Never before has a Republican won both New Hampshire and South Carolina’s primaries and not gone on to seize the GOP presidential nomination.
That’s the position Donald Trump finds himself in after his first-place finish in South Carolina on Saturday night. Yet Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio both laid out cases Sunday for why the billionaire businessman won’t be the party’s eventual nominee.
The large number of qualified Republicans in this year’s race means it is not comparable to past races, Rubio said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“We’ve never had a race where 15 credible candidates began and you had so many choices,” Rubio told host Jake Tapper. “You cannot apply the old rules to this one.”
Rubio dismissed Trump’s South Carolina win as any indicator that the real estate developer will seize more states down the road. While Trump earned about 30 percent of voters in that state, the rest split votes among himself, Cruz, Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Ben Carson, Rubio noted.
“That really divided up the vote,” Rubio said. But he said “that dynamic is beginning to shift” now that Bush has dropped out and Carson and Kasich won only a small share of voters.
“You’re now down to a core probably of three candidates who are running full-scale national campaigns,” Rubio said, referring to himself, Trump and Cruz.
Cruz also dismissed Trump’s victories, while contrasting his first-place finish in Iowa with Rubio’s second-place finish in South Carolina.
While Rubio gained the most endorsements in South Carolina, including from Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott, he still took second place to Trump. That proves Rubio can’t beat Trump, Cruz said, while he can.
“That’s really striking,” Cruz said. “I was in the same position in Iowa. The leading conservatives in Iowa were backing me, and we won decisively. When all the leaders were behind Marco, he couldn’t come close to beating Donald Trump.”
