However, although three successive political formations have ruled UP since 2000, they paid more attention to consolidating vote-banks along caste and religious lines, and none of them took up the state's poor health indicators as a political priority.
Mr. Rubio believes that if Mr. Cruz is out of the race, he can more quickly consolidate votes and contributions from the party's largest donors.
His opponents, most of whom are Republicans, haven't been able to consolidate votes — Karen Handel, former Georgia secretary of state, trails in a distant second with 17.4percentt.
But on Super Tuesday, three candidates — Al Gore, Jesse Jackson, and Richard Gephardt — each won Southern states rather than consolidating the vote.
While the national story is more about stability over the fall campaign than big dramatic shifts, one important trend is nonetheless modest but real: Hillary Clinton has been gradually consolidating her vote among Democrats, while Trump continues to bleed support among Republicans to Clinton and the third party candidates.
Traditionally, presidents shepherd legislation through the Congress by consolidating the votes of members from their own party, then by siphoning off the votes of enough moderates from the opposing party to get legislation passed.
For India's Hindu nationalist government, the Kumbh's message of unity across the religion's castes and innumerable deities dovetails nicely with the ruling Bharatiya Janata party's goal of consolidating Hindu votes.
But "some Republicans repelled by Mr. Trump feel little urgency to attack him because, they say, he is preventing what they see as an even less desirable standard-bearer -- Senator Ted Cruz of Texas -- from consolidating the votes of hard-line conservatives".
And it consolidated its vote last week by holding up the threat of the further ascendancy of Sinn Féin, to the point at which the republicans might appoint the first minister.
It suits Mr Abdullah that Mr Karzai delays any appointment of a new vice-president, so that Mr Abdullah can consolidate his vote bank in the former Northern Alliance.
Santorum will increasingly be seen as an obstacle to consolidating the conservative vote, rather than as the recently crowned Iowa winner that he is.
