Miami — “I loved watching Michael Jordan play basketball, because he could do things with the basketball that were not teachable,” Whit Ayres, a highly regarded Republican pollster, said in between sips of coffee in a downtown D.C. hotel conference room. “Marco Rubio is the Michael Jordan of American politics.”
It was March 31, 2015, just 13 days before Rubio, long considered the GOP’s brightest star, would launch his campaign at the Freedom Tower here in his hometown. Ayres, Rubio’s polling guru, had written a book with detailed, data-driven prescriptions for Republicans to take back the White House in 2016. He met on that March morning with a few dozen reporters to make his case — not just for the book and its blueprint, but for Rubio, whom he did not hesitate to hail as the party’s messiah.
Ayres was not alone in his assessment of Rubio’s unique talents. The 44-year-old son of Cuban immigrants became a celebrity in 2010, when he toppled Florida’s popular governor, Charlie Crist, en route to winning a seat in the U.S. Senate. His victory epitomized everything the then-ascendant Tea Party stood for — disrupting the established order, cleansing the landscape of Republicans perceived as too moderate — and he became a refutation, in the flesh, of charges that the party was a home only for old, wealthy, white men.
Though he ran as an outsider, the young senator wasted no time forging connections with Washington heavyweights and surrounding himself with skilled campaign operatives to help plot a path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. After wisely sitting out the 2012 race, in which Mitt Romney won just 27 percent of Latino voters after a primary filled with harsh rhetoric about illegal immigration, Rubio and his team were convinced that spearheading a comprehensive, bipartisan immigration-reform effort would earn him the party’s goodwill and position him as a 2016 front-runner. They were wrong. The conservative grassroots revolted at Rubio’s co-authorship of a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, the Senate “Gang of Eight” bill collapsed, and by the summer of 2013 Rubio had become persona non grata to the same Tea Party movement that had carried him into office just three years earlier.
His star was dimmed — but hardly diminished. In a tribute to both his resilience and the stubbornness of elite impressions of his aptitude, the Florida senator found himself a top-tier contender at the outset of the 2016 race. There were reasons it should not have been so: his misreading of the base on immigration; his standing with conservatives, who had defected in droves to Ted Cruz, another charismatic Cuban-American senator with designs on the presidency; and the looming presence of friend and former mentor Jeb Bush, who was the first Republican to announce his intention to enter the race. Yet Rubio and his team began the campaign in April 2015 convinced of his unmatched talent, and bullish — bordering on cocky — about his prospects of winning the nomination and the White House.
Those dreams came crashing down Tuesday night when Rubio lost the Florida primary in a landslide to Donald Trump. The bombastic real-estate mogul, whom Rubio spent most of the campaign ignoring in hopes that he would implode, took 46 percent of the vote to Rubio’s 27 percent. After an atrocious 3-for-26 start to the primary season — the wins coming in Minnesota, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. — Rubio’s campaign had hoped his home state and its 99 delegates could save him. Instead, his defeat here dealt a death blow to what will likely be remembered as one of the most underachieving campaigns in modern Republican history.
“It is clear that while we’re on the right side, this year we will not be on the winning side,” Rubio told a crowd of several hundred supporters at Florida International University. Having foregone reelection to the Senate to focus on his presidential bid, he now faces an uncertain political future. With an eye on 2020, convinced that Trump will be devastated in a general election, Rubio used his closing remarks Tuesday night to condemn the GOP front-runner in harsh terms — though not by name — for using “fear” to “prey upon” the insecurities of voters.
