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MANCHESTER, N.H. — Florida Sen. [crscore]Marco Rubio[/crscore] arrived in here with momentum from a third place finish in Iowa but is now deemphasizing the strong possibility of a similar result in the Granite State.
“Well, every state is different,” Rubio told “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt on Monday evening. “You know, in New Hampshire you have some candidates that literally have a campaign nowhere else. They only have a New Hampshire campaign. And so these are people that have invested all of their resources in one place. So that’s a challenge.”
“You have Donald Trump that’s consistently been in first place now since June or July. He’s the clear front-runner. So it’s a crowded field,” he said.
“This is a very unusual election. I think it would be a mistake to judge this election by any of the metrics of past elections. We’ve never had six or seven well-funded, credible candidates running for president on the Republican side at the same time,” he added.
Rubio’s mostly criticized performance at the Republican debate at Saint Anselm College on Saturday appears to have shaken the Rubio campaign’s confidence, despite insisting that the Florida Republican’s repetition of the same attack line against President Obama during the debate did not harm him in the polls.
Rubio campaign spokesman Todd Harris told reporters after the debate, “All we have to do is look at what our fundraising totals are and, as I said, we’re still counting the money, but as I left to come over here we raised three times more money than we had in any previous debate. It speaks for itself.”
Dr. Lee Meringhoff, an assistant professor of political science and director of the Marist Institute Public Opinion told The Daily Caller that he does not believe Rubio’s debate moments on Saturday is a political death blow to his campaign.
“No event is likely to be fatal. It took some of the momentum. He started to get moving and started to get thought of as a one of the likely third place finishers — maybe second place in New Hampshire,” Meringhoff said. “I think it sort of slowed that down a little and gave a last chance for Chris Christie, John Kasich, Jeb Bush to still keep that so called establishment log jam lane full.”
Meringhoff explained, “So right now, Rubio certainly didn’t close the sale for his big bounce out of Iowa. It’s likely he’ll live to play another day. The question is who finishes in that top rung and I think he was hoping to eliminate some of those others, so he could go one on one or one on two against trump and Cruz in South Carolina. He probably lost the opportunity, unless he attracts an awful lot of independent voters on Tuesday.”
Life on the campaign trail did not get any easier for the Florida senator thereafter. At his first campaign stop in Londonderry, the day after the debate, he doubled down on the line and he was jabbed again by the media for reiterating it. Needless to say, the Rubio campaign did not offer up a press avail afterwards, one reporter confirmed.
A Canadian Press reporter at Rubio’s third stop on Sunday noted 17 “colorful” remarks from a Rubio speech as well as a town-hall question-and-answer session afterward. The reporter later researched the web for an original quote. Fifteen showed up in a Google search from prior speeches.
The Rubio campaign decided to limit media access to Rubio on Monday by establishing pooled media coverage for five of the seven Rubio campaign events. Other than his watch party, his scheduled Tuesday campaign stops on primary day are also pooled media coverage.