Rubio: Cruz is the Super Tuesday loser

Presidential contender Marco Rubio is mocking rival Ted Cruz’s Super Tuesday results, arguing the GOP senator’s wins in Texas and Oklahoma are nothing special.

“Tonight was supposed to be his big night,” Rubio said on Fox News. “This was supposed to be the night Ted Cruz won five states. He ended up winning his home state and sharing delegates in the neighboring state of Oklahoma.”

{mosads}That’s one more win than Rubio garnered; he took the Minnesota caucuses but nothing else on Tuesday.

Still, Rubio said he didn’t claim he would “clean house” on Super Tuesday.

Cruz has eyed March 1 as a critical day for his campaign for some time. The Texas senator long believed his conservative brand of politics would be popular with voters in the South.

Instead, party front-runner Donald Trump beat Cruz in Alabama, Arkansas and Georgia, as well as in Tennessee. He also won the South Carolina primary last month.

Still, Cruz was able to win his home state as well as Oklahoma.

Rubio noted that this is still the “proportional stage” of the contest, so “no one is taking home all of the delegates.”

And the Florida senator said that his campaign “was not built” to succeed on Super Tuesday in the way Cruz’s was.

“Cruz was arguing that Super Tuesday was his firewall,” Rubio said. “Ted Cruz’s campaign was he’d win Iowa, South Carolina and sweep Super Tuesday — look at the states coming up now, they’re states where he won’t do well and we will. Now the map starts to look really good for our campaign.”

Rubio is now turning his sights on must-win contest in his home state of Florida, a winner-take-all contest with 99 delegates up for grabs.

Polling shows Trump with a big lead there, but Rubio said the public opinion surveys are not accurate.

“I don’t believe he’s up by 20 points and in fact I know he’s not,” Rubio said. “Secondly he was up by 20 points in Virginia and after just five days of pointing out to people that he’s a con artist, he went from 20 points up to barely beating me in a state where if I didn’t have to share the ballot with other people, I would have won.”