Marco Rubio speaks at a campaign rally in Shelby Township, Mich., on March 2, 2016. | AP Photo Rubio ignores calls to quit Short of delegates, the 2016 contender implores Republicans to reject Donald Trump.

SHELBY TOWNSHIP, Mich. — After bungling a debate and falling to fifth place in New Hampshire, Marco Rubio’s campaign immediately recognized it had a problem and adjusted accordingly, loosening the reins on a tightly scripted candidate and opening up access to the press.

But after a disappointing Super Tuesday that saw Rubio fall further behind Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in the delegate count, the Florida senator is sticking to the script and batting away questions about whether he’s in denial.


Ignoring Cruz’s call for him to leave the race and the increasingly difficult delegate math, Rubio is focusing only on the contests ahead and continuing to prosecute his case against the clear GOP front-runner.

The only change Wednesday for Rubio was a slightly tempered tone. After responding to Trump’s brand of personal insults in kind over the weekend with a mix of blistering mockery and sophomoric jokes about the billionaire’s manhood, the Florida senator attempted to regain his aspirational, future-focused message while laying out his case against Trump.

“The conservative movement is at its best when it appeals to people’s hopes and their dreams,” Rubio told a crowd of 500 people in this Detroit suburb Wednesday afternoon. “We are at our worst when we appeal to those fears and people’s anger and frustrations as the base of our movement. There has never been in the history of the world a great movement built on anger and frustration.”

Although Tuesday night finally brought Rubio his first outright victory of the nomination fight, he himself is feeling increasing pressure to perform better or to leave the race as a frustrated Republican establishment panics over the prospect of being powerless to stop Trump.

After Super Tuesday’s results, Trump has 243 delegates while Cruz, largely as a result of winning his delegate-rich home state of Texas, has 220. Rubio, by comparison, has won just 101 delegates. His campaign argues that he can catch up as the race moves north and west, to states such as Michigan on March 8, and to his home state of Florida the following week.

The problem for Rubio: At the moment, he trails Trump in Florida, where establishment groups and super PACs supporting him are prepared to spend millions on anti-Trump TV ads in order to save his candidacy, and in Michigan. A new poll of Michigan GOP voters out Wednesday showed Trump leading with 29 percent, followed by Cruz with 19 percent and Rubio with 18 percent.

Although he didn’t specifically address the stalemate within the Republican primary — the three candidates who are dividing up the anti-Trump vote are enabling the billionaire to keep winning — Rubio attempted to explain why he and so many conservatives refuse to fall in line behind the Manhattan mogul.

“Usually, when you’re the front-runner, everyone is saying, ‘Please, everyone get out of the race so we can unify around the front-runner,’” Rubio said. “What people are saying now is, ‘Please, everyone get together so we can keep this front-runner from winning and destroying our party.’”

Not everyone, of course, is saying that. Increasingly, top Republicans from Congress to K Street, either resigned to the fact that Trump’s nomination is inevitable or newly optimistic about harnessing Trump’s unlikely appeal to a new audience of disaffected white Democratic and independent voters, are signaling their openness to anointing him the GOP’s standard-bearer.

Rubio, who has vowed to fight Trump “as long as it takes” to defeat him, remains a vehicle for those establishment Republicans who simply cannot give the keys to the party to a Manhattan billionaire with conservative credentials that are thin at best — even though those people now acknowledge that the only way Rubio or Cruz can reasonably stop Trump is with a floor fight at the Republican convention in July.

“If we choose Donald Trump as our nominee, we will lose in November,” Rubio said. “If we choose Donald Trump as our nominee, we will put in charge of the conservative movement someone who is not really a conservative. And if we choose Donald Trump as our nominee, he will have carried out the most elaborate con job in the history of American politics.”