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The more that join the stage, the less likely anyone can derail Trump.
The debates are meaningless. Every once in a while someone gets off a good line and genuinely hurts another candidate. Christie did it to Rubio seven years ago. But generally, they yap to a draw and people pretend that the person they liked all along had a great showing. We call that spin.
Debates are to meaningful discourse as side-bets on the coin toss are to the Super Bowl.
Trump wins when people get into the mud with him. He's captured that personality trait. I don't know how he does it. The more he talks, the less serious I think he is as a human being. But that plays well in what passes for debate. He takes others out of their game. He got Rubio jabbering about penis size, of all things. On national television. Rubio would have won easily if not for the Christie line and the subsequent penis debate.
I'm not 100% sure Rubio would have governed much differently from Trump, but at least he wouldn't have been such a giant (penis metaphor) about it.
Unfortunately, handicapping the crowd changes to benefit the name you know every time a new name is added. Of the "whos", Ramaswamy is making a name being the outsider who says out loud what the outsiders are thinking. And thus he will top out at 3-4%. He'll appeal to the small number of people who genuinely like Trump, but think Trump can't win. As opposed to splitting the vote ten ways between those who genuinely dislike Trump and think he can't win. That second group might actually be huuuge within the party, but divided ten ways has no say whatsoever.
With all these candidates, Trump only needs 20-25% of the party (not the whole voting population) to stick with him fervently long enough that no one in that second group manages to unite that second group.
But if I have to handicap it, DeSantis is the name because of the landslide in Florida, but when he speaks, people fall DeSleep. Plus taking on Disney might be all fun and games, but it's not a serious platform. He's wasting whatever he could legitimately offer by wrestling the mouse.
Haley would have been the name, but her time has apparently passed, and, like McCain, she has become bitter. Scott is interesting enough, but relatively generic as senators go. Pence will never overcome having been on the ticket with Trump, and then the avid Trumpers hate him because he refused to break the law after the election. I don't know why he'd run, given that it helps Trump. Christie is also interesting in other ways, but his association with Trump plus being out of the game for so long makes his candidacy a non-starter.
Anyway, it looks like a slam-dunk for Trump unless something major changes. The wild card is that convincing fake audio/video is now a thing, and it will be used effectively last-minute in ways we can't yet anticipate. But that's more important for generals than primaries.
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