Needing a breakthrough, Marco Rubio brings presidential campaign to Dallas

At the beginning of Marco Rubio’s rally in Dallas, a heckler shouted anti-Semitic remarks at the Republican presidential candidate.

“I’ve seen Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz”, Connie Peterson, a retired 74-year-old Republican, said Wednesday at a Rubio event in Marshalltown.

The overwhelming majority of House Republicans supporting Rubio so far voted for the legislation that President Barack Obama signed into law, but some lawmakers who voted in favor of it said they did so at the time because there was no viable path forward for any more expansive program.

Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich want nothing more than to be the viable alternative to the runaway Trump train.

“It’s very easy for someone in Congress to say I’m against illegal immigration but offer no ideas. And when an issue changes, so must your policies”.

“ISIS is trying to use our legal immigration system against us”, he said.

While Rubio isn’t jettisoning the hopeful message of reviving the American dream that endeared him to many center-right Republicans, he’s now alternating it with a more ominous one. He called for term limits on Congress and federal judges; insisted on no amnesty for undocumented immigrants; and had a message for veterans.

Rubio believes the Constitution as it was originally written.

Rubio told the crowd of several hundred packed into the Westin Hotel ballroom that Clinton was a bad secretary of state.

Rubio, who is lagging behind Cruz in the polls, has been more forceful in criticizing Cruz while they’ve crisscrossed Iowa.

He’s a top tier candidate, and when you look at the polling averages by Real Clear Politics, he’s in the top three not only in Iowa, but in New Hampshire and SC. If Trump drops as a factor, it’s possible some of his supporters could go to Cruz to lift him another 6 to 10 points for a scrappy, slim win in the Granite State.

And heaven help Obama if he had run an ad about what it meant to grow up as a person of color in the United States.

Heath Cheek is the chairman of the group Young Professionals for Rubio in Dallas. You are surrounded 115 hours a day by people carrying smartphones whose only job and passion is to know instantaneously any time anything of any significance is said about you online.

The state is an uphill battle for the Florida senator, one he’ll have to fight against a Texas senator and other candidates with Texas ties.

“He represents a generational shift”.

LARRY WARNELL: It could be because in the last couple elections, number ones have never finished, I don’t think.

Wilson says Rubio may be in the sweet spot between ideological purity and electability. Marco Rubio probably won’t either. “He has credibility among conservatives, but he’s not so stridently conservative that alienates people in the middle”.

Rubio, who is running for president, was responding to a question about missing Senate votes in recent years.

A victory in Iowa for a Republican candidate driven by the evangelical wing of the party should come as a shock to no one.