Ted Cruz, Establishment Man?

Matt Purple

Politics, United States

The GOP establishment's best anti-Trump chance is now the senator from Texas, not the one from Florida.

It came as no surprise that Donald Trump pummeled the competition on Super Tuesday, winning a broad cross-section of states: Georgia, Virginia, Massachusetts, Alabama, Arkansas, Vermont, Tennessee. When he emerged under the sparkling chandelier at his estate in Palm Beach, it both looked and felt like a coronation. Trump might not yet be inevitable, but the official GOP playbook lies in tatters.

The Republican establishment’s strategy was apparently formed around the notion that Marco Rubio himself is a superdelegate worth 800 regular delegates. That’s really all they’ve got at this point. Their man has only won in Minnesota, a quirky caucus state that was barely contested by the other candidates. (“As go the Minnesota caucuses, so go the nation,” quipped David Axelrod on CNN.) Meanwhile, Rubio is on track to score less than 20 percent of the vote in lucrative Texas, which means he won’t qualify for a single delegate there.

Rubio’s problem is that he’s confused electoral success with the lesser metric for victory we pundits like to use: the news cycle, several of which Rubio won last week thanks to his newfound feistiness against Donald Trump. But Politico headlines don’t translate into delegates. “Winning a state outright would be nice in that it would shut the pundits up,” conceded Team Rubio last night. Actually, winning a state outright would be nice because it gets you delegates.