Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio 2016 Rivalry Gets Ugly
The rivalry between 2016 GOP presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio are getting uglier by the minute as the two strive to gain traction over other Republican candidates in the race.
Before, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio regarded each other with mutual respect. But now, the Florida Republican presidential candidates are already starting to regard each other as a threat to their political goals and have begun to heat up the verbal attacks against each other, according to AOL.
Nowadays, Bush is likening Rubio's beginnings to that of U.S. President Barack Obama. Rubio, on the other hand, is targeting the Bush family's long political background. And the rising popularity of GOP rivals Donald Trump and Ben Carson only served to heat up the Bush-Rubio fight even more, Latin Post reports.
For Bush, Rubio has not proven his leadership skills during his first term in the Senate. But he is also frustrated that Rubio continues to rise in recent polls, the report adds.
"We've got a president that the American people supported based on the fact that he was an eloquent guy," AOL quotes Bush's statement in Iowa the previous week. "And he had nothing in his background that would suggest he could lead."
On Thursday, Bush's team announced that they have managed to raise $13.4 million in the previous quarter. Just a few moments after, Rubio's team countered this by saying it has almost $11 million in store and Bush only has $10 million, the report details.
However, Bush campaign spokesperson Tim Miller pointed out that Rubio cannot access $1 million of his funds, unless he will top the GOP nomination. In a Twitter post, he said Rubio lied about his budgets — a habit that Miller implied as a common practice in the Senate.
Both Bush and Rubio are fighting to win the votes of the same group of people and both have strong standings with Hispanic voters. They even speak Spanish fluently. However, real estate mogul Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson remain the top contenders in the primary campaign.