Yesterday’s conventional wisdom: Trump will win 10 to 12 Super Tuesday states and come away with 300 delegates. If Cruz can’t win Texas, it’s curtains for his campaign. Rubio has a chance to score victories in Minnesota and Virginia and must rack up delegates. There’s a CNN poll showing Trump favored by 49 percent of Republican voters!

This morning’s conventional wisdom: Trump is nearly inevitable after winning only seven states — three narrowly — and gaining 234 delegates. Rubio is toast and should drop out because he won only one state, even though the SEC primaries were never supposed to be his strong suit. Cruz is now the only candidate who can defeat Trump.

The speed with which the commentary narrative zigs and zags is enough to give you whiplash.

While there is no denying that Trump is very strong, it isn’t at all clear, to me at least, that Cruz has a path to defeating him one-on-one. Cruz’s campaign rationale was to consolidate the very-conservative/Christian evangelical vote behind him and then take on the so-called “establishment” figure. He announced his candidacy at Liberty University. His campaign speeches are often delivered the cadences of sermons. He invested a huge amount of time and money in South Carolina and the SEC primary states.

It didn’t work out. True, he has four victories under his belt, and that’s fine. But he was expecting to run the table, and he has pitched his candidacy so much to one constituency that he cannot very well claim now to be the consensus candidate. He came in third in South Carolina, slightly behind Rubio and far behind Trump. And even among Evangelical voters in South Carolina, he lost out to Trump (26 percent to Trump’s 34 percent). Cruz’s team had predicted that a great wave of Christian conservatives who had not voted before would swell the voting ranks and sweep him to victory. In Nevada, the percentage of “born-again” voters did increase — up from 10 percent in 2012 to 39 percent in 2016. But 41 percent went for Trump, 26 percent to Cruz, and 25 percent to Rubio. In the overall vote totals, he was third again behind Trump and Rubio.

Now the primaries move on to states in which the very-conservative vote and the percentage of Evangelicals both decline. Cruz has had success in four states, but his theory about Evangelical Christians — who they are and why they vote — has been discredited, so what is the new theory by which he wins the nomination?