Kimberley Strassel details “the Rubio gamble”:

Mr. Rubio by contrast is flouting the usual rules, playing everywhere at once and nowhere on top. It’s the Wait Them Out strategy. The plan hinges on edgy calculations and big risks. Yet given the unusual nature of this primary cycle, the approach may prove as plausible as any other.

That’s a fair description of what Rubio is trying to do, and there’s a reason no one tries to run a campaign this way: it can’t work. Rubio is now banking on a good showing in Iowa, and he will probably get a decent result with 12-15% of the vote. (It’s possible that his poor campaigning and weak organization will cause him to do worse than this, for the sake of argument let’s assume that doesn’t happen.) However, his plan requires that this produces much better results in the next several states. It’s hard to see how it does that. The best he can realistically expect in the other February contests is third place, and he will probably fall short of that in New Hampshire, where his numbers have been dropping for the last month thanks to a barrage of negative ads. No one can just “wait out” the competition without winning somewhere in the way that Rubio is trying to do. The lack of success early on reinforces the justifiable impression that a candidate isn’t viable, and that just makes it harder for that candidate to win later.

Strassel says that the Rubio campaign assumes that “a lot more votes will be up for grabs” after Iowa, but in the near term that is almost certainly wrong. There won’t be a lot, and there will be more candidates better-positioned to get the few that are available. Rubio faces stiffer competition in New Hampshire and South Carolina from other so-called “establishment” candidates, and disillusioned Cruz voters (if there are many) are more likely to go to Trump than they are to go to him. Even if Cruz is “wounded” by a second-place finish in Iowa, that doesn’t help Rubio very much, since he has to fend off Kasich and Bush as well. Unless Rubio finishes ahead of Kasich, Cruz, and Bush in New Hampshire, it is he who will be wounded and suddenly in serious trouble. Instead of being propelled onward to success by his finish in Iowa, he is more likely to be hamstrung by a weak showing in New Hampshire. His late burst of campaigning isn’t likely to make up for the months when he spent little time in the early states, and his campaign organization is very likely too small to make up the difference.

Even if several of the no-hopers drop out after Iowa, that won’t include Paul, who certainly isn’t quitting before New Hampshire. Besides, it makes no sense for Paul voters to gravitate to Rubio in any case, since Rubio represents everything about the GOP that Paul voters dislike. If Paul voters were up for grabs, that would most likely help Cruz. Since they aren’t going to be available, that leaves at most an additional 5% of the New Hampshire vote (Fiorina/Huckabee/Santorum) open to Rubio, and the remaining candidates are just as likely to win over these people as Rubio is. If Carson drops out next week, his voters are almost certainly going to prefer Cruz and Trump, but then Carson has been averaging 8-9% in Iowa and has no particular reason to quit right away if he finishes fourth on Monday.

Too much of Rubio’s plan relies on many other candidates doing exactly what he needs them to do at exactly the right time, and it assumes that none of the candidates currently polling ahead of or behind him also benefits from a late surge. Since Rubio likes football references, let’s put it another way. Like a mediocre team on the cusp of getting into a wild card game if everything goes just right, the Rubio campaign is not in control of its own destiny and needs a ridiculous amount of help from its rivals. Those teams almost never make the playoffs, and that’s because they haven’t played well enough to belong there. The only way Rubio’s plan works is for several other candidates to screw up or collapse simultaneously, which shows that it isn’t really a plan at all and has long been an exercise in wishful thinking.

The main reason to doubt that Rubio’s “gamble” will work is that he has shown very bad political judgment and has made disastrous gambles in the past. That is one of the reasons why he’s in his current predicament. He initially thought he would be boosting his political fortunes by getting behind the Gang of Eight bill, because this is what many Republican elites and donors said they wanted after the 2012 election, and then he discovered too late that it had been a terrible political mistake. Stunned by the backlash from conservatives, he then spent the next several years trying to repair the damage he had done by running away from the only major legislation he worked on as a senator. No one has forgotten his attempt to have it both ways on this issue, and that’s why the attacks ads his rivals are running against him that question his trustworthiness are so effective. It is genuinely funny to read about Rubio’s many “calculations” for the primaries when we already know that he grossly miscalculated on the biggest political gamble of his career.