Rubio thinks voters are stupid

Marco Rubio, who failed spectacularly in his campaign to win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, is trying to get Florida voters send him back to the US Senate, an office he’d rejected only months ago. It’s clear that Rubio thinks Florida voters are stupid.

I’ve never thought much of Rubio. His campaign performance made him seem not very bright, and he’s a religious extremist, just like nearly all the other Republican clowns candidates who ran for president this year. But his latest iteration is just pathetic.

When he ran for US president, Rubio announced he wouldn’t seek re-election to the US Senate. That was that—but when he lost so utterly and humiliatingly in the Florida Republican Primary, he quit the presidential race and—surprise!—announced his intention to seek re-election to the Senate after all.

Rubio parachuted into the Republican Senate campaign, and set about insulting the intelligence of Florida voters. When his Democratic opponent, US Rep. Patrick Murphy, suggested Rubio was planning on running for president again in 2020, Rubio said: "If I wanted to run for something else, I wouldn't have run for Senate." Riiiiight.

Marco Rubio is lying to Florida voters. OF COURSE he plans on running for president in 2020. And this is how it will play out: He’ll say he had no intention of running for president again, but there’s been a “huge groundswell” of people urging him to run, and, gosh!, who is he to deny “the will of the people”?!

Seriously, Rubio’s entire political career has been focused on his ambition, and he wouldn’t have gone back on his word and run for the Senate again unless he had already planned his next step: Running for president in 2020 as a sitting US Senator.

From Rubio’s perspective, this makes perfect sense: He doesn’t do much of anything as a US Senator, so it’s clearly not taxing him very much. Then, when he runs for president in 2020 and his campaign crashes and burns again, he’ll still be a US Senator with two years to convince Florida voters that he wasn’t lying to them in 2016 when he said he wouldn’t run for president.

And yet, Rubio has some very real problems standing in the way of his plans.

Rubio was loudly booed at a rally in Florida by the largely Hispanic crowd attending. This is a real problem for him.

Part of Rubio’s problem with Hispanic voters is that he’s endorsed Donald, the stridently anti-Hispanic Republican presidential nominee. Hispanic voters have been drifting Leftward for years, and Rubio’s support for Donald has hurt him.

So, too, Rubio was damaged by his abandoning comprehensive immigration reform—even to the point of trying to pretend he’d never championed it. This same issue has driven a wedge between him and White Republican voters, who overwhelmingly oppose any immigration reform, especially the sort Rubio once championed.

So, Rubio has problems getting votes from White conservatives and from increasingly Left-leaning Hispanics, too. That leaves moderate voters, who are more likely to vote Democratic, particularly when the Republican presidential candidate Donald—who, let’s not forget, Rubio endorsed—scares the crap out of so many voters.

ALL of this is of Rubio’s own making. He looks like an opportunist by running for re-election to the Senate after he said he wouldn’t, then changed his mind when he crashed and burned as a presidential candidate. He looks like a coward for running away from comprehensive immigration reform. And, he treats Florida voters as if they’re stupid by pretending he won’t run for president in 2020.

Florida voters AREN’T stupid, though, and that’s why he’s in a dead heat with US Rep. Patrick Murphy. Florida, and the US Senate, would be better off without Rubio in office. That seems to be the conclusion that more and more Florida voters are making, too.

Despite what Marco Rubio thinks, Florida voters aren’t stupid.