Who did you think would win the Republican Nomination as of July 1st, 2015?

[AN63093]

Unfortunately there's no "proof" of this, since I hadn't started posting here yet (though I did occasionally lurk, going back to 2008ish actually).

However, this was my opinion at the time.  I tend to dislike making predictions so far in advance, but my "gut feeling" was Bush.  I thought Walker was living on borrowed time since he didn't have any particular advantages over Bush.  I was completely convinced that Rubio was a paper tiger, since although he had a fair amount of support, I thought he was a lightweight that would eventually have his "moment."  I wasn't sure what that moment would be, but I knew it was going to happen sooner or later (it ended up being his ghastly debate performance).

Although Trump had announced by this point, I didn't think he'd win.  I did think, however, he was a much stronger force than people were giving him credit for.  At this time, most people thought his campaign was a joke or a promotional scheme, but I was unconvinced.  I saw, even from his announcement speech, that Trump was hitting all the right notes on issues that there was considerable angst about in the base, but no one else was effectively addressing.  Additionally, it was quite obvious from early on that Trump was much better/comfortable being on TV than any other candidate (this is way more important than people seem to understand) and had significantly more salesmanship, marketing savvy, etc.  Trump was the only one generating positive memes online from the base at the time as well (Bush generated a lot of memes too, but they were mostly ones making fun of him).

That being said though, I thought that Bush's institutional support would be too much to overcome at the end of the day, though Trump was going to make it interesting.

That changed as soon as the debates got going.  It was patently obvious at that point that Trump was sucking up all the oxygen in the room and absolutely eviscerating Bush (love him or hate him, Trump's destruction of Bush was one of the most wondrous things I've ever seen in politics, and I've been following elections since the early 90s).  I probably knew for sure around New Years that it was Trump.