Live from Evans Hall: : What Makes Me so Confident in Marco Rubio?: "I gave a speech last night where I repeated my prediction...
...that Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio would win their respective primaries. But I’m increasingly unsure where my confidence in Rubio comes from. Look at this chart. Can you easily pick out Rubio’s line? And even once you spy his violet thread, is there anything in that line to justify much optimism?...
I don’t believe Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination, but I also can’t tell a very convincing story... of what he does to lose it. But... [even so,] what... suggest[s] his support would flow to Rubio or Bush rather than to Carson, Cruz or Fiorina?... Rubio is Trump’s stylistic opposite... [and] also Trump’s substantive opposite. Rubio is known for his work on immigration reform, his fiscal and social conservatism, and his closeness to the neocon[s].... Trump is known for his anti-immigrant rhetoric, his heterodoxies from fiscal and social conservatism, and... his instincts appear dovish. The best argument... is that Republicans will somehow get the message that Rubio is their best chance.... But if Republicans gave a damn about that message--or about the messengers who might deliver it--they wouldn’t be supporting Trump in the first place....
Rubio, to be fair, is in third place now. But Rubio's support is roughly a third of Trump’s... and... [came] largely at Jeb Bush’s expense.... Trump, Carson, Cruz and Fiorina now command 61.3%.... Anyone in my position should be approaching this election with extreme humility--I didn’t predict the Republican primary would look like this six months ago, and so I shouldn’t pretend to understand its internal dynamics now. I still have trouble believing that any of the outsiders will win the Republican nomination. It still seems obvious to me that Republicans should nominate Rubio.... But perhaps that's just my old model--the one that didn't call this primary correctly--refusing to die.... I’m exerting a lot of energy here to deny that the GOP primary simply is the thing that it looks like it is, and Republican voters simply have the preferences they clearly, in poll after poll, say that they have.
