Today will correctly be marked as the day upon which the Trump candidacy became invulnerable or vulnerable, irresistible or resistible, inevitable or evitable, but for the wrong reasons. (Someone please inform Edmund Gettier.)
If Trump sweeps the winner-take-all states of Ohio and Florida, then he will probably knock out both Kasich and Rubio, who are widely considered the last best hope of the GOP establishment. This would in turn set Trump up for a two-way race with Cruz, which would probably cause him to fail to win the nomination outright, according to a sophisticated election simulation from Sam Wang, a data scientist and professor who outperformed Nate Silver in 2012.
https://twitter.com/SamWangPhD/status/709362404782686208
If, however, Kasich wins Ohio (seems likely enough) and then soldiers on to the convention in Cleveland, the odds become somewhat better for Trump to come within striking distance of 1,237 pledged delegates, perhaps with a small boost from Carson and Christie.
What we seem to have here is a conflict between mathematics and momentum, between the best available quantitative predictions and the media narrative pumped out by the cable news pundit classes. The more inevitable Trump sounds on television this evening, the less inevitable he will actually become.
