Wolf Blitzer of CNN will moderate the debate with Telemundo’s Maria Celeste Arrarás, conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt and CNN’s Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash also asking questions of the candidates.
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Thursday’s debate will take place just a few days before 11 states hold Republican elections that could either cement Trump’s dominance, or let his rivals slow his march to his party’s nomination.
John Kasich and Ben Carson will be on stage Thursday night, but they won’t be the focal points.
The two-hours-plus debate played out as a raucous night of tit-for-tat insults, with candidates shouting over one another so much that it was hard to follow at times.
Midwestern states more friendly to Kasich come later in the cycle, after Trump has likely won several Super Tuesday states: MI votes March 8, and then Kasich’s home state of OH votes March 15. Trump resorted to his usual stand-bys of quoting poll numbers and calling Rubio a “choke artist” and Cruz a “liar”.
Senator Marco Rubio, who stumbled in a previous debate by repeating the same lines over and over, accused Donald Trump of doing the same during Thursday’s showdown. “Selling watches in Manhattan”.
For his part, Trump predicts that the relative civility between Rubio and himself is about to disappear.
But the attacks are beginning to pile up, with a New York Times story this week saying Mr. Trump’s Florida country club has hired hundreds of foreign seasonal workers, rejecting applications from Americans.
Trump shot back at Rubio: “I hired tens of thousands of people”.
“Self-deportation, as I really define it, and that’s the way I define it, is you’re going to get some to go, and the rest are going to go out”, Trump said.
“You repeat yourself every day”, Rubio said.
Mr Trump has said he is confident heading into Super Tuesday. “It’s a fact”, Rubio quipped back. Taking on Mr Trump’s declaration that he would build a wall on the Mexican border, Mr Rubio declared: “If he builds a wall the way he built Trump Tower he’ll be using illegal immigration to do it”.
Trump wrote in his 2000 book The America We Deserve that Canada’s single-payer healthcare system deserved examination.
Rubio has been reluctant to talk about Trump by name but stepped up his aggressiveness Wednesday, criticizing Trump for what he called a failure to strongly oppose President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. Trump himself is no stranger to confrontation.
One of the more interesting findings of today’s poll in Florida: Just 21 percent say they would never vote for Trump, only 4 points more than Rubio (and 6 less than the 27 percent who say Cruz would never get their support).
“We’re going to do very well in Ohio”.
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But Trump, fresh off wins in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, would win Florida easily, the poll suggests.
