the remaining delegates to achieve a majority, and the geography of the race would strongly favor him. Cruz, with his following of dedicated conservatives, does best in caucuses and in the South. But the only remaining Republican caucus is in Utah, which votes on March 22nd, and the only Southern state yet to vote is West Virginia, which arguably isn’t part of the South at all. For Trump, by contrast, the primary map looks very favorable. In big states like New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, he is running well ahead in the polls.

Of course, as we rediscovered in Michigan, the polls aren’t always reliable. For what they are worth, however, they suggest that Trump has a big lead in Florida, while the contest in Ohio is veryover the weekend, Trump and Kasich are now running even in the Buckeye State, with each getting thirty-eight per cent of the vote. (Cruz is in third place, at sixteen per cent.) An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which was carried out from Wednesday to Friday of last week and published on Sunday, showed Kasich with a six-point lead over Trump: thirty-nine per cent to thirty-three per cent.

As the sitting governor of the state, Kasich has a big advantage in organization and endorsements, including that of Mitt Romney, which may yet see him home. But Trump is making a fight of it. On Monday, he claimed to have received the endorsement of a local icon, Pete Rose, the disgraced Cincinnati Reds great. On his Twitter feed, Trump showed