These states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin—were thought to be Democratic locks, having not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988. Yet, with Trump’s Michigan triumph, and the polling on trade and other issues of economic nationalism, a once-faint sketch was coming into focus: The GOP, with Trump as its nominee, could redraw the electoral map in 2016.
CRUZ WAS RUNNING OUT OF TIME. HE WAS FALLING FURTHER BEHIND IN the delegate count, and despite his public insistence to the contrary, there was little evidence that he would win a one-on-one duel with Trump. Having once envisioned a “natural arc” to Trump’s campaign, Cruz later adjusted his prognosis to set a ceiling of 20 percent on his rival’s support. And then 25 percent. And then 30. And then 35.
By early March, with Trump clearing 40 percent in multiple nominating contests, it was clear that something radical needed to happen, and quickly, to prevent him from running away with the nomination. That’s when an idea took root among Cruz’s staff: a ticket with Rubio. The Florida senator was treading water and heading for a certain exit after losing Florida; what would happen if he teamed up with Cruz, running as his vice-presidential-pick-in-waiting?
Cruz was lukewarm to the idea. The two senators had a strained relationship, and the last several months, including Rubio’s jab about not speaking Spanish, had been especially spiteful. But his outlook brightened upon seeing the polling. According to numbers compiled by Cruz’s gold-standard data analytics team, a Cruz-Rubio ticket would demolish Trump in head-to-head competition in the remaining primaries, often winning more than 60 percent of the vote.
Cruz’s pollster, Chris Wilson, called Utah senator Mike Lee to share the campaign’s findings. Lee had not endorsed in the primary; he was close friends with both Cruz and Rubio. Reviewing the data, Lee sprang into action. He called dozens of hotels in the Miami area, needing one with an underground parking garage and an elevator that could ferry guests directly up to a private suite. Upon securing such an arrangement, at the Hilton Miami Downtown, Lee called Rubio to set up a meeting for March 9, one day before the Republican debate in nearby Coral Gables. He then informed Cruz that Rubio had agreed to a secretive sit-down at five o’clock that afternoon. Cruz cleared his campaign schedule and held his breath.
When the day arrived, several hours before the scheduled meeting, Lee received a text from Rubio. He did not feel right about the situation. The meeting was off.
The Utah senator, sitting in the hotel suite with his wife, was dejected. He viewed Trump as a threat to every principle he had entered public life to protect, and believed that the only way to defeat him, at this point, was if his two friends joined forces. With Rubio no longer interested, Lee grabbed hotel stationery and began sketching out his endorsement of Cruz, which he would announce the next morning. He was the first senator to endorse the Texan, an indication of Cruz’s popularity among his colleagues. It was a fatal blow to Rubio—endorsing a nemesis on his home turf less than a week before the Florida primary—but Lee felt his friend had left him no choice.
Rubio says it “wasn’t a serious consideration” to form a ticket with Cruz on top. “Mike, at the end, saw two friends running,” Rubio says. “If I wasn’t going to be president, there comes a point at the end of the campaign when you’ve invested almost two years of your life into it. The last thing you’re looking forward to is now joining up on the ticket with somebody else you were just competing with. It was a zero percent chance that that was going to happen.”
Cruz, for his part, still wonders what might have been.
“I believe it would have broken the race open. It would have been decisive in terms of winning, and for the life of me, I will never understand why Marco didn’t come to that meeting,” he says.
“When I lay awake at night frustrated about 2016, that night is the moment I go back to most often. I actually kick myself that I didn’t go literally beat on his hotel room and talk to him,” Cruz says. “I never had the chance to even talk to him.”
The next evening, as the candidates and their teams arrived at the South Florida venue for what would be the final primary debate of 2016, a physical tension filled the air. Lee, having greeted Rubio, stuck close to Cruz’s entourage. Rubio’s crew gave him the cold shoulder. And Trump, taking it all in with childlike glee, eventually made his way over to Lee. “Hey,” he said, grabbing the Utah senator by the arms. “Good luck with that endorsement.”
The debate did nothing to alter the inevitable. On March 15, Trump trounced Rubio in the Florida primary, winning 46 percent of the vote to the home-state senator’s 27 percent and driving him from the presidential race.
“It is clear that while we’re on the right side, this year we will not be on the winning side,” Rubio told a crowd of several hundred supporters at Florida International University. Rubio used his closing remarks to condemn the GOP front-runner (though not by name) for using “fear” to “prey upon” the insecurities of voters.
It was the end of a brief and underwhelming era. Rubio, the brightest star in the GOP galaxy on whom the hopes of so many in the party’s establishment rested, was done. The “Republican Savior” had fallen short of messianic. “Michael Jordan” had missed his shot.
Having promised not to run for reelection to the Senate in 2016, Rubio appeared to be on his way out of politics—maybe even permanently. It would have made for an anticlimactic ending to a career that had held such promise just a few years earlier. Eventually, however, at the prodding of Mitch McConnell, and after a shooter killed forty-nine people at a gay nightclub in Orlando that June, Rubio changed his mind. He reentered the race to keep his Senate seat, all but clearing the Republican primary field and cruising to a second term that November.
As for the presidential primary field—and with due respect to Kasich, who won Ohio’s primary on March 15, gaining token justification to keep campaigning—it was now down to two: Trump and Cruz.
Chapter Thirteen
March 2016
“I think it was Roger’s dying wish to elect Donald Trump president.”
SCOTT REED DIDN’T RECOGNIZE THE NUMBER BLINKING ON HIS CELL phone screen. But there was no mistaking the gruff, gravelly voice on the other end of the line: It belonged to Paul Manafort.
A native of New Britain, Connecticut, where his extended clan was best known for its sprawling construction enterprise, the young Manafort grew up obsessed with the other family business: politics. He helped his father win three terms as the town’s mayor, earned his undergraduate and law degrees at Georgetown University, and landed a job in the Gerald Ford administration soon thereafter.
Manafort caught his break in 1976, when the former California governor Ronald Reagan challenged Ford in the GOP presidential primary. Enlisted to help protect Ford’s delegates from defecting to Reagan at the contested convention, he proved so effective that he was tasked with corralling the entire Northeast delegation. His role in sealing the nomination for Ford turned Manafort into a major player. In 1980, he partnered with veteran GOP operatives Charlie Black and Roger Stone to found the lobbying giant Black, Manafort and Stone, a firm described by Time magazine as “the ultimate supermarket of influence peddling.”1