Ha, that’s so funny. No one ever ran against 16 candidates. Trump is on track to set the record for the most votes ever earned in the primary election. He’s already surpassed all of them, but Bush.
Most of those candidates barely made a blip on the radar. And most were out after the first 4 states. There were plenty of candidates in 2008 and 2012 too. I certainly remember similarly full debate stages in 2012.
The key difference this time was a strong challenger in Cruz, not the amount of candidates. Cruz got millions more votes than most recent runners-up, even 1.5 million more than McCain did in 2000, which was pretty much a 2-man race back then. Meanwhile Rubio and Kasich each got less votes than Santorum in 2012 or Huckabee and Romney in 2008. Cruz is also only 250,000 votes short of Reagan’s winning total in 1980.