped sending him checks.

This leaves Trump, Cruz, Rubio and Kaisch to split the single digit percentage of voters who supported Carson.

How Carson voters split, however, is anyone's guess.  He was relatively moderate in style, if not particularly so in substance, which would tend to favor Kaisch and Rubio.

His evangelical Christian credentials would seem to point voters towards Cruz. But, would supporters of a candidate whose rhetoric had some inkling of compassion really relate to someone know for being rigid and intolerant?

Carson's status as someone with no prior political experience would tend to point voters towards Trump.  But, are voters who were willing to support a black man for the Republican Presidential nomination really going to flock to a candidate who was slow to disavow a white supremacist leader and has cornered the racist demographic within the Republican party?

Kaisch, meanwhile, seems determined to hold on until the Republican primary in Ohio in two week on March 15, 2016, and may even have a chance of winning that contest where a February 2016 poll with a 3.6 percentage point margin of error found that likely Republican voters in Ohio were split:

Trump 31%
Kaisch 26%
Cruz 21%
Rubio 13%
Carson 5%

But, the fact that Kaisch has yet to finish better than a strong second place anywhere, and is struggling to be able to manage that feat in his home state, insures that there is really no conceivable way that Kaisch could win the Republican nomination.  If Kaisch dropped out too, Rubio might have a prayer of besting Trump in Ohio, but we'll probably never know, since that scenario is unlikely to unfold.

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