Marco Rubio didn’t make a victory speech Tuesday night after his second place finish in the Nevada caucuses, opting instead for a good night’s sleep. As the numbers rolled in, however, it was clear the Florida Senator could have crowed like a rooster.
That Donald Trump would win was a foregone conclusion by the time the caucuses were held. The real race was for second place, to help nudge voters to consolidate behind one anti-Trump candidate. And it’s clear that GOP voters are increasingly preferring Rubio for that role.
Rubio didn’t just beat Cruz out for second place for the second time in less than a week, he beat him badly. Perhaps the reason he didn’t crow about it is, he might have had to explain fractions. Rubio beat Cruz by 1,091 votes in South Carolina Saturday. On Tuesday, he beat Cruz by 1,861 votes.
Absent context, that doesn’t sound like a big difference. After all, it’s only 770 more votes. But it’s not the size of the fish that matters here so much as the size of the pond.
737,917 votes were cast for the major candidates in South Carolina Saturday. Nevada’s Republican electorate was about one-tenth the size of that: 74,878 votes. To compare the percentages between them, one must multiply Nevada by 9.85 repeating, which the Washington Examiner duly did.
What we found was a mathematical horror show for the Cruz campaign. On Saturday, the two candidates practically tied, with 22.5 and 22.3 percent of the vote. On Tuesday the spread was a bit more pronounced but in a way that sort of sounds close: Rubio’s 23.9 against Cruz’s 21.4 percent.
If the Nevada electorate was the same size of South Carolina, the gap would have grown from 1,091 to 18,340 votes in three days.
Further entrance polling gave much more good news for Rubio and awful news for Cruz and possibly Trump. In the South Carolina primary, late-deciding voters broke against Trump and for Cruz and Rubio in numbers that were only slightly more favorable to Rubio (Trump 17; Cruz 26; Rubio 28).
In the Nevada caucuses, late deciders broke overwhelmingly for Rubio. Those who said they had decided whom to vote for sometime in the last week, for instance, voted 49 percent for Rubio, 28 percent for Trump, 13 percent for Cruz, according to a CNN entrance poll.
If anything, that may understate Rubio’s draw in Nevada, because the GOP caucuses there don’t allow same-day registration and late deciders so heavily favored him.
Rubio may not have bested Trump in his own Vegas backyard, but he walked away from the electoral craps table with a lot more chips than the nearly busted Texan.
