u.s. sen. marco rubio addresses supporters after winning a second term in the u.s. senate in miami. | mike stocker/south florida sun-sentinel via ap by marc caputo 11/15/16 05:10 am est miami <u+2014> the election that was supposed to kill marco rubio<u+2019>s political career only made him stronger. florida<u+2019>s junior senator almost had his political obituary written this spring after a humiliating home-state loss in the gop presidential primary in which donald trump beat him in 66 of 67 counties. after reversing course and deciding to seek reelection, rubio faced an energized opponent and the threat of about $21 million from washington democrats to extinguish the once-rising republican star by handing him an unprecedented two statewide losses in a year. story continued below <u+201c>that probably would have been a distinction i wasn<u+2019>t looking forward to,<u+201d> rubio told politico florida. <u+201c>you don<u+2019>t want to be the guy who<u+2019>s the asterisk in the political science book.<u+201d> instead, rubio crushed u.s. rep. patrick murphy so soundly last week that he<u+2019>s now a footnote in florida<u+2019>s political history records for a different reason: he<u+2019>s the first republican senator from the sunshine state ever to win reelection in a presidential election year. in terms of his 714,000, 7.7 percentage-point margin in the general election, rubio won more than 6 times that of trump in florida. the billionaire businessman beat the former secretary of state by about 114,000 votes, or 1.2 percentage points. rubio garnered almost 52 percent of the vote in the u.s. senate race, while trump earned a little more than 49 percent in the presidential race. in all, rubio received almost 218,000 more votes than trump. rubio<u+2019>s spot on the ticket probably helped republicans to such a degree in his democratic home county of miami-dade that democrats say there was a discernable <u+201c>rubio effect<u+201d> that helped many republican state legislators survive in legislative districts that clinton carried. for a modern-day republican in a presidential election year, the bilingual rubio won historic shares of support from hispanics (48 percent) and african-americans (17 percent), exit polls showed. he even carried a majority-black jacksonville precinct. rubio racked up more total votes than any other gop senator in a truly contested race from any other state this year, partly due to the fact that florida has more voters as the nation<u+2019>s biggest swing state. <u+201c>it shows what a strong vote-getter rubio is <u+2014> he outperformed trump by almost three points and trump did better than any statewide republican at the top of the ticket since 2006 when charlie crist was a republican who won his race for governor,<u+201d> said kartik krishnaiyer, a liberal blogger for the site the squeeze and a former spokesman for u.s. rep alan grayson<u+2019>s unsuccessful u.s. senate primary campaign against murphy. <u+201c>marco rubio is back,<u+201d> krishnaiyer said. <u+201c>and he<u+2019>s a threat again.<u+201d> but rubio won<u+2019>t be a worry for democrats in 2020. trump<u+2019>s resounding electoral college win assured that rubio<u+2019>s presidential ambitions would be deferred, if not denied. rubio insisted for months, though, that he was content with making the senate his last elected post. <u+201c>people would say <u+2018>of course you<u+2019>re going to run [for president] again. and i was saying to myself: <u+2018>they have no idea how hard it is or the strain it puts on your family and everyone you know,<u+2019><u+201d> rubio said <u+201c>once you<u+2019>ve run for president once, you know what it entails,<u+201d> he said. <u+201c>once you<u+2019>ve actually done it <u+2014> you know the amount of work that goes into it, what you give up to do it, how hard it is <u+2014> you end up respecting people a lot who win it. it<u+2019>s a lot easier to talk about running for president than to actually go out and do it.<u+201d> will rubio never appear on a ballot? <u+201c>i would never say that. i can tell you it ain<u+2019>t gonna be in 2020,<u+201d> rubio said. <u+201c>and i said that during the campaign. my goal is to be the best senator florida ever had and certainly the most consequential. i<u+2019>ll have to decide in five years about whether i<u+2019>m going to run for reelection.<u+201d> assuming trump wins reelection in 2020, rubio won<u+2019>t have a shot at running for the white house until 2024, when he<u+2019>s 53 (17 years younger than trump is now). <u+201c>eight years from now is a long time,<u+201d> rubio said. <u+201c>who knows what happens eight years from now?<u+201d> murphy<u+2019>s campaign declined to discuss the campaign or rubio on the record. before election day, many florida democrats were bracing for a loss because, in part, the democratic senatorial campaign committee and senate majority super pac pulled back at least $16 million of the pledged $21 million they planned to spend to help murphy. democrats said rubio was a paper tiger beloved more by insiders and reporters, a weak candidate who lost to trump in march and who failed to achieve majority support in florida in 2010, when he first ran for office. without the washington cash, the relatively unknown murphy was at a severe disadvantage to the better-known rubio. ultimately, murphy<u+2019>s campaign said he was outspent three to one on television. the decision to leave murphy hanging in florida was made by dscc chair jon tester of montana and incoming senate minority leader chuck schumer, of new york, who said florida was just too expensive to campaign in relative to other states. that was just what rubio<u+2019>s campaign had planned. he said his campaign <u+201c>frontloaded<u+201d> its spending and fundraising to savage murphy early and spook democrats. <u+201c>if we posted strong september and early october poll numbers, the democrats would realize the combination of the gap they needed to make up and how expensive florida was might make it prohibitive for them, given the fact that their map had multiple other states they wanted to play in,<u+201d> rubio said. <u+201c>if it were a year where there were only one or two seats at stake, it might have been a different situation. it was a year we knew they were involved in missouri, in indiana, in north carolina, wisconsin and so many other states.<u+201d> the national republican senatorial committee and the senate leadership fund super pac all joined in. like rubio, the nrsc<u+2019>s executive director, ward baker, is a student of florida politics. baker, who spent the months after the gop presidential primary persuading rubio to run for senate again, had overseen florida gov. rick scott<u+2019>s absentee-ballot program in 2010 and knew how important it was to try to build an edge by the beginning of october, when mail-in ballots are set out to voters by county election supervisors. at the same time, rubio<u+2019>s senate campaign learned from his presidential loss and invested in more on-the-ground canvassers and local events throughout the state. rubio kept his trusted team by hiring something else strategies, led by consultants heath thompson and todd harris, who handled media and strategy for rubio<u+2019>s 2010 senate campaign, his presidential election and occupied a similar role in the re-election. another firm, firehouse strategies, was founded by veterans of rubio<u+2019>s presidential campaign: terry sullivan and alex conant, his former senate office spokesman who consulted on earned media and strategy for the re-election. sullivan worked for a pro-rubio super pac. <u+201c>we took lessons learned from the presidential campaign and applied it to the senate re-election. politics has changed so much in recent years <u+2014> we produced a lot of content, invested heavily in ground game, and were able to raise amazing amounts of money online,<u+201d> conant said in an email. of the stunning $18 million rubio raised in just over four months, his campaign said, $5 million was from online donors. in all, the campaign said it made: 9 million voter contacts, a third of them in the final week of the campaign; 8.7 million calls; 250,000 door-knocks; and 50,000 text messages and cellphone-voter calls. it said it added 85,000 low- to mid-propensity voters to the state<u+2019>s absentee-ballot request list and got 70,000 of them to vote by mail; staffed 19 <u+201c>victory<u+201d> offices with the republican national committee; and it tasked 25 victory field organizers to focus on traditional grassroots outreach, with four specializing on youth, hispanic, faith-based, and jewish-voter turnout and engagement. the campaign also had separate programs reaching out to voters of cuban-american, puerto rican, venezuelan and colombian descent. it mined for votes in miami<u+2019>s haitian american community and made inroads in traditionally african-american quarters of the electorate. rubio<u+2019>s outspoken criticism of the <u+201c>slumlord<u+201d> company that runs the eureka gardens housing project in jacksonville earned him such goodwill that he won the neighborhood precinct by 4 percentage points. relatively speaking, trump<u+2019>s campaign focused less on traditional ground-game outreach efforts and relied more on the star power of its candidate and the zeal of his followers. the republicans<u+2019> senate and presidential campaigns in florida at times ran parallel to each other, a reflection of the different candidates and a partial legacy of the hard feelings between the two sides from the presidential primary, in which trump name-called <u+201c>little marco<u+201d> and rubio suggested the developer had small hands indicative of diminutive genitalia. rubio later apologized for the remarks. when rubio first announced his bid for senate, he made sure to single out trump as well as clinton. rubio said he would act as a check on any president in office. what will rubio stand up to trump over now? <u+201c>hopefully nothing,<u+201d> rubio said. murphy consistently called attention to rubio<u+2019>s tepid endorsement of trump, but the senator refused to withdraw it even after trump hit a low point in october amid the disclosure of an <u+201c>access hollywood<u+201d> recording of him crudely talking about grabbing women by their private parts. rubio<u+2019>s campaign and inner circle didn<u+2019>t believe trump would win florida because polling from them, the rnc, the trump campaign, other republicans and even democratic groups all showed clinton would likely carry the sunshine state. overall, though, the two campaigns were <u+201c>mutually beneficial<u+201d> to each other, said trump<u+2019>s florida campaign manager, susie wiles. she said the two candidates shared a voting base that they each helped turn out in different ways. rubio did consistently better than trump in florida<u+2019>s urban counties overall in the general election, and ran strongly in his home county of miami-dade, where 72 percent of the registered republicans is hispanic and nearly all <u+2014> like rubio <u+2014> are of cuban-american descent. rubio still lost miami-dade to murphy, by 109,000 votes. trump lost it to clinton by almost 290,000. many republicans in the county say trump<u+2019>s numbers in miami-dade <u+2014> and perhaps with cuban-americans <u+2014> would have been worse without rubio on the ticket. clinton carried all of the state house districts in the county, but most republicans won their legislative seats. and many credit rubio. <u+201c>rubio was the catalyst in ensuring that incumbent republican members in dade county won their reelections,<u+201d> said state rep. carlos trujillo, who chairs the florida house<u+2019>s budget committee. <u+201c>he actively engaged in get-out-the-vote efforts, recorded commercials and robo calls for several members of the delegation. he was the tipping point in getting us elected.<u+201d> juan cuba, executive director of the miami-dade democrats, agreed. <u+201c>there was a rubio effect that we saw,<u+201d> cuba said. <u+201c>we believe we would have been more competitive in some of these house districts if he hadn<u+2019>t been on the ballot.<u+201d> trump <u+2014> who at one point as a private businessman underwrote a prospecting trip that appeared to circumvent the u.s. embargo of cuba <u+2014> adopted more of hardline position on the communist island nation in the final days of the campaign. trump indicated he<u+2019>d repeal president obama<u+2019>s policies to undermine the embargo <u+2014> a position long held by rubio, who says the castro government hasn<u+2019>t reformed enough to earn any breaks. <u+201c>cuba is about to undergo a generational leadership change, a basic function of biology,<u+201d> rubio said. <u+201c>the same leaders are all over 80. extrapolate that over the next six to ten years and it<u+2019>s logical to conclude there<u+2019>s going to be some leadership changes. we hope to influence the direction that takes and we would use u.s. policy as a leverage point for some of that, as a carrot.<u+201d> rubio said he looked forward to trump rolling back obama<u+2019>s cuba policy and to adopting a more conservative view concerning the middle east, over which rubio had once criticized trump. now that trump will receive classified briefings, rubio said he believed he<u+2019>ll change his position. <u+201c>the president-elect is going to be privy to more information than he was as a candidate, it<u+2019>s going to shape his opinion and views on these issues,<u+201d> rubio said. with trump as president-elect, rubio said he<u+2019>s happy he has a republican administration to work with instead of clinton<u+2019>s. asked if he<u+2019>d like to serve in a trump cabinet position, rubio declined. <u+201c>it would be disrespectful to say <u+2018>no i wouldn<u+2019>t consider<u+2019> if a president asks you to serve. i doubt that i will be, and my preference is to remain in the senate,<u+201d> rubio said. rubio indicated a willingness to change some of his views on free trade deals as a result of the election. holding up south korea and colombia trade deals as more ideal than others, rubio acknowledged that most countries the united states has agreements with <u+201c>are going to be reticent about renegotiating.<u+201d> <u+201c>what<u+2019>s abundantly clear is the american people feel they<u+2019>re losing more than winning from these trade agreements. and we have to respect that,<u+201d> rubio said. <u+201c>this election," rubio said, "acted as a rejection of the sort of political class in both parties and in the media alike whose view is <u+2018>well we know better than the people about what<u+2019>s good for them.<u+2019> if anything else, this election was a rejection of this elitism. i hope people listen to this and taken this into account.<u+201d> marc caputo's must-read briefing on what's hot, crazy or shady about politics in the sunshine state.
how rubio outdid trump in florida and revived his career
marc caputo