A week out from the next Republican presidential debate, the contest remains where it has been for months. Sure, a few of the chess pieces have shifted — most significantly, Nikki Haley challenging Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s foothold on second place. But the big picture is that Donald Trump is about 50 points ahead in national polling and about 30 points ahead in the early states. Sure, there have been late surges in the past — such as Rick Santorum soaring from single digits in December to winning Iowa in early January 2012, or John McCain coming back from the dead to win the nomination in 2008. But in both of those cases, the Republican fields were unsettled, with multiple frontrunners over the course of the campaign, and no single candidate ever that far ahead. While Trump isn’t presumptive until he’s secured enough delegates to be the nominee, for his current lead to collapse in the less than two months before Iowa, we’d have to see something we’ve never seen before.

Assuming Trump goes on to win, there will be a lot of theorizing about what rival candidates could have done differently. The DeSantis campaign will undergo the most scrutiny given that he started out the year relatively close to Trump — even leading in a few state-level polls — and well ahead of any other rivals. I have my own theories on why the DeSantis campaign has underperformed, but the reality is that I’m not sure he would have beaten Trump, even had he run a perfect campaign.

The simple reason why Trump has been so formidable is that he keeps getting indicted. It’s the most obvious point, but it’s hard to escape the reality that the one factor put the race out of reach for anybody else was the fact that Republican voters have rallied around Trump during his legal fights, and they are not ready to abandon him. This seems pretty clear from the data.

Trump was indicted for the first time by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on March 30th, with news of the impending indictment having circled in the week before. On March 28, DeSantis was 15.1 points behind Trump in the RealClearPolitics average. That polling suggested Trump remained popular within his own party, but that there was an opening for somebody else. Within three weeks, Trump’s lead had more than doubled, to 31.6 on April 18. In the months that followed, DeSantis underwhelmed — while Trump’s support steadily grew as he racked up indictments. He now leads DeSantis in the national average 61.3 to 13.8 — or by nearly 50 points.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Trump would be losing now were it not for the indictments, or that DeSantis’s mistakes would not have mattered were it not for the indictments. But the indictments are the factor that turned Trump from a vulnerable favorite to the prohibitive favorite.