The Future of the GOP Is Trumpy | RealClearPolitics
There are three problems with the Rubio (or any other establishment candidate) would have won. First, it overlooks the unique difficulties that Donald Trump posed for Democrats in 2016. The Democratic playbook against Republicans had remained more or less the same since 1992. You could portray the GOP candidate as someone who wanted to gut Medicare and Social Security. Or, you could portray him as a closet theocrat.
Rubio and most of the other candidates would have been highly vulnerable to either attack. The Florida senator s plans, for example, would have eliminated most capital gains taxes (leaving Mitt Romney paying almost no taxes) while eliminating the Department of Education. It isn t difficult to see how that could be attacked. At the same time, Rubio favored making abortion illegal, even in cases of rape or incest. While that s arguably the intellectually consistent pro-life stance, it also polls very, very poorly. Every major GOP candidate was vulnerable to at least one of these attacks, and usually both.
As for Trump? Neither of those attacks landed. He famously opposed entitlement reform, and ran as a big-spending Republican. And the closet theocrat charge? Needless to say, that mantle is hard to hang on Trump. Clinton was left with a series of personal attacks on him that failed to resonate as much as Democrats had hoped.
Second, Rubio et al. might have amassed similar or better popular vote counts, but they wouldn t have been as efficiently distributed as Trump s and still would have lost. Remember, in 2012 the Electoral College actually had a Democratic bias to it, in part because Romney famously failed to connect with blue-collar voters because of his stance on fiscal issues and his culturally upscale persona.