Just when you think it can’t get any worse for the sober-minded, cool-headed traditionalists in the Republican Party, it does. They see their gold-plated gate crasher taken down a peg, only to find themselves faced with the prospect of kissing up to Ted Cruz.
On Saturday he matched Donald Trump’s two victories, in Louisiana and Kentucky, with two of his own, in Kansas and Maine. He got substantially more delegates from the four contests overall than Trump did.
And it was like the cosmically mischievous twist in an O. Henry story. The prayers, pleading and plotting of G.O.P. elders were answered: A rival candidate indeed gathered some steam, restrained Trump’s momentum and staked an equal claim to at least one news cycle’s headlines. But that candidate was a creature they find every bit as loathsome as the crass billionaire, if not more so.
And then there was Marco Rubio.
What in the world ever happened to Marco Rubio?
To the Rubio who was supposed to be the party’s savior and hope, I mean. The Rubio who made donors’ hearts beat faster. The Rubio they kept foisting on Republican voters, except that the donors didn’t see it as foisting. They saw it as benevolent instruction in which candidate was really best for all involved, which candidate could deny Democrats a third consecutive term in the White House.
Rubio is essentially the Christmas fruitcake of the 2016 cycle: presented as a gift, received as something neither appetizing nor especially nutritive.
With just four Republicans left in the race for the party’s nomination, he notched three third-place finishes on Saturday and one fourth-place finish. In none of the contests did he beat Cruz. In none did he come close to Cruz — or even to 20 percent of the vote.
It was a performance so poor, particularly in terms of the expectations that once swaddled Rubio, that Trump called on him to end his campaign, saying that the race was effectively down to two men, so why not make that the formal reality?
Rubio will stay. His home state of Florida votes on March 15th, and he is betting everything on it, just as John Kasich, who finished fourth in three states on Saturday and third in one, is counting on Ohio, which he governs, and which also votes that day.
At this point neither Rubio nor Kasich can hope for a majority of delegates or even, really, a plurality of them. They’re after enough of them to prevent Trump from getting a majority himself.
Trump’s lead, on paper, isn’t mammoth. After Saturday’s contests, he had 378 delegates to 295 for Cruz.
But Cruz can’t get cocky. Scratch that. He can — he’s Ted Cruz, after all — but he shouldn’t. One of his main strategies for winning the nomination was monopolizing the votes of the evangelical Christians prevalent in southern states, and Trump foiled that in South Carolina two weeks ago, foiled that again in many states on Super Tuesday, and foiled that once more on Saturday, when he won Kentucky and Louisiana.
The states ahead of Cruz are less favorable to him, all in all, than the states behind him. Barring the implosion of Trump, he doesn’t have a promising path to the nomination. Saturday’s results didn’t change that. They just solidified his standing as the most successful — so far — of the Republican candidates doing battle with Trump.
And how exactly might Trump implode? It’s harder than ever to imagine.
With his tantrums, his apostasies, his vulgarity, his abundant flip-flops and his transparent lies, he has certainly done all he can to sabotage himself. It hasn’t worked. And his Saturday victories came after a triumphantly odd debate performance on Thursday night and several days of increasingly impassioned anti-Trump appeals from an all-star Republican cast.
There’s another debate this coming Thursday. If Trump and Rubio continue their puerile trajectory, one of them will almost certainly give the other a wedgie, and the 2016 road to the White House will swerve yet again into uncharted and previously unimaginable terrain.
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FRANK BRUNI>
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