The 'Rubio Effect:' Conservative Victory Among a Diversifying Electorate

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The election that was supposed to kill Marco Rubio’s political career only made him stronger. Florida’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. 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’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 “Rubio Effect” 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’s biggest swing state.

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