“Rubio Suddenly Notices Trump”: The Fervor Of Someone Who Has Undergone A Deathbed Conversion
What a difference a sense of urgency makes.
Having finally stood up to the bully Donald Trump in Thursday night’s debate, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio continued his assault on the GOP front-runner on NBC’s “Today” show.
But the most remarkable part of Rubio 2.0 is the hypocrisy and shamelessness of that same urgency.
“We’re on the verge of having someone take over the conservative movement and the Republican Party who’s a con artist,” Rubio said. “His target audience is working Americans who are really struggling over the last few years in this economy but he has spent a career sticking it to working Americans.” Remember the phrases “con artist” and “sticking it to working Americans” – you’re going to hear that a lot from Rubio, who famously excels at hitting his talking points. In the “Today” interview, for example, he used the former expression four times and the latter three in a four-and-a-half minute interview. (The line of attack is actually quite strong, not least because it has the virtue of being correct – this morning’s clips will make good fodder for Hillary Clinton’s admen in the fall.)
And how did we get to be “on the verge of” of a Trump victory? Rubio’s answer, of course, is the media: He, Rubio, has had articles written about his driving record, he complained, while the tyrant of Trump Tower is “always making things up and no one holds him accountable for it. … He’s being treated with kid gloves by many in the media in the hopes that he’s the nominee. Some of them are biased – they’d love to see a liberal like Donald Trump take over the Republican Party. And others know he’s easy to beat once he gets there.”
It’s as if Rubio just wandered into the race and realized that the party of Saint Ronald of Reagan is on the verge of being taken over by Trump. How could such a thing happen?
Don’t blame Marco! It’s not like he’s been sitting meekly for months watching up close as Trump runs roughshod over the party, right? Marco Rubio hasn’t been on the debate stage and the hustings, treating Trump with “kid gloves,” failing to hold him accountable for his nonsensical ravings and – lest we forget – abetting his neofascist Muslim bashing, right? It was literally two days ago on the very same TV show that Rubio dismissed the idea that he had to attack Trump as “a media narrative,” piously saying he “didn’t run for office to tear up other Republicans.” (Except for Ted Cruz, whom he was busy ripping apart.)
I get that Rubio’s campaign learned the lesson of Jeb Bush and was smart enough to deliberately not telegraph the volley of punches they planned for Trump. And Rubio doesn’t bear all the blame alone – fellow survivor Ted Cruz, for example, made a conscious strategy of bear-hugging Trump for much of the last several months. But Rubio’s shock – shock! – that Trump has been allowed to get this far is rather rich.
Rubio suddenly has the fervor of someone who has undergone a deathbed conversion, which is pretty much what he has. As I wrote yesterday, the extent to which Trump is in the catbird seat is reflected by the fact that the Florida primary – where the former reality TV star is doubling Rubio in the polls – is an existential test for the freshman senator but not Trump. A loss there kills Rubio, while vanquishing Trump would merely mean holding serve at home.
So we’ll see if Rubio’s mad stop-Trump scramble pays off. If it doesn’t and he wants to blame someone for losing his beloved conservative movement to a con artist, he can start by looking in the mirror.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Managing Editor for Opinion, U.S. News & World Report, February 26, 2016
“Staying In Harmony”: Christie Endorses Trump, And They Sing A Duet Of Contempt For Rubio
Just when it looked like it was Donald Trump against the Republican world — a world for which Marco Rubio was to be the savior — along comes an endorsement that cannot be ignored: Chris Christie, an Establishment candidate before he became the odd man out in New Hampshire, has embraced the Donald. If, like me, you didn’t see that coming, you have to admit it makes sense from a stylistic and geographic perspective. Boisterous is probably the euphemism for the rhetorical qualities the two share, along with a Greater New York orientation. And it is probably a relief for Christie, after he’s spent years sucking up to conservative activists, to join a campaign where it’s okay to admit the public sector has duties other than fighting wars and enforcing contracts. Christie will have to deal with hearing his own words mocking Trump’s Muslim-immigration-ban idea quoted back to him; he will need, and is no doubt formulating, a quick response or just a brush-away reference to coalition politics.
But it’s clear Christie and his new candidate of choice won’t have any trouble staying in harmony on the subject of the day: Marco Rubio as a stone loser, per the New York Times‘ Maggie Haberman:
At Friday’s news conference announcing the endorsement, which was peppered with demeaning insults of Mr. Rubio by the two men, Mr. Christie repeatedly attacked Mr. Rubio, calling his behavior at the debate “desperate” and reflective of a “losing campaign … ”
Mr. Trump heaped praise on Mr. Christie for tenderizing Mr. Rubio during the final debate in New Hampshire, where the Florida senator wilted under blistering criticism from the governor.
“I thought he was gonna die — good going, Chris,” Mr. Trump said.
Nothing like some Marco-bashing to bond two guys together, eh? But Haberman thinks Christie’s move will have more practical benefits than just messing with Rubio’s head:
Mr. Christie’s endorsement augments Mr. Trump’s appeal for working-class voters. But more significantly, Mr. Christie could become a catalyst for other leading Republicans to back him after they have held back from supporting the developer despite his recent string of victories.
We’ll see. I’d say Chris Christie’s endorsement plus 11 or 12 wins on March 1 would be a good one-two combo for Trump. And then, yes, Christie’s example could make it easier for other moderate or “somewhat conservative” pols to gamble their respectability on a front-row seat at that most improbable of events: the nomination of Donald J. Trump.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, February 26, 2016
“Quite Unpopular At Home”: Rubio’s Must-Win State Is His Own — And He’s Losing There
As political observers absorb Thursday night’s tenth Republican-candidate debate and argue over Trump’s untouchability or Marco Rubio’s new fight-club mentality, Nate Cohn of the New York Times takes on the more prosaic chore of examining how, exactly, Rubio might survive a losing streak and still win the GOP nomination.
The good news he offers Rubio and his growing circle of party and conservative-Establishment fans is that he doesn’t have to win a single state on March 1.
[I]t wouldn’t be optimal for Mr. Rubio to lose all 12 contests on March 1, Super Tuesday. His chances of amassing an outright majority of delegates, and becoming the presumptive nominee before the convention, would be quite low. But he would still have a real chance to take a clear delegate lead over , and win the nomination.
Rubio’s key to survival thereafter is to take advantage of proportional award systems by exceeding the 20 percent threshold necessary to win delegates in every (or nearly every) state. If he does that, a more ambitious goal may come into sight: edging out Ted Cruz for second place in enough states — especially in the South — to all but knock him out of the race and set up the long-awaited head-to-head competition with Trump.
On the other hand, says Cohn, excuses for Rubio not actually winning primaries come to an abrupt end on March 15:
Ohio and Florida will award their delegates on a winner-take-all basis. Missouri will award its delegates on a winner-take-all basis by congressional district, and Illinois isn’t much different. North Carolina, on the other hand, awards its delegates proportionally. It figures less prominently in the delegate math and as a result the candidates are unlikely to spend money there on television advertisements or campaign stops.
If Mr. Trump swept the day in the same way he is expected to sweep Super Tuesday, he would net nearly three times as many delegates as he would on Super Tuesday, defeating Mr. Rubio, 282 delegates to 40. For Mr. Rubio, winning Florida would make Mr. Trump’s advantage a more manageable 183 to 139, but his hole would start looking pretty deep.
With that sort of a deficit, Mr. Rubio’s chances of winning a majority of delegates would all but evaporate.
So Rubio really needs to win in Missouri, Ohio, and Illinois on March 15 to stay in the game with Trump (assuming Trump doesn’t stumble on March 1). And it goes without saying he must, must, must win his home state of Florida. Getting skunked there would decimate his delegate math, even if his Establishment friends somehow found a way to madly spin a home-court loss into something other than a disaster.
Signs are growing, however, that winning Florida won’t be easy for the state’s own junior senator. For months Rubio languished in third or even fourth place in Florida public-opinion surveys. Only with Jeb Bush’s withdrawal from the race — giving Rubio a boost in both elected official endorsements and favorite-son status points — has he begun to rise; a post-Jeb Quinnipiac poll has him within 16 points of the longtime leader in the state, Donald Trump. What should be more troubling to Team Rubio, however, is that Trump is now rivaling him on his home turf in all the indices of basic popularity.
This is made most evident by the very latest Florida survey, from Public Policy Polling:
[Rubio’s] approval rating as Senator has cratered to a 31/55 spread, compared to a much more evenly divided 41/44 when we last polled the state in September. Only 40% of voters in the state think he should continue with his campaign, compared to a 44% plurality who think it’s time for him to drop out. And he narrowly trails both Hillary Clinton (45/43) and Bernie Sanders (44/42) in head to head general election match ups. Rubio’s become quite unpopular at home over the course of his campaign.
Winning has made Trump more popular. 64% of Republicans in Florida now have a favorable opinion of him to only 27% with a negative one. That actually puts him ahead of Rubio’s 60/28 standing.
Let that sink in for a minute. From the very beginning of the 2016 cycle, Marco Rubio’s ace in the hole has been high and positive favorability ratios all over the country. Nobody much disliked him, and that made him the likely beneficiary of the winnowing of the field. Now Donald Trump’s more popular than he is with Florida Republicans, at least according to this one survey. And PPP has more bad news for those who assume the fading of other candidates on and after March 1 will put Rubio over the top:
The most remarkable thing in this poll though is what happens when you narrow the field down to just Trump and Rubio- Trump still leads by double digits at 52/38. Rubio does win over supporters of Cruz (56/25), Kasich (47/32), and Carson (64/21) in such a scenario. But Trump has such a big lead to begin with and picks up enough of the supporters of the also rans that it gives him the overall 14 point advantage.
Is the PPP survey an outlier? Maybe, though the Quinnipiac poll that offered Rubio relatively good news also found that Trump’s “negative score” — the percentage of Republicans who say they could not support him — is now lower in Florida than Cruz’s and not much higher than Rubio’s. That may be the overriding reason Rubio suddenly went after Trump with a claw hammer in last night’s debate. A scenario where the mogul is as popular as Rubio in Florida is simply catastrophic, to the point that Rubio is willing to risk his own warm-and-fuzzies to undermine acceptance of Trump.
And Rubio can’t entirely count on another strong finish among late-deciders to win Florida for him: Early voting is a very big deal there, with some local election officials estimating a majority of primary votes will be cast by mail or in person before March 15. The option of lying in the weeds and waiting for Trump to self-destruct or for someone else to take him out has vanished for Marco Rubio. He’s potentially two and a half weeks away from watching his candidacy expire where it started.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, February 26, 2016
“Ideological Malleability”: Why Trump Could Be Tougher In General Election Than You Think
Donald Trump may not wind up as the Republican nominee for president, but at this point it’s far and away the most likely outcome of the primary race. Having won three of the four contests so far, he’s heading into Super Tuesday six days from now in a position to widen his lead beyond the point where his opponents could catch him.
Which raises an inevitable question: Is he really as terrible a general election candidate as so many people have assumed?
The most rational answer is that we have no idea. If Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio were the nominee, the general election would likely be fairly predictable, in that the debate would revolve around traditional partisan divisions on issues, and we know which states would be competitive and which wouldn’t. But just as Trump’s unique candidacy has defied all that we thought we knew about what matters in primary campaigns — the damage done by outrageous statements, the importance of ideological consistency, the key role played by party elites — so too could a Trump nomination produce an utterly unpredictable general election.
There are still good reasons to think that Trump would be be obliterated by the Democratic nominee. But there’s also a case to be made that Trump would so scramble the election calculus that he could win. Indeed, you might even argue that he has a better shot than a more traditional candidate. Let’s examine each way of looking at the general election.
The case against Trump’s chances begins with the fact that he’s tremendously unpopular. As much as he has thrilled a certain segment of the Republican electorate, everything he has done and said in the primary campaign — the xenophobia, the bigotry, the bombast — has served to alienate him from voters he would need to win the general election. Polls of all Americans, as opposed to just Republicans, show that around 30-35 percent of the public have a favorable impression of Trump, while around 55-60 percent have an unfavorable impression of him.
Furthermore, talking about building a wall with Mexico and rounding up 11 million undocumented immigrants might make the audiences at his rallies cheer, but it won’t play so well with the broader electorate. Everyone understands that the GOP must improve its showing among Latino voters, one of the fastest-growing parts of the electorate, if it’s ever to win back the White House. Trump wouldn’t just fail to improve those numbers, he’d make the bottom fall out: polls have shown (see here or here or here) that Trump is spectacularly unpopular with Latinos, just as you might expect, with approval ratings as low as 11 percent. Furthermore, his nomination would be a terrific mobilization tool to get Latino voters to the polls.
That’s true of other voting groups as well. If you’re not a white guy and Trump hasn’t insulted you yet, he probably will by the end of the primaries. Imagine that the Democratic nominee were Hillary Clinton. How wide will the gender gap be when the potential first woman president is running against a guy who shows such contempt for women and discards each of his wives as soon as she hits her 40s? (Note to Melania: the clock is ticking, so you might want to prepare yourself.)
There’s no doubt that Trump has tapped into something important within the Republican electorate, but that’s where it resides: that combination of anger at their party’s leaders and fear of a changing world sowed the seeds for Trump’s rise. But the general electorate is very different from the Republican electorate: among other things, it’s less white, less Christian, and younger. The positions Trump has taken as he’s appealed to Republicans — overturn Roe v. Wade, loosen gun laws, cut taxes for the wealthy, repeal the Affordable Care Act — are all unpopular with the public at large.
So that’s the case for a Trump defeat in the fall: he’s got the wrong positions on issues, he’s ticked off a lot of voters he’ll need, and he’s generally considered to be an obnoxious jerk.
The argument in favor of a Trump victory has two pieces to it, one about demographics and one about the kind of candidate he’d actually be in a general election. The demographic argument says that Trump has an appeal that other Republicans don’t have. We’ve seen again and again how party leaders (and his opponents) have attacked him for liberal positions he’s held in the past (like being pro-choice and saying nice things about single-payer health care), and even some heresies he’s offered in the present (like his bizarre assertion that George W. Bush was president on September 11, 2001 or his criticism of the Iraq War). Trump’s voters, it turned out, didn’t care. Ideological consistency isn’t important to them, because their affection for Trump is based on other things, like their contempt for Washington and the belief that he’s a “winner,” and if he were president he’d spread his winningness over the whole country, through some process that need not be explained.
Since these beliefs aren’t tied to conservative ideology, they could have appeal beyond Republicans. And even if Trump alienates women, his displays of chest-thumping dominance could appeal to lots and lots of white men, particularly those who are lower on the income and education scales (as Trump said after his Nevada win yesterday, “I love the poorly educated”). That could make Trump competitive in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan that have been in the Democratic column in the last two elections. Unlike other Republicans who have to work to convince voters that they aren’t just on the side of the rich, Trump, an actual rich person, has an economic appeal that has nothing to do with facts but is more about feeling. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders may be leading Trump in general election trial heats, but not by much — just a few points.
It’s the second piece of the puzzle that may be less appreciated at this point. To put it simply, Donald Trump would be a completely different candidate in a general election than the one we see now. Conservatives are justified in being terrified by Trump’s ideological malleability. They look at him and see someone with no true beliefs and no commitments, who will quickly change positions if it suits him. He’s only presenting himself as a conservative Republican now — to the degree that he’s even doing that — because he’s running in a Republican primary.
When conservatives think that, they’re absolutely right. He will indeed transform himself once he has a different audience. We don’t have to wonder about that, because he has said so on more than one occasion. “Once you get to a certain level, it changes,” he told Greta Van Susteren a few weeks ago. “I will be changing very rapidly. I’m very capable of changing to anything I want to change to.”
On another occasion, he told voters in Iowa, “When I’m president, I’m a different person. I can do anything. I can be the most politically correct person that you’ve ever seen.” While ordinary politicians try to convince you of their consistency, Trump proudly says that he’ll turn himself into whatever the situation demands. And if it demands someone who has moderate positions, that’s what he’ll be.
Will the voters buy it? We have no way of knowing, because we haven’t seen that version of Trump yet. But we shouldn’t assume that the fact that most of them dislike the current version means they won’t like the next one.
At the moment, I haven’t decided which of these scenarios I think is more likely, Trump getting blown out and taking the Republican Party with him, or Trump forging a heretofore unseen coalition that carries him to the White House. I lean toward the first, but I can’t tell if that’s because the idea of this despicable buffoon being the most powerful human being on earth is so ghastly, and my judgment derives more from hope than anything else. The truth is that with Trump in a general election, we’d be in uncharted territory. Anything could happen.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, February 24, 2016
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