By his own admission, Republican Marco Rubio should have retired from the U.S. Senate years ago, following his flop of a presidential run (the man lost his home state). “That’s why I’m missing votes,” he told The Washington Post in October 2015. “Because I am leaving the Senate.” He was basically phoning it by that time, missing floor votes for nearly a month at a time. He was “frustrated” by the job, he said.
But shameless to his core, he reneged on that promise and used the tragic Pulse mass shooting as his excuse to stay in the U.S. Senate. Rubio is now running for a third term for the job he couldn’t complain enough about. While new polling shows that he maintains a lead against his likely Democratic challenger, Rep. Val Demings, “what’s interesting is that he’s sort of stalled out,” a pollster says.
RELATED STORY: Marco Rubio's anti-LGBT record continues on, following defense of Florida GOP's 'Don't Say Gay' bill
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The polling results, conducted by Center Street and reported by Florida Politics, show Rubio leading Demings 50%-42% among likely voters in the state. But the report said that “when polling all Florida voters, the race was closer, with Rubio at 45% and Demings at 40%. The results when compared to the centrist organization’s last poll in March also showed Demings with the momentum, with a 13% swing in her favor among registered voters.”
What’s also working in Demings’ favor is that no one is particularly excited about Rubio, the report continued. Perhaps voters are saying that they want their elected officials to do more than just tweet Bible verses? (By the way, Slate reported back in 2018 how Rubio was fucking that up too, noting he used the Bible to bash survivors of the Stoneman Douglas High School when in reality the scripture was critical of failed leaders, like him).
“The other issue is that there’s no constituency that’s particularly excited about Rubio,” Center Street Co-Founder Jacob Perry told Florida Politics. “Democrats obviously don’t like him, but neither do Trump Republicans. Val outraised him two to one, but also outspent him, and that spending really paid off in building her Awareness numbers.” Per the report, Demings raised more than $12 million in the second quarter of 2022.
The Demings campaign has pointed to Rubio getting advertising help from the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC), saying the senator “has continued to lose momentum and enthusiasm, and he’s had to call in Rick Scott and the NRSC in a desperate attempt to save his campaign.” Scott’s committee has continued to push racist, anti-immigrants ads in its efforts to elect more Senate Republicans. Scott himself has gotten awfully close to echoing the kind of xenophobic shit spewed by racist mass murderers, too.
Rubio would probably wag his finger at me for any suggestion that his colleagues are pushing a racist agenda and say that Democrats are unserious people pushing a “woke” agenda, or that he’s too busy working for Floridians to take any of this seriously. But what did Marco do after a racist mass shooter shot up Black shoppers in Buffalo, and shot Latino schoolchildren in Uvalde? He fired off a letter complaining about drag queens.
Rubio also turned his back on the immigrant communities he once claimed he championed. The Florida Immigrant Coalition Votes (FLIC Votes) this past spring noted that Rubio once touted a pro-immigrant voicemail left by his late mother, where she pleaded with him to not “mess with the immigrants. They are human beings just like us.” Rubio, to his credit, co-authored the 2013 comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the U.S. Senate, but was blocked by then-Speaker John Boehner. Rubio then disowned the bill.
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