The Time headline: “Rubio's storybook political life faces a dark chapter.”
Yes, Rubio is still losing, and his campaign’s obituary is being written while he’s still officially in the race. There’s the report that some of his advisers think he should drop out before he has a chance to lose his home state of Florida. There’s the string of losses, with wins coming only in Minnesota and Puerto Rico. There are all the donors who haven’t jumped on board. There’s the fact that Rubio himself has not lived up to his billing as a great political talent:
The broader misstep, was in a candidate that tried to be everything to everyone, and may have lost himself in the process. For much of 2015, Rubio avoided inserting himself into the primary squabbles swirling around him in hopes of selling himself as a generational figure.
But as Trump’s bombast dominated the news coverage, Rubio’s lofty message began falling flat. He began swiping at Trump, first on policy and then personally, but misjudged the toll getting into the mud would take on his brand. Lacking a defined base of his own, Rubio’s campaign saw some supporters flock to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who flirted with Trump attacks but avoided the personal ones, or Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who refused to engage his rivals entirely. Rubio has since reversed course on the Trump attacks.
And there’s the fact that Rubio’s campaign is not built for the primary it now faces—he was supposed to be so personally irresistible that little things like ground game weren’t going to be necessary. But now the primary is, as Zeke Miller writes, a “grueling slog,” and Rubio is trying desperately to get up to speed for that, without the big donors he was counting on to fund his ascent to begin with. His best chance is the Republican establishment’s desperate conclusion that the way to block Trump is to keep Rubio, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich in the race, racking up what delegates they can in hopes of keeping Trump under the threshold for the nomination and leading to a convention fight. All of which would put more than a few new dings on Rubio’s fresh-faced, hopeful Republican-of-tomorrow image.