Florida Sen. Marco Rubio edged out Ohio Gov. John Kasich to win the DC Republican caucus on Saturday. GOP frontrunner Donald Trump came in third, while Texas Sen. Ted Cruz finished last.
Rubio won 37 percent of the vote, which took place at the Washington, D.C. Republican Party convention. Kasich fell just short of Rubio, finishing with 34 percent. Trump won 14 percent, while Cruz finished with just 12 percent support.
Rubio won 10 delegates, while Kasich picked up 9. It was Rubio’s largest haul of delegates since Super Tuesday on March 1st.
Rubio is a distant third in the overall race for delegates and faces a do-or-die contest in his home state of Florida on Tuesday. Kasich faces a similar situation in Ohio that day. Both candidates will be happy to secure the delegates from DC.
The two candidates who failed to win any delegates in the DC caucus, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, are also probably happy with the results. Being the choice of DC Republicans is not a popular attribute this year.
Since the beginning of the campaign, candidates who have campaigned openly against Washington and, specifically, the Republican leadership in DC, have enjoyed 60-70 percent support from Republican voters nationwide.
This year, in fact, the losers of the DC Republican caucus may get more campaign mileage out of the loss than those candidates who won delegates.
Rubio and Kasich, however, are not in a position to worry about the optics of winning delegates in DC, especially since both candidates have embraced the Republican establishment.
The DC caucus is when the Republican establishment, literally, gets to cast votes for President. It isn’t suprising then that, in this contest, 72 percent of their vote went with Rubio and Kasich.
It is also not suprising, for those who follow politics very closely, that Cruz came in dead last.
In the DC caucus, the Republican vote truely goes “through the looking glass” from the rest of the country.