TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) – US Senator Marco Rubio is campaigning Monday in his home state. He’s hosting a rally in Tampa.
Rubio finds his Oval Office ambitions squeezed by Donald Trump’s outsider ambush and the Republican Party’s resulting identity crisis.
The Florida senator has struggled to reconnect with the kind of voters who sent him to Capitol Hill six years ago as a Tea Party favorite, instead watching them fuel Trump and his closest challenger to winning the GOP presidential nomination, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Yet, left to depend on more traditional Republicans, Rubio also has not fully harnessed the financial and organizational muscle of the GOP old-guard eager to derail Trump, with some backers of failed candidates like Jeb Bush remaining on the sidelines and others supporting Ohio Gov. John Kasich. And even where Rubio has corralled establishment players, voters haven’t always followed.
Trump is attacking Florida Sen. Marco Rubio on his home turf, in Florida, in a new television advertisement, the Trump campaign says. A minute-long version of the Trump ad concludes, “Marco Rubio: Another corrupt, all-talk, no-action politician.”
Rubio considers Florida a must-win contest and has trailed Trump in some recent polls. The Florida primary is March 15, and early voting has been underway for weeks.
Trump has hit Rubio for missing Senate votes and lately has called for him to drop out of the race for the GOP nomination.
This is the first Trump ad to go after Rubio. Other Trump commercials have focused on Ted Cruz, including one that calls him the “worst kind of Washington insider, who just can’t be trusted.” That ad has aired mostly in South Carolina, where Trump topped Cruz, and in the Texas senator’s home state, where Cruz prevailed on Super Tuesday last week.
