Why Marco Rubio Is Strongest Possible NomineeIt has become conventional wisdom that Republicans are blessed with a talented crowd of potential candidates this cycle. Fine. But here's my case for why only one of them is likely to win the general election.
Forget the triumphalism that followed 2014. It will do the GOP exactly as much good in 2016 as its remarkable success in 2010 did it in 2012. The off-year electorate is different.
Republicans begin the race for 270 Electoral College votes at a structural disadvantage. California, New York, Illinois and other large Democratic states deliver reliable EC votes. In the past six presidential races, Republicans have averaged just 211 electoral votes, while Democrats averaged 327. Among swing states -- Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia -- all are seeing increases in their minority voters and decreases in white voters.
As Republican pollster Whit Ayres explained in The Wall Street Journal, "Groups that form the core of GOP support -- older whites, blue-collar whites, married people and rural residents -- are declining as a proportion of the electorate. Groups that lean Democratic -- minorities, young people and single women -- are growing."...
..Rubio has read broadly and thought deeply about the problems America confronts in the 21st century. He was widely criticized for signing onto an immigration reform some caricatured as "amnesty" in 2012, but he has since shifted his emphasis to border security first. Many are unaware that though he is young (the same age as John F. Kennedy in 1960), he is not inexperienced, having served as the Speaker of the Florida House before being elected to the U.S. Senate.
The urge to stoop to identity politics makes some conservatives (including this one) gag. But Rubio is the very best kind of immigrant success story: the son of a bartender and a maid who says he can never repay what America has done for him. His family's Cuban heritage (he is fluent in Spanish) has made him especially sensitive to the thugs and tyrants of the world, including those in Tehran. His foreign policy would be assertively Reaganite....
http://townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/2015/03/06/why-marco-rubio-is-strongest-possible-nominee-n1966334/page/2
