At Silverton, Rubio repeats he’s the GOP’s unifying force

By Megan Messerly

Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016 | 1:30 p.m.

After campaigning in the north Monday, presidential candidate Marco Rubio closed out three days of campaigning today with an early-morning rally of a couple of hundred supporters at the Silverton, where he stuck to his message saying he's the unifying force of the Republican Party.

“We can’t win if we’re divided. If we’re still fighting with each other — if half the voters in the party say, ‘Well, we nominated someone in the party I don’t like, I’m not going to vote’ — we are going to lose this election,” Rubio told the crowd. “We cannot nominate someone who cannot win because they cannot unite us.”

Rubio pledged that, if chosen as the party’s nominee, he will reach out to hotel workers on the Las Vegas Strip — most of them Democrats and members of the powerful Culinary Union. Rubio said that as a child in Las Vegas, he joined the union’s 1984 labor strike and even called his father a “scab” when he crossed the picket line to return to work at Sam’s Town.

“They park cars here at the valet and they sweep up the floors in the casino and they clean your room after you use it and they serve you your drinks and your food, and they work behind the tables,” Rubio said. “These people that are working here, they haven’t heard from conservatives in a long time.”

Multiple people in the crowd this morning said they were from out of town and were trying to catch as many of the Republican candidates’ events as they could while in Las Vegas — adding a bit of political tourism to their vacations.

Vicki Kwan and her husband Calvin, visiting from Cypress, Calif., said they went to Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s rally Monday night at South Point and Rubio’s rally this morning, and were going to try to make it to retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s town hall at Sun City Summerlin later today. They also plan to attend Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s rally tonight.

Kwan said she was probably going to vote for Rubio in California’s primary June 7, saying that Trump is “very explosive” and that she thinks Cruz is too divisive. Her husband said he’s wavering between Rubio and Cruz.

Rubio will travel to Minnesota and Michigan for rallies there this afternoon. His Nevada campaign will host a watch party with Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison this evening at a pizzeria, which Rubio will not attend. Trump took an oblique shot ar Rubio for that, saying on Twitter this morning, “Unlike the other Republican candidates, I will be in Nevada all day and night - I won’t be fleeing, in and out. I love & invest in Nevada!”

At his rally at South Point on Monday, Trump said he planned to visit some of the caucus sites this evening after a noon rally in Sparks. Cruz is visiting Fernley, Minden and Carson City this morning and afternoon before returning to Las Vegas to watch the results come in.