After another second-place finish, Rubio gives himself until March 15 to start winning

Marco Rubio racked up another second-place finish in Nevada Tuesday night, which means that Rubio himself and his legion of fluffers are out trying to convince us he’s still got a great shot at the Republican nomination. Rubio has given himself a generous deadline: He needs to start winning on March 15. See, until then, delegates are awarded proportionally, so you can piddle along in second place picking up a couple delegates at a time while Donald Trump cleans up, and it’s all fine and dandy. But:

"By the time you get to March 15, now you’re in some big states like Ohio and Florida that award all their delegates at once," he explained. "That’s where you have to start winning states, and we feel very confident about where we’re going to be come March 15.”

Bear in mind, Rubio’s home state of Florida votes on March 15, and he’s currently trailing badly in the polls there. The media is ready to offer Rubio some comfort, though. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump points out that Bill Clinton lost a bunch of early primaries, too, and still went on to win. But he … kinda glosses a key point.

Clinton lost and lost and lost, over and over. He was similarly in a splintered field, which took a long time to work itself out. This doesn't map one-to-one -- there was no candidate that had a 2-1-1-1 strategy, as Donald Trump deos -- but it reinforces the central idea: This thing is necessarily complex.

When Bump says “there was no candidate that had a 2-1-1-1 strategy, as Donald Trump does,” what he means is that, in the five contests that Clinton lost before winning his first, there were four different winners. That’s really, really not mapping one-to-one.

All sorts of things are possible in this primary. You never want to count out the Republican establishment. Donald Trump could have the implosion pundits have been predicting since the minute he got in the race. Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and Ben Carson could drop out and every single one of their voters could go to Rubio, even though polling and common sense tell us that’s not what would happen. But the most likely scenario—the scenario supported by polling and everything we’ve seen so far this cycle—is that Donald Trump is going to go on winning, despite all the fantasies about Rubio rising to save the GOP.