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As the bruising Republican primary fight moves south, the rivalry between Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio is nearing a turning point. Rubio's advisers see South Carolina as something close to make-or-break after a disastrous fifth-place showing in the New Hampshire deeply wounded his candidacy. Bush, whose campaign has found new life in recent days, is trying to notch his second consecutive victory over Rubio - something his team hopes would sideline his rival as competition in the center-right lane. Indeed, while Donald Trump and Ted Cruz duel for first, the battle between these Floridians has become a primary of its...

Two days after the New Hampshire primary, Jeb Bush's top aides are leveling a sharp accusation at Marco Rubio's campaign team. In an internal memo distributed to top aides Thursday morning, Bush campaign manager Danny Diaz argues that Rubio's staffers use "questionable tactics." -snip- Diaz does not single out any of Rubio's staffers specifically - the memo seems intended more to lay the groundwork for future accusations. But he points to a recent mailer that a pro-Rubio Super PAC released last week in New Hampshire that invoked Bush's mother, former first lady Barbara Bush. The mailer showed a doctored photograph...

With the hours counting down until the New Hampshire primary, tensions between the Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush campaigns are intensifying. On Sunday afternoon, Bush campaign manager Danny Diaz convened top aides for an afternoon conference call in which he told them to expect "dirty tricks" from the Rubio campaign in the run-up to voting here, according to one source on the call. The source said Diaz, a hard-charging veteran operative, was not more specific.

With negative ads being lobbed at their candidate from all sides, the "super PAC" supporting Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Conservative Solutions PAC, is broadcasting a spot calling Jeb Bush "Not the Answer." On Screen The famed (or infamous) exclamation point in the "Jeb!" logo switches to a question mark as the narrator asks, "What happened to Jeb Bush?" Stacks of televisions looking like a department store display each broadcast a different image of Mr. Bush. "He spent millions praising himself," the narrator says, "and his campaign tanked." A nail-biting image of Mr. Bush fills the screen. The words "Dishonest"...

The battle between Jeb Bush's and his former protege Marco Rubio is heating up for the GOP presidential nomination, but Rubio said Tuesday that he and the ex-governor will continue to be friends. "It's a political campaign," the junior Florida senator told Fox News' "Fox and Friends" program, explaining that on a personal level their relations are "not strained at all. I continue to like Jeb very much, and as I said, we'll continue to be friends."

There was a time in my life when I was a campaign communications consultant, responsible for helping political campaigns come up with new and intriguing ways to engage voters using digital media. There is a reason I don't do it anymore, and that reason is, because no matter how many times I or any of my colleages explained that most Republican consultants had the pop culture knowledge of 80 year old men and couldn't find a connection to Millennials if they were accosted by an entire room of Urban Outfitters employees, they still produced things like this. Though, in fairness,...

Right to Rise, the "super PAC" supporting Jeb Bush, has released its third advertisement criticizing Senator Marco Rubio, this time attacking him over immigration. The ad is called "Vane" - no doubt a deliberate homophone. On Screen The ad opens on a picture-perfect scene of a rural barn, then zooms in on a weather vane on the roof, in the form of a smiling Mr. Rubio, one hand insouciantly in his pocket, the other pointing west - or is it east? As a swirling wind blows this way and that, Mr. Rubio reverses himself again and again. Over the faint...

The super PAC supporting Jeb Bush released a new TV ad entitled "Vane" on Monday - a 30-second spot that attacks Sen. Marco Rubio for changing his position on immigration reform and supporting "amnesty." Politico reports that the ad was first reported by the Washington Examiner on Monday and noted that the spot opened with an animation of Rubio shown as weathervane atop a barn who shifts with the "political winds." "Marco Rubio: He ran for Senate saying he opposed amnesty," the ad says. "Then he flipped and worked with liberal Chuck Schumer to co-author the path to citizenship. He...

To be precise, it's his Super PAC, Right to Rise, that's responsible for this. One of the criticisms of Jeb after he feebly attacked Rubio for his Senate absences was that he was forced to hit Rubio on a minor liability because he wasn't well positioned to hit him on a major one. After all, how could Jeb Bush, who (in)famously described border-hopping as an "act of love" and who so identifies with Hispanic Americans that he once erroneously described himself as one on a voter registration form, possibly go after Rubio for his Gang of Eight work? Poor Jeb...

Jeb Bush's super PAC is slamming Republican rival Marco Rubio on the contentious issue of illegal immigration and amnesty. The 30-second ad by Right to Rise USA, called "Vane," depicts Rubio as a weather vane turning in the wind.

Jeb Bush has virtually no chance of winning the Iowa caucuses - but his team wants to make sure Marco Rubio doesn't do too well there either. On Tuesday, the Bush-allied Super PAC Right to Rise USA released a new negative ad attacking Rubio - and, according to the Des Moines Register's Jennifer Jacobs, the ad will air on Iowa television. The ad itself is a pretty misleading attack on Rubio for missing a Senate briefing on terrorism to fundraise (Rubio actually attended a similar briefing days earlier, one that included classified information). What is interesting about the ad, though,...

-snip- Rubio's campaign spokesman, Alex Conant, also called the pro-Bush ad "sad" and factually incorrect on one of the national-security hearings it highlighted. "Bush's team dishonestly omits that Marco is on the Senate's Intelligence Committee, where he attended the highest-level briefings on the Paris attacks," Conant said in a statement. "No other candidate for president has received more classified Intelligence briefings or better understands the threats facing our nation today than Marco. It's sad to see Jeb's 'joyful' campaign reduced to such intellectual dishonesty." Bush's super PAC, or political action committee, is legally required to be independent of his campaign,...

A new ad from the Jeb Bush super PAC hits Marco Rubio for missing votes and key national security meetings in Washington. "Politics first, that's the Rubio way," a narrator says. The ad will run in Iowa for the next two weeks at a cost of $1.4 million, according to Right to Rise. The ad is the hardest-hitting yet from Right to Rise and is bound to stir new tension between the opposing camps. Rubio has one of the worst attendance records of any current senator.

If there was any doubt that one of the storylines to watch in Tuesday night's Republican presidential debate will be the intensifying battle between Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, it should be gone after a sequence of events that entangled the two campaigns Monday night. After the New York Times reported that the pro-Bush super PAC Right to Rise USA has filmed an attack video claiming Rubio's hard-line stance on abortion makes him unelectable and its top strategist has shown a willingness to unleash as much as $20 million worth of ads targeting the Florida senator, Rubio's campaign tried to...

Aides to Jeb Bush and the super PAC backing him are so freaked out and betrayed by Sen. Marco Rubio's rise in the Republican presidential polls and Bush's decline, they are setting aside up to $20 million to sink Rubio's campaign and previewing an attack ad criticizing Bush's former protege as too extreme on abortion to get elected president, report Maggie Haberman and Michael Barbaro at The New York Times, citing at least three people "privy to" discussions and preparations in the Bush camp. Bush and Rubio are facing off in a Republican debate on Tuesday, and given how poorly...

The Marco Rubio campaign is making the most out of the blockbuster story in today's New York Times about the Jeb Bush campaign about to go nuclear on Rubio. Specifically, Right to Rise, Bush's super PAC, is apparently ready to spend $20 million in attacking Rubio. "Part of running for president is you have to put your big boy pants on and get vetted on the issues, so we know we don't have a dud candidate running against Hillary Clinton," Right to Rise chief strategist Mike Murphy told the Times. Forget whether the strategy makes any sense - who could...

Republican senators are coming around to the view that Jeb Bush is unlikely to win the party's nomination for president and that freshman Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) is the most viable prospect for the general election. Rubio has had plenty of support among Beltway pundits since the outset of his campaign but Bush's poor performance in the last Republican debate, together with his declining poll numbers, have begun to shift sentiment in even the upper echelons of the GOP's establishment. "Marco's in the driver's seat. There's a lot of disappointment in Bush's performance," said one Republican senator, who requested anonymity...

One of Florida's top GOP fundraisers officially quits Bush team, signals shift to Rubio. Jeb Bush's decision to attack old friend and new rival Marco Rubio is backfiring, pushing important supporters to criticize the campaign's tactics and driving one of Florida’s top fundraisers to officially quit and signal a shift in allegiance to the senator. "I think the world of Jeb Bush. He was a great governor of Florida and is a really good person, but the campaign has hijacked his message" said Brian Ballard, a Tallahassee lobbyist who contributed more than $25,000 of his own money and has raised...

Republican presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio are butting heads over Rubio's Senate attendance record. The tensions between the two Floridians boiled over at last Wednesday's GOP debate, when Bush said Rubio should either be present for his Senate votes or simply resign. Rubio came away from the controversy largely unscathed, and Bush's self-admitted subpar debate performance has caused some to openly wonder if his campaign has staying power. Flash back to just five years ago, when Rubio was first elected to Congress, and Bush introduced the senator-elect with praise and admiration that he has, for obvious reasons, not...

One of the wealthiest and most influential Republican donors in the country is throwing his support to Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a decision that could swing millions of dollars in contributions behind Mr. Rubio at a critical point in the Republican nominating battle. The decision by the donor, Paul Singer, a billionaire New York investor, is a signal victory for Mr. Rubio in his battle with his rival Jeb Bush for the affections of major Republican patrons and the party's business wing. -snip- Last week, Mr. Bush's campaign manager, Danny Diaz, and senior adviser, Sally Bradshaw, flew to New...