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Rubio Still Isn’t the Front-runner

Like everyone else in the field, Rubio is being outpaced by Trump and Carson in South Carolina and nationally.
Ben Carson

Politico reports on the state of the presidential race in South Carolina:

Even as Trump falls to second place in Iowa and in at least one national poll, he continues to tower atop the field here, where his campaign boasts offices across the state, thousands of volunteers and the support of a primary electorate heavy on tea partyers and veterans, two groups that have flocked to him with gusto.

His staying power here hurts none of his rivals more than Rubio, who has devoted disproportionate resources to the state where his top campaign brass cut their teeth and that is considered his best chance at winning one of the first three contests on the primary calendar.

The core assumption behind the case for Rubio is that the two leading candidates are going collapse sooner or later, but what’s happening in South Carolina suggests that this assumption is badly flawed. Here we have a state where a primary win is crucial for Rubio’s campaign, and he registers all of 8% support in the RCP average of state polls. Like everyone else in the field, Rubio is being outpaced by Trump and Carson in South Carolina and nationally, and by quite a large margin. It shouldn’t be happening if he is the most likely nominee and the secret front-runner. It makes sense if you accept that Rubio is running a long-shot campaign with little chance of winning the nomination.

The report doesn’t just tell us about Trump and Carson’s relatively stronger positions in South Carolina, but it also gives us some idea of how enthusiastic and devoted many of their supporters are. One Trump supporter boasted that he would take a bullet for his candidate. Carson’s evangelical supporters are growing in number and are likewise enamored with their champion. They appear to have both greater numbers of supporters and greater intensity of support. Like most observers, I figured that Trump and Carson would implode once they were subjected to minimal scrutiny, but that hasn’t happened. Instead, they have thrived on controversy and benefited from increased media exposure. I assumed that neither of them would make the effort to put together real campaign organizations, and that also appears to be wrong. At some point it becomes absurd to imagine that the two candidates that have routinely commanded 50%+ of the Republican electorate nationally and in the early states aren’t going to be successful when it comes time to vote. Eventually the argument that the race will end up as a contest between Rubio and Cruz that has been cropping up lately seems like nothing more than wishful thinking or willful denial of what the evidence has been telling us for months.

The reason for that denial is plain: most pundits and journalists covering the presidential race don’t know what to do with Trump and Carson supporters except to deride them, and they take for granted that it is just a matter of time until the “normal” nominating contest gets underway and a conventional candidate is selected. That is how it’s “supposed” to work, but the Republican contest hasn’t been working that way all year. Once Trump and Carson are eliminated from consideration, Rubio becomes the default answer to the question, but the voters seem to have other ideas. That could still change, and it’s always possible that it will, but at the moment it isn’t at all clear why it would.

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