Can Marco Rubio and John Kasich survive until their home states vote? Tuesday night has raised this uncomfortable question for both candidates.
For weeks, Rubio’s strategy for winning the Republican presidential nomination has centered around winning Florida. Kasich is following a similar script in Ohio, where he has won statewide twice and been a political fixture since the 1980s.
Both scenarios have since become an important of the burgeoning movement to deny front-runner Donald Trump the Republican nomination by keeping him from winning a majority of delegates on the first ballot at the national convention this summer.
While Rubio and Kasich are the last men standing who are acceptable to the Republican establishment, a potentially broader #NeverTrump coalition has been placing their hopes in the Florida senator and Ohio governor.
Significant sums of money have been sunk into Florida to help Rubio catch up to Trump. A recent Monmouth poll showed Rubio breaking 30 percent and coming within 10 points of the bombastic billionaire who has up-ended the GOP primaries.
Rubio has only won Minnesota and Puerto Rico. Kasich has won nowhere, posting just a couple of distant second place showings in New England. Tuesday night has made things considerably worse.
Kasich was supposed to have the best chance of any Republican running to beat Trump in Michigan. Instead he finished third. There was talk of Rubio potentially competing in Idaho or Hawaii. He finished third in both states, while running fourth and in the single digits in Michigan and Mississippi.
Perhaps Rubio’s support was to some extent depressed strategic anti-Trump voting. Only in Idaho did such a strategy even deny Trump a victory. Not only did Trump win Michigan but the strategic anti-Trump choice, Kasich, didn’t even get second place. Rubio didn’t get any delegates from Michigan, Mississippi or Idaho and may at most get a couple from Hawaii.
This raises several potentially devastating problems for both candidates. Neither can count on the anti-Trump vote to go to them even in their best states without significant defections to Ted Cruz, who can plausibly argue he has more effectively competed with Trump. Neither can guarantee that they can avoid defections to one another.
The two of them need to wring every vote they can out of their home states. Maybe they will. But they are going into Florida and Ohio looking like losers. The whole thing that was supposed to differentiate Rubio’s Florida-centric approach from Rudy Giuliani’s failed 2008 strategy was competing in primaries and caucuses before the Sunshine State’s. After promising showings in South Carolina and Nevada, he has seemed to get less competitive.
Worse for Rubio is that this has happened as he has stepped up his criticism of Trump, briefly persuading much of the media to frame this as a Trump vs. Rubio race. But the voters haven’t cooperated, repeatedly preferring Cruz to Rubio while Trump’s collapse never seems to actually happen in any enduring way.
Cruz has underperformed too, especially among evangelicals and Southerners. But he has beaten Trump a number of times in Republican caucuses. Trump won more times Tuesday night than Rubio has ever beaten him.
Finally, Rubio has only been the candidate who was supposed to have the best chance of beating Trump in two states where the billionaire was competitive: Virginia, mostly in the northern suburbs of D.C., and his Florida home. He lost Virginia and trails Trump in Florida.
With Trump still hurtling toward the nomination and Cruz enjoying at least some momentum, can Kasich and Rubio continue to maintain they have any kind of path to the nomination? Even some anti-Trump Republicans now openly speculate about the two of them dropping out to make more delegates available to the Texas senator.
Rubio hopes he can have a redeeming debate performance Thursday night and get his campaign back on track before Florida. He’s done well in debates before while Trump has faced more scrutiny on a smaller stage. Sometimes these exchanges have moved the needle, but often they have not.
Kasich’s top strategist keep issuing statements pretending that everything is going swimmingly for their campaign. Cruz and Rubio’s supporters on social media have an increasingly acrimonious relationship.
Meanwhile, Trump has an opportunity to put away both of them in Florida and Ohio. Expect him to try and take it.
