Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., speaks to supporters at a campaign rally, Tuesday, March 1, in Miami. | AP Photo Rubio’s path to an outright win has vanished His campaign is forced to turn to a delegate denial strategy against Trump.

Marco Rubio’s path to the Republican nomination short of a contested convention has narrowed to nearly nothing as his campaign and allies reboot their strategy to prepare for months of guerrilla warfare to deny Donald Trump a clean, pre-convention victory.

The math for Rubio is daunting. After getting thoroughly routed on Super Tuesday, Rubio is in so deep a delegate hole that he would now need to win roughly two-thirds of all the remaining delegates to guarantee his nomination ahead of Cleveland, according to a POLITICO analysis.


That is an enormously difficult, if not impossible, climb for a candidate who has so far won only a single state, Minnesota, and especially one who is not predicting victory in any of the next dozen states and territories that cast ballots, until his home state of Florida votes on March 15.

“It's fair to say that Rubio’s path to 1,237 is shot,” Dave Wasserman, an analyst with the Cook Political Report who closely tracks the delegate race, said of the threshold to secure the nomination.

“There’s virtually no chance for Marco Rubio to get to a majority prior to the convention,” said John Yob, who served as a top delegate strategist for Rick Santorum in 2012 and John McCain in 2008.

Even inside the Rubio orbit, there has been an acknowledgement that as long as Ted Cruz (and John Kasich) stay in the race, they have virtually zero mathematical chance of securing the nomination. Asked directly by Fox’s Megyn Kelly on Wednesday night if it was now “mathematically impossible” for him to be the nominee, Rubio dodged.

“I think you can make that argument for virtually everyone in this race at this point,” Rubio said, save Trump.

So far Rubio has secured somewhere between 110 and 115 delegates — a mere 15 percent of those available. Trump has 335, and Cruz is carrying 234 after his Super Tuesday wins. (Kasich, with only two dozen or so delegates, has virtually no pathway, either.)

At a briefing for donors and bundlers held Tuesday at the campaign’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, campaign manager Terry Sullivan focused heavily on Rubio’s delegate-gathering convention scenarios, to the dismay of some supporters.

“That’s like drawing a 3-card and hoping people are going to bust along the way,” said one Rubio fundraiser, who attended and was disappointed with the presentation. “It usually doesn’t play out that way.”

Team Rubio’s strategy shift to deny Trump delegates will play out both in his campaign schedule and on the airwaves in the coming days and weeks.

Starting this weekend, Rubio plans to burrow almost continuously in Florida, campaigning there “virtually every day” until March 15, according to a senior adviser, to ensure he secures its 99 delegates. The campaign is writing off Ohio and its 66 winner-take-all delegates entirely, in hopes that Gov. Kasich, who the Rubio campaign had previously tried to nudge out of the race, can prevent Trump from carrying his home state.

“As long as Kasich is in the race, Cruz and Marco are not going to win Ohio,” the senior Rubio adviser said.

Meanwhile, Rubio’s super PAC, flush with as much as $20 million in fresh cash, has yet to buy any ads in Ohio and is not expected to do so in the future. Instead, it is currently invested in Florida and four of the earlier voting states that divide delegates proportionally.

The race has become, in the words of the Rubio adviser, “a little bit of three-dimensional chess,” as they cede some states to erstwhile rivals in the name of stopping Trump while trying to simultaneously rack up delegates. Any hopes to knock Cruz out of the race have disappeared in the near term, as Cruz has roughly twice as many delegates as Rubio.

Yob, who served as Rand Paul’s political director this cycle and who opposes Rubio, criticized the Florida senator for his private focus on forcing a convention while still claiming publicly he’s still trying to win outright.

Marco Rubio can't name states he's 'banking on' winning Marco Rubio can't name states he's 'banking on' winning during an interview on CNN.

“He’s essentially a con artist who is convincing voters and donors to support him so he can win some delegates proportionally so that he can win a multi-ballot brokered convention,” Yob said, using Rubio’s anti-Trump line against him.

For Rubio, the tactical shift puts him in line with the outside groups that have sprouted up to stop Trump. On Thursday, 2012 nominee Mitt Romney delivered an impassioned and unusual speech in which he called Trump a “fraud” and “phony” and urged a united anyone-but-Trump effort.

“Our whole strategy has always been to deny him 50 percent,” said Katie Packer, who served as Romney’s deputy campaign manager and is the founder of Our Priorities PAC, which is spending millions on anti-Trump ads. “I’m expecting and prepared to take this fight all the way to Cleveland.”

“I think it would be smart strategy for those guys to let these candidates win their homes states,” Packer said. “Clearly, Kasich has the best shot at winning Ohio, and Marco has the best shot at Florida.”

Romney called for strategic voting, as well. "Given the current delegate selection process, this means that I would vote for Marco Rubio in Florida, John Kasich in Ohio, and for Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state,” Romney said in Utah.

Time may be running short. Trump is running as much as 20 points above Rubio in Florida, according to some public polls.

Also, it is not clear that Cruz, who faces his own daunting mathematical challenge to getting a majority of delegates, is ready to play along in solely trying to prevent Trump from winning.

"It may be doable for us,” a senior Cruz adviser said of securing the nomination. “It's not doable for him," the adviser said of Rubio.

Indeed, Cruz is tentatively planning his own multi-day trip to Florida next week, according to a second Cruz source, potentially hoping to knock Rubio out of the race entirely. How much time and money Cruz devotes to Florida would be contingent on whether Rubio falters badly in the states such as Kansas, Louisiana and Kentucky that vote over the weekend, and then again on March 8, when Mississippi, Michigan, Idaho and Hawaii cast ballots.

“A weakened Marco Rubio gives us an opportunity,” this Cruz adviser said.

“Is it better for Cruz to let Trump win Florida or Marco win Florida?” wondered the Rubio adviser aloud. “I suppose you could say, either.”

Rubio’s delegate predicament came about largely from a devastating Super Tuesday. While Rubio’s narrow loss in Virginia was heavily covered, it was not nearly his most damaging result of the night.

That came in Texas, where he failed to meet the 20 percent threshold to garner delegates statewide. As a result, Rubio may collect as few as three delegates from Texas’s treasure of 155 delegates. Rubio narrowly missed similar cutoffs for delegates in Alabama and Vermont, ceding potential delegates to his rivals.

Henry Barbour, a Republican National Committee member from Mississippi and a Rubio supporter who is helping to organize delegate strategy, said, “Marco Rubio is running for president. He’s not running to keep somebody from being president.” But even as he did so, he also spoke of Rubio’s edge in what would be a wild and unpredictable open convention.

“The candidate who is other people’s second choice has an advantage, and polling says that is Marco Rubio,” Barbour said, ticking off from memory the percentage of delegates who become unbound on the second and third ballots of a contested convention.

Rubio spokesman Alex Conant declined to discuss the campaign’s strategy but noted that Trump was just coming under “sustained attack” for the first time in the campaign now, as the contest spreads nationwide and states become winner-take-all.

“We’re seeing that negative messaging works on Trump. It worked in Iowa and it worked in Virginia, although it was too late. We nevertheless closed the gap there very quickly,” Conant said, noting the upcoming states are more favorable to Rubio than the ones that dominated Super Tuesday.

“The states that have yet to vote look a lot more like Minnesota and Virginia than Texas and Alabama,” he said.

