The battle for the Republican nomination appeared more splintered than ever between two halves of a bitterly divided party as several candidates scrambled Friday to consolidate the support of more moderate conservatives after a raucous debate.
With Donald J. Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz finally now engaged in an open feud for the most disillusioned voters, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, were fighting to win over a group of more traditional Republicans who are showing little sign of coalescing around any single candidate.
This fracture was most vividly apparent in New Hampshire, where Bush and Rubio campaigned Friday, and polls show that no one is emerging as the obvious alternative to Trump or Cruz, two candidates that many Republicans fear would doom their party in the general election.
The jockeying to become that alternative has opened up the harshest and most antagonistic phase of the Republican presidential race yet.
Rubio, who in the earlier phase of his campaign vowed to remain above any intraparty bickering, took aim at Cruz and Christie in separate attacks Friday.
Questioning Cruz’s devotion to conservative principles, he said on Fox News, “The only thing consistent is the consistent political calculation.” He added, “So don’t run as a consistent conservative if in fact you have consistently calculated your position. And that’s what he’s done.”
Speaking later to voters in Derry, New Hampshire, Rubio was more theatrical, whipping out a piece of paper from his pocket to read verbatim a quote from Christie in support of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal Supreme Court appointee of President Barack Obama’s.
“I support her appointment to the Supreme Court and urge the Senate to keep politics out of the process,” Rubio read from the page, adding sarcastically, “That sounds like support.”
“Let me be very clear and very blunt,” he continued. “When I am president of the United States, we are not appointing justices like that to the Supreme Court.”
The pressure on Rubio to break out as the choice of Republicans who cannot stomach the thought of voting for Cruz of Trump is growing. He trails Trump and Cruz in Iowa, and polls show a tight race with Cruz in New Hampshire and South Carolina. While he has won backing from some of the Republican Party’s wealthiest and most influential donors, he has not yet charted a clear path to winning the nomination.
As he campaigned Friday, he presented himself as the person who could best stitch back together a divided party.
“We can elect someone that is angry and frustrated about what Barack Obama has done to America,” he said, a nod to Trump and Cruz’s angrier appeals. “But also someone that knows what to do about it, to fix it, someone who will unite our party and also attract new people to our cause.”
Bush, who lags behind Rubio in national polls as well as those in Iowa and New Hampshire, made his own play Friday to be the alternative to Trump and Cruz.
Speaking in North Charleston, South Carolina, he announced the endorsement from the state’s senior senator and one of his former rivals in the race, Lindsey Graham. Graham extolled him as a sensible and steady choice who has not given into anger and despair.
“He’s the one guy to push back against Donald’s demagoguery at a time when somebody needs to push back,” he said.
Talking to reporters after the event, though, Graham was more sober about Bush’s prospects with a Republican electorate that seems to have little appetite for candidates advocating conciliation. And he confessed he did not know whether a party so divided could repair itself in time to win the White House.
“I don’t know if he’ll win; I want him to win,” said the senator, adding: “I don’t know how it’s going to end for the party.”
In Republican circles, many see the division in the center-right coalition part of Bush’s own doing. There has been a bitter debate lately whether his strategy of trying to take out Rubio is futile and ultimately destructive to both men. Bush reserved much of his fire for Trump during the debate and in his remarks Friday morning.
But as Bush prepared to leave South Carolina to campaign in New Hampshire later in the day, his super PAC ads were running across both states criticizing Rubio for being soft on immigration.
He said he would not be leaving the race anytime soon.
“I’m not a cut-and-run politician,” he said at the news conference with Graham. “I see the fire and I move toward it.”
A Republican contest that has been more national in scope than any in recent history — taking shape in contentious exchanges on the debate stage, in cable television interviews and through taunts and insults on Trump’s Twitter feed — will now narrow into a more local and intimate contest as the candidates focus intensely on the first caucuses in Iowa on Feb. 1 and the first primary in New Hampshire eight days later.
“I’m going to be here so much,” Trump said in Iowa, “you’re going to be sick of me.”