The heat is on in the battle for second place between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who are both trailing Donald Trump in the Republican race.

McKay Coppins, senior political writer for BuzzFeed News and the author of The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House (Little, Brown and Company, 2015), says it's no joke that Trump has won 3 states in a row now.

But, unlike many pundits, Coppins says he's very skeptical of the theory that Trump will begin to lose power once the Republican nomination becomes a two-man race.

"If and when Ted Cruz does drop out...I think that his supporters are going to split pretty evenly between Rubio and Trump."

@BrianLehrer It's rich for Romney to comment on a candidate not releasing his tax returns.

— John Semlak (@johnsemlak) February 25, 2016

.@BrianLehrer We could clone him and make him fight the clone in an arena

— Jon Rosenberg™ (@jonrosenberg) February 25, 2016

Rubio "plans tonight to train his fire on Ted Cruz," @mckaycoppins tells @BrianLehrer on @WNYC. Not Trump. Plenty of time, apparently.

— Matt Katz (@mattkatz00) February 25, 2016