Noah Rothman wonders if the Rubio campaign should start panicking:
While they are banking that a few third and second place finishes in February can position their candidate well ahead of the March primaries, the damage that will be done to Rubio’s brand if he fails to win at least one of the February contests will be palpable.
Failing to win any of the early contests would be a serious problem for Rubio’s campaign, but it would be even worse if he ends up finishing in fourth or lower in any of these states. While polls have put him at third and second in Iowa and New Hampshire respectively, his weak organization and sporadic campaigning could end up delivering worse results than expected. Rubio supporters have already accepted that their candidate isn’t going to win either of these contests, but he can’t afford fourth or fifth-place finishes in either of those states. If Rubio were to finish behind Cruz in both states and behind Kasich in New Hampshire, the question won’t be how Rubio consolidates the “establishment” vote but rather how soon it will be before he is forced out of the race.
South Carolina is the primary where Rubio is believed to have better organization, and he has some campaign staffers (including his campaign manager) that are supposed to know South Carolina politics fairly well, so another underwhelming performance there would be even more damaging. One problem for him there is that these staffers are enemies of Nikki Haley, the state’s governor. That could make it much harder for him to win backing from state party leaders. Right now Rubio is in a distant third place in South Carolina, but bad results in the earlier contests would probably cause him to lose some of that support. Anything worse than third place in South Carolina would likely doom his campaign, and even a third place finish will only be enough to keep him afloat.
Rubio isn’t a serious threat to take the nomination at this point, since no one can identify a single contest that Rubio will be able to win. His campaign’s goal for the next few weeks has to be ensuring that he isn’t humiliated.