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Beverly Hills, California, United States
Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal. Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

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Tuesday, April 14, 2015

What Marco Rubio Would Need to Do to Win

New York Times
By Ashley Parker
April 13, 2015

The Coalition
Mr. Rubio will try to position himself as a next-generation conservative who can unite the Republican Party, impressing moderates while satisfying social conservatives and galvanizing the Tea Party fiscal hawks who helped elect him to the Senate in 2010. His fluent Spanish certainly will not hurt him with Hispanics. Admirers see Mr. Rubio as a charismatic speaker with an optimistic message, someone who could be a fresh ambassador for the party, exciting not just younger voters but those looking for a politician for the 21st century. But if that sounds like another politician who was elected president not long ago, the Rubio team is quick to reject any comparisons to President Obama, who remains wildly unpopular among Republican primary voters.

The Map
Mr. Rubio hopes to compete in all four of the early nominating contests, and will need to finish first in at least one, or come close in a number of them, to be considered viable. He campaigned for Senator Joni Ernst in Iowa during the 2014 midterm elections and has a strong ground operation in New Hampshire, where the state’s predilection for town hall events should highlight his strengths as a speaker. His operatives include several people from South Carolina, giving him useful connections in that state. He spent his formative years in Nevada, a heavily Hispanic state, and has relatives there. But it remains unclear which early nominating contest offers Mr. Rubio the best chance. And he could still face Jeb Bush, the former governor, in a winner-take-all primary in Florida, the state that has elected them both.

The Message
Mr. Rubio, 43, hopes to persuade Republicans to entrust the party’s future to a new generation of leaders with him as its standard-bearer. Expect an optimistic theme that connects his biography, the story of a son of Cuban immigrants who made it to the upper echelon of American politics, to specific economic policies. These include allowing investors to cover college students’ tuition in exchange for a percentage of their future earnings, as he suggests in his book “American Dreams.”

Why He Will Win
Running neither as hotly conservative as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas nor as coolly establishment as Mr. Bush, Mr. Rubio could be the right contender to unite the unruly factions of his party. An often inspiring speaker, he starts with high favorability ratings in polls and performs well on the stump. He would look for a breakout performance in the debates, perhaps on foreign policy, a strong suit.

Why He Won’t
Mr. Rubio is navigating a fine line as a man for all factions, and he could instead find himself with no obvious base. He was a part of the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” that helped push through a broad bipartisan immigration bill in 2013, but he later distanced himself from his own legislation, saying he realized that an overhaul could come through only a step-by-step process that starts with border security. Mr. Bush — also a Spanish-speaking Republican from Florida — undercuts Mr. Rubio’s natural base, forcing him to compete harder for money and support in his home state. He might have to rely on factors outside his control — faltering efforts by Mr. Bush or Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, for instance — to get the second look that would allow him to surge.

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