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The discreet obscure charm of Marco Rubio

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Jeet Heer asks a question which I’ve been wondering about myself: Why is Marco Rubio considered by so many well-informed people (including some LGM luminaries) to be by far the most likely winner of the GOP nomination battle? Rubio is a distant third in the polls, he’s been losing the fundraising battle so far to several other candidates, and he doesn’t have a lot of endorsements, at least not yet, from the party bigwigs.

Echoing Ross Douthat, Heer says the answer is that he’s the survivor of a sort of deductive game of elimination:

Trump and Carson are viewed as too extreme and inexperienced not to crash and burn. Cruz is the darling of the Tea Party base, but hated by Republican officials and his colleagues in Congress. Fiorina lacks political experience, money, and organization. Bush is thrashing around like a turkey afraid it’s about to become Thanksgiving dinner. John Kasich, Christie, Huckabee, and Rand Paul are slowing sinking, though their demises have been less dramatic than Bush’s. And you have to remind yourself that Bobby Jindal, George Pataki, and Lindsay Graham are still in the race. So, simply by crossing out the names of every other candidates for one reason or another, all you have left is Rubio.

But at some point, voters will have to agree. The process-of-elimination argument works better as a deductive scenario than as an account of how voting actually works. The idea that Rubio will triumph in the end is partly founded on the last two GOP presidential races, both of which had the narrative arc of a soap opera. In both 2008 and 2012, the Republican Party acted like a wealthy heiress who threw herself into wild flings with wild scoundrels (Mike Huckabee, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich) before finally settling down with a respectable mate (John McCain, Mitt Romney). Douthat explicitly draws the analogy with Romney, suggesting that the GOP will settle for Rubio just as it entered into a largely loveless marriage with the former Massachusetts governor. The problem with this analogy is that both McCain and Romney were more substantial figures than Rubio: They could flash not just impressive resumes (McCain as war hero, Romney as governor and business leader), but also a genuine popularity with large constituencies in the GOP. Romney never sank below 20 percent in the polls in 2012, a figure Rubio has yet to even remotely touch.

I suspect that among GOP pundits the belief in Rubio’s eventual victory is largely a reflection of wish fulfillment. Among political scientists, that belief has the much more solid foundation, in an analysis that assumes that, based on historical precedents, early polls don’t necessarily mean a lot, that somebody like Trump or Carson just can’t win a majority party nomination, and that Rubio is the most likely of the candidates who are acceptable to the money men and other power brokers who are ultimately calling the shots.

We’ll see.

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