It didn't take long on Election Night before Sen. Marco Rubio could breathe easy. After months of focusing on his stance as a national security hawk and riding high on MAGA support from former President Donald Trump, Rubio coasted to victory in Florida on Tuesday. ABC, NBC, and CNN had all declared Rubio the winner just a little after 8 p.m. EST.
He beat Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), a former Orlando police chief, who has now lost her seat in Congress.
Demings outraised and outspent Rubio by a long shot, burning through $68 million of the $72 million she pulled together. She focused on the GOP’s threat to women’s abortion rights, its anti-democratic fealty to Trump, and Rubio’s failure to fulfill his promises to Parkland shooting victims by not seeking to raise the age limit to buy an AR-15 rifle.
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But she couldn’t overcome Rubio, who spent most of his $46 million persistently tying his Democratic opponent to the Biden administration—slamming them over the nation’s persistent inflation, inability to secure lower gas prices, and failure to successfully counter international threats.
Rubio used his video advertisements and televised debate to focus on his bread and butter: national security. He has stressed the looming military threat of China’s authoritarian communist government and the destabilizing effect of Russia’s imperial ambitions. But he also continued to hammer Democrats for domestic economic troubles felt in homes across the country.
Rubio was bolstered by an early endorsement from Trump, the same political rival who previously ridiculed him as “Little Marco” and criticized the way “he never shows up to vote.” But Trump supplanted that by stumping for him at a political rally on Sunday at the Miami-Dade County fairgrounds, just a short drive from the neighborhoods Rubio represented as he rose through local and state politics two decades ago.
The MAGA blessing—along with Rubio’s constant warnings about foreign authoritarian governments—have worked well in Florida, which continues to trend red. It pulled in Trump-loyal Republicans across the northern and middle parts of the state, as well as the more die-hard rightwing Cuban-Americans in South Florida. Rubio is the son of Cuban refugees who fled the unstable island as it transitioned from a rightwing dictator to a communist one.
