Rubio pivots

Marco Rubio pivots to his next stage 

The Florida senator's focus is finally shifting from political influencers to the voters themselves.

By Shane Goldmacher

In near freezing weather, Marco Rubio kicked off the next phase of his presidential campaign in an unheated barn that was so packed that many could only hear the Florida senator they had come to see.

“This election,” Rubio told them, “must be a turning of a page.”

The Thanksgiving holiday marked a page-turning of sorts for Rubio’s campaign, as well. After months of jostling behind the scenes with Jeb Bush and the rest of the 2016 field in the invisible primary for donors, endorsements, money and momentum, Rubio is pivoting toward a more public-facing campaign. His focus is finally shifting from political influencers to the voters themselves.

He blitzed through New Hampshire on Monday, will campaign in South Carolina on Tuesday and then fly to Alabama, which votes on March 1 and where he will hold a rally, his first public event there this cycle. Rubio began to pick up the pace just before Thanksgiving, spending more time in Iowa just before the holiday — five straight days — than he had in the entire first six months of 2015. He’ll be back again in New Hampshire later this week, too.

The aggressive public travel schedule is being paired with a flood of new television ads. This week, his campaign blankets the Iowa and New Hampshire airwaves in full force for the first time — more than $700,000 in TV ads across the two states. His super PAC, meanwhile, released its first ad of the campaign on Monday.

It’s the clearest signal yet that the low-profile period of Rubio’s campaign is over, as his campaign terrain shifts from boardrooms to barns like the one in Rye. The senator’s advisers believe much of the 2016 race is being defined by free media coverage and, with just over two months until voting begins, Rubio’s team wants such coverage to pair with his ads, especially in the early-voting states.

“We can be the authors of the greatest chapter in the amazing story of America,” Rubio declared at a “No BS BBQ,” hosted by former Sen. Scott Brown on Monday.

Fueled by his discipline, speechmaking skills and solid debate performances, Rubio has been gaining momentum with the Republican political class — among donors and on Capitol Hill. Rubio rolled out 10 congressional endorsements in November, compared to three for Ted Cruz and one for Jeb Bush last month. No other candidate announced any. (Bush still has far more congressional endorsements overall.)

Rep. Darrell Issa, the former House Oversight Committee chairman who antagonized the Obama administration, became the latest Rubio endorser on Monday. And within hours, businessman John Rakolta, a national finance co-chairman for Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, was backing him, too. Rakolta, who is organizing a Michigan fundraiser for Rubio next week, follows closely behind two influential billionaire political financiers, Paul Singer and Frank Vandersloot, supporting Rubio.

The challenge now for Rubio is translating his increasing insider support to the broader electorate, where he has yet to top any national or early-state polls. Even with his growing favor among mainstream Republicans, Rubio is eager not to be pigeonholed as a candidate of an unpopular Republican establishment. “My intention is to unify the Republican Party,” he said Monday when asked how he would motivate conservatives who stayed home in 2008 and 2012 to vote.

Rubio has clashed with Cruz in recent weeks over his conservative credentials, as Cruz has pegged Rubio as a “moderate.” They continued to jab at each other from afar on Monday. Rubio attacked Cruz on Fox News for harming American security with his vote to limit the government’s collection of Americans’ metadata. Cruz hammered Rubio over his “longtime support of amnesty” on the “Hugh Hewitt Show.”

The pro-Rubio super PAC’s first ads, meanwhile, try to cast the Florida senator as a political outsider. “Don’t just send the establishment a message, send them a conservative president,” the narrator says in the group’s ad.

With interest in his candidacy peaking, Rubio’s pivot to a more public-facing campaign is well-timed. The parking lot at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall where he held his first event in Laconia overflowed into the Dollar Tree lot next door. One woman, Karen Fogg of Belmont, pulled off the road as soon as she saw people waving Marco Rubio signs, in hopes he might be there. Others, like Steven and Patty Giguere, had been scouring political websites for months in hopes of a convenient Rubio New Hampshire sighting — there weren’t many — and jumped at the chance to see him in person.

Not all went smoothly for Rubio on Monday. He was nearly rear-ended on the highway on the way to airport. His flight to New Hampshire got him in late. And so he showed up to the roughly 200-person VFW crowd more than an hour tardy. He had to open with an apology and delivered an unusually scattershot speech.

But by evening he had found his rhythm, as he spoke fluently about tax policy, education and foreign affairs. In the wake of the terror attack in Paris, Rubio has further emphasized national security in his stump speech, saying he wanted to restore the federal government to “its constitutionally limited role, which is primarily to keep our nation safe.” And he issued a harsh warning about the Islamic State and the current “civilizational struggle.”

“They’re not going to be contained. They’re not going to self-implode. They’re not going to go into another line of work,” Rubio said.

“The earlier part of year here we really didn’t see much of Marco Rubio and people did say things to me,” said Alan Glassman, chairman of the Belknap County Republican Party, and a member of the New Hampshire GOP’s executive committee. “They said, ‘When are we ever going to get Rubio here, like in Belknap County, or whatever.’ And you can see, here we are, it’s the last day of November and we’ve got Rubio now in Belknap County. So it took some time.”

About 50 miles from Rubio’s event, Gov. Chris Christie was busy setting a standard Rubio will find hard to meet: The New Jersey governor was holding his 36th town hall in the state — more town halls than Rubio has had total events, according to New England Cable News’ candidate tracker. Christie has parlayed his intensely New Hampshire-centric campaign into several key endorsements, including the Union Leader newspaper this past weekend.

Christie has gone all-in on New Hampshire, as has Ohio Gov. John Kasich and, increasingly, Bush. Other Rubio’s rivals have focused on Iowa. But the Florida senator has yet to pick a single state on which to stake his White House bid — spreading himself across Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and even Nevada.

Few say it’s too late for Rubio to target New Hampshire — if he’s determined to win here. Jodi Lavoie-Carnes, vice chairwoman of the Strafford County Republican Party, said Rubio is exactly where he needs to be, within striking distance.

“You want to be Seabiscuit,” she said, “right with the pack.”