From wanting to hold the highest office in the free world, to holding no office at all….
Less than a week after dropping out of the presidential race, [score]Marco Rubio[/score] told reporters he will not be seeking re-election for his Florida Senate seat.
“I’m not interested in being vice president,” Rubio told reporters on Thursday. “I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way. I’m not gonna be vice president. I’m not running for Governor of Florida. I’m going to finish out my term in the Senate and over the next ten months we are going to work really hard here — we have some things we want to achieve — and then I’ll be a private citizen in January.”
To make it perfectly clear, Rubio clarified, “No, I’m not running for reelection to the Senate.”
Rubio caught heat on the campaign trail for missing too many votes during his tenure in the Senate. According to GovTrack:
From Jan 2011 to Mar 2016, Rubio missed 231 of 1,519 roll call votes, which is 15.2%. This is much worse than the median of 1.6% among the lifetime records of senators currently serving.
It wasn’t clear that Rubio even liked serving in the Senate. He told the Washington Post last year:
“I don’t know that ‘hate’ is the right word,” Rubio said in an interview. “I’m frustrated.”
This year, as Rubio runs for president, he has cast the Senate — the very place that cemented him as a national politician — as a place he’s given up on, after less than one term. It’s too slow. Too rule-bound. So Rubio, 44, has decided not to run for his seat again. It’s the White House or bust.
It looks like Rubio ended up with “bust,” after all.
