This is the last Jim-written Morning Jolt until March 28. Jack Fowler or one of the other great voices at NR will fill in during my absence -- until then, Happy Easter! Is Ted Cruz Going to Be Able to Pull This Off? Right now, as a #NeverTrump guy, I'm rooting hard for Ted Cruz. We haven't seen any polls conducted after Rubio's departure from the race -- either in key upcoming states or nationally -- so we don't have a good sense of whether anti-Trump Republicans are coalescing around him. Tuesday Arizona holds its primary and Utah holds its caucus. At first glance, those are natural Cruz states, right? [Cue ominous music.] Notice that we've had two polls of Arizona Republicans -- you know, right next to Texas -- and Trump's well ahead of Cruz in both. The two polls were conducted before Rubio dropped out, so maybe Rubio's 10 to 12 percent will shift to Cruz and help the Texas senator make up the deficit of . . . 12–14 points. Uh-oh. The last Utah poll was in mid-February, and had Rubio 24, Cruz 22, Trump 18. Caucuses usually have low turnout, but the Utah one may turn out quite different: For its presidential preference caucus next week, the Beehive State's Republican Party will allow any Utahn outside or inside the state to vote online. This will be the first time any political party has allowed online voting for a presidential primary election in the nation. "We're stepping out on the national stage in a way we never have before," Bryan J. Smith, the executive director of the Utah Republican Party, said during a recent Utah caucus preparatory meeting. "This time it matters in more ways than you think." The Utah Republican Party said its new method of voting will mainly help families, workers, missionaries and military workers throughout the world, who can't be in town for voting. It also may help Utah mothers, who find themselves swamped with child care and work. A week from now, if Trump wins Arizona and Cruz wins Utah . . . do people begin to doubt whether Cruz can win a one-on-one race against Trump? Or do anti-Trump Republicans begin to really turn their ire on Kasich for sticking around? Politico reports, "Marco Rubio is close to endorsing Ted Cruz, but the two proud senators -- and recent fierce rivals -- have some details to work out first. Cruz has to ask for the Rubio's endorsement, and both sides need to decide that it will make a difference, according to sources familiar with the thinking of both senators." If you're Cruz, why wouldn't you ask? Meanwhile, one more ominous note for the #NeverTrump forces. According to the Associated Press count, Trump has 678 delegates, and needs 1,237. He's 559 delegates away from winning the nomination, and 1,059 remain. Can Trump win 53 percent of the remaining delegates? Even if you feel confident in saying "No, Trump won't win that many delegates" -- and yeah, that's a high bar to clear going forward -- so far Trump has won about 46 percent of the delegates available so far. (He's done so with 37 percent of the votes cast in Republican primaries and caucuses so far.) Assume Trump maintains his current level of support throughout the rest of the process, and he'll get 46 percent of the remaining 1,059 delegates. That gives him 492 more delegates. Trump would enter the convention in Cleveland with 1,170 delegates, just 67 short of what he needs. (It's easy to picture Trump's first phone call going to John Kasich, currently sitting there with 144 delegates.) Yes, you might hear talk or calls for a Cruz–Rubio ticket, but Trump will argue, with justification, he's won 94 percent of what was needed to be the nominee. Derailing Trump will require a big surge from Cruz from here on out. Can he do it? Mike Murphy Lets It All Out Gee, do you think Mike Murphy, formerly of Jeb Bush's super PAC, doesn't like Marco Rubio? It especially enrages Murphy that the Beltway crowd has been so protective of Rubio, "having a breakdown as their precious helicopter-mom dreams are evaporating." Yes, Right to Rise smacked the silly out of Rubio repeatedly. Murphy's personal favorite was a web ad that reworked Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made For Walking" as "These Boots Are Made for Flipping," featuring a Marco character in his trademark lady-boots, dancing fast, as the ad hits him on everything from immigration flip-flops to his absentee Senate record. Murphy adds that he donated money himself to Rubio's Senate campaign and likes him personally. But for president? "Marco's just not ready." Even if his Last Establishment Man Standing strategy failed for Jeb, Murphy stresses it wasn't his job to help elect Rubio over Trump. "We're not the RNC. We're not the party cop," Murphy thunders. "If our donors wanted to help Marco Rubio, they'd have given to him instead of us." Many in Jeb World viewed it as a betrayal that Rubio, Bush's former protégé whom they regarded as a young man in a hurry, jumped in. "Our problem was too many regular Republicans ran," says Murphy. "And Marco ran, which was a problem, because we spent a lot of energy fighting Marco, and Marco spent a lot of energy fighting us. When the better thing to do would have been to unite our army and go fight Trump and Cruz. But that wasn't the situation we found ourselves in. These Marco guys always say, 'Why the hell didn't you spend a hundred million dollars attacking Trump and helping us?' And I was like, 'Why did you not? How about you don't f -- ing run?' . . . Loyalty is not a small thing. I'm an old Irish pol. No loyalty is owed, if no loyalty was given." When Marco Rubio started reciting his "the old guard has told me to wait my turn" routine, he wasn't kidding. Notice the implication that Rubio had somehow acted disloyally to Bush by not standing aside so that a governor who had largely been absent from the political fights of the Obama era could step into the GOP's presidential nomination. In the long profile piece, Murphy trashes Trump, Cruz, the rest of the field (with the exception of Kasich), the media, and offers quite a few jokes at his own expense. But you can tell what's still really sticking in his craw. Murphy's precondition for the piece in the Weekly Standard? "That you put in this piece that The Weekly Standard has become a Rubio-Love Spank Mag -- and Kristol can't cut it!" Just shocking that Murphy's efforts didn't pan out, huh? One other great section from that Matt Labash piece: I'd like secure borders, more tightly controlled immigration, and would love to see manufacturing jobs come back as much as the next guy. But what about our own culpability in the nation's decline? The technologies we so ravenously consume as our jobs get automated or algorithmed out of existence. We pretend as though character doesn't count, then wonder why we get so many characters. We buy cut-rate Chinese goods at Walmart, or better still, on Amazon Prime, so we don't have to put down the Doritos bag and budge from our easy-chair rage-stations as our passions get serially inflamed by Sean Hannity telling us how great we are and how hard we have it. Our consumption of everything seems to be increasing -- of carbs, meth, anger-stoking shoutfests -- even as our producers seem to be disappearing. Maybe we have unimpressive politicians because they're our representatives, and we've become grossly unimpressive ourselves. ADDENDA: No new pop-culture podcast this week, but last week's episode, featuring special guest Mary Katharine Ham dissecting the sociological insanity that ABC's The Bachelor represents, has been doing gangbusters, so if you haven't listened already, check it out.  | 
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