Three candidates have already pulled out, and a couple more may go before the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1. Soon after that, candidates who haven’t scored anything resembling a primary win will begin to drop off, until there are only a few left.

Some of the people who write the checks are getting this idea. As the Washington Post reported, “More than a dozen interviews with high-profile GOP financiers revealed a pervasive confidence that the party’s rank-and-file voters will ultimately reject Trump’s brand of politics” — so there’s no need to put money behind a concerted effort to take him out.

The truth is that all the party’s voters won’t be rejecting Trump. It’s certainly possible that his campaign will prove incapable of the nuts-and-bolts work required to actually get primary voters to the polls. But by now it seems pretty clear that the voters who like Trump actually like Trump. It isn’t because they haven’t learned enough about him, and it isn’t because they haven’t thought enough about their loyalty to the party. He’s the one they want.

So the party’s only hope is that the seven out of 10 potential primary voters not currently behind Trump find their way to somebody else who can accumulate enough delegates to wrest the nomination from him. Those party bigwigs may be able to help that person, but it won’t be by holding 100 more focus groups to figure out what turns voters away from Trump.