By Jeremy W. Peters

New York Times

MIAMI >> Confident just two weeks ago that he could win Ohio and cement his path to the Republican nomination, Sen. Marco Rubio now plans to spend almost no time or money there at all. He is resigned to hunting for smaller prizes like Puerto Rico, where he will campaign this weekend.

He talks of driving around the country asking for votes in his pickup truck if it comes to that.

And his senior aides, who once spoke in a self-assured way about the race quickly narrowing to a two-man contest between Rubio and Donald Trump, now privately concede that will never happen. Their most plausible road ahead, if there is one, is through a second or third ballot at the Republican National Convention — something that has not happened since 1948.

After a string of middling finishes in the Super Tuesday contests, the Rubio campaign’s expectations are catching up with the hard and dire realities of delegate math, a fractured vote and the seemingly unstoppable force that is Trump.

Now, facing the possibility of a humiliating and likely campaign-ending loss here, where Trump leads in polls, Rubio is redirecting his time and resources to Florida, where aides say he will spend most of his time between now and the March 15 winner-take-all primary.

A campaign that has always played a cautious expectations-setting game is now making brash predictions, insisting that there is no way it will lose in Rubio’s home state. He himself left no room for error, declaring Wednesday, “We will win in Florida.”

Rubio’s biggest threat in the state, Trump, has come under an unrelenting assault from the party establishment, with the most extraordinary shot yet coming from Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential candidate. On Thursday Romney urged party members to rally around one of Trump’s rivals, without saying which one.

The Rubio campaign and its allies insist that they have plenty of money to sustain a campaign for the foreseeable future. They have not released figures to back up their confident projections. But people who have been briefed on the fundraising activities of the campaign and the super PAC backing the Florida senator say that money started rolling in after his second-place finish in the South Carolina primary. Terry Sullivan, the campaign manager, even boasted to donors last month that while his finance team might not want him to say so, they had nothing to worry about financially.

The defiance coming from Rubio and his campaign brings new attitude to a candidate always better known for his precision and predictability. Adjusting to that new role has not been without its complications.

In his new turn as Trump’s chief tormentor — Rubio has taunted the real estate mogul, calling him a wimp and saying his business dealings are as fake as his tan — Rubio has struggled to find the right balance between seriousness and silliness.

In finally making their move against Trump, Rubio and his advisers honed a critique of him they believed could cut away at the core of his appeal to the white, blue-collar voters he attracts at the polls: that over the course of his career, Trump has actually hurt the working class. So Rubio went on the attack over the lawsuits against Trump’s education business, Trump University, and over his hiring of foreign and undocumented workers instead of Americans.

But then he veered into taunts about the size of Trump’s hands — a thinly veiled jab at his manhood — and his apparent preference for aggressive self-tanning. And he implied that Trump was not tough, saying that for all his bluster, “This guy has never punched anyone.”

It alarmed some donors, who emailed campaign advisers saying they thought the senator had gone too far.

Even Rubio seemed to sense that he had overdone it. At a rally in Oklahoma on Monday, someone in the crowd shouted out to him to do his bit on Trump’s hands. Rubio sheepishly declined. “We’re not talking about that today,” he said.

Rubio has been unable to break a cycle of surge and setback throughout his campaign. He almost finished ahead of Trump in Iowa, and then crashed in New Hampshire after a debate meltdown. He narrowly beat Sen. Ted Cruz in South Carolina, which Trump won, but three days later he finished a distant second to Trump in Nevada, where he once lived. He basked in a spotlight of media attention as he tore into Trump during a debate last week only to watch him run away with victories from Vermont to Alabama on Tuesday.

Even his best result of Tuesday evening, winning the Minnesota caucuses in his first outright victory in any state, was uninspiring. He received just four more delegates than Cruz, who finished second. And in Ohio, the Rubio campaign and its allied super PAC have reserved no advertising time, according to a Republican advertising executive unaffiliated with any campaign.

And Rubio’s performance on Super Tuesday was not exactly encouraging enough for him to be able to make a strong case that he is entitled to delegates he did not win the first time. Because he failed to reach 20 percent of the vote in Alabama, Texas and Vermont, he was ineligible to receive the bulk of the delegates awarded. He won four in Texas, one in Alabama and none in Vermont. The loss in Alabama was especially stinging. He had campaigned in the state at the last minute and even ribbed Cruz for skipping an event there they had both committed to. Rubio did not win a single county.

The loss in Virginia on Tuesday also hit especially hard. It would have been a symbolic victory proving that Rubio was capable of winning in an important swing state.

In the final days before the vote there, the campaign watched with growing confidence as private polling showed its candidate closing in on Trump. They were two points behind. Then suddenly they were tied.

They tore up their schedule and added four last-minute stops, one in every corner of the state. Aides began telling a close circle of supporters what sounded like a fantasy: They believed they could actually win.

Fantasy it was.

© 2016 The New York Times Company