party’s nomination. It was defensible, then, for Cruz to focus his fire elsewhere. “There are seasons to a campaign,” he told his allies. “We will deal with Trump if and when necessary.”
The problem with Cruz’s approach was that it undermined his own brand. He was a brawler, but also a dispenser of brutal honesty, someone whose word could be taken to the bank. (“TrusTed,” his campaign banners read.) Cruz didn’t just lay off Trump; he spent the months of June through December lavishing praise on his opponent in the hope of seducing the supporters whom Cruz believed would not, could not, ultimately pull the lever for such a man. But many conservative voters didn’t see the Trump whom Cruz saw, a soulless, philosophically hollow showman. They saw a brash renegade taking on a broken system on their behalf, someone whose credibility had been vouched for by leading figures on the right, including Cruz himself.
In mid-December, Cruz spoke to me at length about his team’s considered outlook of the race: He believed he would win the Iowa caucuses, and predicted that Rubio, who had become the favorite to emerge from the “moderate lane,” would need to win the New Hampshire primary to keep pace. Never once did Cruz mention Trump’s name; it was as though the front-runner could be wished out of existence.
This was telling. Despite a race that was unconventional in every sense, Cruz was clinging to his original, most conventional view of it. He took to reminding anxious donors and friends that America had never elected someone with neither political experience nor military experience. Despite the media’s obsession with Trump, Cruz insisted, the primary contest would still come down to a collision between an establishment favorite and a conservative favorite, with Trump’s supporters abandoning him long before that day arrived.
Trump knew better. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” he said in Iowa the following month. “It’s like, incredible.”
NOBODY KNEW WHAT TO MAKE OF RUBIO’S CAMPAIGN.
As a candidate, he was the total package: intelligence, personal magnetism, stirring oratory, policy chops, a gripping biography, and a message that could unite the GOP’s disparate factions. But his campaign did little to accentuate these strengths. For much of 2015, while most of his Republican rivals stumped their way across the early states, Rubio was nowhere to be found. He had enjoyed a solid bounce from his mid-April launch, but he was doing nothing to build on it. Rubio spent much of the summer avoiding voters so conspicuously that opposing campaign officials would ask reporters of his whereabouts. Officially, Rubio aides claimed that he was on fund-raising swings. And yet, for the entire third quarter of 2015, he raised less than $6 million,1 a haul dwarfed by those of Bush, Cruz, and Ben Carson. Even Carly Fiorina had raised more.
At the same time, news clips piled up detailing Rubio’s poor attendance record in the Senate. Stories alleged that he’d missed half his committee meetings; others claimed he had the Senate’s worst voting record. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel demanded his resignation in an editorial.2 The “truant senator” narrative, combined with his absences from the trail and his lackluster fund-raising numbers, flummoxed friend and foe alike. If he wasn’t barnstorming across the early states, and he wasn’t collecting campaign dough, and he wasn’t voting in the Senate, what exactly was he doing?
Rubio’s absenteeism was especially baffling in Iowa, where GOP officials wondered why he wasn’t making a play for the swaths of center-right voters desperate for an alternative to Trump and Cruz. But Rubio’s team, reluctant to raise expectations in any given state, kept playing hard-to-get. By the time Thanksgiving arrived, frustrations were boiling over. Prominent Republicans scolded Rubio in private for his failure to organize in the Hawkeye State, as stories abounded of his team missing easy opportunities to reach voters: The time a line of people waited for him after an event, while his field staffers ate pizza backstage; the appearance he canceled at a major evangelical gathering for no apparent reason; the Saturday he spent in Iowa watching football with his state chairman, Jack Whitver, rather than holding public events.
In response to the uproar, Rubio’s campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, told the New York Times, “More people in Iowa see Marco on Fox and Friends than see Marco when he is in Iowa.”
This only made things worse. Rubio had been dogged by criticisms that he was running his campaign from a television