On January 7, Rubio defended his record by arguing that votes were "precooked" and votes were used to "make a statement." Rubio participated in the January 28 Fox News debate, charging Cruz with building his campaign on "the lie" stemming from his stance on immigration and insisting in Jeb Bush's book "" that the latter changed his "position on immigration". January 29, during an interview the following day, Rubio was confident about his chances in Iowa, though did not deny that Ted Cruz was the frontrunner since by Rubio's admission, "He’s spent basically all of his money in Iowa." Rubio finished in third place in the Iowa caucus on February 1. Though polling had shown him in third place prior to the caucus, the result was still treated as a surprisingly strong showing. Amber Phillips of "The Washington Post" wrote of Rubio's performance, "He over-performed expectations, and for that, Rubio perhaps almost as much as Cruz can call Monday a win." After being projected in third place, Rubio said in a speech that he had defied expectations and swore that when he was the nominee of the election cycle, "we are going to unify this party, and we are going to unify the conservative movement". A little over a week after the primary, on February 10, Rubio accused Cruz of having misled voters through claiming fellow candidate Ben Carson would be ending his campaign in what he called "a concerted effort that I'm sure they planned to execute on something in order to influence the election." Going into New Hampshire, Rubio by February 5, four days after the Iowa victory, was polling at an average of 16%. This placed him in second place, behind Trump. At the New Hampshire debate on February 6, 2016, Rubio was criticized by Christie for repeating memorized speeches, to which Rubio replied by repeating four times a statement to the effect that President Obama was destroying America. Rubio defended these remarks the following day, saying with respect to the statement that Obama "knows exactly what he's doing" that "It's what I believe and it's what I'm going to continue to say, because it happens to be one of the main reasons why I am running." Rubio came in fifth place during the New Hampshire primary on February 9. Shortly afterward, Rubio admitted to supporters that he was disappointed and concluded that his debate performance three days prior had not helped him in the state. Chris Christie, who came in sixth place behind Rubio, dropped out the following day. Rubio responded to his ended candidacy by praising him.