Senator Marco Rubio from Florida has positioned himself well to win the Republican nomination. He is in the third place behind Donald Trump and Ben Carson in the Real Clear Politics average of polls. That is good for him because the two people ahead of him do not appear to be ready for the long haul, and could falter at some point. On the Predictwise composite of betting sites Rubio is currently the favorite to win the nomination. So when people betting money think you have a good chance to win, that has to be a good sign. While he appears to be set up for a long run, the question for Rubio, who now has more attention being paid to his campaign, appears to be: is he ready for prime time?
If you compare Rubio to Jeb! Bush and Ted Cruz you wonder if Rubio is a more polished version of Jeb! or less extreme version of Cruz. If you make a Venn Diagram of all three men, where the Bush circle and the Cruz circle overlaps, you have Marco Rubio. When it comes to policy issues most of the Republicans agree on the big picture. Most of the disagreements are about tone and tactics more than goals. At one end you have Cruz and his buddies in the House Freedom Caucus, who are tired of compromises and just wants to be in control, so they can push their far right agenda. The far right are not only at war with the Democrats, but are wanting to fight their fellow Republicans as well. On other end you have Bush, Kasich, and the other establishment types who are very conservative but still want to work within the boundaries of government, and that might mean working with Democrats to get things done. Rubio seems to be more comfortable in the establishment wing, and as Ezra Klein points out in Vox he may cause a math problem to win the nomination.
Klein says: "According to the Huffington Post's polling averages, Trump, Carson, Cruz, and Fiorina now command 61.3 percent of the Republican vote. To make the math work for Rubio, you somehow need an explanation for why he's going to rip votes from outsiders - the candidates who are everything he isn't, and whom Republicans seem to be favoring precisely because they don't want an insider like Rubio."
Rubio is conservative, and other than maybe immigration, he has taken some of the more conservative stands in the field. Rubio is overall more conservative than Trump, but the base is eating up Trump's tone. Maybe that is the ultimate question for the 2016 cycle. After settling in 2008 and 2012, and losing anyway, what does the Republican base really want this time around? We keep saying these outsiders aren't going to win, but they keep hanging around. As Klein points out in the Vox piece, the numbers on the entire establishment wing still doesn't beat Trump. With Bush's supporting cratering, and John Kasich still not catching on, is Rubio being the leading establishment guy going to be good enough to win the nomination?
There is one thing that could hurt Rubio's chances to win the nomination, and it is something that he has little control. The politician that most people think of when they see and hear Rubio is President Barack Obama. They are both smart, young, first term Senators, that tend to be soft spoken, but can give a good speech. Rubio claims to have more experience, but when PolitiFact looked at the issue, they called it a draw. The problem for Rubio is the Obama comparison may not be given as the reason that voters say they won't vote for him, but they may attribute it to a gut feeling that voting for him doesn't feel right. After spending the past 7 years despising Obama, are you going to turn around and vote for the Republican version of the president?
When Marco Rubio first said he was going to run for president, he seemed like someone who was actually running for vice president. That seemed like a good a good idea, because was a smart, young, Hispanic Senator from the must win state, Florida. He still he has those things going for him, but since the other establishment candidates have faltered, his chances of actually winning have increased. With the current chaos in the race, I am not sure that he will end up getting the nomination, but, this point, I would say he has as good a chance as anybody else running.
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