As the field has been reduced to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, Trump’s frontrunner status is seemingly being accepted by more grassroots Republican voters, and he is poised to be the majority nominee for the Republican Party.

As the Primaries season continues into March, many watching the race are increasingly eager to crown winners and losers, not just in specific states, but for the entire nomination contest. With attention honed in on coronating a victor, it’s useful to remember that the “winner” in plurality elections often fails to reflect a majority of voters.

The Republican Party has a problem in its presidential nomination process. As it turns toward holding winner-take-all contests on March 15, including in the delegate-rich states of Florida and Ohio, its use of a plurality voting system may well allow a candidate to win the nomination who would be unlikely to win in a head-to-head contest with his strongest opponent.

If Super Tuesday contests had been conducted with ranked choice voting -- a proven system that empowers voters to rank candidates by preference in order to elect the candidate with the strongest support and the one most likely to garner the support of a majority -- the results would look very different. Our models suggest that Trump would have won Alabama and Massachusetts, competed in toss-up races in Tennessee and Vermont, and lost the remaining seven states.

Last night Donald Trump received harder body blows than ever before in a Republican presidential debate, but it may be too late for those seeking to stop his run to the GOP nomination.

In the wake of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, South Carolina’s primary on Saturday looms large for defining the race for the Republican presidential nomination. A more nuanced analysis of the polls shows that Trump’s high floor of support comes with a relatively low ceiling.

Only three days after the Iowa Caucuses, the results of that contest are already reshaping the Republican primary field. Despite the fact that Ted Cruz technically won the Caucus (as much as any candidate can really “win” a caucus with proportional allocation of delegates), second-choice polling reveals a different candidate picking up momentum.

FairVote has been a consistent advocate of asking voters for more than just their first choice in polling. As the race narrows in the Republican field, second choices will inevitably play a large role in how the eventual nominee consolidates support.

With Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton seemingly in a very tight contest to win the state, Gov. O'Malley supporters' second choices may decide whether Sanders or Clinton wins more state and national delegates. On the Republican side, a large field means that some Republican voters are going to walk away not having cast a vote that elected delegates because they didn't get a second choice.

PPP’s latest set of data from Iowa shows significant strength for Cruz. FairVote used data from PPP’s three way contests to simulate a ranked choice contest for a state. Cruz dramatically narrows Trump’s lead in the first round, and in each subsequent round earns enough second-choice support to easily emerge as the victor.