There is little of Marco Rubio left in the Republican presidential primaries, where he’s won just one state and one Caribbean territory. And with six days until the March 15 election–and early voting well on its way–Florida, Rubio’s home state and last hope, is shaping up to be his Waterloo.
The latest Qunnipiac University poll, widely considered to be the broadest and most accurate poll taken in Florida, shows Donald Trump ahead of Rubio by a 45-22 margin, with Ted Cruz at 18 percent and Ohio’s John Kasich at 8 percent. The poll was released this morning, based on surveys of 657 likely Florida Republican primary voters between March 2 and March 7. Early voting in Flagler and much of Florida began Saturday (March 5). The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.
Two other polls issued Wednesday on the Florida contest show Rubio losing by double-digits: A CNN poll has Trump beating him 40-24, and a University of North Florida poll has Trump ahead, 35.5 to 23.8.
Rubio loses in every category of voter: once the darling of Florida tea party faithfuls–he was elected to the U.S. Senate on a tea party wave in 2011–he garners just 9 percent of their support in the Quinnipiac poll. He does better with white born-again evangelicals (22 percent) and does best with moderate to liberal Republicans, who give him 24 percent support. Trump in comparison gets 48 percent of the tea party vote, 57 percent of the “somewhat conservative” vote and 39 percent of evangelicals.
In a February 25 poll, Trump was leading Rubio 44-28, indicating that Rubio’s onslaught of Trump-like criticism and insults in the past two weeks has helped to damage his standing further and possibly deal a fatal blow to his political viability in the future. Worse for establishment Republicans who saw Florida as a firewall against the Trump machine: the strategy, resting as it did on a strong Rubio showing, will be particularly ruinous as the winner of Florida’s primary gets to take all of the state’s 99 delegates. That would enable Trump to vault well ahead of second-place Cruz, who so far has managed to keep the battle competitive. He is within roughly 100 delegates of Trump’s total of 446, with 1,237 needed to win.
“The effort within the Republican Party to stop Donald Trump from winning the presidential nomination appears unlikely to stop him from taking Florida’s delegate-rich winner-take-all primary. But that effort might have a better chance of success in Ohio where Gov. John Kasich is giving ‘The Donald’ a tougher run for his money,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.
The poll shows Kasich well ahead of Trump in Ohio, with 38 percent to Trump’s 32–not much of a margin, though Ohio, too, is a winner-take-all state, so Kasich can deny Trump 66 delegates. Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina are also voting next Tuesday. Illinois is winner-take-all, Missouri and North Carolina are proportional states. Trump is running well ahead in North Carolina and Illinois. There are no polls for Missouri, according to Real Clear Politics, the hub of all polls.
“Kasich, who has been the governor for five years, has one of the highest job approval ratings of any governor in the nine states surveyed by Quinnipiac University,” Brown said. (Gov. Rick Scott, in comparison, is among the lowest-liked governors in the nation, with his approval rating hovering around 40 percent, though his name has been floated as a possible vice presidential nominee on the Trump ticket.)
In Florida, 6 percent of voters remain undecided and 19 percent of those who name a candidate say they might change their mind.
In early voting so far in Flagler County, some 5,000 voters have mailed in absentee ballots, and as of the end of the day Tuesday, 4,657 have cast early-voting ballots, for a turnout of about 18 percent out of the county’s 53,500 registered Republicans and Democrats. Florida is a closed-primary state, so independents may not vote in the primary.
confidential says
None of them three what we need!
Too bad Bush quit as was less bad of the badder.Trump will loose to Dem’s.
Layla says
Rubio is the architect of his own destruction, an opportunist of the worst kind. Politicians who place their own ambition ahead of the needs of the people generally do not get reelected, especially when they lie to the voters.
r&r says
Rubio should drop out and go back to the Senate and do nothing like he was before.
PCer says
Hillary will be the next president. The Republican media did not pay enough attention to the viable candidates and instead chose to help bolster Trump through free media everytime he said something outlandish. Good job GOP, you have created this monster and now we all have to suffer for it.
Anonymous says
There’s your sign Rubio! Don’t go away mad, just go away!
Sherry says
Right On PCer!
I personally believe that if Rubio were not a handsome TV presence and the son of Cuban immigrants (with that huge voting block in Southern Florida). . . he would not have been elected Senator. Rubio has no viable credentials for that position. Since being in office, he has done NOTHING for our citizens or state. . . hell, he hardly showed up for work at all.
I also firmly believe that Rubio “WAS” the choice of the Republican establishment/political machine because they could completely control him. . . unlike John Kasich. Kasich is the only reasonable, sane, adult running to be the Republican Presidential candidate. It will be very interesting to see how all this ludicrous “reality show” plays out .
My next huge concern is that the “talking heads” of the main stream media are actually saying that Rubio should drop out of this election cycle before Floridians vote on Tuesday. . . because he will likely lose to Trump. They believe Rubio should preserve his political chances to be Senator again or even our next governor.
WOW! Just WOW! So, the pundits think so little of the voters in Florida that we would choose this complete FAILURE as a leader of any kind in our state. Really? Rubio is the guy that got down in the mud with Trump and started with all the penis size, wet pants and orange skin attacks.
Florida most certainly deserves much better! We need mature, wise and reasonable leaders. . . not more “Tea Party” weaklings and bullies/obstructionists like Rubio and Cruz! We need a complete change in the Congress and state houses as well!!!
Sherry says
Take a moment. . . A Must Read from Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald:
Leonard Pitts Jr.: The Republican Party is an incoherent mess
LEONARD PITTS JR. | Miami Herald Mar 6, 2016
“If he was for it, we had to be against it.”
— Former U.S. Sen. George Voinovich, quoted in “The New New Deal” by Michael Grunwald
The “he” is President Obama. The “we” is the Republican Party. And it is not coincidental that as the former pushes toward the end of his second term, the latter is coming apart.
The GOP is an incoherent mess. Republican-on-Republican rhetorical violence has become common. Party members find themselves mulling whether to break away and form a third party or unite behind a coarse, blustering bigot whose scapegoating and strongman rhetoric has Holocaust survivors comparing him to Hitler.
The situation is so objectively and transparently grim that many on the right no longer even bother to spin it. “I’m a lifelong Republican,” tweeted historian Max Boot last week, “but (the) Trump surge proves that every bad thing Democrats have ever said about GOP is basically true.”
“It would be terrible,” wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens last week, “to think that the left was right about the right all these years.”
But it can be argued Trump is less the cause than an inevitable effect of the party’s looming disintegration. It can be argued that what’s really destroying the Republican Party is the Republican Party.
The popular storyline goes that voters are seeking political outsiders this year in their frustration over a government where the legislative gears are frozen and nothing gets done.
What that storyline forgets is that this gridlock was by design, that GOP leaders held a meeting on the very evening of the president’s first inauguration and explicitly decided on a policy of non-cooperation to deny him anything approaching a bipartisan triumph.
The party followed this tactic with such lockstep discipline and cynical disregard for the national welfare that in 2010, seven Republican co-sponsors of a resolution to create a deficit reduction task force voted against their own bill because Obama came out for it. They feared its passage might make him look good.
In the book quoted above, Michael Grunwald distilled the GOP’s thinking as follows: “As long as Republicans refused to follow his lead, Americans would see partisan food fights and conclude that Obama had failed to produce change.”
Republicans and their media accomplices buttressed that strategy with a campaign of insult and disrespect designed to delegitimize Obama. With their endless birther stupidity, their death panels idiocy, their constant budget brinksmanship and their cries of, “I want my country back!” they stoked in the public nothing less than hatred for the interloper in the White House who’d had the nerve to be elected president.
And the strategy worked, hobbling and frustrating Obama.
But as a bullet doesn’t care who it hits and a fire doesn’t care who it burns, the forces of ignorance and unreason, grievance and fear the Republicans calculatedly unleashed have not only wounded the president. No, it becomes more apparent every day that those forces have gravely wounded politics itself, meaning the idea that we can — or even should — reason together, compromise, form consensus.
There is a sense of just deserts in watching panicked Republicans try to stop Trump as he goose-steps toward coronation, but it is tempered by the realization that there’s far more at stake here than the GOP’s comeuppance.
This is our country we’re talking about. This is its future we choose in November. And any future presided over by “President Trump” is too apocalyptic to contemplate. Yet, the possibility is there, and that’s sobering.
It is bad enough the Republicans may have destroyed themselves. One wonders whether they will take America with them.
W&K says
Marco is very weak in all .
Anonymous says
Rubio doesnt vote much in the senate and he doesn’t answer questions asked of him much either. He needs to suspend his campaign, resign as a senator and get a job to learn how it really is in the USA. This kid is out of touch!