Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Minnesota Delivers Good News on a Grim Night for Rubio



By Alexis Levinson
Wednesday, March 02, 2016

Andover, Minn. — Exactly one month into the Republican primary season, Marco Rubio finally won a state.

The win came here in Minnesota, where Rubio handily bested Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, who finished in a distant third despite dominating most of the night’s other contests. It was the lone bright spot in an otherwise bleak evening for the Florida senator’s campaign.

Super Tuesday was never expected to yield great success for Rubio. The glut of Southern states voting, several of them with high vote thresholds for earning delegates, was always thought to favor Cruz — who had focused hard on the South — and Trump, whose poll numbers are consistently strong there.

Until this afternoon, Rubio’s campaign had been careful to manage expectations. Super Tuesday, they pointed out, was supposed to be Cruz’s big moment, not theirs. Going forward, as the race moved out of the South, they argued that the map would get worse for Cruz and better for them. As late as Tuesday morning, Rubio campaign manager Terry Sullivan even warned donors that the night could be a rout, per Politico.

But then, this afternoon, the campaign’s tone changed. Coming off the momentum from his strong debate performance last week, and capitalizing on the fact that he is gathering support as the alternative to Trump, Rubio himself suddenly started sounding very optimistic about his chances, raising expectations in a gaggle with reporters.

“I certainly think we’re going to do a lot better than we’re expected to do tonight. . . . It’s a night where we’re going to get a lot of delegates and be ready to fight next Saturday and beyond as we head into Florida and the winner-take-all [states],” Rubio said, according to a transcript sent out by the campaign. He singled out Minnesota and Virginia, in particular, as states where the campaign felt “great.”

Instead, Rubio fell short almost everywhere, even in the states where he’d seemed poised to do well.

He lost narrowly in Virginia, finishing three points behind Trump. In Oklahoma, where the campaign had seen a glimmer of hope in the final stretch, he finished third, two points behind Trump and six points behind Cruz. In Texas, Alabama, and Vermont, he failed to meet the 20-percent threshold required to net even a single delegate.

All of those losses were apparent by the time Minnesota, the second to last state to be called, gave him Rubio his one and only win. It was the payoff of a calculated investment by the campaign.

About two and a half weeks ago, the Rubio campaign opened up an office in the Minneapolis suburbs and dispatched three paid aides to man it — making them the only Republican campaign in the state with non-volunteer staff. Already they had a strong team in place. One Minnesota Republican described Rubio’s state chairman, Jeff Johnson, as the man behind what may be the state’s best voter-turnout operation. And Rubio had already made one stop here in the past week before his appearance today, which was his final stop in a Super Tuesday state.

There was a reason the Rubio campaign bet its precious resources here: the demographics of the state favored him. “I think we’re similar to Iowa in many ways,” says Johnson, invoking the state where Rubio pulled off a surprisingly strong third-place finish. In particular, Minnesota resembles those suburban areas in Iowa, such as Ankeny, where Rubio focused his efforts. And the state’s polite affect aligns with Rubio’s generally sunny temperament rather than Trump’s blustery bravado.

“The whole Trump persona — he’s kind of like a stand up comedian who keeps insulting the audience. Rude, and so totally un-Minnesotan. Just antithetical to our political culture,” says John Hinderaker, who runs the Center for the American Experiment and co-founded the conservative blog Power Line.

But even with those built-in advantages, Rubio couldn’t be sure of a win going into Minnesota. Caucuses, in general, can be hard to predict because so much depends on turnout. And this was the first year that Minnesota has scheduled its caucuses early enough on the calendar to make a real difference in the nominating process, so no one knew quite what to expect — one Minnesota Republican said his caucus site was preparing for anywhere between 1,000 and 3,000 voters.

Turnout more than doubled the previous record. With 92 percent of the vote in, over 111,000 people had caucused. But new voters, and even some who had voted before, did not seem to realize what they were getting themselves into. At a caucus site in St. Cloud, about an hour northwest of Minneapolis, people seemed flummoxed that the process required more than just walking in, voting, and leaving. One couple with a baby got up and left when it became clear they would have to sit for a while before they could vote; another couple walked out when they learned they could not caucus for Democrats at a Republican caucus site.

Rubio emerged from the process with a solid win. He finished with 37 percent of the vote, ahead of Cruz at 29 percent and Trump at 21 percent. But on the raw numbers, he won’t have much to show for it because of the proportional allotment of Minnesota’s 38 delegates. Despite beating Cruz convincingly in the popular vote, he’ll pick up only one or two more delegates than the Texas senator.

The raw math was an overarching problem for Rubio tonight. He’ll get no delegates from Texas, Vermont, and Alabama. And in Virginia — where he did well, but still finished a close second behind Trump — he’ll net only 16 of 49 delegates. And John Kasich, whose national viability has been largely dismissed by the media and other campaigns, continues to be a headache for the Florida senator. Kasich pulls from the same type of voters as Rubio. In Virginia, where Rubio finished three points behind Trump, Kasich took 9 percent of the vote. And in Vermont, where Kasich finished just over 1,000 votes behind Trump, Rubio failed to even clear the delegate threshold.

Rubio-world sees a better map moving forward. Other than North Carolina and Kentucky, there are no more Southern states left. Michigan looks promising, and two weeks from today, the race moves to his home state of Florida, whose winner-take-all 99 delegates could easily recalibrate the primary math. He finished the night there, delivering his Super Tuesday speech early in a tacit acknowledgment that the results were unlikely to improve much as the hours progressed.

In any other election year, donors would be clamoring for Rubio to get out of the race and make way for a candidate who had proven himself more viable — someone who had one more than one state. But “this unusual election,” as Rubio termed it here earlier today, means that he remains the establishment favorite to take on Trump, even if the actual results make that an increasingly dubious distinction. Financial support is lining up behind him to keep him in the race against Trump beyond Florida, even if that means a contested convention. The month of April has contests in a number of states that don’t bind delegates, meaning the primary vote in that state won’t necessarily mean much come July. And even bound delegates, in most states, are only bound for the first ballot.

For the moment, Rubio can claim some small victory tonight: Thanks to his win in Minnesota, Ted Cruz can no longer call himself the only candidate in the race who has proven he can beat Donald Trump.

It’s an accomplishment Rubio will no doubt point to as he continues to throw everything he has at the race’s front-runner. This afternoon, he added a Minnesota-touch to the barrage of insults he’s taken to lobbing at Trump throughout his stump speech.

“If any state has experience with electing someone who runs as some great celebrity, this tough-talking celebrity. Well, how’d that work out for Jesse Ventura? Jesse Ventura is an embarrassment,” Rubio said.

Minnesota Republicans evidently agreed. They may live in the state that elected a professional wrestler to be governor and a Saturday Night Live star to the Senate, but on Tuesday night, Trump proved to be a bridge too far.

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