Catch ya on the flip, NH.
Marco Rubio may be
skipping a boatload of Senate votes but it's not because he's spending time in New Hampshire. While Chris Christie has visited the state
two dozen times in the past couple years, and John Kasich, Jeb! Bush, and Donald Trump are all in double digits, Rubio has only visited the state nine times total since the 2012 presidential elections. That has NH Republicans riled,
reports Michael C. Bender.
Earlier this year, as former New Hampshire House Speaker Donna Sytek began considering which Republican presidential candidate to back, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio was at the very top of her list. The charismatic Floridian was also a favorite for Wayne MacDonald, the former Republican Party chairman in the state.
Now, Rubio isn't in Sytek's top five. MacDonald? He's chairman of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's presidential campaign in New Hampshire.
“I brought my husband to see Marco speak at a GOP confab in the spring, and then he didn't come back to New Hampshire for a long time,” Sytek said in an interview, explaining why she no longer considers Rubio a top choice. “The others came into everyone's living room, to the VFWs, and you say, 'Is he taking this seriously?' We just haven't seen him lately.”
The Rubio campaign says the candidate's low profile is all part of its master plan, natch.
J. Warren Tompkins, who runs a pro-Rubio super-PAC, told the Washington Post that “it takes a lot of discipline” to avoid peaking before February and March, when primary voters start casting their ballots. Politico quoted Rubio campaign manager Terry Sullivan saying the strategy was to wait out the rest of the field.
“We need everybody not named Marco to fizzle,” Sullivan said at an event in Washington on Monday. “That is the plan.”
Apparently, Scott Walker was just a pawn on Rubio's chess board. Either that or Walker offers a cautionary tale: over exposure to donors and under exposure to voters doesn't translate to real support (i.e. good polling).