Once upon a time, way back in September and October, Marco Rubio’s campaign was bragging endlessly about how thrifty they were when it came to travel:
As recently as September, Rubio campaign manager Terry Sullivan bragged that “Marco flies 95 percent commercial, always coach.”
“We just booked a Frontier Airlines flight for him today, which is a special kind of hell for anybody. But we do it because we gotta — we’re gonna put the resources where it matters,” Sullivan said then.
Those days, they have passed.
Rubio has traveled overwhelmingly by chartered jet since the Republican debate held in Milwaukee in mid-November.
Now, Rubio is spending an estimated tens of thousands of dollars every day to keep a Cessna Citation Excel plane by his side. The jet can comfortably sit a half-dozen passengers, with room for a couple more to squeeze on, if needed.
Thing is, even back in the third quarter, those days of flying “95 percent commercial, always coach,” Rubio’s campaign spent more than $270,000 on private jets. Now that the campaign has lost even those questionable bragging rights, the explanation is that Rubio has to travel to a lot of different states and can’t just focus on one state like some other candidates (which boils down to the fact that he doesn’t have a clear shot to win any single state, so to keep himself in play he has to spread his campaigning around).
The turn to private jets so Rubio can get from place to place more efficiently also looks like a late-stage effort to show that he’s working … on anything. He is, after all, a candidate who’s notorious for skipping Senate votes while also—at least until recently—holding fewer campaign events than his competitors. Maybe now he's realized he has some catching up to do, and he won’t be flying Frontier Airlines in that last-minute scramble.