Rubio has speciously and cynically claimed that the Orlando massacre called him to leave his plow and return to public life. But he is really running for reelection because the Republican leadership is afraid of losing its majority in the Senate, should Trump lose in a landslide. More importantly, Rubio still believes he has something to gain from returning to D.C.
According to The New York Times, Rubio “has told colleagues and advisers that he would like to run for president again, either in 2020 or 2024. But he increasingly came to think that doing so from the private sector would be difficult.” Rubio got hammered during the primaries for being a bad senator. Between March of 2015 and March of 2016, Rubio missed 77 of 263 roll call votes and had an atrocious 41 percent absentee rate. If Rubio is indeed returning to the Senate because he thinks it is the best launching pad for a presidential campaign, he will probably show up to work more often—for a bit. And then, a year or two before the next Republican primary, he will start running for president again and forget about the state of Florida. Because Marco Rubio doesn’t want to be a senator, he wants to be president.