By Nate Cohn
Friday, February 26, 2016
Marco Rubio has not won a state, a fact that worries
allies and pleases skeptics who mock his chances to win the Republican
presidential nomination.
It doesn’t even sound as if the Rubio team knows when it
will win one.
Can this strategy really work? Could he really lose every
state on Super Tuesday and still stand a chance of becoming the nominee?
The delegate math says yes. No, it 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 Donald Trump, and win the
nomination.
That window closes March 15. On that day a slew of big
winner-take-all states will vote. If Mr. Rubio can’t hold his own in those
states — Illinois, Ohio, Florida, Missouri and North Carolina — it will become
extremely difficult for him to finish the primary season with a lead in pledged
delegates. His more realistic strategy then would be to deny Mr. Trump a
majority and hope to win at a contested convention.
So, yes, the delegate math works. The problem for Mr.
Rubio isn’t the math; it’s winning even the small number of states needed to
pull it off.
The Rules Buy Time
for Rubio
The Republican delegate rules, relative to those for the
Democrats, are biased toward candidates who win. That makes it very easy to
imagine how Mr. Trump could sweep to the nomination over a divided field.
But that’s not so true before March 15, when party rules
prevent states from apportioning their delegates on a winner-take-all basis.
Most states wound up splitting their delegates, awarding a pool of at-large
delegates proportionally by the percentage of the vote and awarding other
delegates to the candidates who lead in each congressional district.
As a result, it will be difficult on Super Tuesday for
Mr. Trump to amass a significant majority of delegates if the other two major
candidates — Mr. Rubio and Ted Cruz — clear the thresholds (at highest 20
percent) for earning proportional delegates. It seemed quite possible a few
weeks ago that Mr. Trump could build a big lead on Super Tuesday, but Jeb
Bush’s exit from the race and the big bump in Mr. Rubio’s poll numbers make it
far less likely that Mr. Trump can pull that off.
Imagine, for a moment, that the candidates fare about as
well on Super Tuesday as they have through the first four contests. Given the
types of states in play on Super Tuesday, perhaps that yields something like a
34-25-25 percent split between Mr. Trump, Mr. Rubio and Mr. Cruz.
In this scenario, Mr. Trump claims a clear edge in
delegate accumulation but not a majority. He gets 279 delegates, or just 44
percent of the delegates at stake, while Mr. Rubio receives 164 delegates.
It’s a respectable tally for Mr. Rubio, even though he
loses every state. That’s because he clears 20 percent in every state. That
scenario includes Texas, where the most delegates are at stake on Super Tuesday
and where Mr. Rubio is in the most danger of missing the delegate threshold
because of Mr. Cruz’s home-state popularity. For anyone counting delegates,
whether Mr. Rubio reaches 20 percent in Texas is a lot more important than
anything else.
Supposing that Mr. Rubio clears all of these thresholds,
he has two big objectives: beating Mr. Cruz in the South, in hopes of driving him
from the race, and winning a state or two. His schedule reflects this strategy.
He’s visiting a host of Southern states where Mr. Cruz is hoping to do well,
and where delegate thresholds still pose some risk to his ability to deny Mr.
Trump a majority of delegates. He’s spending all of Sunday in Virginia, which
should be one of his best states because of its mix of religious and
well-educated voters. Virginia is a clear momentum play (the lift that could
come from finally winning); the state uses a purely proportional delegate
system, so there are fewer delegates to be gained there than by winning just
about anywhere else. Minnesota would seem to be another good option for Mr.
Rubio.
The deficit for Mr. Rubio after Super Tuesday in this
scenario — 181 over all and 115 from Super Tuesday — would not be especially
big. If Mr. Rubio won Florida — a winner-take-all state worth 99 delegates — it
could balance out nearly all losses from Super Tuesday.
Then All Eyes Are
on March 15
But for the same reason Mr. Rubio can erase so much
damage by winning in Florida on March 15, he can’t afford to lose on March 15
either.
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.
Even if Mr. Rubio swept on March 15 and started doing as
well as Mitt Romney did at that stage in 2012, he would barely edge ahead of
Mr. Trump in the pledged delegate count. And of course, there would be plenty
of reason to question whether Mr. Rubio could really do so well after losing so
many states to that point.
Delegate Math
Isn’t The Problem
Winning by March 15 is what matters for Mr. Rubio, not
the math.
It’s not going to be easy. The Republican establishment
is flocking to him, but the escalating pace of the primary season makes it
harder for him to take advantage of growing support from the party. There’s not
much time for him to raise money, and whatever he does raise will be spread
fairly thin.
The party isn’t fully unified either, with Mr. Cruz and
particularly John Kasich remaining in the race. Mr. Trump holds between 30 and
40 percent of the vote, most national surveys say, so it is very difficult for
Mr. Rubio to overtake him when votes are siphoned off by another candidate. If
Mr. Kasich remains in the race, his home state of Ohio will be very difficult
for Mr. Rubio to win.
There’s a final issue: Some big winner-take-all and
winner-take-most states aren’t necessarily favorable ground for him.
Mr. Trump has tended to fare best with less educated and
less religious voters. There’s also evidence he does better in places with a
larger nonwhite population. Florida and Ohio fit the bill. And separately New
Jersey also shapes up well for him later in the calendar. They’re all projected
to be above-average states for Mr. Trump based on the results so far (though
obviously this can change, and it doesn’t account for a potential home-state
edge for Mr. Rubio in Florida and Mr. Kasich in Ohio).
New Quinnipiac surveys show Mr. Trump ahead in Ohio and
Florida.
Rubio Needs Others
To Quit
But there is one important bit of good news for Mr.
Rubio: the struggles of Ted Cruz. He has finished third in two consecutive
contests where he had hoped to perform well. He is in danger of being shut out
on Super Tuesday; he could even lose his home state, Texas. Polls show him
falling behind Mr. Rubio in other Southern states like Georgia and Oklahoma.
The Cruz campaign has always been clear that it is
counting on a strong showing on Super Tuesday, and Mr. Cruz’s path to the
nomination would look exceptionally bleak if he fared as poorly on March 1 as
he did in South Carolina and Nevada. It could be enough to force him from the
race. Mr. Kasich’s play is less clear, but he could quit if he finishes poorly
in Michigan on March 8.
If Mr. Cruz or Mr. Kasich exited, it would give Mr. Rubio
the chance to build a coalition of ideologically consistent conservative voters
and more mainstream, well-educated conservatives. The onset of a real
one-on-one race would pose a challenge to Mr. Trump, who would finally be
forced to build a majority coalition.
So far, more G.O.P. voters tell pollsters they would
definitely oppose Mr. Trump than currently support him, which at least raises the
possibility that Mr. Rubio could prevail in a one-on-one fight. Polls pitting
the two against each other have shown a tight race or even a lead for Mr.
Rubio.
Mr. Trump would also have to overcome a barrage of
negative television advertisements — something he hasn’t had to face very much
of so far.
Whether Mr. Rubio could in fact consolidate the
preponderance of Mr. Kasich or Mr. Cruz’s supporters is hard to say.
But whether it happens before March 15 could easily
decide the outcome of the Republican race.
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