Following the GOP golden boy‘s second place finish at the Republican primary in South Carolina on Saturday, a Super PAC supporting the presidential ambitions of junior Florida Senator Marco Rubio published a very interesting memo on Sunday. “Interesting” because, due largely to the fact that Donald Trump won the primary by 10 points, it targeted the Republican frontrunner with a Harry Potter analogy.
According to Politico, Warren Tompkins and Jon Lerner of Conservative Solutions emailed supporters with a series of arguments likening neither actor Daniel Radcliffe nor author J.K. Rowling‘s character as-written to Potter, but their very own Mr. Rubio. Why? Not so much because of the candidate and the boy wizard’s shared youth, but because Rubio is the best weapon against Trump’s Lord Voldemort. Because of course Trump is Voldemort in this scenario.
“In Harry Potter lore, Voldemort, the Dark Lord, had a secret to his strength. His secret was his horcruxes,” they wrote. “As each horcrux was destroyed, Voldemort became increasingly vulnerable, not increasingly strong. When all of the horcruxes were gone, Voldemort lost his one-on-one battle with Harry Potter.”
Tompkins and Lerner provided a brief explanation to their readers about the fictional Harry Potter universe in order for their later Rubio/Potter and Trump/Voldemort comparisons to make sense. Once the foundation was laid, however, the Super PAC used it to argue that Rubio would eventually defeat Trump in a political one-on-one contest after the other Republican presidential hopefuls had subsided.
“The data consistently and overwhelmingly shows Trump with the highest unfavorables among the remaining candidates, and that he is the last choice of more voters than any other Republican by far,” they write. “Like Voldemort’s horcruxes, the large candidate field shields Trump from harm. At each step of the primary process, Trump is losing his shields, and that is making him more vulnerable.”
Then again, considering that many of Trump and Rubio’s constituents think of something like The Witch whenever someone brings up the wizarding world of Harry Potter, Tompkins and Lerner’s explanation was probably more of a preemptive fire retardant.
(Via Politico)