Josh Kraushaar touts Rubio as the Republican front-runner:

The leading contender for the GOP’s presidential nomination is polling at a measly 3 percent in two new national surveys testing Republican primary candidates. He wasn’t even included in Bloomberg’s November poll of likely New Hampshire primary voters. He’s been overshadowed by the media’s obsession with brand-name candidates, like Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, even though his profile is more compelling than either.

Kraushaar can claim that Rubio is “the leading contender” for the nomination if he wants, but there doesn’t seem to be much to support that. As Scott Conroy points out this week, it isn’t at all certain that Rubio will even seek the nomination. For my part, I have guessed that Rubio won’t run at all and will focus on his re-election bid. Conroy also notes that “the buzz that Rubio has generated the last few years has not resonated much outside of his home state.” Rubio already lost some of the early support that he had enjoyed when he was being prematurely built up as the answer to the GOP’s woes. Many politicians temporarily benefit from speculation about their aspirations for higher office, and Rubio was no different. Rubio’s problem is that his boomlet happened two years ago, and political journalists and pundits have mostly moved on to look at other potential candidates.

The case for Rubio may seem strong at first glance, but makes no sense under closer scrutiny. For instance, take Kraushaar’s first claim that Rubio “can win support from both the establishment wing of the party and tea-party activists.” That may have seemed true when he was first elected, and it might have been true two years ago, but I don’t think it holds up today. Now many of the activists that originally supported him feel that he betrayed them on immigration, and many “establishment” Republicans don’t need Rubio when they have other candidates that will give them what they want. Rubio’s anemic polling in early states can’t really be explained by lack of name recognition. It is more likely that his old supporters lost interest in him as they learned what he did in office.

So it is a remarkable stretch to say that he is the “most electable” Republican in the 2016 field when he is in single digits nationally and in early primary states. Even in Florida, he averages 13% support. Rubio has won exactly one statewide race in his career, and that was an odd three-way contest in an exceptionally Republican years. Assuming that Rubio is “most electable” because of his biography makes even less sense. Most Hispanics aren’t going to be interested in voting for a conservative Cuban-American, and young voters aren’t likely to be impressed by a foreign policy hard-liner in his forties. A “child of the 1970s” whose thinking and arguments are still mostly stuck in the 1980s will have little or nothing of interest to say to the generations that came of age since then.

Kraushaar places a lot of emphasis on Rubio’s “background” in foreign policy, but for all practical purposes his background is not noticeably more extensive than that of other first-term senators that have also shown an interest in the subject. It’s true that Rubio has spent a lot of time talking about foreign policy issues, and he clearly wants to be known for his hawkish views (while disavowing the label and baggage associated with it), but that doesn’t make him that much more qualified than most of the other possible 2016 candidates. While Rubio may be comfortable talking about foreign policy, he isn’t likely to appeal to anyone except other hard-liners. His record as a vocal advocate for new military interventions is more likely to be off-putting to many of the “somewhat conservative” voters that often decide primary winners. Hawkishness by itself won’t be a liability for him among Republican voters, but he has pigeonholed himself as one of the most consistently aggressive hawks in the Senate. Despite support specifically for the war against ISIS, the public still doesn’t have any desire for a foreign policy as aggressive as Rubio prefers.