It’s hard to exaggerate what a debacle Tuesday night was for the senator from Florida. It was fine to come in third in Iowa’s caucuses when he saw a late surge and was running against 11 other people. It is not fine to come in third in Idaho in a field of four candidates. It is not fine to win 16 percent of the vote there, when you need 20 percent to qualify for any delegates. It is not fine at all to come in fourth — dead last in the current field — in both Mississippi and Michigan, qualifying for delegates in neither.

This was once a three-man delegate race, with Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) jockeying a bit behind Trump. Rubio will pick up a couple of delegates in Hawaii, but on Tuesday overall, Kasich, the governor of Ohio, gained ground on the onetime establishment front-runner.

So now Rubio’s campaign is spending the day doing two things. One, it is brashly predicting that it will win Florida. Second, it is insisting that it will still exist by the time of that vote next Tuesday.

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To the first point, more bad news. A new poll from CNN-ORC indicates that Rubio hasn’t made much of a dent against Trump’s dominance in Rubio’s home state. Trump leads by 16 points. He leads with men by 27 and women by three in a state where the gender split was about even in the 2012 primary.

In the RealClearPolitics average of polling — which, admittedly, has had some misses this year — Trump leads by 15, even as both he and Rubio have slipped.

What that graph does not show is a big Rubio surge, the sort of surge that he would absolutely need to see to win his home state.

So why are Rubio’s people telling everyone who will listen that he will win in Florida? Because there is nothing else they can say. It’s like when your kid asks if the elderly kitty will be all right after a visit to the vet where you know to expect the worst. “Sure, kid. Mittens will be fine.”

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To have any shot at winning, Rubio needs to pull support from somewhere. Clearly, he’s not going to win through sheer force of personality. So his campaign has turned to a process argument: Voting for Cruz or Kasich ensures a Trump win. Maybe. But, then, Cruz and Kasich could each make a similar argument. So Rubio’s argument adds another layer: Only Rubio can beat Trump and keep him from gobbling up the state’s 99 delegates — 8 percent of the total needed for the nomination.

Rubio has to win Florida, unquestionably, to be able to stay in the race. But even if Rubio does win Florida, it’s not clear that he has any path to the nomination. He will have beaten the odds, yes, but he’s supposed to win Florida. It’s his home state! Cruz seemed like he was in a tough fight in his home state of Texas and then won easily — but it didn’t keep Trump from completing his sweep of the South. If Florida were added to Rubio’s column right now, he’d have 250 delegates — more than 100 behind Cruz and 200 behind Trump as of this moment.

All of which brings us to the second thing Rubio’s team is going to be doing today: Insisting that it will be around for Florida. Rubio needs about three-quarters of the remaining delegates to win his party’s nomination outright. That’s simply not going to happen unless Trump is abducted by aliens and Cruz decides to move back to Alberta.