neo:
Yes, I really am asking that question.

With respect to all of the remaining significant Republican candidates, I would at the very least feel wonderfully relieved if any one of them won rather than any of the currently running Democrats.

As for actually having feelings of happiness in addition to being relieved, this is the order in which my current favorites line up:

Fiorina
Cruz
Rubio
Christie
Huckabee

I bet that most readers here have at least four of those people on their lists of their top five favorites to be president (as opposed to being the Republican candidate).

I think my parenthetical comment immediately above is important. As much as I really like Fiorina (I wear a Carly for America t-shirt or bring a Carly for America mug with me to my neighborhood cafe), I currently feel she doesn’t have what it takes to win the general election. I hope I am wrong.

In any event, I think we conservatives should be supporting a single candidate sooner rather than later to prevent Trump from gathering more momentum and to reduce the risk that good candidates will do harm to each other. (Remember folks that it was during a primary that Al Gore brought up the issue that Dukakis had tolerated a Massachusettes furlough program for violent criminals even after a horrible event showed that that was a bad policy-see http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/chatterbox/1999/11/did_gore_hatch_horton.html.)

So, I ask who should that candidate be, taking into account conservatism and electibility? Yes, neo, you did state that Cruz is “the truly conservative alternative.” Who do the commenters here think should be our consensus candidate?

As much as I like Carly, I think our consensus candidate should be Cruz.

So for me, the choice will be whoever I think has the best chance of beating Hilary. I haven’t decided that yet, but it might be Trump.

Because ANY of them (even Kasich! even Bush!) would be much, much better than Hillary. I see a possibility of taking the country back after eight years of Barry O. Tack on another eight years of Hillary and I don’t think we stand a chance.

The ship of state is ponderous and slow, and very difficult to turn. I’ll happily settle for a 90º
turn instead of the 180º I would like, given that the alternative is running into the iceberg named Hillary Clinton.

Are you really asking that question? Do you not know the answer? In fact, there are several answers in my opinion—as long as the conservatives are sane, that is—but the most obvious one is Cruz, as I indicated long ago, and as Bookworm (among many others) indicates here.

Early in the Trump campaign, most of them were saying, “he’s a successful businessman, he knows what he’s doing.” It was not about his over-the-top comments. They were looking at his successes in business and understanding that could translate to great success elsewhere. Period.

If you guys don’t get that, then you are underestimating Trump supporters.

I am still on the fence. I am waiting to see what happens after those early primaries. I have time. However, Trump is definitely on the list.

Of all the candidates, Carly Fiorina is my first choice for president. (My least favorite candidates are Trump, Sanders and Clinton, with Clinton’s being the worst.)

Unfortunately, Carly Fiorina does not appear to be an effective candidate in her TV appearances, notwithstanding her great performance during the first “under card” debate.

So, following the Buckley rule about supporting “the rightwardmost viable candidate”
(see http://www.nationalreview.com/article/340485/buckley-rule-according-bill-not-karl-neal-b-freeman), who should our candidate be?

The GOP standard-bearers are at a significant disadvantage if they try to adjust by mimicking Trump’s approach. At the least, it demands a fine calibration under raucous conditions. See this comment under a Neo post from September, where I described the difficulty for standard-bearing Republican candidates to adapt as you suggest.

There isn’t much the GOPe candidates can do within the presidential race if they must adjust to the Trump phenomenon.

The likelier solution falls to mainstream conservatives banding together in order to win the activist game versus the Clinton-backing Left and Trump-backing alt-Right, and the ascendant Right-activist movement lifting their preferred GOP standard-bearer(s).

It is, as it should be, a fight. The pendulum swings side to side. We celebrate our victories and in defeat we get back into the fight. Same as it ever was.