Why It’s Too Soon for Mitt Romney to Endorse Marco Rubio

(Slate) - It doesn’t take many mental contortions to figure out whom Mitt Romney would support in a three-way race between Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz, and Sen. Marco Rubio. Obviously he would support none of them, because Romney is waiting for the three to end up in a deadlocked convention from which Romney emerges the consensus nominee. Just kidding, sort of. The dude wants to endorse Rubio, and it’s only a matter of time.

How about this weekend? Romney convincingly won the New Hampshire primary in 2012 and owns a proper gentleman’s lakeside estate in Wolfeboro. He remains popular in the state and could give Rubio, already rising in New Hampshire and elsewhere, the surge he needs to overtake Trump—and effectively put Trump to bed for good.

Romney supposedly had no plans to endorse prior to the New Hampshire primary but opened himself to a last-minute change of mind after witnessing Rubio’s strong Iowa performance. He has since been crunching the numbers to determine whether his endorsement would shift enough votes to push Rubio over the top. “Romney,” CNN reports, “has a trademark reaction to such talk: Is there data to support the argument that Rubio is in play to defeat Trump in New Hampshire?”

Well? There’s more data to support that possibility than there was, say, a few days ago. Rubio is rising and Trump is dipping, but not quite enough to put a scare in Trump, yet. (Let us insert here the standard disclaimer that all polls are cheap and New Hampshire has lots of ornery voters who like to make snap decisions just to mess with people.) Rubio is most generously about 10 percentage points off of Trump’s pace. In other words, Rubio is just close enough to make this decision agonizing for a worrywart like Romney. Read more.