Following his second place win in the South Carolina Republican primary, Florida Senator Marco Rubio is riding the “Marcomentum”.
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He adds that Trump’s ground game has not been as visible in the Silver state as Cruz’s or Rubio’s well organized efforts, with Rubio spending the most money on advertisements. Trump has carried New Hampshire and SC, losing Iowa to Cruz. Republicans are holding party caucuses there on Tuesday. That makes it possible for one candidate to win all of Missouri’s 52 delegates, or at least a large majority. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, vowed to fight on after a narrow loss to Hillary Clinton in Saturday’s Nevada caucuses. Trump’s victory in SC on Saturday was vindication for political mavericks whose hunger for an outsider has defined this year’s campaign.
Cruz said Trump has embraced liberal ideas, including abortion rights and requiring healthcare coverage, as well as liberal politicians, including Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. In this respect he was no match for the acerbic Donald Trump, the focus of multiple Bush attack ads who in turn ridiculed Bush as low-energy and even went to the extent of insulting his Mexican-American wife.
Rubio also addressed the latest development in his intensifying feud with Senate colleague Cruz, whose campaign helped promote a video on Sunday that incorrectly suggested Rubio had criticized the Bible. But with roughly 70 percent of Republicans in national polls declining to back Trump, Cruz and Rubio tried to cast themselves as the one candidate around whom what Rubio calls the “alternative-to-Donald-Trump vote” can coalesce. This is a demographic Cruz has shamelessly courted for months, knowing they were his only path to the nomination. Speaking to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Monday, McCarthy said Trump’s victory and Rubio’s second-place finish in SC dealt a blow to Cruz’s strategy to win the nomination.
The No. 2 Republican in the House said on Monday that Trump’s victory in SC dealt a blow to Texas Sen.
“It’s every single day something comes out of the Cruz campaign that’s deceptive and untrue, and in this case goes after my faith”, Rubio told reporters.
“If Marco Rubio won Nevada it would be an earth-shattering moment in the race”.
Mr Rubio took note of the smaller Republican field after former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s departure from the race.
Cruz failed in his attempt to get Carson to concede during a face to face meeting on Saturday in SC before the voting began, and after bad blood between the two over “dirty tricks” allegedly played by the Cruz campaign in Iowa had spilled over the two subsequent contests. The billionaire businessman grabbed a big win, capturing almost a third of the votes, according to early counts, but all major networks projected Trump the victor.
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If one candidate can run up a significant lead, as Trump has begun to, then proportional contests also make it hard for rivals to catch up. He won SC by ten points.
