As Donald Trump tries to notch his third win in a row in Tuesday’s Nevada caucuses, his two chief challengers for the Republican nomination appear to be more concerned with fighting it out for second place.
Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have emerged from the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries as the best positioned to defeat Trump for the nomination. But as early as Saturday night, after Trump bested both freshmen senators by 10 points in the Palmetto State, the two campaigns were already ratcheting up the attacks—not on Trump, but on each other.
“Serious questions tonight about Senator Cruz’s campaign,” wrote one Rubio campaign operative in an email to reporters Saturday night. The email went on to highlight analyses from various media outlets on how Cruz’s loss third-place finish in South Carolina spelled real trouble for the Texan’s ability to win in the future.
On Sunday, Rubio campaign manager Terry Sullivan issued a public memo about the “9 key takeaways” from the previous night’s results. Just one takeaway was about Trump: that the New York businessman “has a ceiling” and “only will continue as a frontrunner as long as the field is crowded.” Three of them concerned Cruz. “South Carolina was made for Ted Cruz and he fell short,” read the memo. “Ted Cruz will truly say anything at all to get elected and ran the nastiest campaign South Carolina has ever seen…Ted Cruz’s dishonest tactics have left him with permanent damage.”
And sure enough, almost to confirm Sullivan’s point about dishonesty, Cruz campaign manager Rick Tyler publicized on Twitter a video that purported to show Rubio candidly dismissing the Bible as a Cruz staffer was reading it. Tyler deleted the tweet and has since apologized after it was clear Rubio had not said the staffer’s book had “not many answers” in it but that it had “all the answers” in it.
In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper taped Saturday night, Cruz described himself as the best candidate to take on Trump, before laying into Rubio. “He attacks us almost with every breath out of his body, personal attacks, and consistently avoids engaging with Donald Trump,” Cruz said. But instead of the Cruz campaign following up with an actual engagement with Trump, Tyler promoted an article calling out Rubio for missing committee meetings about 9/11.
Is all this back-and-forth between the Cruz and Rubio camps missing the big target, Donald Trump? Neither campaign responded to a request to comment, though there’s a hint to Rubio’s thinking from Sullivan’s public memo. “Donald Trump’s electoral ceiling is in the mid 30s,” he writes. “He has the highest negatives of any candidate by far and the most voters who say they would refuse to vote for him.”
“This is not about going after Donald Trump,” Rubio himself said when pressed by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Sunday about why he was not focusing on Trump. “This election is about who is best capable about uniting the Republican party.”
That may be true, or it may be wishful thinking. Steve Deace, an Iowa-based radio talk-show host who backs Cruz, is calling on his candidate to get tougher with the frontrunner:
Cruz needs to return to his “burn it down” roots. Taking on Rubio is a loser, because Trump has his voters now not Rubio.
— Steve Deace (@SteveDeaceShow) February 22, 2016
