“How did we end up without a choice for conservatives? I am concerned about this election.”
I agree, it’s a terrible outcome to a terrible process. Several points I think caused this:
After Super Tuesday, McCain became the putative nominee with little more than 35% of the vote.
The above happened due to several large, winner-take-all states, but we had four or five viable candidates. It’s as if a state elected it’s governor and senators with one voting day, no runoff, and the winner got 35%.
The non-McCain vote in all states was scattered among the three or four other viable candidates. Huckabee in particular pulled much of the evangelical vote from Thompson and Romney, so neither of those two were able to build a winning coalition.
If we’d had only two or three viable candidates, winner-take-all states would have worked fairly well, but they are a (IMO) a disaster when there are four or five viable candidates. They can, and did, serve up a very marginal winner such as McCain this year.
Possible outcome:
As polls currently show, Obama wins the nomination, but around 40% of Hillary’s white voters go to McCain in the GE.
McCain receives a healthy Hispanic vote, a good part attributable to many Hispanics reluctance to vote for a black candidate.
McCain wins fairly handily and attributes his win to his “humane” approach to illegal aliens (no mention of the first two points above).
A disaster for Republicans in the long run.