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Is It Already Over for Rubio in Florida?
Is It Already Over for Rubio in Florida? | RealClearPolitics
Is It Already Over for Rubio in Florida?
Is It Already Over for Rubio in Florida? | RealClearPolitics
For Donald Trump, it may all come down to the land of the hanging chad – twice. To win the Republican nomination, he must beat Marco Rubio in Florida. To triumph in the general election, he almost certainly must vanquish Hillary Clinton in the Sunshine State as well.
Florida is indeed the mother of all swing states. With its rapid growth, Florida’s electoral college votes have increased from a mere 10 in 1960 to 29 today. That’s more than 10% of the total of 270 needed to win the general election.
More importantly, only one president since 1972 has lost Florida and still won the White House. Ironically, it was Hillary’s husband Bill in 1992.
In addition, races in this schizoid swing state are almost always close. George W. Bush (with an assist from the Supreme Court) beat Al Gore by a few hundred hanging chads in 2000 while Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in 2012 by less than 1%.
The good news for Donald Trump is that he matches up well with Hillary Clinton in what is often referred to as Trump’s “second home.” For example, in a recent Florida Atlantic University poll featured in Breitbart, Trump, with his broad and energized base, is the only Republican candidate to beat both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
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As for Rubio v. Trump, Young Marco is rolling the Establishment Republican dice on the mother of all “delegate math” gambles. Florida is a “winner take all” state with 99 delegates, Ohio is “winner take all” with 63 delegates, and together, Florida and Ohio constitute fully 13% of the total Republican delegates Trump needs to win the nomination.
Rubio is gambling he can beat Trump in his home state of Florida and favorite son John Kasich can thump Trump in Ohio. These two Establishment Republicans can thereby prevent Trump from sewing up the nomination before what then must become a “brokered convention.” Of course, at the convention, the Republican Party machine will take over, snuff out the reviled Trump in a smoke-filled room, and anoint Rubio and Kasich as their dream ticket – or perhaps Romney-Rubio.
It’s a strategy that looks pretty good on paper – particularly since it is likely to be bankrolled by a flood of anti-trump Super PAC bucks. The only BIG problem is this: Marco Rubio doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in the hot and humid Hell of a Miami summer of taking his home state.
For starters, Rubio has a math problem of his own. Floridians love to vote absentee, and a not insignificant fraction of these voters have already cast their ballots for Jeb Bush before the hapless Jeb pulled the plug on his campaign. These are votes that likely would have gone into the Rubio column.
In addition, Floridians love to vote early in-person as well. Sixteen of Florida’s 67 counties opened up their polls for business on February 29th, all of the polls opened by March 5th, and over half of the voters in Florida will have already cast their ballots by the March 15 official election day. This means that the avalanche of TV ads and sleazy hit piece mailers that Rubio and his Anti-Trump Super Pac will soon be unleashing will have already missed many of their marks (pun intended).
A “Traitorous” Flip-Flopper?
Rubio’s real problem, however, is not really one of delegate mathematics but rather that of extremely poor political judgment. In a nutshell, Young Marco forgot the most important rule of politics, which is to “dance with the one that brung ya.”
The “one” that brought Rubio quite unexpectedly to the US Senate in 2010 was the Florida Tea Party. These rabid conservatives supported Rubio not because of any deep and abiding faith in his far right of center politics. They are hardly that naïve.
Rather, the Tea Party, along with much of the Republican Party in Florida at the time, simply hated Rubio’s opponent Charlie Crist. Moreover, they hated Crist for precisely the kind of run-to-the-center, flip-flopping behavior that Rubio has engaged in almost from the moment he seized the brass Senate ring. As one frosted Tea Partyite put it:
Floridians have a very specific disdain for Marco Rubio based on his self-serving backstabbing of his own constituency. The anger is personal, deep, widespread, and will never go away.
The biggest beef the Tea Party has with Rubio is his trampoline-size flip-flop in supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants. It’s a broken promise that has created a great divide and an irrevocable split between Rubio and his Senate election base. That’s why Trump is killing Rubio in the polls in Florida with self-identified Tea Partyers and conservatives.
That said, Florida’s Right Wing is not the only constituency incensed at Rubio. There are about a million Puerto Ricans in Florida, and a little over 40% are Republicans or Independents. Many of them likewise hate Rubio for his flip-flop on legislation that would have allowed Puerto Rican municipalities to declare bankruptcy. Rubio’s about-face was widely viewed as a traitorous act that many in the Puerto Rican community attribute to Rubio’s support from rich Wall Street donors representing bondholders.
As for the Cuban community from which Rubio has sprung, Rubio’s problem here speaks to the brilliant foresight of Trump himself. While Rubio has clung to the hardest of lines on thawing ties with Raul Castro’s Cuba, opinions within the Florida Cuban community have steadily shifted. Indeed, a majority of Cuban-Americans now support the thaw – and Trump is way out in front on this issue.
On top of all this, there is also Rubio’s near sociopathic “shape-shifting” about who he really is. He has lied about being the son of Cuban exiles – his parents arrived in the US well before Castro’s revolution. He’s been a Mormon, a Catholic, and a Baptist. With the abruptness of Linda Blair’s neck-swivel in the Exorcist, he has also swung from being a strong environmentalist to a climate change denier.
Finally, there is the uncomfortable matter of Rubio’s alleged corruption during his tenure as a state politician in the sleazy underbelly of Miami. For example, he nepotistically put his mother-in-law and three other of his wife’s family members on a front group political committee. With his wife as treasurer, he then failed to report over $30,000 in campaign contributions.
It is also well-documented how Rubio used an American Express card issued to him by the Republican Party for a raft of personal and unauthorized expenses – from a $1,000 minivan repair and a $10,000 family reunion to buying groceries and wine.
Shakespeare In Florida
In truth, there is an underlying tragedy to Marco Rubio’s rise – and what now looks to be his inevitable fall. It did not have to be this way.
Rather than launch his rabid negative campaign against Donald Trump, all Rubio had to do was smile and use his brilliant intellect to debate civilly and wait to be tapped as Trump’s Veep. He was the logical choice right up until he opened his foul mouth and started spitting epithets at Trump.
In this “statesman scenario,” Rubio would have either been in the White House in 2016 as Vice-President or he would have been perfectly positioned to capture the nomination in 2020 in the event of a Republican loss. Instead, Rubio now faces an all-or-nothing roll on a Florida roulette wheel that is spinning far out of his control. This is indeed a bleak and tragic future. He will be out of the Senate in 2016 with nowhere to go but down.
