Florida challenge

Cruz forces Rubio to defend turf

Hinting at a Florida challenge, Cruz creates space to collect delegates elsewhere.

By Marc Caputo, Shane Goldmacher and Katie Glueck

Ted Cruz is threatening to make one of the biggest gambles of the 2016 season: diving into Florida to knock off Marco Rubio.

Cruz has little chance of winning the March 15 Florida primary, but he’s showing signs he might compete by opening field offices and sending surrogates to stump in the state while his super PAC prepares to strafe Marco Rubio with a seven-figure ad buy.

The aim: pull enough voters away from Rubio to ensure Donald Trump wins the state’s 99 delegates and deny the Florida senator any pick-up opportunity elsewhere by forcing him to defend his turf. Doing that gives Trump a bigger lead in delegates, but it means Cruz has calculated he can catch up.

“Cruz thinks he can do well against Trump in a head-to-head race. And he needs to kill Rubio to do it,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, whose survey released showed Trump leading Rubio 38 percent to 30 among Florida Republicans.

Whether it’s an elaborate headfake or expert play to kill off a rival 2016 contender, the Texan aims to force Rubio to spend more time and money defending his home turf, freeing up Cruz to more easily compete for delegates in eight states and U.S. territories that hold contests between Tuesday and Saturday.

But the strategy is risky. Cruz doesn’t want Trump to get too strong, and he needs to pad his delegate count on March 15 too. Attention paid to Florida cuts into resources available in places where Cruz could have more clear-cut opportunities to win delegates, including in conservative North Carolina, which awards delegates proportionally, and Missouri, which employs a hybrid method.

Cruz goes to North Carolina on Tuesday while his wife is scheduled to attend a Miami fundraiser on Wednesday, a day before the GOP debate.

Meanwhile, a pro-Cruz super PAC, Keep the Promise I, which released three new attack ads hitting Rubio on Sunday, was readying a seven-figure ad buy across the state on late Monday, according to a person familiar with the discussions. So far the super PAC has only inquired about rates, not purchased any ads. It is still debating internally over what media — talk radio, cable and broadcast — to hit and, more crucially, which of Florida’s vastly different media markets to play in, the source said.

If Cruz’s super PAC goes aggressively against Rubio in South Florida, it is clearly going for the kill. But any pro-Cruz ads that would air in more conservative regions, such as the Panhandle, could take more votes from Trump than Rubio.

Saul Anuzis, the former chair of the Michigan GOP who has advised the Cruz campaign on delegate strategy, said Rubio already looks weakened after Super Tuesday and Super Saturday. Cruz wants to be ready to pounce should the Florida senator stumble badly in his home state.

“Rubio doesn’t really have a path to victory,” Anuzis said. “At some point he has to make the decision about dropping out. We’re setting up shop, we’ve got our people there, we’re getting people to go down there, I think we’re prepared to play in Florida. If Rubio drops out, then we have a shot. Then it’s very real.”

Rubio won’t drop out before Florida votes March 15. While he’s trailing Trump in Monmouth’s most recent poll of likely Florida voters, Cruz is a distant third at 17 percent. The poll’s results generally jibe with other surveys that account for Florida’s closed-primary system, where only Republicans can vote in the GOP contest.

But critically for Rubio – and for Cruz’s calculations -- the poll found that the Florida senator was crushing Trump two-to-one among voters who had cast early votes in person or by mail. If the percentages hold, that means Rubio could be leading Trump by as many as 150,000 votes heading into primary day. However, the number of early voters surveyed was small, so Rubio’s lead could be more narrow.

The poll numbers indicate Rubio’s campaign is making good on its promise to bank early votes. It also suggests that Trump, who has invested in little infrastructure in many states, hasn’t spent the time or money organizing in Florida, where a ground-game can be a must because of the month’s worth of early voting.

Trump last week reserved $1 million in Florida TV airtime and on Monday unveiled a one-minute ad that attacks Rubio for missing votes and for being “corrupt” over his use of a Republican Party of Florida credit card for personal expenses years ago and for a real-estate deal that benefitted the mother of a chiropractor who had business before the Legislature when Rubio was House speaker. The real-estate attack, first used by Gov. Charlie Crist in 2010, was ruled “mostly false” by PolitiFact.

“It’s almost identical to the attack Charlie Crist used against me in 2010,” Rubio told reporters in Tampa.

So far, Trump has 391 delegates, followed closed by Cruz with 303. Rubio has 152 and Kasich, 37. And on March 15, another 367 delegates are up for grabs en route to the 1,237 needed to win the nomination at the GOP convention.

Cruz needs the Republican field to quickly whittle down to two for his math to work. Otherwise he faces the potential of a contested convention, where his unpopularity among party elites could doom him if there are multiple candidates.

Cruz’s strong showing in Saturday’s state contests not only showcased the candidate’s strength, it exposed weakness in Rubio and Trump, argued Florida state Rep. Neil Combee, the chair of Cruz’s campaign in Florida.

“We always had a plan to be competitive in Florida,” Combee said. “People are getting down to hard decisions and Republicans see who the real conservative is in the race.”

One of the political committees backing Cruz, Make DC Listen, went a step further -- tying Rubio and Trump’s fates in Florida. “One of the single biggest ways to stop Trump at this point in the race is for Cruz to win Florida,” the group said in an email. “It's now clear that Marco Rubio has no chance of winning the nomination so a vote for Rubio is a vote for Trump.”

While none of the polling indicates Cruz has a serious shot at winning Florida, to some Republicans, his big push here shows he’s looking not only at 2016 but 2020.

“Cruz knows he does not have a great chance to beat Trump this year, but he is already playing for the next race,” said Curt Anderson, a Trump critic who’s also a top adviser to Florida Gov. Rick Scott. “This kind of gamesmanship rarely works out. Much will happen in the meantime.”