TAMPA, Fla. — The only message one can take from Donald Trump’s final week before the Florida primary is that he believes he has the biggest delegate prize of the campaign in the bag.
Trump simply hasn’t spent much time here lately. He was in Florida last Tuesday, when he marked his big victory in the Michigan primary with a news conference and get-together with invited guests — most were apparently members of Trump’s various clubs in South Florida — in a ballroom at the Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter. It wasn’t exactly retail politicking.
The next day, Wednesday, it was off to North Carolina for a rally in Fayetteville, that was the one in which a Trump supporter infamously sucker punched a protester being led out of the arena. Trump returned to Florida on Thursday for the CNN debate, but no campaigning. On Friday, Trump rolled out the Ben Carson endorsement at Mar-A-Lago — again, no mixing with voters before heading to an event in St. Louis — and finally on to Chicago for the rally he had to cancel in the face of a massive, organized, left-wing shut-it-down protest.
Over the weekend, Trump campaigned in Dayton, Cleveland, Kansas City, Bloomington, and Cincinnati before returning to Florida for rally in Boca Raton on Sunday evening. On election eve, Trump flew to North Carolina. He originally planned to finish up with a town hall in Tampa and a final rally at Doral, his club in Miami, but changed course at the last minute, canceling the Miami event and heading instead to a final-night rally in Youngstown, Ohio.
The Florida total: one rally and one town hall in a week. It wasn’t exactly the schedule of a man who is terribly worried about the state’s 99-delegate winner-take-all prize. By contrast, Sen. Marco Rubio spent the week camped out — the words of one key aide — in Florida in what has increasingly seemed like a doomed effort to win his home state.
Despite talk of apocalyptic levels of violence and chaos in Trump rallies, he’s actually getting sunnier these days. In Tampa, as he has in other places, Trump began by citing the phenomenal increase in Republican primary voter participation this year, versus the striking decrease on the Democratic side.
“We’ve been all over, and the biggest story in all politics worldwide today is what’s happening with the Republican Party,” Trump told the crowd. “What’s happening is millions and millions of people are going out and they’re voting. But they’re not voting for Democrats; they’re down 35 percent from four years ago. They’re voting for Republicans … and I’m so proud to be a part of it.”
Rush Limbaugh has noted that Trump, who has made bragging an art form or sorts, is careful to include a few moments of pure modesty in every appearance. And there it was. Proud to be a part of increased Republican turnout? Trump is driving it.
The early vote in Florida may bear Trump out. On Monday morning, Politico Florida noted that 1.1 million people have voted early or absentee in the Republican primary. Of those, Politico said, 23 percent had not voted in any of the last three Florida GOP primaries, while 21 percent had voted in just one of the three. That’s 44 percent of early voters who have been only tangentially connected to the political system and the Republican Party over the years — just the sort Trump seems to be reaching. In Tampa, Trump asked how many people had already voted, and probably one-third to one-half the crowd raised their hands.
The Trump event, a kind of combination town hall and rally held in a big, but not huge, room in the Tampa Convention Center, was filled with the type of people who don’t go to other political events. One 65-year-old man told me he had gone to Trump’s rally a month ago in the Sun Dome, which attracted more than 10,000. “I’ve never seen electricity like that,” the man said. “It was like a WWE event.”
Of course there were protesters. Trump has now fully incorporated them into his act. Before he appeared on stage, a voice-of-God message was played for the crowd. It began by saying how much Trump values free speech — he “supports the First Amendment just as much as he supports the Second Amendment.” And then:
However, some…have taken advantage of Mr. Trump’s hospitality by choosing to disrupt his rallies by using them as an opportunity to promote their own political messages. While they certainly have the right to free speech, this is a private event paid for by Mr. Trump. We have provided a safe protest area outside the venue for all protesters. If a protester starts demonstrating in the area around you, please do not touch or harm the protester. This is a peaceful rally. In order to notify the law enforcement officers of the location of the protester, please hold a rally sign over your head and start chanting TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! Ask the people around you to do likewise until the officer removes the protester. Thank you for helping us make America great again.
The announcer had such a deadpan delivery that the crowd was laughing and cheering by the time the recording finished. And when Trump arrived and the first protester began screaming that Trump is something terrible — I couldn’t hear exactly what — Trump himself was the voice of kindness.
“Don’t hurt him,” Trump said. “Don’t hurt him.”
Meanwhile, the crowd did just as instructed. TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!
It was perhaps a sign of Rubio’s luck that when he got a protester, it wasn’t really a protester at all but was instead some sort of odd political performance art.
On Sunday, Rubio appeared about an hour outside of Orlando at The Villages, the 110,000-person retirement community that is the world’s largest. It was kind of a military-themed event; General George S. Patton’s grandson was there to speak on Rubio’s behalf, and he brought a polished pair of the general’s boots to sit on a little platform near Rubio as he addressed the crowd.
Rubio was just beginning his speech when a man in one of the front rows, just a few feet from Rubio, rose and loudly said, “That’s enough. I have to tell everyone the truth. Marco Rubio is trying to steal my girlfriend. They met in New Hampshire, and she doesn’t look at me in the same way anymore.”
The man sounded like a professional, a comedian or performer or something. It just seemed too weird and too scripted to be real. Rubio took it in stride and, suspecting some sort of setup, said he was wondering where the hidden cameras were. Then, always on message, he added, “We don’t beat up our hecklers at our events.”
Security gently but firmly pushed the man toward the door, even as he continued to accuse Rubio of trying to take his girlfriend. “He’s probably going to steal yours, too,” the man cried on the way out.
Nobody found out who he was, but the next day, the same guy, and a friend who was also at the Rubio rally, were in West Palm Beach, trying to get attention for their “Trump armbands.” Obviously looking to make some sort of fascist connection, they said the Trump campaign was giving the armbands out, which was not true. They apparently made it all up for whatever project they’ve got going.
By the way, two actual protesters did show up outside Rubio’s event at The Villages. A man and a woman held up signs that said Rubio was a “Disney puppet” for his work on the Gang of Eight immigration bill, and a “No-show senator” as well. The two were standing in a designated place right beside rally-goers as they left. Several Rubio supporters became angry and engaged in loud debate; one woman, and then a man, tried to grab the signs. The behavior was almost Trump-like, except that it was a Rubio event.
Rubio got a good crowd at The Villages. The room in which he spoke held about 350 people, and he filled that. Then there was a nearby overflow room, with about 150 seats, and he filled that, too. So it was a healthy showing, at least by non-Trump standards. And when everybody stopped laughing about the guy and the girlfriend, Rubio gave a fine speech.
As sometimes happens at the end of campaigns, the candidate returned to first principles. In Rubio’s case, it was the tenets of conservatism that he learned growing up in the Reagan era. (It’s perfectly safe to speak at length about Reagan in a retirement community, with the confidence that everyone will know who you’re talking about.)
“Why are there so many young, 40-something leaders in the conservative movement?” Rubio asked. “What do we all have in common? We grew up in the era of Reagan, where Ronald Reagan defined for us what it means to be a conservative.”
Now, Rubio continued, “we’re being asked once again what it means to be a conservative. And I’ve got to tell you there are troubling trends. First of all, there are those who now believe conservatism has nothing to do with principle. It’s an attitude. How angry can you get? How offensive can you be? How loud can you speak? That is not conservatism. Conservatism is a set of principles that have served this nation for two centuries.”
Rubio, still standing next to Patton’s boots, laid it out — the principle of limited government, of a free economy and free enterprise, of a strong national defense. “These principles, backed up by real and serious ideas — that is what conservatism means,” he said. “And when our nation has been in trouble for over two centuries, it has largely been when it has abandoned those principles, as it has done over the last seven years under the current president.”
Perhaps that final phrase, about the last seven years, pointed to the yawning gap between Rubio’s audience and Trump’s. Yes, both men slam Barack Obama from the stump. But a significant number of Trump’s voters disapprove of George W. Bush’s time in office nearly as much as Obama’s. They would not limit the abandonment-of-principles indictment to just the last seven years.
At Trump’s Tampa event, I chatted casually with several people who were all in one way or another deeply unhappy with the political system, and who expressed hope that Trump might fix it. Later, one of the men I had talked to came back and asked very earnestly whether I thought someone like Ted Cruz could make the kind of changes in Washington that are needed. I always answer (truthfully) that I don’t know. But then the man said he thought Trump was the only one who could bring change, because everybody else, Cruz included, is basically happy enough to operate within the system as it is. So he’s voting for Trump.
The polls suggest there are a lot of Floridians like him. On the eve of the election, Trump was at 43.0 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of polls, while Rubio was at 24.4 percent. The most recent half-dozen polls in the average had Trump ahead by 18, 20, 25, 17, 24, and 20 points. Yes, polls can be off, but a Rubio victory would require a lot of polls to be way, way, way off.
The day before he traveled to The Villages, Rubio did a bunch of stops in central Florida that included a quick visit to a coffee shop in Lakeland. The shop filled up — that took just 40 or 50 people — and then more gathered in a mall-like area outside. When Rubio finished a few brief remarks in the shop, he went outside to shake hands.
A woman approached to tell Rubio that she had strongly supported him back in 2010 when he was beginning his Senate race and was far behind in the polls. He came on strong to win then, she told him, and now she is praying for him again, because he would make a wonderful president.
Rubio gave her a heartfelt thanks and looked straight into her eyes. “It’s all in God’s hands now,” he said.
