Why Rubio Lost

With Marco Rubio dropping out tonight, you’re going to hear a lot of theorizing about why he lost. It was the Gang of Eight. It was Trump. It was the anger. It was the out-of-touch elites. None of this is correct.

For a long time Marco Rubio was the odds-on favorite to be the Republican nominee. Why? He didn't raise the most money. He was never higher than third in the RealClear poll average. He did not have any obvious base of electoral support or geographic safe house. Even his home base of Florida was going to be a dog fight with Jeb Bush. The only thing Rubio had going for him was his innate political skill.

Yet Rubio was such a tremendously gifted candidate that despite his situational liabilities, his personal assets were enough to make him the smart-money favorite. And not just the smart-money: You can tell who campaigns fear by watching who they spend their money attacking, and the rest of the Republican field spent its dollars through the fall and winter going after Rubio, despite the fact that he was always in the second tier of the polls.

So what happened? Rubio's participation in the Gang of Eight was always his Achilles Heel, yet he seems to have finessed the issue to the point that it became only a minor liability. Exit polls consistently showed that immigration was a lower-level concern. For instance: in Florida, where Trump thrashed Rubio, 12 percent of voters said immigration was their top concern, compared with 22 percent who said terrorism, 26 percent who said government spending, and 35 percent who said the economy/jobs.

It's not clear that Trump's rise hurt Rubio, either. Or at least, that Trump hurt Rubio any more than he hurt other Republicans. Rubio was never a threat to win either Iowa or New Hampshire, so it wasn't Trump who blocked his rise in the early states. Neither is there any evidence that voters were simply "too angry." Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich—none of whom are especially angry pols—have consistently taken about 65 percent of the vote. And he wasn't a tool of the Republican elites. The Republican establishment rallied to Rubio three weeks ago, only as a last resort, and with something less than its full support.