Rubio’s Florida Endgame
The Florida delegate apportionment model lets the winner take all, and it was set up that way to clear a path to the nomination for Jeb Bush.
.. The campaign wanted to have the rally at the University of North Florida arena on Jacksonville’s Southside. But they couldn’t swing the $11,000 charge. So they went with the Morocco Temple, a nearby concert and event facility, which rents for $5,000. The Morocco Temple’s main ballroom holds 3,000 for concerts, when not configured for press corps setups, which took up maybe a tenth of the floor space.
.. The bigger problem revealed in Rubio’s speech was a fundamental disconnect between the movement conservative talking points that are de rigueur in his speeches, and the kind of populist appeals that are moving the Golden Corral Conservatives and Gun Rack Republicans who are deciding state after state for Cruz or Trump.
.. Appeals to a National Greatness conservatism, paeans to conservatism in general, and pledges to support Israel and reform regulatory structures all fell flat with the crowd beyond the true believers in the front and the VIP seats. As did a pledge to “repeal every one of Barack Obama’s unconstitutional executive orders.”
.. If anyone is going to emerge as Trump’s permanent intraparty foil, it’s Ted Cruz, whose data driven campaign has gotten tremendous return on investment for money spent.
.. “Identify[ing] the low propensity voters who other campaigns are ignoring,” and “tailoring issues and how they think about those issues,” has been key to Cruz’s success thus far.
.. The Northwest Florida Daily News, a Pensacola paper, said that “Rubio appeared to attempt to diminish ‘North Florida’ as a voting force” after a Fox News host noted that “Florida shares media markets with 19 counties in Alabama and Georgia and in those counties Trump beats you 50 percent to 16 percent.”
“Obviously these are important counties and great people that live in those counties, but you’re talking about North Florida, not heavily populated areas,” Rubio said, adding that “the bulk of the vote comes from the I-4 corridor, Southwest Florida and, of course, my home area of Miami and even up into Jacksonville.”
So Rubio’s Florida strategy is not predicated on appeal throughout the state. (This is probably just as well given that his favorability rating is -24 in a recent Public Policy Polling poll.) It’s targeted to appeal to very specific demographics that are anomalous in the GOP base.