Nevada’s largest daily newspaper has endorsed Marco Rubio in the 2016 GOP presidential primary, and Friday that the Florida senator is “is best-positioned to advance from the primary season and allow the GOP to win the White House.”
The announcement from the Las Vegas Review-Journal comes just a few months after billionaire GOP donor and reported Rubio supporter Sheldon Adelson quietly purchased the paper in December 2015.
“After much consideration, the Review-Journal is endorsing Sen. Marco Rubio for Nevada’s first-in-the-West Republican caucus on Feb. 23,” the paper’s editorial board said Friday. It stressed that the board met with the Florida lawmaker two months before the paper was bought by Adelson.
The group’s publisher, Jason Taylor, stressed in January that Adelson, who is hugely influential in Republican politics, would not have any input in the Review-Journal’s presidential endorsements.
“Our reasons for endorsing Sen. Rubio are many. Notably, the Florida senator has deep personal connections to the state. He lived in the Las Vegas Valley from age 8 to age 14, the son of immigrants employed by the hotel industry,” the added. “The driving force behind the 44-year-old’s compelling story is his family’s pursuit of better opportunities and a better life. The policies he champions in his campaign are intended to provide all Americans as much.”
“Sen. Rubio is a limited-government conservative, as proved by his 94 percent conservative rating from Heritage Action — bested by only five Republicans in the entire Congress. He is not a go-along-to-get-along RINO (Republican in Name Only), as many have declared,” the paper said Friday.
The paper also praised the senator for his positions on entitlement and immigration reform, and praised him for having that rare sort of charisma that grants one “electability.”
“On immigration, Sen. Rubio backs a reasonable approach to fix a broken system, while noting that legal immigration deserves just as much attention as illegal immigration,” it added. “Among other reforms, he wants a merit-based system of legal immigration to replace today’s family-based system.”
Rubio is also not part of the so-called GOP establishment, it argued.
“If you want your next president to be an outsider, Sen. Rubio is part of the discussion. The other Republican candidates we interviewed brought bold ideas to the table. Sen. Cruz is excellent on tax reform and border control. Gov. Bush’s ideas for civil service reform and a balanced budget stand out. Dr. Carson has worthy stances on a training wage to address this country’s youth unemployment crisis and, of course, on health care reform. And Mrs. Fiorina is an absolute firebrand on transparency in government and the need to fix just about everything in Washington,” it said.
In the end, though, Rubio is simply the best positioned to capture the White House, the editorial concluded.
When Adelson purchased the Review-Journal last year for $140 million, he managed to keep it a secret for a few days. Fortune was the first to confirm that the chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corp. was the paper’s buyer, but the news group was unable to say why he had tried to keep the business deal hush-hush.
“What remains unclear is why Adelson has refused to come forward. Clearly this isn’t a vanity play, and it’s also hard to imagine it as a financial investment (particularly given the steep price tag),” Fortune reported at the time.
