Marco Rubio’s super PAC casts Trump as Voldemort (and who is Harry Potter?)

Is Sen. Marco Rubio the candidate who lived?

A memo equating Rubio with Harry Potter -- and Donald Trump with evil Lord Voldemort -- was sent to donors by a super PAC supporting Rubio’s presidential candidacy, Politico reports.

The group, Conservative Solutions PAC, sent the message the day after Rubio’s second-place finish in the South Carolina primary. Rubio, who is a Republican senator from Florida, narrowly beat Sen. Ted Cruz, but lost badly to Republican front-runner Trump.

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“In Harry Potter lore, Voldemort, the Dark Lord, had a secret to his strength. His secret was his horcruxes,” the fundraising memo read. “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.”

In the “Harry Potter” books, “horcruxes” are objects that contain a part of an evil wizard’s soul. The wizard can’t die unless all of his horcruxes are destroyed.

“Like Voldemort’s horcruxes, the large candidate field shields Trump from harm,” the memo went on to explain. “At each step of the primary process, Trump is losing his shields, and that is making him more vulnerable.”

The horcruxes, in this analogy, would be Republican contenders who have dropped out -- first New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and, after the South Carolina primary, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

The memo didn’t go so far as to put Rubio in owl-eyed glasses and a boy-wizard uniform, but the Wall Street Journal writes that the super PAC made a clear implication. “Extending this analogy puts Marco Rubio in the role of Harry Potter,” they noted, probably needlessly.

Despite the somewhat tortured metaphor, the super PAC insisted they weren’t comparing Trump to Lord Voldemort: “Note: we are not calling Donald Trump evil. This is an analogy, not a direct comparison.”

Others have been more than willing to compare Trump to Voldemort, however, including J.K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” books.

Actually, Rowling took the comparison several steps further. In December, she tweeted a link to a BBC article suggesting the real estate magnate and the evil wizard had more than a few things in common.

“How horrible,” Rowling commented. “Voldemort was nowhere near as bad.”

The super PAC’s memo has brought out the inner nerd in several political observers. In Vox, journalist Libby Nelson said the message was a “poor analogy” for the presidential race.

“While it’s true Rubio needs to defeat Kasich, Sen. Ted Cruz, and Dr. Ben Carson — whom the email accused of being horcruxes — to get the nomination, it is extremely unlikely that Trump has actually embedded pieces of his soul in their bodies,” Nelson wrote.

“The good news for Rubio is that horcruxes lodged in living creatures can be destroyed by killing the host,” she explained further, “so he’d merely have to murder his rivals instead of seeking out a basilisk or the sword of Gryffindor and destroying the horcruxes — all before Trump’s lead in the delegate count becomes bulletproof.”

The next Republican nomination contest is Tuesday in Nevada. Polls show Lord Voldemort leading Harry Potter there by at least 20 points.

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