Not long after the polls closed in many Super Tuesday states, the narrative was already being cast: Marco Rubio was the night’s big loser. Several members of the media promoted it. So did the GOP frontrunner himself, Donald Trump, who spent several minutes of his election night press conference knocking his rival’s performance. “I know it was a tough night for Marco Rubio,” Trump said. “A very tough night.”
Problem was, Trump was speaking before Rubio had won his first nominating contest of the year, Minnesota’s caucuses. Before then, Trump had swept through the majority of the Super Tuesday states, winning Massachusetts, Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Vermont. Meanwhile, Ted Cruz won his home state of Texas and neighboring Oklahoma, and ran second in many of the states Trump won. Even John Kasich, whose path to the nomination is inscrutable, grabbed second place in two states and a handful of delegates.
So what about Rubio? In many respects, it was, as Trump said, a “tough night.” Exit polls and early returns suggested a much closer race for Rubio in Virginia than the 14-point advantage for Trump in the polls indicated. Instead of finding himself behind Trump by double digits, Rubio closed to come within 3 points and 30,000 votes. That wasn’t enough to beat Trump, who came in first place with 35 percent of the vote and earned 17 delegates. Because of Virginia’s proportional allocation, however, Rubio will receive 16 delegates, just one fewer than Trump. But in the psychological expectations game, Rubio failing to win Virginia (one of the few states the campaign suggested they could win on Super Tuesday) outright would be a serious blow. He didn’t, and it was.
To add insult to injury, Rubio struggled to reach even the threshold of support needed to win statewide delegates in several primaries. As of this writing, he’s just over the 20 percent thresholds in Tennessee and Georgia but below the thresholds in Alabama, Texas, and Vermont. Henry Olsen figures this will cost Rubio 25 delegates—not a lot overall, but significant this early in the process. All in all, Dave Wasserman of FiveThirtyEight calculates, Rubio will end up nearly 100 delegates behind Cruz and 200 delegates behind Trump overall after Super Tuesday.
But there were bright spots for Rubio, the most obvious being his victory in Minnesota, where he not only beat Trump for the first time but did so by more than 15 points and relegated the Donald to third place behind Cruz. As the upcoming primary contests shift to the Midwest, where Trump has performed the worst so far, Minnesota’s results might bode well for Rubio in states like Michigan (March 8) and Wisconsin (April 5).
He also overperformed his position in the polls in several states, including in Virginia (10 points better than the RealClearPolitics average of polls), Minnesota (13 points better than the only recent poll there), and Oklahoma (5 points better than the RCP average). Exit polls showed in Virginia and Georgia that Rubio won among those who decided in “the last few days” or in “the last week”—precisely when Rubio began taking on Trump directly and more bluntly than before. That suggests Rubio’s strategy, derided by many in the media, may be working to expose Trump’s liabilities and peel away fence sitters considering him.
Beyond those good points, though, Super Tuesday was less than ideal for Rubio. Yet in his own election night speech, which he delivered from his hometown Miami before the Minnesota results, Rubio sounded as if everything was coming up Marco—and everything Donald was going in the opposite direction.
“We are seeing in state after state his numbers coming down, our numbers going up,” Rubio said, sounding like a candidate ready for the long haul, not on his way out. He insisted he would win his home state of Florida’s primary on March 15 and casted himself as an “underdog” from an “underdog state” in an “underdog country.” He also laid into the man currently leading him in the polls in Florida, Donald Trump.
“We are going to send a message that the party of Lincoln and Reagan and the presidency of the United States will never be held by a con artist,” Rubio said.
But given Trump leading both Cruz and Rubio in the popular vote and delegates, it’s a message that doesn’t seem to have reached the party faithful so far. (And GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini has data to back that up.) There are hints in Tuesday’s results of a path for Rubio to perform better in the future—his double-digit deficit behind Trump in Florida, for instance, may not reflect reality as it didn’t in Virginia. But Rubio will need a lot more than suggestions to compete post-Super Tuesday.
