In last Thursday’s debate, when Marco Rubio reduced Donald Trump to repeatedly muttering “the lines around the states,” conservatives and establishment Republicans held out the hope that it was a turning point in the election.
Super Tuesday results didn’t show a Trump collapse. Trump has won 7 of 10 states (Alaska is still voting as of this writing), including the hard-fought Virginia.
Yet on “Fox News” at around 10:40 pm, Rubio said of Trump, “The erosion has already begun.” What’s the evidence of this?
The polls have a couple of little items onto which Rubio can hang some hope of momentum.
Tuesday results were closer in some states than polls that were conducted before the Thursday debate
Trump averaged a 14.5 percent lead in Virginia in polls taken before or overlapping Thursday’s debate. Trump is winning by less than 3 percent. Rubio outperformed in Minnesota by 10 points. But in other states, we didn’t see any erosion — Trump’s win in Georgia was even bigger than his poll lead there.
Late breakers in most states went to Cruz and Rubio
The late-deciding voters in Virginia went overwhelmingly for Rubio, according to exit polls. Virginia was where Rubio campaigned the hardest. Even in states where he lost badly, Cruz and Rubio won the late breakers, and Cruz kept pace with or beat Donald Trump. (See Georgia, Arkansas, and Tennessee, for example). Cruz and Rubio won the late-breakers in Oklahoma. Massachusetts was the outlier — Trump won late-breakers there.
The establishment and the conservatives are starting to spend money against Trump
Remarkably — shamefully — the GOP establishment and the conservative movement have dedicated very few words and very little money to attacking Donald Trump. That began to change last week. You can expect it to accelerate this week. Rubio and Cruz both finally trained their attacks squarely on Trump in the past week. Those numbers above hinting at some anti-Trump momentum could reflect that.
But Trump has a dominant lead in the delegate count and he leads in nearly every other state poll, so that “erosion” would have to be dramatic — and soon — to make a difference.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
