Just a month ago, Marco Rubio tweeted, "I have only said like 10000 times I will be a private citizen in January." And yet on Wednesday, Rubio announced that he would reverse his longstanding promise not to seek re-election and would in fact run for a second term in the Senate. There's only one way to reconcile these two statements: Marco Rubio is predicting he will lose.
And he very well might. While several competitors in the GOP primary bowed out in the wake of this news (Rubio's "real good friend," Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, up and quit the race, and Rep. Ron DeSantis will run for re-election; Rep. David Jolly said he'd do the same last week), one major obstacle remains in Rubio's way: Wealthy businessman Carlos Beruff, aka the Donald Trump of Florida politics.
Beruff, a raging nativist in precisely the Trump mold, has already spent $4 million of his own money on the race and has reportedly said he's ready to shell out as much as $15 million more. (Another rich candidate, Todd Wilcox, is also insisting he’ll stay put, but he hasn’t spent nearly as freely.) Beruff’s campaign has also scathingly questioned Rubio's honor, demanding to know whether the senator will commit to serving a full six-year term—and thus not run for president again in 2020.
Rubio, of course, has refused to say anything of the sort, since this about-face is designed to further his own personal ambitions, not serve the people of Florida. In fact, Rubio’s barely making any effort to hide what he’s up to: The New York Times reports that Rubio has told “colleagues and advisers” that he concluded it would be harder to run for president a second time from the private sector.
But Rubio did say, in attempting to explain his reversal, that he wants to remain in the Senate because he finds Donald Trump "worrisome," despite the fact that he'd previously pledged to support his party's nominee. Rubio's not so good with the promises, clearly, but this kind of triangulation is an even bigger problem, because it won't play well in the primary.
Beruff will be eager to turn this race into a replay of Trump vs. Rubio, and that’s not a battle Rubio wants to repeat. Indeed, Rubio has yet to recover from his 46-27 drubbing at the hands of Trump here three months ago: A recent PPP poll gave Rubio an abysmal 44-42 job approval rating with Republicans.
Yet even if Rubio survives the primary (he did, upon his re-entry, instantly earn the Club for Growth's endorsement, so he's got that going for him), there's still the general election to fret about. A new Quinnipiac poll finds Rubio leading his likeliest Democratic opponent, Rep. Patrick Murphy, by a 47-40 margin, but that gap is mostly reflective of Rubio's broad name recognition. (Murphy, by contrast, beats Beruff 43-31.) And that gap may not even exist: A pair of PPP polls conducted this month found Murphy ahead of Rubio by a point. The newest one also gave Rubio an atrocious 30-49 approval score with all Florida voters.
And as Murphy has pointed out, he announced his own Senate bid last year before Rubio declared for president—when, in other words, it was still possible that Rubio might forego a White House run and seek re-election instead. Even if that was never especially likely, Murphy still had to be prepared for that contingency, and his choice showed he wasn't afraid to risk his own promising House career to take on an incumbent senator.
But it's looking like the smart choice. Murphy will not only have the benefit of presidential-year turnout, he'll also have Donald Trump working overtime on his behalf to juice Latino turnout. Funny how Trump could screw Rubio in both the primary and the general in completely opposite ways, isn't it? Rubio may have ultimately concluded that his shot at the Republican presidential nomination four years from now depends on him preserving this seat for the GOP, but his odds of keeping his dreams alive are no better than even. Daily Kos Elections is holding fast to our rating of Tossup, and we would be entirely unsurprised to see Rubio lose for a second time this year.
