Buzzfeed News
By McKay Coppins
October 27, 2015
The
national news media have identified an exciting new frontrunner in the
2016 race for the Republican presidential nomination. The latest polls
have him at around third
or fourth place.
Marco
Rubio’s transformation this month into popular fuss-object for the
cable news know-it-alls and Beltway oddsmakers has been difficult to
miss. At NBC News, he is
“the new favorite to win the GOP nomination.” At U.S. News, he has
“gain[ed] the hot hand.” And in the New York Times op-ed pages he is
“the real frontrunner.”
Ross
Douthat, the conservative Times columnist who bestowed this latest
honor upon Rubio, ably summed up the consensus case for the candidate’s
eventual nomination, which
involves methodically ruling out the viability of all other contenders:
No
major party has ever nominated a figure like Trump or Carson, and I
don’t believe that the 2016 G.O.P. will be the first. Rand Paul’s
libertarian moment came and went,
Carly Fiorina seems like she’s running for a cabinet slot, John Kasich
is too moderate (and ornery about it), Chris Christie has never
recovered from the traffic cones. Scott Walker and Rick Perry are gone.
Ted Cruz has the base’s love, but far too many leading
party actors hate him…
That
leaves Jeb! and Marco Rubio. But Jeb’s campaign has been one long
flail. His favorable ratings are terrible, he and Trump topped a recent
poll of Iowans that asked
which candidate should drop out expeditiously…
So
that leaves Rubio. And unlike all the rest, it’s surpassingly easy to
imagine the Florida senator as the nominee. He sits close to the party’s
center ideologically,
and his favorable ratings with Republicans are consistently strong.
He’s an effective debater with a great personal story and an appealing
style, and a more impressive policy portfolio than most of his rivals.
He scares Democrats in the general election, and
strikes the most politically-useful contrasts with She Who Has Always
Been Inevitable.
“The
betting markets have him as the most likely nominee, and — since this
is quadrennial prediction time — I’ll say that I agree,” Douthat
concludes, effectively speaking
on behalf of his colleagues in the political press. “I think he’s the
real front-runner, and I predict that he will win.”
But,
of course, Rubio is not actually the Republican frontrunner in any
statistical sense. The RealClearPolitics average of 2016 polls has him
in third place, at 9.2%.
The Huffington Post poll tracker has him in fourth, with 6.7%. Perhaps
most strikingly, Rubio has never topped the national polls — at least
not since he became a candidate. The last time he led the 2016 primary
field was two years and four months ago, in
June 2013, when the polls were entirely hypothetical.
This
has not stopped the political press over the years from hyping Rubio’s
presidential prospects at every chance possible, and generally gushing
about his political
talents.
When
Time magazine put the young, dynamic, Cuban-American senator on its
cover in early 2013 and declared him “The Republican Savior,” he was
leading in a handful of premature
polls — just ahead of the other two top-tier contenders at the time,
Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee. But then came Rubio’s ill-fated foray
into the Senate’s bipartisan immigration bill, and his subsequent
collapse of support among conservatives. By the end
of June, Rubio had tumbled to third place (behind a surging Rand Paul),
and the decline continued all year, according to HuffPost Pollster.
The
Republican savior fallen from grace. The tea party saint now shunned by
believers. The stories wrote themselves — and once they had, in fact,
all been written, reporters
went searching for new Rubio angles.
In
March 2014, some in the media — including me — spotted glimmers of a
comeback narrative after one of Rubio’s speeches went semi-viral on the
right. BuzzFeed News published
a tick-tock of the game-changing performance: “Behind The Speech That
Launched Marco Rubio’s Comeback.”Townhall’s Conn Carroll pronounced his
verdict: “Rubio is the 2016 frontrunner again.”
Rubio rode this new wave of media excitement from sixth place to seventh in the national polls.
By
November 2014, the prospective presidential candidate was registering
just over 4% support, nationally. That month a political analyst
declared him the leading contender
for the nomination. Business Insider promptly splashed the prediction
across its homepage.
This
news cycle repeated itself last spring, when Rubio got a bounce from a
widely covered campaign kickoff speech that propelled him (briefly) to
second place in the
polls; and it started again earlier this month. But the candidate has
yet to live up to the great expectations of the opinion-makers.
What
pundits and reporters really mean when they call Rubio the
“frontrunner” is simply that he is the best candidate in the race: the
savviest politician, the most impressive
performer. Rubio is the Republican who makes the most sense to the
political press — and for a candidate like him that could become a
problem.
Chris
Christie’s coziness in the Morning Joe greenroom compounded
conservatives post-2012 wariness of him, and when scandal struck his
administration, many in the online
right were content to watch him get devoured by the “liberal media” he
so adored. Jon Huntsman’s 2012 candidacy — already marred by
organizational failings and a transparent disdain for the Tea Party —
was further hampered by his status as a darling of the
media elite (and the perception that he enjoyed posing for that splashy
Vogue spread a tad too much).
Both
Christie and Huntsman either were or signaled to voters they were much
less conservative than Rubio, but the more a candidate is doted on by
the news media, the more
he opens himself up to suspicion from primary voters — and attacks from
opportunistic rivals.
This
is a lesson Rubio learned once before during the immigration fight of
2013. His willingness to work on a bipartisan immigration overhaul was
already seen as a betrayal
of conservative orthodoxy — and when the backlash began, his time spent
reveling in the adoration of the press made it all the easier for his
right-wing critics to dismiss him as a fraud. In one memorable on-air
rant, Glenn Beck labeled him a “piece of garbage”
who had let himself be hypnotized by the enticements of the powerful
and the glamor of media fame.
“He’s not trying to do the right thing,” Beck said at the time. “He’s falling into the power structure.”
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