Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) bowed out of the Republican presidential fray Tuesday night and the GOP was thrust into its new reality: any hope to appeal to voters with a message of opportunity in 2016 is over.
Tuesday night, as billionaire Donald Trump swept primary victories in Florida, Illinois and North Carolina, it looked as though the Republican Party was going to be forced to officially throw out its own 2012 autopsy, a playbook that was once meant to rebuild the party by softening its rhetoric on immigration and becoming more inclusive of a rapidly diversifying electorate.
While a contested convention is mathematically possible, from here on out, the most likely scenario is that the party will line up behind Trump, whose message includes banning Muslims from entering the U.S and immediately expelling immigrants living in the country illegally.
“We have to bring our party together,” Trump said Tuesday in a press conference. News also broke Tuesday that Trump has begun to reach out to congressional leaders including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
While Rubio never was a frontrunner, his exit is emblematic of a party at war with itself. Rubio was once named the Republican Party’s savior, but the freshman senator failed to break through in a crowded and sometimes vicious 2016 Republican primary. As it turned out, Rubio’s message of opportunity (which sometimes seemed to be a direct reflection of the RNC’s now abandoned autopsy report) was never what Republican voters wanted. What they were looking for was radical change and revenge against the establishment wing of the party that had over-promised and under-delivered as it won majorities in the House and the Senate in Washington.
“From a political standpoint, the easiest thing to have done in this campaign is to jump on all those anxieties … to make people angrier, make people more frustrated,” Rubio said in his withdrawal speech Tuesday night. “But I chose a different route and I’m proud of that. That would have been, in a year like this, that would have been the easiest way to win, but that’s not what’s best for America. The politics of resentment against other people will not just leave us a fractured party, they’re going leave us a fractured nation.”
Rubio himself embodied the complicated tug of war within the party that eventually led to his campaign’s demise. On the one hand, the son of immigrants sought to work across the aisle with Democrats in 2013 to fix the country’s broken immigration system. He voted to expand border security all the while backing a plan to give immigrants living in the shadow a path to citizenship. But Rubio eventually backed off his bipartisan bill. Facing backlash from talk radio and base voters across the country, Rubio ran from the very legislation that had given him a shot at being the solutions-based candidate he so often said the party needed.
Once on the campaign trail, Rubio again struggled to maintain his campaign’s optimistic tone. In an attempt to take down Trump, Rubio sunk to Trump’s rhetorical level. Instead of promoting policy, he resorted to name calling, a move he later said he regretted.
“My kids were embarrassed by it, and I, you know, if I had to do it again, I wouldn’t,” Rubio said during an MSNBC town hall.
This cycle has been dominated by Trump, a showman whose strategy has been to shout loudly, scare often and condemn the competition when polls show his candidacy teetering from the edge of victory.
It is still possible that Trump could come up short of the needed 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination before the GOP convention, but the pivot to the general election may already be underway.
Even as leaders around Washington have sought to condemn Trump’s rhetoric, and the violence at his rallies, many have signaled they will still support the eventual nominee no matter who he is.
The one man who could potentially challenge Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (R- TX) is not that different from Trump in terms of message. Cruz is a tough person for the Republican leaders to rally around given his hard-charging tactics and sometimes-alienating rhetoric.
And while, Ohio Gov. John Kasich won the Republican primary in his home state of Ohio Tuesday and has maintained a hopeful, opportunity-based message, he is far behind in the delegate count and has just a single victory under his belt.
“I will not take the low road to the highest office in the land,” Kasich told supporters Tuesday.
Rubio seemed keenly aware Tuesday night of what his exit from the race meant for his party. His speech was as much a warning as it was a reflective oratory of his candidacy.
“I ask the American people, do not give in to the fear, do not give in to the frustration. We can disagree about public policy, we can disagree about it vibrantly, passionately, we are a hopeful people, and we have every right to be hopeful,” Rubio said.
