“It was bizarre, man, why did he keep saying the same thing over and over and over?” said a GOP operative who is close to Rubio’s Washington-based campaign team. “It was like looking at your iPhone and the video freezes and says it’s buffering. Weird.”…

Added one top adviser to another one of Rubio’s GOP presidential rivals. “He’s anal, he’s a planner and the way to get under his skin is to knock him off script,” the aide said. “He doesn’t react well when circumstances shift. Christie is a bully and understands that instinctively just as [Donald] Trump gets Jeb’s weakness.”…

Rubio managed to raise a solid $500,000 online after the debate — but Harris’s pep talk did little to reassure the party’s establishment elites. Rubio’s finance operation is aggressively trying to court Bush donors to make the case that voters are coalescing around the Florida Republican and he would be the establishment lane candidate. But Rubio’s subpar debate performance has all but stopped any of that momentum. One veteran Republican bundler said the donor class would be “frozen in place” now until after Tuesday’s primary.