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Road to 2016

How Marco Rubio Could Lose All the Key Early States and Still Win

Marco Rubio and his wife, Jeanette Dousdebes Rubio. Poor showings in the early states wouldn't necessarily be a knockout blow for him.Credit...Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

People who make bets on the presidential election give Marco Rubio a slight edge for the Republican nomination. But there’s a catch: The same betting markets show that he’s an underdog in all of the early states, and not favored in any of the Super Tuesday states.

It’s not clear even the Rubio team disagrees. My colleague Jeremy W. Peters reported that the campaign doesn’t have a plan to focus on any early state.

That has supporters concerned. And with good reason. Mr. Rubio would have a much surer path to the nomination if he led in an early state. His difficulty finding a place to break through is a result of what has always been his biggest problem: carving out a niche in a deeply factionalized party.

But how big a problem is it? Could he really win without an early state, as the betting markets imply, and as his campaign seems to believe?

Usually, it would be pretty hard to win the nomination without an early victory. But this year, there’s a good case for why it might be easier: The candidates favored in Iowa and New Hampshire might be such flawed candidates that they would not necessarily block Mr. Rubio.

Those candidates, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, will face protracted resistance from the party’s elite and many of its voters. The opposition they face will not evaporate, even if one of them wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. Opposition could even grow in a desperate, last-ditch effort to stop them — assuming such an effort still seems possible.

How could Mr. Rubio win if Mr. Cruz and Mr. Trump split Iowa and New Hampshire, or if one of them won both? Three conditions would need to be met.

First, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Trump would need to have fundamentally limited appeal, so limited that it could not be overcome even by resounding success in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Obviously, there is danger for Mr. Rubio here. Either candidate could roll to the nomination, the way John Kerry did in 2004 or John McCain did in 2008.

But in general, pundits and analysts tend to overestimate the potential for early-state victories to catapult candidates to the nomination. Momentum helps candidates reach their potential, and in the case of candidates who possess the broad appeal and elite backing necessary to win the nomination, that can be enough. But early wins don’t let candidates overcome their limitations.

It’s something we’ve seen over and over again in recent years. A win in Iowa helped Mike Huckabee win evangelicals for the rest of the race, but it didn’t help him win more secular voters. In 2012, Mitt Romney was a very close second in Iowa and won New Hampshire, and yet still couldn’t break through in South Carolina, where religious conservatives reign, as they do throughout the South. And then of course there was Barack Obama, who won a long string of primaries and caucuses in 2008 and then still ran into a wall of traditionally more moderate and conservative Democratic voters in the South and Appalachia, narrowly holding off Hillary Clinton.

So Mr. Cruz could win Iowa, Mr. Trump could win New Hampshire, and there would still be plenty of room for a candidate who could appeal to the supporters who remain: the party’s mainstream conservative and moderate voters and elites.

The second condition is that Mr. Rubio would need to fill the void and emerge as the natural candidate for those more mainstream conservative voters and donors. The easiest way to do it would be to beat those who are in the more moderate lane — Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and John Kasich — by a clear margin in New Hampshire, either outright forcing them out of the race or encouraging the party’s voters, donors and leaders to coalesce behind his candidacy. He could do this, even while losing the state to Mr. Trump, simply by outperforming the rest of the field by a wide enough margin.

But Mr. Rubio has only a modest lead over Mr. Christie, Mr. Bush and Mr. Kasich in New Hampshire. Any of them could overtake him. All three candidates are paying more attention to the state than Mr. Rubio. And while Mr. Rubio may be a natural choice for mainstream conservatives, he is not such a great fit for moderate and independent voters — the type who supported Mr. McCain in 2000 and 2008, and Ron Paul or Jon Huntsman in 2012. And those kinds of voters are overrepresented in the state.

The third condition is that Mr. Rubio would need to hang on until more favorable states on March 8 and particularly March 15, because he probably won’t be doing much winning before then.

The Republican primary calendar is front-loaded with relatively conservative and Southern states, which makes it very hard for a candidate in Mr. Rubio’s position to finesse an early win.

There’s precedent for a candidate to wait it out until a more favorable stage of the calendar, and that candidate also happens to be someone who didn’t win Iowa or New Hampshire: Bill Clinton. He won just three of the first 14 contests before Super Tuesday in 1992, when the South voted for a favored son by a tremendous margin.

To manage something similar, Mr. Rubio would need to do well in relatively favorable states like Nevada, Massachusetts, Colorado, Vermont and Virginia. He would need to do well enough to stay competitive in the hard delegate math, preventing either Mr. Trump or Mr. Cruz from amassing a clear majority of delegates.

From the standpoint of delegates, he would need to start winning on March 15. He would be counting on Florida, his winner-take-all home state, and either Ohio, another winner-take-all state, or Illinois, which has unusual delegate rules that make it pretty close to a winner-take-all state if a candidate wins by a modest margin.

If he were to win Florida and either Illinois or Ohio (or both), he would enter the second half of the primary season in a reasonable position. He wouldn’t be assured of victory (or even a majority of delegates), but the mainstream of the Republican Party would probably see he was worth the investment. He could restock his war chest and go on to fight for the predominantly Democratic-leaning states that make up the final three months of the primary calendar.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: How Rubio Could Win Despite Losing Early States. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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