The new rules the Republicans have generally agreed upon for the upcoming presidential election season--you can find the details elsewhere--will lead inevitably to one thing, a brokered convention. Indeed it is a good thing for them that they have decided to hold their convention at the beginning of the summer, because it could very well last for weeks before a candidate is actually decided upon. The reasons for this will be enumerated below the thingy
In approaching the 2012 election, one candidate had the organizational momentum--the money, the connections, the game plan and so on--to achieve the nomination, and that candidate, Mitt Romney, eventually nailed it down. He did not, however, have trouble doing so because the primary season was so elongated. He had troubles because the 'flavor of the week' kept passing from candidate to candidate and he had to continually modify his defense to keep up and overcome it. Had the season been any more compact, he might not have had the time to nail it down. His competitors would have been able to see the approaching goal line--the convention--and would have realized that if they held out, they could enter it with no clear cut majority winner and a decent fistful of delegates to negotiate with. He was prepared to win the marathon, and that is what he did, but the best he could have done in a sprint would have been, perhaps, to be the leading qualifier.
And now, in 2014, there is not a single potential Republican candidate who has come close to marshaling the resources and connections that Romney had marshaled by the beginning of 2010. The 2016 election cycle has started, and, thanks to their love of concealed weapons, the Republicans have already shot themselves in both feet. There will not be enough time for the public, the media, and the fickle Republican voters to vet the candidates. Unless one hopeful parachutes into a fleet of invading North Korean troop ships and singlehandedly stops them from landing on American soil, there will not be enough time for one candidate to stand out from the others--to appeal to more than his or her own niche market--and achieve the required majority of the nominating votes. Keep July open. All of it.