Hostility Doesn't Work for Everyone

This is the wisdom of Trump at his victory speech last night: hostility works for some people, it doesn't work for everyone.

He was specifically referring to Little Marco. Harry Enten had this to say about Rubio post last night's disaster where he didn't get single delegate.

"Increasingly, that potential looks as though it will go unrealized. But I want to back up and consider why Rubio is in this predicament. I won’t focus on recent strategic decisions made by his campaign, such as his potty humor directed at Trump, insofar as these decisions are more the effect of his problems (when you’re losing, it’s rational to employ high-risk strategies) than the cause of them. Instead, I see three main issues for Rubio that have dated back to the start of his campaign."

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/marco-rubio-never-had-a-base/

Harry Enten had been very high on Rubio for a long time so this is not an easy column to write. He also doesn't want to criticize Rubio for trying to out Trump Donald Trump. He at the time had praised Rubio for doing it or said that 'Rubio would be crazy not to fight back.'

True he was losing when he started the potty humor but he was the second place loser in a lot of polls and in both SC and Nevada. Then he fell to third place on Super Tuesday and now fourth place.

He wasn't on pace to win after Nevada but after he decided he had to try to be Trump and he has fallen off the face of the earth since.

"Rubio had such a bad night, watching his support crater over the past week and falling short of the 15 percent threshold necessary to win delegates in Michigan and Mississippi, that Trump at first resisted — for a while, anyway — mocking him. But he offered his own analysis, as self-justifying as it was indisputably true, that his rival’s collapse resulted from his decision two weeks ago to try to go to toe-to-toe trading puerile insults with himself. After polling around the 20 percent mark in Michigan just weeks ago, Rubio fell to just 9 percent in the final results. His 5 percent showing in Mississippi was even more disastrous."

“He got very hostile a couple weeks ago,” Trump said of Rubio. “Hostility works for some people; it doesn’t work for everyone.”

"It’s a warning Trump has sounded before, noting, “Every single person who’s attacked me, they’re gone.” And he has the scalps to prove it: Rick Perry’s, Lindsey Graham’s, Jeb Bush’s and, perhaps soon, Rubio’s. The ultimate alpha dog, Trump refuses to be out-bullied, having withstood his rivals’ best punches for months and laid them out with his signature uppercut —crippling characterizations like the “low energy” tag he hung on Bush and the “Little Marco” moniker he’s now sticking to Rubio."

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/donald-trump-republican-odds-220476#ixzz42P0u91cB

This should also put to rest the illusion of the media that Trump had a bad debate last week. Clearly, Marco Rubio had the bad debate. It again makes you wonder about the calls for Rubio to vacate before Florida and saving himself the embarrassment of losing his home state.

It makes me think of what Nate Silver said after Scott Walker crashed and burned. For the record Walker was another guy who attacked Trump and ended up near zero at the end.

Silver said that the best candidates get out early. I thought that was pure spin at the time-of course he would try to turn a negative into a positive, as Silver had regaled us at the start of the race with how great a candidate Scott Walker is.

But now I see his point. Rubio could destroy his future with a loss in his own home state. Trouble is getting out now would suggest he expects to lose it. I have no idea what path he can take now that's not tragic.