At the same time, news clips piled up detailing Rubio’s poor attendance record in the Senate. Stories alleged that he’d missed half his committee meetings; others claimed he had the Senate’s worst voting record. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel demanded his resignation in an editorial.2 The “truant senator” narrative, combined with his absences from the trail and his lackluster fund-raising numbers, flummoxed friend and foe alike. If he wasn’t barnstorming across the early states, and he wasn’t collecting campaign dough, and he wasn’t voting in the Senate, what exactly was he doing?
Rubio’s absenteeism was especially baffling in Iowa, where GOP officials wondered why he wasn’t making a play for the swaths of center-right voters desperate for an alternative to Trump and Cruz. But Rubio’s team, reluctant to raise expectations in any given state, kept playing hard-to-get. By the time Thanksgiving arrived, frustrations were boiling over. Prominent Republicans scolded Rubio in private for his failure to organize in the Hawkeye State, as stories abounded of his team missing easy opportunities to reach voters: The time a line of people waited for him after an event, while his field staffers ate pizza backstage; the appearance he canceled at a major evangelical gathering for no apparent reason; the Saturday he spent in Iowa watching football with his state chairman, Jack Whitver, rather than holding public events.
In response to the uproar, Rubio’s campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, told the New York Times, “More people in Iowa see Marco on Fox and Friends than see Marco when he is in Iowa.”
This only made things worse. Rubio had been dogged by criticisms that he was running his campaign from a television studio; now his campaign manager was confirming it. However tone-deaf Sullivan’s remark may have been, it contained no small kernel of truth. The unwritten rules of presidential campaigning were being rewritten in real time. In the four decades since the modern nominating system was canonized—Iowa, New Hampshire, then South Carolina—candidates had endeavored to achieve as much face time with voters as possible: coffee shops, high school gymnasiums, church sanctuaries, and, when in Iowa, Pizza Ranch restaurants.
But Trump, equipped with universal name identification and unceasing media coverage, was atop the polls despite shaking fewer hands—“I’m a total germaphobe,” he explained—than anyone in the three early states could remember. On top of this, candidates who did spend lots of time on the ground and who did boast booming field organizations, such as Bush, had nothing to show for it. Studying their surroundings, Rubio’s team made the calculation that their time and money would be better spent on television than on ground operations.
It appeared good enough for third place in Iowa. That would be good enough to earn a ticket to New Hampshire. But then what? As the voting season neared, Rubio’s team continued to blanch publicly and privately at the basic question of what its path to victory looked like. “To win the nomination, you have to win states,” Stuart Stevens, Romney’s 2012 chief strategist, says. “I love Rubio and I love his guys . . . but my question for them was always: Where are you going to win?”
The dam broke in January. The Rubio brain trust had outlined an unconventional sequence in which Rubio would place third in Iowa, second in New Hampshire, and first in South Carolina. Nicknamed “3–2-1,” the strategy banked on a rapid winnowing of the field. Rubio’s team felt that a third-place finish in Iowa, ahead of establishment-friendly competitors such as Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich, would vault him ahead of the pack in New Hampshire. If he finished second to Trump there, he could consolidate the center-right vote, which, added to his share of conservatives, would give him a winning plurality in the three-man race with Trump and Cruz in South Carolina.
By designating South Carolina as their must-win state, Rubio’s team was investing in a home game. Much of the candidate’s high command either hailed from or had deep connections to the Palmetto State; Jim DeMint, the former senator, had brought Rubio there with such frequency during his 2010 campaign that the underdog candidate became an adopted son. Rubio also had trip aces up his sleeve, three waiting high-profile endorsements in the state, national figures all: Governor Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott, and Congressman Trey Gowdy.
Rubio and Scott had developed a particularly close kinship in the Senate, joining each other for Bible studies and pickup basketball games. Rubio had brought his family to Scott’s church in Charleston; Scott had backed Rubio during the darkest moments of the Gang of Eight affair. Now, as Rubio’s endgame finally came into focus, he found himself sharing a stage with Scott at a feel-good Republican event that only Reince Priebus could love.
It was January 9, and Scott was teaming with Paul Ryan to cohost a “Poverty Summit” in Columbia, South Carolina. Staged as a nontraditional conversation about conservative solutions to socioeconomic immobility, Ryan and Scott strained to display a GOP that cared about building trust with minority communities more than walls along the southern border. One by one, the presidential hopefuls took the stage to discuss the plight of poor Americans, offering commentary rarely if ever heard in contemporary Republican politics.
Rubio was thoroughly in his element, peddling his up-by-the-bootstraps biography and pitching a forward-looking vision of conservatism that made the regular suspects swoon. Arthur Brooks, the brilliant president of the American Enterprise Institute, called the event “a new day for the Republican Party and the conservative movement.” Mika Brzezinski, the cohost of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, who took part in a panel discussion, remarked, “This is a Republican Party that can win the White House.”
Two candidates declined to attend: Trump and Cruz.
The symmetry was inescapable. A year earlier, Congressman Steve King had unofficially kicked off the 2016 Republican primary by hosting an event dominated by red-meat rhetoric that showed the hardline impulses of the party. Rubio had refused to go, not wanting to identify with King, and Trump and Cruz had won rave reviews. Now, a year later, with the voting soon to begin, Rubio had distinguished himself at an event designed to showcase the GOP’s softer side. But Trump and Cruz, not wanting to identify with Ryan, had refused to attend.
It would soon become clear which version of the party Republican voters preferred.
THE TRUCE BETWEEN TRUMP AND CRUZ COULD NOT HOLD FOREVER. The physics of a presidential campaign would not allow it: Two candidates, occupying the same space, are bound to collide. When they finally did, it was unlike anything the Republican Party had ever witnessed.
Their rivalry began in earnest with a New York Times story in December that reported that Cruz had questioned the “judgment” of both Trump and Ben Carson during a private fund-raiser in Manhattan.3 Cruz objected to the reporting, prompting the Times to release audio of his remarks. This was validation for Trump, who had been predicting that Cruz would soon start attacking him. Cruz quickly tried to pull back. On December 11, as Trump began needling him with tweets, Cruz sent a tweet of his own: “The Establishment’s only hope: Trump & me in a cage match. Sorry to disappoint—@realDonaldTrump is terrific.”
But the genie could not fit back into the bottle. Over the ensuing seventy-two hours, Trump began hurling a hodgepodge of insults. He questioned the authenticity of Cruz’s faith, telling a rally in Iowa that “not a lot of evangelicals come out of Cuba, in all fairness.”4 He accused Cruz of being in the pocket of big oil and slammed his flip-flopping on ethanol subsidies. And he told Fox News, “I don’t think he’s qualified to be president,” saying that Cruz carried himself “like a little bit of a maniac” in the Senate.5 (Apropos of nothing, it was around this time that Trump said that Hillary Clinton “got schlonged” by Barack Obama in the 2008 primary.6)