It has been observed more than once that the absurd overcrowding of the GOP debate stage - excuse me, debate stages (by the current absurd crowd) is an unintended consequence of Citizens United. Any candidate who can find himself a billionaire bankroller doesn't have to drop out for lack of funding, so the attrition which had been the rule in prior cycles isn't taking place.
This phenomenon actually feeds on itself. Precisely because the field has not narrowed, each candidate can look to the polling-at-single-digits doofus on his left and the polling-at-single digit doofus on his right (I speak in merely spatial terms, of course), and reason, "If with those poll numbers he thinks he has a chance, then who's to say I don't have a chance?"
But this morning I had one of those little blinding flashes of light.
All that is true enough, but the fundamental dynamic goosing the podia population is this: They can see what we can see.
Any one of the hopefuls can look at each of the others and legitimately say to itself, "Someone that lightweight, that certifiably insane, that boring, can never possibly win the general election." And each, being a politician (or else a first-class narcissist from some other field) is naturally endowed with a vampiric superpower: the inability to see its own reflection in a mirror. Therefore it draws the ineluctable conclusion, "I am the party's only hope in 2016."
None of them drops out precisely because all of them are so craptastic, and all of them know it.