Marco Rubio is the most likely current candidate to win the Republican nomination, and that’s true regardless of what the polls say. And it’s true regardless of what the polls say about Iowa and New Hampshire, too.
That’s a bit of a puzzle, particularly given this factoid, mentioned by the folks over at NBC’s First Read:
After his strong debate performances, after the endorsements he’s picked up and after Jeb Bush’s weakened position, Marco Rubio looks to be the Republican frontrunner — at least in the “establishment” bracket of the GOP race. And there’s the emerging perception that, if the early contests started tomorrow, Rubio would be the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination. But here’s what gives us a little pause: Is he built to win in either Iowa or New Hampshire? Remember, in this modern political era, every GOP nominee has won EITHER Iowa or New Hampshire. Right now, he’s standing in third place in public polling in both states – behind both Trump and Carson.
The problem with this argument is that the modern political era has also never seen a candidate win the nomination (or even come particularly close) without strong traditional political credentials. That is: they have served high political office, or they were a general, and strong support within the party establishment.
And that seems a far more ironclad basis for assessing the strength of a candidate than the fact that no Republican has won without taking one of the first two states.
I mean, look, Iowa and New Hampshire are important, of course. But their importance is more about them being bellwethers than anything else. Basically: folks who do poorly in those two states generally fade away because those failures are usually indications that the candidacy isn’t going anywhere, so people turn their attention elsewhere. But that’s not even close to guaranteed to happen if Trump/Carson win them. It’s quite possible that people will continue treat them as sideshows rather than genuine competitors, meaning that finishing ‘third’ will be interpreted by a lot of people as ‘finishing first among the real candidates.’
Obviously, winning those states would be way better than losing them. But I remain thoroughly unconvinced that Trump/Carson represent a genuinely new force in electoral politics. It seems far more likely that they’ll fade eventually, and that’s grounded in something a lot more tangible than the indicative power of Iowa/NH.
And, it’s worth noting, Iowa is still months away. Rubio hasn’t actually lost those states. He just hasn’t taken a polling lead. Meanwhile, Trump and Carson already are thoroughly non-traditional candidates. Maybe that won’t end up mattering. But until I see more definitive evidence of that fact, I’ll continue discounting their odds quite a bit more than Rubio’s.