Sen. Marco Rubio Sunday offered a detailed post-mortem of his own campaign, explaining the key junctures at which he failed to generate “the momentum front.” Chief among them: his mishandling of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s attacks in the debate before the New Hampshire primary.
Rubio explained that he knew Christie was going to attack him, but he regarded Christie as a fading rival, and so he didn’t want to spend a significant amount of time in the debate sparring with a candidate whom he expected would have to drop out in a few days.
“So my strategy was, you know what, just kind of address it on the front end and just kind of pivot to your core message,” Rubio said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Unfortunately, in any other debate in any other environment it might not have been a big deal but it was because that was the argument Chris had been using all week, that I memorize these 20 second sound bites and I repeat them over and over and that’s what I did. And so, I walked right into that trap.”
Rubio remembers it as a fatal error. “It consumed the coverage for 72 hours leading into New Hampshire and as a result really hurt us there and we finished in fifth,” he said. “Had we finished in second, I think we go on to South Carolina with maybe a four person or a five person race. Instead Jeb was still in the race … and I think that ultimately hurt us in South Carolina and beyond.”
Rubio thinks that Donald Trump is the biggest beneficiary of “frustration” among working-class Republicans that has been visible for a decade, including in the Tea Party wave that carried Rubio to victory in the 2010 Florida Senate race.
“There have been hints of it in the Huckabee campaign in 08,” he said. “I think you saw hints of it in the Tea Party in ’10. I think you saw hints of it in Rick Santorum’s campaign in 2012. But I think Donald Trump was able to tap into that and get those people who normally didn’t vote in primaries to vote in primaries in large numbers and it gave them that early boost that to him going on the momentum front and then the rest from their snowballed.”
