Eli Stokols is a national politics reporter. Shane Goldmacher is a political reporter covering the 2016 presidential race.

Three days before Florida’s climactic primary, Marco Rubio sank deep into a black leather armchair on his campaign bus. He had just spent 25 minutes smiling wide for supporters at a high-end boutique selling $150 candles. “Don’t forget to vote on Tuesday!” he shouted from the third step of a wood-paneled staircase. Now, on his parked bus, the afternoon sunlight shut out by drawn blinds, the smile was gone. The candidate knew it was already over.

“There will be a reckoning,” he warned.


“There will be a reckoning in the mainstream media, where all these networks and cable networks are going to have to ask themselves why did they give so much coverage for the sake of ratings,” he said. “There will be a reckoning in the conservative movement, where a lot of people who for a long time have espoused conservative principles seem to not care about those anymore in rallying around Donald Trump because they like his attitude.

“I think there are a lot of people in the conservative movement who are going to spend years and years explaining to people how they fell into this and how they allowed this to happen.”

For now, though, it is Rubio’s reckoning that’s at hand. And not just because of Trump or cable television networks.

Rubio’s strategy was always an inside straight—overly reliant on a candidate’s ability to dominate free national media in order to outperform, outwit and eventually outlast a wide field of rivals. It was sketched out by an inner circle of advisers who believed they could eschew the very fundamentals of presidential campaigning because they had a candidate who transcended.

That's exactly what happened in 2016; it just turned out Rubio wasn’t the one transcending.

Even before his picturesque launch at symbolic Freedom Tower in Miami last spring, Rubio’s aides were hardly the only ones who saw in Rubio an answer to the Republican Party’s prayers: a young, charismatic and Hispanic conservative, the son of a bartender and a maid with remarkably broad appeal across a GOP spectrum riven by ideological and stylistic divisions. He’d been plastered on the cover of Time as “The Republican Savior.” Rubio was the kind of rare talent who could win a primary and then articulate a conservative message that resonated in a fast-changing country in the general.

They didn’t need a particular political base. They didn’t need to talk process. They didn’t need a ground game. All they needed was Marco.

And he scared the daylights out of the Democrats.

So while other campaigns touted “shock and awe” fundraising networks and precise, psychographic analytics and voter targeting operations, Rubio’s tight-knit group of mostly 40-something bros believed wholeheartedly that they didn’t need a specific early-state win. They didn't need a particular political base. They didn’t need to talk process. They didn't need a ground game. They didn’t need to be the immediate front-runner.

All they needed was Marco.

Their confidence bordered on arrogance. Sure, his closest advisers—campaign manager Terry Sullivan and media strategists Todd Harris and Heath Thompson—were right that their candidate was likable. He began the race as the second choice of many Republican primary voters. They just never figured out how to make voters embrace him as their first.

Trump was drawing away the cameras they had banked on lifting their rising star, sucking up all the media attention as he dominated media cycle after media cycle, setting the parameters of the 2016 debate, day after day. Suddenly, their telegenic candidate couldn’t get on TV.

And when Rubio stumbled, as all candidates do, there was no infrastructure to catch him, no field program to lift his support, no base to fall back upon.

All they had was Marco.

***

As Jeb Bush was quickly beset by leaks, backbiting and inflated expectations, Rubio’s campaign more closely resembled the Barack Obama model of 2008 from the start. It was a close-knit group, led by Sullivan, Thompson and Harris, with Alex Conant, Rubio’s communications director since 2011, Rich Beeson, the deputy campaign manager, pollster Whit Ayers and a few others in the innermost circle.

They held conference calls three times a week to stay on the same page, and based their headquarters only a few blocks from Capitol Hill to better coordinate with Rubio when the Senate was in session. Sullivan ran a tight ship. In the early months of the campaign, he insisted on personally signing off on every expense above $500. The limit was later relaxed but symbolic of a campaign that knew it had to scrimp to compete with Bush, whose super PAC hauled in $100 million in the first half of 2015.

The campaign spared no expense in setting up events to be television-friendly. There were invariably press risers, tidy backdrops and television lighting to portray Rubio, quite literally, in the best imaginable light.

But one of the things Sullivan seemed least interested in was field offices. The campaign would force volunteers and supporters to pay for their own yard signs, posters and bumper stickers.

Rubio arrives to address supporters at a caucus night party on February 1, 2016 in Des Moines, Iowa. | Getty

Rubio seemed to agree. In August, he was due to open his Iowa state headquarters the morning after flipping pork chops at the state fair, but he bailed at the last minute. The reason: heading back to Florida for his children’s start of school. The grand opening would be delayed for 10 days, and it would occur without Rubio. He wouldn’t announce a state director to run operations in the crucial caucuses for another month.

It was a fitting episode for a campaign that had bragged about how staff could work just as well out of a Starbucks with a laptop. The campaign wouldn’t announce supporters in Iowa’s various regions until January 2016, and only then under intensifying pressure from allies. And when campaign officials announced their “field offices,” they wouldn’t say exactly where they actually were, making it all but impossible for volunteers to volunteer.

It’s not that Rubio’s team didn’t know the data science that powered Obama’s two campaigns or that studies showed that door knocks and personal phone calls are among the most effective means to get out the vote. It’s that they’re expensive and time-consuming. And Rubio’s team thought they had figured out a better way: targeting exactly their voters with pinpoint precision online, on TV and in the mail.

“It’s almost like they wanted to prove they could win without doing some of the stuff people have to do to win,” said one Rubio supporter very familiar with the campaign’s planning. “Were they just fucking lazy or arrogant?”

In fact, they had designed a campaign to fit neatly with Rubio’s own conception of himself as master political communicator.

“Marco is convinced, and perhaps rightly so, that he has the skills to convince anyone,” said Dan Gelber, who served for eight years in the Florida Legislature with Rubio, including two as the Democratic counterpart when Rubio was GOP speaker. “He really believes that if you give him an audience, he can turn them to his way of thinking.”

***

Donors were unnerved by it, though. So Terry Sullivan outlined the plans to some of Rubio’s supporters at a closed-door strategy session at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas in October.

The campaign’s goal, Sullivan explained, was simply to put Rubio “in front of as many voters as possible as often as possible,” according to an attendee. And that meant getting free media coverage and buying paid television ads. So the campaign had locked in ad rates early—paying as little as 10 cents for every dollar spent by Bush’s super PAC. At times, they’d spend far less than Bush’s allies and still out-advertise them.

The team wanted Marco to sell himself on TV, not rely on second-rate surrogates or volunteers. And that meant less focus on door-knocking or volunteer phone-calling.

It’s almost like they wanted to prove they could win without doing some of the stuff people have to do to win.”



Donors and early-state supporters who had grown accustomed to presidential-level coddling and attention pushed back. And by December, Optimus, the firm paid nearly $900,000 to run Rubio’s analytics operation, prepared a public memo to quiet the critics. The memo described a hypothetical Midwestern state with 150,000 likely voters (roughly the expected Iowa turnout at the time) and one candidate at 20 percent, trailing another at 30 percent.

It was clear to everyone it was about Rubio and Iowa.

In it, Optimus made the case that running a ground game “missed the elephant in the room” as it nudged support up less than 1 percentage point. “You’ve got a 10 point gap you need to close,” the memo read.

“All this is not to say that door knocking doesn’t work. We know it does,” the memo concluded.

Sullivan put it most succinctly to the New York Times in December: “More people in Iowa see Marco on ‘Fox and Friends’ than see Marco when he is in Iowa.”

The ground-free strategy surprised Democrats and even some of Rubio’s rivals.

“This isn’t even a question in the mind of anyone who’s worked on presidential campaigns,” Dan Pfieffer, a former senior adviser to President Obama, told POLITICO earlier this year. “You have to build an extensive and aggressive ground operation to win.”

“The weirdest thing is that we’re debating this,” Pfieffer added.

Ted Cruz had invested more in ground operations than any other Republican, and his campaign manager, Jeff Roe, told POLITICO he was surprised how few ground troops any of his opponents were mobilizing.

"It’s a huge investment; it’s a huge investment of resources when a lot of people might not know how many resources they have, so I understand why they don’t do it,” Roe said. But there’s an advantage: "The ground game just never goes away."





Roe estimated that a total of 4.5 percent of the vote can be swung through field operations, often divided among the various candidates. "I’ve been surprised that we’ve been the beneficiary of nearly all of that 4.5 percent, for the lack of other campaigns,” he said.

Rubio’s strategy worked just fine in Iowa. He surged through the finish line there, topping pre-caucus polls and expectations to finish a strong third, powered by his glowing media coverage and onslaught of paid advertising—although it didn’t hurt that every other establishment rival, from Bush to Chris Christie and John Kasich, faded there down the stretch.

That night, he scored the largest televised audience by jumping ahead of his rivals to deliver the first “victory” speech of the night. “So this is the moment they said would never happen,” he began.

***

Rubio arrived in New Hampshire off a red-eye flight a renewed candidate. His campaign—and his opponents—began to see it in their tracking internal polls. Day by day, Rubio ticked up. Rubio began to pull away from his establishment rivals, Kasich and Bush, and stand alone in second place.

One rival’s polling had Rubio at 12.3 percent in New Hampshire on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, and then jumping to 16.4 percent the day before the pre-primary debate. Another rival had a single night sample before the debate—admittedly a small statistical sampling—showing Rubio moving within striking distance of Trump.

After his infamous repetitive debate performance before the New Hampshire primary, Rubio antagonists in Manchester started to dress up as robots to substantiate the "Marcobot" meme. | Getty

It made sense that Christie, dead in the water in a state where he’d invested more time than any other candidate, tried to take the paint off Rubio that Saturday night. But what no one expected was that Rubio, as strong and consistent a debater as there was in the field, would fall apart under Christie’s cross-examining. When Rubio got stuck repeating a point about Obama “knowing exactly what he’s doing,” Christie pounced. “There it is, folks,” he said, pointing out the robotic recitation of a talking point.

One Rubio adviser said Rubio was “second in New Hampshire when that moment happens. He ends up taking fifth.”

Rubio took just 10.6 percent of the vote. A candidate whose campaign had bet it all on his ability to perform had just made a critical mistake—and there was no organization to provide a safety net. "Every time there was a failure from the candidate, he didn’t have the underlying structure to back him up,” said a senior adviser to a rival campaign.

Perhaps more importantly, the two rivals he’d been about to knock out stayed in the race. "Because of that fifth place finish, Jeb goes on to South Carolina and Kasich is still alive today,” said a Rubio adviser. "It really caused this chain reaction.”

Rubio managed to rebound. He owned the New Hampshire disaster and closed a strong second in South Carolina. His margin of victory proved to be enough to finally drive Bush out. Suddenly, in a race that began with 17 candidates, Rubio, despite not having won a single state, was in the final four.

***

But Trump remained in his way, and with his other rivals gone, Rubio’s advisers decided it was time for their candidate to take the gloves off. It was a high-risk move for a risk-averse campaign. But the Rubio team knew it needed to jolt the race after going 0-for-February and heading into the single most delegate-rich day on the calendar: March 1. There were only two ways to reset the media storyline, the Rubio campaign believed. One was winning states, which hadn’t happened. The other was through brute force to set a two-man narrative.

Under the bright lights on a Houston debate stage, Rubio proved to be pretty good at throwing haymakers. And his performance drew rave reviews from conservative pundits and establishment Republicans, increasingly desperate for someone to take on Trump. The next morning in Dallas, Rubio pushed it even further, cloaking his critique of the businessman’s record in the humor of a junior high schooler, joking that Trump may have needed a full-length mirror in a debate commercial break “to make sure his pants weren't wet.” The next day, standing on the sidelines of a high school football field, Rubio mocked Trump’s spray tan before a crowd of 7,000 people. Before long, he was joking about the businessman’s small hands. Suddenly, the cable networks that had been obsessively fixated on Trump’s every move for months were giving the newly pugnacious Rubio equal time.

When he started trading these juvenile insults with Trump, it hardened people’s perceptions that he’s not ready or not serious enough. And that was it.”

The Rubio campaign knew in detail the value of such airtime. In mid-February, Optimus’ partners Brian Stobie and Scott Tranter had sought to quantify the value of a 40-minute Trump news conference, held on February 15, that was carried live, in whole or in part, by CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. Optimus estimated it netted Trump the equivalent of $2.8 million in free TV coverage. “Without question, Donald Trump’s single biggest contributors to his presidential aspirations are Fox News, CNN and MSNBC,” the report concluded.

From Texas, Rubio boarded the campaign’s private plane and flew east toward SEC country, where he would offer repeat performances over the weekend, thinking he was doing real and lasting damage to Trump. If he was hurting any campaign, it was his own.

“You don’t ever want to exacerbate a candidate’s weaknesses,” said one Rubio donor, who spoke privately. “Rubio is articulate and engaging, but he seems young. When he started trading these juvenile insults with Trump, it hardened people’s perceptions that he’s not ready or not serious enough. And that was it.”

Rubio watched his electability numbers plummet in exit polls from Super Tuesday and contests the following Saturday in Mississippi, Maine, Louisiana and Kansas. Suddenly, the voters who’d felt warmly toward Rubio were strongly considering Kasich, a man the campaign had largely ignored.

The Ohio governor’s rivals knew his embrace of Obamacare could be enough to do him in, but they didn’t take his candidacy seriously enough to spend money highlighting it in television ads. So when Super Tuesday rolled around, it was Kasich who was still alive and able to capitalize on Rubio’s slip-up, eating up enough support in several states to keep Rubio from meeting the delegate threshold and playing spoiler in Virginia, where the Florida senator might otherwise have notched his first win.

“If you just look at what Kasich got, you take him out and his race is a whole different place,” said one Rubio senior staffer. “All of these states are much different. We just didn’t see Kasich coming.”

***

If the pendulum of American politics typically swings from extremes—from the misunderestimated Texan George W. Bush to the cool, Harvard-educated Barack Obama—then perhaps a smooth-talking first-term senator never had a chance. The man many viewed as the Republican savior just a few years ago has become the road kill of the activist base that got him elected. The grievance-fueled Tea Party movement Rubio shrewdly aligned himself with in 2010 is now propelling Trump.

“The Tea Party movement was ideological,” Rubio said aboard his bus. “It was about the direction of our country, it was about policy, about liberalism versus conservatism. This is all about anger. He knows there are people out there who are angry and frustrated because they’re hurting; and instead of saying, ‘I know you’re angry, here’s how we’re going to fix it, he says, ‘I know you’re angry, let’s get even angrier so you’ll vote for me, and then we’ll take it out on whoever you’re going to take it out on.’ It’s a hijacking of the movement, not an evolution of it.”

The tension between Rubio and Trump was apparent early and often. Yet it wasn't until the March 3rd GOP debate in Detroit that Rubio tried to offer Trump some of his own medicine, backing up vulgar jokes he debuted on the trail and trying to dismiss him as a con man. | Getty

In a way, Rubio’s daring presidential run was just another establishment candidate’s misread of a Republican base that, in fact, wasn’t looking for someone to save the party so much as someone who would set the whole thing aflame.

And an hour before the polls closed in Florida on Tuesday night, Rubio’s team was finally willing to acknowledge what their candidate hinted at on his bus—2016 wasn’t going to be their year. They were already looking ahead toward 2020. Their optimistic message, they said, didn’t match the angry mood of the GOP base this year. But Rubio’s team predicted that when the Republican Party emerges from the rubble of this election cycle, he would be well-positioned to unify and lead it.

“We’re all looking for that little sliver that could have made the difference. I don’t think there is one,” said John Rakolta, a Michigan-based Rubio bundler and supporter.

“Would more organization have made a difference? Yeah, but maybe 3 points, not 21. There’s a phenomenon going on here that’s unbelievable.

“Could he have won? My answer is he couldn’t have. The public just wasn’t buying what we were selling.”

Of course, losing campaigns often take solace in believing there was nothing more that could have been done. In Rubio’s case, there was.

“Marco did well at all the stuff he was supposed to do well at, except one debate,” said a Rubio supporter. “If the principal did at every turn as well as he was supposed to do, well, he can’t do everything.”