Don’t worry, Donald Trump supporters. You don’t have much to fear from Senator Marco Rubio based upon his continued failures in his bid to earn the Republican nomination for President. Still, it may be his best hope to abandon his odd attacks regarding immigration against Ted Cruz and instead try to pull some of the moderate voters who are currently backing Trump.
Rubio’s ploy was risky and it’s becoming increasingly clear that it backfired. Rather than taking a page from Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s campaign book of admitting evolution in his thinking, Rubio chose to deflect his Gang of Eight problems by pointing to Cruz’s support of legalization. For some reason, the Rubio campaign felt that it would be easier to pull conservative supporters from Cruz than to go after Trump’s moderate supporters. It failed miserably.
Now, he may have to “go nuclear” on Trump in an effort to maintain relevance in the conversation. He’s not polling well in any of the early primary states and assuming he can’t come away with a win, his aspirations might be toast. The nuclear option would be to target Trump’s less conservative supporters by appealing to their demands for an outsider based upon his first-term status while having just enough experience to be able to get things done. It’s not quite as risky as attacking Cruz, but it would give him a leg up that Jeb Bush and Chris Christie simply haven’t been able to grasp onto so far.
If you’re wondering why he hasn’t done it yet, they decided to go with the current attacks against Cruz for three reasons:
- They underestimated Cruz’s appeal to non-Evangelicals.
- They overestimated Trump’s swiftness of falling out of favor, something that seems less and less likely the closer we get to Iowa.
- They watched John Kasich, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, and now Jeb Bush attack and fail against Trump.
It’s understandable why Rubio’s campaign team picked Cruz, but it still doesn’t make sense when you think about it all the way through. They took the most conservative candidate in the race and attacked him on his conservatism. What did they hope to accomplish? To look at it another way, they hoped to expose Cruz as mushy on immigration while simultaneously hoping that nobody would notice the “no amnesty” promises he made on the campaign trail before begging for amnesty with the Gang of Eight. Hindsight is 20/20, but they seriously miscalculated at every turn on this one.
This is shaping up to be a race between two much better candidates that Marco Rubio. Whether it’s Trump or Cruz, the one thing that’s becoming increasingly likely is that we will have our first nominee in years who isn’t owned by the Republican Establishment.
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