After two debates in which Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio took a blowtorch to Donald Trump, the freshman senators decided to lay up.
Trump faced no sustained criticism from Cruz or Rubio. (Or John Kasich, though by this point in the race, that should go without saying.) Instead, both senators tried to outclass Trump on serious, high-minded grounds. For Rubio, it was by demonstrating a mastery of policy and attempting to gently contrast this with Trump’s constant freelancing. For Cruz, it was by gently pointing out that voters have every right to be angry, but ought to look for a champion who actually has a plan and will stand with them. These criticisms were made as mildly as possible.
It was an . . . interesting . . . strategy.
The conventional wisdom for the last two weeks has become that Rubio hurt himself by going hard negative on Trump. Certainly, Rubio has underperformed and looks to be mortally wounded. But was that the result of him fighting Trump with Trump? Or just the natural conclusion to Rubio’s foundational problem: He did not eliminate Bush and Kasich when he needed to in New Hampshire. It took an extra week and a half to get Bush out of the race and Kasich has been allowed to linger, completely uncontested, growing his tiny base.
This deprived Rubio of the time he needed to accelerate and the result is that his campaign stalled out in a mostly-foreseeable manner while Cruz did what he needed to in the SEC states.
And the truth is that the hard-neg debate attacks on Trump did coincide with two big developments: Trump’s delegate momentum not only didn’t increase, the way it normally does for frontrunners—it actually slowed down. And for the first time since November, another candidate was able to close on him in national polls.
Maybe this was just coincidental. But maybe not.
Whatever the case, with the March 15 contests just five days out, Cruz and Rubio decided to change tactics.
They were not ineffective. In traditional political terms, you would have thought that Rubio’s deconstruction of Trump on issues such as Obama’s Cuba deal, or how trade and tariffs work, were devastating. Or that Cruz’s contention that “if you have a candidate who has been funding liberal Democrats and funding the Washington establishment, it’s very hard to imagine how suddenly this candidate is going to take on Washington.”
There was even some news broken in the debate: Trump admitted that his proposed 45 percent tariffs are only a threat and not meant to be implemented. He suddenly reversed his stance on Syria and ISIS as being not an American problem by saying that “we have to knock them out fast” and that “I’m hearing numbers of 20,000 to 30,000” American ground troops will be needed. Also, he described the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square as a “riot.”
And in response to this—and scores of other outright falsehoods from Trump—Cruz and Rubio had no sharp criticisms. They were above the fray and unwilling to get dragged into the mud and whatever other metaphor you’d like to use. And maybe voters will really respect and support that.
Another interpretation is that it looked like capitulation. And if treating Trump like a normal political actor didn’t work for the first eight months of the campaign, it’s unlikely to start working now.
We’ll see. Maybe Kasich holds Ohio on Tuesday and Cruz takes big chunks of Missouri, Illinois, and North Carolina. But as tonight’s debate wrapped up, Trump looked much happier than he did after the last two donnybrooks.
