Cruz or Trump? You have to pick one.

Iowa is over. New Hampshire had its say. Now the world turns its lonely eyes to South Carolina.

Time for some real talk. Everyone has their preferred candidate. For some people, their preferred candidate may have dropped out the race. For most, their preferred candidate is lagging behind Donald Trump to some varying degree.

By the way, if you consider yourself to be a conservative and you support Donald Trump...well I don't know what to tell you other than you're being conned.

I know that there are a lot of Republican voters out there who don't view Cruz favorably. Likely, he wasn't your first choice when this whole dance started. He wasn't my first choice. Heck, he wasn't my second or third choice. But you go to war with the army that you have, not the army that you want.

For me, the priority is stopping Donald Trump. Full stop. He is not a conservative.

So, how do we go about achieving this objective? Simple. We nominate someone else. At this point, the field of alternatives is down to Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, and Bush. That's really it. And there's only one person of the four who can actually win.

Let's dispense with Kasich. He has no path to the nomination. He went all-in on New Hampshire, and he got second. Okay, good for him. He has no money and no organization here in SC, or anywhere else for that matter. He's not going to win.

Bush and Rubio are also stuck in a prisoner's dilemma of each taking establishment votes from the other. Also, factor in Kasich horning in on this voting bloc now, too. There just aren't enough regular, mainstream establishment Republicans to go around. Accordingly, each of these guys only gets a small piece of the pie. If there were only one mainstream guy, he would have a big number. But we have at least three.

So you have Cruz. Sure, he rubs some people the wrong way with his tone. He's going to have to address that. But he won Iowa, and he came in third in New Hampshire despite having not really spent that much time or money in the Granite State.

He's organized, and he has a ton of money. Sure, David Brook doesn't like him, but who cares? Guys like David Brooks are pretty much why you have so many people voting for Trump and Cruz.

I've thought about it very carefully, and I have to say that I think that Cruz is now the only candidate who can beat Trump. So you can pick one, South Carolina. Who's it going to be, Cruz or Trump?