Rubio falters again as Trump extends his lead

MIAMI – Marco Rubio jumped on to a stage in front of a few thousand wildly cheering supporters at an open-air equestrian center Tuesday night, pumped his right fist twice, and bragged that he has been rising in polls since he started aggressively going after Donald Trump.

“We are seeing in state after state his numbers going down. We are seeing in state after state, our numbers going up,” Rubio said.

The boast came about as close to ignoring reality as a politician can get. Eleven states held actual primary elections or caucuses Tuesday night, and Rubio lost all but one. He gained his first victory of the entire primary process so far in the Minnesota caucuses, a result announced an hour before midnight.

Now, with one-third of the total delegates that determine the GOP’s nominee awarded, the 44-year-old U.S. senator from Florida trails Trump and fellow Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the delegate race. But far more pressing for Rubio is his momentum problem. He has almost none, and worse, Tuesday marked the third time in this primary that he has appeared to have some wind in his sails, only to run aground when the votes are cast.

Cruz, a 45-year-old first-term senator, won the surprise contest of the night, beating Trump 34 percent to 28 percent in Oklahoma, with Rubio finishing at 26 percent. In addition to winning his home state of Texas, Cruz emerged as the winner of the ongoing sweepstakes to be the alternative to Trump.

Cruz crowed that his was “the only campaign that has beaten, that can beat and that will beat Donald Trump.”

Trump, 69, continued to write his own script, holding a press conference rather than a victory rally, and conducting it in a room at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., that bears a resemblance to the East Room of the White House. No one has ever accused Donald Trump of subtlety.

With New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie standing behind him, Trump congratulated Cruz on his win in Texas, and quickly pivoted to his next point: how he wants to unite the Republican Party to defeat the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.

“I’m a unifier. I know people are going to find that a little hard to believe. But I am a unifier,” Trump said. “We’re going to be more inclusive. I think we’re going to be more unified.”

Trump declared that he is “becoming diplomatic” and delved into the details of how to deal with the Syrian civil war, seeking to project a more presidential air than he has as a candidate so far. It was difficult for him to stay in character as a peacemaker for long. Asked whether he would be able to work with Congress and with House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Trump said that he expects he could “get along great with him.”

“And if I don’t, he’s going to have to pay a big price, OK?” he continued.

Trump argued that he is expanding the Republican party by attracting Democratic and Independent voters, and there is some evidence this is the case. However, in the one state that did not allow Democrats to vote in the GOP primary on Tuesday, Oklahoma, Trump lost to Cruz.

Rubio, meanwhile, was left to ponder another setback. After a higher-than expected finish in the Iowa caucuses, he was poised to capture the anti-Trump wing of the GOP in New Hampshire, but was sidelined by a disastrous debate performance a few days before voters went to the polls and finished sixth in that primary.

After narrowly beating Cruz in South Carolina to finish second behind Trump, Rubio once again claimed to be the candidate who could unite the GOP and defeat Trump. But then Trump rolled to a huge win in the Nevada caucuses three days later. And over the past few days, Rubio has dominated the news cycles because of his relentless and biting attacks on Trump, who he has called a “con man.”

There was some evidence that Rubio made up ground on Trump in Virginia in the last few days. But Rubio didn’t get the kind of bump he’d hoped for.

Minnesota eased the sting of a bad night somewhat. But it also came late into the night, after most Americans had tuned out, and after most of the night’s political conversation had centered around Rubio’s lack of victories anywhere.

“He hasn’t won anything,” Trump said of Rubio at his press conference.

And if Rubio cannot win his home state of Florida on March 15, his candidacy will be considered over by most observers.

Rubio was defiant, however, in an interview with CBS News’ Charlie Rose. When Rose asked Rubio if Trump would “destroy” the Republican party if he becomes the nominee, Rubio did not hesitate.

“Absolutely,” Rubio said. “It will split the Republican party.”

Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, said she had never seen political tumult like the current moment in her lifetime.

“I believe we are seeing a great political party shatter before our eyes,” she said on CBS News.

Rubio vowed to “do anything it takes to keep Donald Trump from being our nominee.”

Cruz supporters will say the best way Rubio could fulfill that promise is to drop out and endorse Cruz. In his speech at the Redneck Country Club near Houston, Cruz asked his opponents to “prayerfully consider our coming together, united” to defeat Trump.

“Tomorrow morning we have a choice. So long as the field remains divided, Donald Trump’s path to the nomination remains more likely, and that would be a disaster for Republicans, for conservatives, and for the nation,” Cruz said.

An official with one of the super PAC’s supporting Cruz underscored the plea. “This is now a two-man race. If all those folks trying to stop Donald Trump are serious, they will coalesce around Ted Cruz,” said Kellyanne Conway, with Keep the Promise I.

Even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who last weekend cracked jokes about killing Cruz and has never made any secret of his dislike for him, said that Republicans may need to unite behind the Texan.

“Ted Cruz is not my favorite by any means,” Graham said on CBS News. “But we may be in a position where we have to rally around Ted Cruz as the only way to stop Trump.”

On Twitter, conservatives took solace in the fact that Trump would not garner even half of the 595 delegates up for grabs in the various contests Tuesday. The New York Times estimate had Trump at 244 delegates for the night, with 221 going to Cruz, 108 going to Rubio, 18 going to Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and three to retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.

That would leave Trump with 326 delegates over all, to 238 for Cruz, 124 for Rubio, 24 for Kasich, and 8 for Carson.

Yet Trump’s support remained Tuesday night at about a third of Republican voters. While he scored right at the 50 percent mark in Massachusetts and got 44 percent in Alabama, his average support Tuesday night in a heavily Southern roster of states was 36 percent.

Kasich, despite his low overall delegate haul, played a big part in Virginia. It was likely his presence in the race that kept Rubio from winning the state. Some good portion of the nine percent that Kasich won there likely would have otherwise gone to Rubio, who finished just three points behind Trump’s 35 percent. With Virginia polls closing early in the night, a Rubio win there would have changed the tenor of the night’s media coverage.

The Rubio campaign was already talking about a contested convention before Tuesday’s results. Republican operative Henry Barbour was presented to Rubio backers and donors Tuesday morning as the man heading up Rubio’s strategy for a brokered convention. The Rubio campaign and many others do not see Cruz as a viable general election candidate, and so while there may be calls for Rubio to exit the race, there is still considerable support within the GOP for him to stay.

And a super PAC funded by wealthy Republican donors is ramping up efforts to take down Trump, in part because Rubio has shown the party how to successfully prosecute the case against the businessman and reality TV personality.

A growing number of Republicans, including freshman U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, have said in recent days that they will never vote for Trump, even if he’s the party’s nominee in November. Trump’s open admiration for tyrannical rulers of other countries, his encouragement of violence at his political rallies, his eagerness to restrict the freedom of the press, his rejection of equality under the law for minority groups, his lack of any coherent political beliefs combined with his many liberal positions in the past all combine to make him anathema to a large number of Republicans.

Trump responded to this news at his press conference by charging that special interests “want to have their little senator do exactly what they want.” But Rubio, he said, “is not going to win anyway” and if GOP leaders tried to mount a third party campaign against him they would “lose everything.”

The race now moves to four more contests on Saturday, followed by four more next Tuesday, including delegate rich Michigan. March 15 holds Rubio’s biggest test, when his home state of Florida will hold its primary. Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina will also hold primaries that same day.

After the March 15 contests, 60 percent of the delegates in the primary process will have been awarded. And if Rubio does not win Florida, the pressure on him to exit the race will be enormous.

Rubio surged back into the spotlight over the last week following a debate in Houston last Thursday in which he went after Trump in a way that no one, including Rubio, had done before. Rubio pestered, confronted and mocked Trump repeatedly, and his candidacy was infused with new energy on the campaign trail in the following days. Rubio hit Trump on a number of things in the businessman’s past that supported an argument that Trump has hurt, not helped, the working class common man voter, and called Trump a “con man.”

Rubio’s mockery of Trump on the campaign trail veered into the juvenile, with jokes about Trump’s “spray tan,” the size of his hands as a way of mocking the size of his genitals, and with speculation about Trump having peed his pants during the debate. These comments were one-offs from Rubio’s main message and he made the latter two jokes only once each, but they drew headlines.

For the Rubio campaign, it was a few days in which they were playing the “perpetual attention machine” game that Trump has perfected this election, using provocation and outrage to dominate news cycles and suck up attention.

One Rubio supporter in touch with the campaign acknowledged that “the short fingers riff … was probably too edgy for some of our supporters.” And when someone at a rally shouted out a comment about Trump’s hands at a rally Monday in Oklahoma, Rubio issued a mild rebuke.

Rubio will have another chance this Thursday evening to tangle with Trump, during the 11th debate of the primary, in Detroit.

This past Saturday, Rubio added his name to a chorus of support for a motto trending on Twitter that in effect signaled his willingness to fight all the way to the convention.

“#NeverTrump,” Rubio wrote.

That sentiment may endure to the Republican convention in Cleveland this July. But it’s increasingly doubtful that Rubio’s candidacy will do so.

Holly Bailey in Palm Beach, FL and Jason Sickles in Houston contributed to this report.