Because of this, the Rubio campaign argues that as long as their candidate can dominate the establishment field in the early primaries, Republican donors will soon pressure the others occupying that space — chiefly Bush, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio — to leave the race. Until that happens, Rubio’s advisers assert, Rubio can stay even with Trump and Cruz in the overall delegate count simply by winning Florida and Ohio on March 15 while placing third in the 33 other contests up to that point. Once the party does anoint Rubio as the last, best hope to defeat Trump and Cruz, money will pour in and delegate-rich states like New York, Pennsylvania and California will follow.
.. “this president has been a disaster” because Obama believes that “America is an arrogant global power that needs to be cut down to size.”
.. In his campaign’s view, Rubio’s charisma — and Cruz’s lack of it — is potentially determinative. “It matters to voters more than anything else,” one member of Rubio’s team told me. “Look how bad the underlying numbers were for Obama in 2012. But at the end of the day, voters liked him better than Mitt.”
Maybe Rubio’s Just a Bad Presidential Candidate
While it is often taken for granted that Rubio is the one that party leaders and donors should get behind, he has scarcely any qualifications to be president. He has nothing like the executive experience that the other “establishment” candidates have in spades. (If you judged Rubio against Kasich or Bush just on their resumes, he is hardly the obvious “establishment” choice.) Rubio also ran away from the only major piece of legislation that he worked on in his one term in the Senate. That does not exactly scream leadership material to the people that are “supposed” to rally behind him.
.. Many people are impressed by Rubio because he delivers speeches well and performs capably in debates. He is smooth and fluent when speaking about policy (even if the things he’s saying about it happen to be dangerous or nonsensical).
.. For most people, he doesn’t inspire the sort of excitement or devotion that Trump does, and that’s because he is a little too polished, too scripted, and too much the career politician (which of course is exactly what he is).
.. Add in his other weaknesses, including his unappealing message of perpetual meddling in foreign conflicts, and you’ve got a recipe for a bad candidate.
Rubio: Never Speechless
“Within two years of getting elected you were co-sponsoring legislation to create a path to citizenship—in your words, amnesty,” Kelly pointed out. “Haven’t you already proven that you cannot be trusted on this issue?” It would be wrong to say that this question left Rubio speechless: he always has an answer. In this case, though, it wasn’t a very persuasive one.
Rubio: Republicans can’t win without expanding beyound white base
The argument that there are simply not enough Republican voters today to elect a Republican president is one that is not usually uttered in public by Republican candidates. And it is essentially the opposite of the theory being put forward by Mr. Cruz, who says he can win by expanding the white vote.
.. “If an extra 10 million evangelical Christians show up on Election Day, we will not be up at 2 or 3 in the morning wondering what happened in Ohio or Florida; they’ll call the election at 8:37 p.m.,” Mr. Cruz told Glenn Beck in an interview last year.