Second place

Rubio’s suburban play for second place

The senator doesn’t have to win outright on Super Tuesday to stay in the game.

By Eli Stokols and Anna Palmer

A line of cars on a single-lane road here snaked along slowly, as police directed traffic to an overflow parking lot where shuttles would carry people back to Mount Paran Christian School to see Marco Rubio.

This event, in one of Atlanta’s northern suburbs, was supposed to be inside the school gym. But now Charlie Harper, a Republican policy activist, was standing on the 40-yard-line of the football field, behind television cameras pointing at a stage surrounded by 7,000 people.

“I just had to take a shuttle bus to a campaign rally,” Harper said. “That’s still sinking in.”

Mitch Hunter, a former congressional staffer who is part of Rubio’s Georgia team, pointed to a Ted Cruz rally 40 minutes away in downtown Atlanta that drew 1,200 people as evidence of a lopsided race headed into Super Tuesday.

“Marco clearly has some sort of wave he’s riding right now,” said Hunter. “There is something with the electorate where they’re starting to pay attention and starting to realize that Marco is the last, best hope to defeat Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.”

With polls showing Trump likely to win Georgia and Virginia overall, Rubio’s Super Tuesday survival strategy centers on targeting these suburban and exurban congressional districts to reach the educated 30- and 40-somethings whose practical, economic conservatism aligns with the Florida senator’s own aspirational brand. That should, if the plan delivers, help him to notch at least 20 percent of the vote and amass delegates that are allotted proportionally.

“You need 1,237 delegates to win. And as long as we are picking up delegates, we’re in the fight,” said Todd Harris, Rubio’s senior adviser.

Rubio employed a similar suburban strategy in South Carolina to some success. He bested Trump in Charleston County and in Richland County with 27.9 percent of the vote in those areas. He gained no delegates there though.

Harris’ strategy ahead of Super Tuesday placed Rubio in Georgia’s Cobb County, part of the sprawling north Atlanta suburbs and the 11th Congressional District, and in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District in Loudon County. He’ll make a stop Tuesday in a Minneapolis-area suburb before returning to Florida for Super Tuesday.

“The 11th C.D. is really the holy grail for the Republican base in Georgia,” said Seth Millican, a transportation lobbyist who is one of Rubio’s top operatives in Georgia. “It’s about 700,000 people, and all of these suburbs are full of people coming from other places. They’re more cosmopolitan — a lot of corporate relocations. All the candidates are working it hard, but we think it’s a real good fit for our candidate and his message.”

Virginia Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock echoed that message Sunday at Patrick Henry College, where Rubio packed the school gymnasium floor and had an overflow of attendees in the balcony.

“A district like this is exactly the kind of district that Marco knows how to win and has won throughout his career,” Comstock said. “You look around who is here today, look around Loudon County, and you see families that look very much like Marco’s family.”

Rubio’s super PAC is spending heavily in Georgia and Virginia because of the favorable demographics and delegate allocation rules. Conservative Solutions PAC has spent $389,000 to run pro-Rubio television ads in Atlanta, even though it’s one of the most expensive media markets in play on Super Tuesday, in order to reach the few million people in the metropolitan area where 5.5 million of the state’s 10 million residents are located. In fact, the group is doing more gross rating points in advertising in the Atlanta market in the week leading up to Tuesday’s primary than in any other media market.

The two ads blanketing the airwaves in the Super Tuesday states attack Trump, dovetailing with what Rubio himself has been doing in the 72 hours since he unloaded on the GOP front-runner in Thursday night’s debate. His once-sunny stump speech is now a fiery, anti-Trump tirade — and nothing less than a promise to save the party and conservatism itself. “The party of Lincoln and Reagan is on the verge of being taken over by a con artist,” Rubio told the crowd in Kennesaw Saturday. “A con artist identifies people who are struggling and convinces you they have something to turn it around.”

He continued bashing Trump in Virginia on Sunday — hitting the real estate mogul over his multiple bankruptcies, hiring of illegal immigrants, closeness to Vladimir Putin, and Trump University. Rubio told the crowd Republicans “cannot be a party that nominates somebody who refuses to condemn white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan.”

He concluded his speech telling rally-goers, "Remember: Friends do not let friends vote for con artists."

It’s a message, Rubio’s supporters believe, that is resonating with the very voters his campaign is targeting, who themselves are starting to recognize the urgency of stopping Trump before he runs away with the nomination.

“You can tell there are legitimate worries about what’s going to happen,” Millican said. “There are a lot of people scared about Trump. As a lobbyist, I deal with arrogant assh---- all the time. But when you couple that to a lack of policy depth, it’s a serious concern for those of us who are looking at a long term debt situation and keeping our country safe in an uncertain world.”