For Marco Rubio, Tuesday night was supposed to be phase two of a daring strategy that would shoot him into the lead in the Republican primary for President of the United States. Step one was to come in a strong third in Iowa, then a strong second in New Hampshire and finally to win the South Carolina primary on February 20th.
Marco Rubio did not come in second on Tuesday, he came in fifth.
Even worse for Rubio, finishing ahead of him were John Kasich and Jeb Bush, two candidates who are competing for the same lane of mainstream moderate support in the primary as he is. The implications of this result for the next month of the Republican primary cannot be understated.
Rubio has been widely seen as the consensus, electable alternative to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, two candidates who have dim prospects in the general election. That consensus was shattered by his poor showing coming off of a panned debate performance wherein Chris Christie masterfully exposed Rubio's tendency to repeat well-rehearsed talking points when under pressure.
Chris Christie's campaign is over after he placed sixth in New Hampshire, but he may just have taken Rubio and perhaps the Republican Party down with him.
The problem for Republicans after the New Hampshire primary can be summed up like this. The splitting of establishment, moderate voters between Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Marco Rubio which led to a huge margin of victory for Donald Trump, now threatens to continue through the coming weeks. It's not hard to imagine Trump pulling off similar margins in upcoming primaries in South Carolina and Nevada, where his support seems to hover between 25 percent and 36 percent.
Mathematically speaking, it's extremely unlikely that any establishment Republican can win a primary while three of them split up the vote. It now seems more likely than not that Trump and Cruz will split all four of the states holding primaries in February.
This is a waking nightmare for Republicans who want to win in November.
Donald Trump is wildly unpopular with Latinos, Muslims, millennials, registered independents and women voters. By themselves, not all of these groups are essential to a winning presidential candidate's coalition, but all together their resistance would absolutely crush any chance Republicans had of taking back the White House in 2016.
Trump simply cannot win and Democrats salivate at the prospect of having Trump face off with Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton come November.
The implications of a Cruz nomination are less clear but likely not ideal for Republicans. Cruz is a freshman Senator elected in 2012, who is well known for being an ideological extremist. He was a key instigator of the 2013 government shutdown.
Cruz is also said to be incredibly unpopular among his Senate colleagues, having failed to receive the endorsement of a single sitting US senator, despite being a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for several months.
This ideological extremism and lack of personal likability should give Republicans plenty of worry as Cruz continues to do well with the highly influential evangelical Christian voting bloc.
In short, Tuesday night could have been the end of a very long nightmare for the Republican establishment that has been going on since June 16th 2015, the day Donald Trump announced he was running for president. Instead, it appears to be just the beginning, with no telling if or when they'll wake up.