– Republican gut check –
Super Tuesday will unquestionably be a gut check for the Republican Party.
It will also test whether Rubio’s newfound aggressiveness toward Trump – the 44-year-old senator has attacked his rival’s business dealings, temperament, age, policy platforms and hairstyle in recent days – will have an impact on voters.
Trump is “the Bernie Madoff of American politics,” Rubio told Fox News, referencing the former investment advisor jailed for life for committing the largest financial fraud in US history.
Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric during the campaign, accusing Mexico of sending “rapists” and criminals across the border and urging a ban on Muslims entering the country, would have been the undoing of a normal candidate.
But all signs show 2016 is far from normal, with a fiercely angry electorate keen to back an outsider who scornfully attacks the establishment.
Trump has shrugged off the criticism, including Clinton’s.
“Hillary says she doesn’t like my tone,” Trump told a crowd of some 3,000 in southwestern Virginia.
“The world is a mean and evil place, we need a strong tone.”
In the latest controversy, Trump came under withering criticism from Republican and Democratic candidates alike for not immediately disavowing the support of David Duke, a white supremacist who once led the Ku Klux Klan.
Rubio said Trump’s failure to immediately repudiate Duke, who has expressed support for Trump, makes him “unelectable.”
The party’s flagbearer in 2012, Mitt Romney, joined the chorus of outrage, tweeting that Trump’s “coddling of repugnant bigotry is not in the character of America.”
Trump sought to put the issue behind him, blaming it on a “very bad ear piece” that prevented him from accurately hearing the question about Duke, and repeating his prior disavowal of the white supremacist.
If Trump sweeps the South, where many of the Super Tuesday races are taking place, it could be lights out for his Republican challengers.
Like Rubio, rival Cruz warned that a vote for Trump was a vote for Clinton in November.
“If Donald Trump is the nominee, Hillary in all likelihood wins,” arch-conservative Cruz told a rally in his home state of Texas.
The Lone Star State is the largest prize Tuesday, and Cruz is banking on winning there. But he trails in every other Super Tuesday state, except for Arkansas.
Nearly 600 Republican delegates are up for grabs Tuesday, close to half of the 1,237 needed to secure the nomination.
Some 865 Democratic delegates are at stake, about 36 percent of those needed to win.
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