Let Us Dispel With the Idea that the Rubiobot Knows What He’s Doing. He Has No Idea What He’s Doing.

This article about how Marco Rubio’s floundering Florida campaign is about to GET SERIOUS (actual quote from Rubio backer: “It’s time to open the can of whoop-ass.”) is comedy gold from which you’ll learn something. His lack of a decent ground game remains as evident in his home state as ever. In addition, one problem with waiting until a week before the primary to open the can of unspecified WHOOP-ASS is Florida’s large number of absentee voters. An electorate that apparently favors Trump by 20 points or so has already cast large numbers of votes, which will make it enormously difficult to catch up even if Rubio starts to close the gap. Which brings us to this detail:

Only Conservative Solutions super PAC overtly backs Rubio, and it’s strictly staying on air — not helping with voter turnout on the ground, where Rubio might need more help getting absentee voters to cast their ballots and getting early and election day voters to the polls. By contrast, Ted Cruz’s super PAC, and Bush’s before, helped turn out voters on the ground in some early states.

Rubio’s campaign said it held off on aggressively targeting absentee-ballot voters when Bush was still in the race because the two candidates shared voters with a similar profile. Rubio didn’t want to spend the money accidentally turning out Bush voters. But, as a result, that meant the campaign left the votes up to chance as thousands of absentee ballots poured in.

So, in an absolute must-win state which is also his home state, Rubio did not make a concerted effort to mobilize his likely absentee voters. The reason he didn’t do this is because…he was scared of Jeb! Bush. And apparently he remained scared of him although 1)it’s long been obvious that Jeb! was not getting any traction, and 2)if Jeb! was running even with him Rubio was dead anyway, so what did they have to lose? It’s kind of amazing just how inept Rubio’s campaign is.

This is presumably one of the variables explaining why the Party didn’t Decide in this cycle for the Republicans. One disadvantage that outsider campaigns can expect to have is a lack of a campaign structure. But when the one viable-ish establishment campaign is being run as badly as Rubio’s, it doesn’t matter nearly as much. And Rubio and his people could almost make Mark Penn look competent by comparison.