For most of the night the race for second place in South Carolina between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz was too close to call, but the trajectory of the Republican presidential contest was immediately clearer.
“After tonight this has become a three person-race,” Rubio said Saturday night before predicting he would win. While the winner has yet to be decided, the first part of the Florida senator’s statement is undoubtedly true.
Donald Trump has now won the first two primaries, beginning a path that led Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and John McCain to the Republican presidential nomination. In his only loss, Iowa, he finished second. He is the front-runner.
But Trump has also under-performed his poll numbers in two out of three states, lost late-deciding voters in all three and has high negatives. An AP-Gfk poll found only 42 percent of Republicans found him likeable, just four in 10 view him favorably.
That suggests there’s plenty of room for one of the surviving non-Trump candidates to grow and perhaps even thrive in a one-on-one race against the billionaire. In South Carolina, Trump won a plurality of evangelical Christians with 33 percent of the vote. Cruz and Rubio captured just under half the evangelical vote combined.
But that vote may not coalesce anytime soon. With nearly 100 percent of the vote in, fewer than 1,000 votes separated Rubio and Cruz in South Carolina. Cruz won Iowa and finished two spots ahead of Rubio in New Hampshire. Neither has any reason to drop out and they have plenty of incentive to continue attacking each other as much or more than Trump.
As long as that dynamic persists, Trump can keep winning states with a plurality of the vote. And if the Rubio-Cruz race gets ugly enough, it could make it more difficult for the victor to attract a majority.
Rubio needed a strong showing in South Carolina after finishing fifth in New Hampshire. Flanked by Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott as he spoke to supporters Saturday night, the trio offered a sharp contrast with Trump and an attractive picture of the party: relatively young, a new generation of Republican leaders, an African-American and two children of immigrants.
Jeb Bush dropping out not only enlarges his former protege’s pool of potential voters. It removes a source of funding for anti-Rubio attacks and possibly makes those donors available to Rubio instead. Rubio is the choice of Republicans seeking electability.
As long as the perception remains that Rubio is the strongest general election candidate with a plausible path to the nomination — a perception the Florida senator’s well-wishers in the mainstream and conservative media are sure to buttress regularly — and he continues to do well enough in the primaries, there will be resources available for him to continue. He’ll keep getting second chances after losses.
Cruz has a lot of money and a strong, data-driven campaign organization. On paper, he seems positioned to perform well in the Southern primaries of Super Tuesday. He offers a choice to Republicans who dislike both Rubio’s past support for the Gang of Eight immigration bill and Trump’s longer list of ideological deviations.
But South Carolina underscored both candidates’ weaknesses as well, besides the fact that neither freshman senator has so far been able to finish the other off. How much can Rubio count on donors who were only recently funding attacks against him by backing Bush? If they do support him, does he not more clearly acquire the establishment label?
“Establishment” has been an epithet in the 2016 Republican presidential contest. Rubio has been able to get some support from the party’s governing class — he has a large and growing list of endorsements from GOP elected officials —but the hits from Chris Christie and Right to Rise have helped him keep his distance from it too. Rubio was actively opposed by the Republican establishment in his 2010 Florida senatorial primary.
At some point, moral victories and managing expectations will cease to be good enough for Rubio. He will have to show he can come in first somewhere. Until he does, he will face this persistent question from skeptical Republicans: where can Rubio win?
While Rubio makes the case it is time for the children who grew up under Ronald Reagan to assume the mantle of leadership, the rationale of Cruz’s candidacy is putting the old Reagan coalition back together. The Texas Tea Partier says he can turn out disaffected conservative voters who stayed home when the party nominated moderates like John McCain and Mitt Romney.
If that’s true, wouldn’t a Republican primary in South Carolina have been a good place to start? Cruz didn’t do badly in the Palmetto State. But South Carolina is precisely the kind of state his Iowa victory was supposed to put in play for his campaign. The fact that Cruz couldn’t beat Trump or outdistance Rubio in South Carolina doesn’t seem to bode well for his strength in the SEC primaries, much less his ability to lead a grassroots conservative army into battle in the general election.
While Bush has bowed out, John Kasich and Ben Carson remain in the race. Cruz could use some of Carson’s evangelical voters and Rubio some of Kasich’s moderate and pragmatic conservative backers. The bad blood between the Carson and Cruz camps over Iowa and Trump’s consistently strong showings among moderate Republicans may mean those votes wouldn’t become available even if Carson and Kasich dropped out, but at least the possibility would exist.
South Carolina cemented a three-way race in which Trump’s opponents look stronger in theory than they have so far proven in practice. Either one of them will emerge and overtake Trump or they will keep fighting for second place.
