QUICK! Someone Send Marco Rubio A Math Book

I appreciate good spin as much as the next guy but, good grief, have a little bit of respect for your audience’s intelligence. Case in point, this Fox and Friends interview this morning with Marco Rubio;

It is a little on the long side so I’m going to paraphrase.

“And right now, what you have is a situation where Donald—the majority of the Republican electorate, the majority of Republican voters in this country do not want Donald Trump to be the nominee.”

I’m not sure that “voting against someone other than Trump in a primary” = “do not want Donald Trump.” If that is the case, more GOP voters oppose Rubio than oppose Trump.

“Until there’s some kind of consolidation here, you’re not going to have a clear alternative to Donald Trump, and the argument we’ve made is, I’m as conservative as anyone in this race, but I’m the conservative that can unify the Republican Party.

Mmnm-kay. If you say so.

Then he is asked if he needs to start winning primaries to, you know, win?

Co-host Ashley Earhardt asked Rubio if he needs to start winning primaries in order to win the nomination.

“You don’t win the nomination by how many states you win,” Rubio responded before adding that he will have to win some winner-take-all states in March.

Earhardt then asked Rubio which states specifically he could win.

“Well, we feel great in every one of those states. We’re going to pick up delegates in all of them,” he said, adding that he doesn’t want to offer specific predictions.

I hope Rubio really doesn’t believe this bullsh**. You don’t have to win all states, but unless you win some states you can’t win enough delegates to gain the nomination. And no, Rubio isn’t going to pick up delegates “in all of them.” For instance:

Some large delegate states, like Florida and Ohio, are winner take all. Rubio is currently third in Florida and fourth in Ohio. Some are proportional with a Winner Take All threshold. For instance, if you win 50% of the vote in Texas you get 100% of the delegates. Others are like South Carolina where delegates are apportioned by Congressional district.

You can’t consistently place 2d, 3d, or 4th behind the same 1st place candidate and win the nomination. For that matter, you can’t finish consistently behind two candidates who are winning first place and win the nomination. While Rubio might “hope” to pick up some Super Tuesday states the fact that he wouldn’t name them shows that his strategy for winning is hope. Hope he wins some states. Hope Ted Cruz drops out. Hope Cruz supports him. Hope Cruz, Bush, Kasich, and Carson voters rally to him. He doesn’t have a plan to make any of this happen. But he has Hope.

What Rubio is doing here is appealing to something that simply does not exist: to wit, his ability to “unify” anything. And he is pretending that he is the best choice despite the fact that he has not won a primary, that he has not come close to winning a primary, and that no poll shows him with shouting distance of winning any future primary.

This kind of disdain for the intelligence of GOP primary voters has become a Rubio hallmark. It doesn’t bode well for his candidacy and it shouldn’t.

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