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What Rubio Revival?

Pundits keep trying to conjure up the ever-elusive Rubio revival, and of course the revival never comes.
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The recent Koch-sponsored gathering in California has reportedly given Rubio a small boost:

In an informal straw poll of some conference donors, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida came out ahead of four other would-be GOP presidential candidates who had been invited, according to an attendee familiar with the results.

This news has prompted some premature speculation that Rubio is enjoying a comeback inside the GOP. Even if the results of this informal poll are reliable, it doesn’t tell us very much. If the donors that attended this event are supposed to be libertarian-leaning, some of them are likely to change their tune when they hear that Rubio wants to make NSA domestic surveillance practices permanent. That is a position that will be hard to sell to a Republican electorate that is much more skeptical of and hostile to government surveillance than it used to be. Perhaps when it is pointed out to these donors that Rubio’s “13th imam” fear-mongering about Iran is all a lie, they also won’t be so keen to trust him on foreign policy. Rubio wants a more intrusive government at home and a more meddlesome one abroad. What is there here for ostensibly libertarian-leaning donors to like? For that matter, what is there for small-government conservative voters to like?

So it is strange to read about Rubio’s political “resurrection” this week. Ever since his foray into the immigration debate ended in failure and backlash, people keep trying to conjure up the ever-elusive Rubio revival, and of course the revival never comes. This happened when he gave some hawkish speeches in 2014, but it amounted to nothing. As I said at the time, there was no Rubio comeback in the offing. Many Republicans did not care about Rubio’s hard-line foreign policy shtick (or were alienated by it), and many of them had simply written him off by that point for other reasons. When he started giving some domestic policy speeches to bolster his credentials as a reformer, this was also touted as proof that he was regaining lost ground, but there was still no revival in his political fortunes nationally. Once again we are hearing about a “resurrection” without much proof that Rubio is gaining any new support. Nationally, he receives 4.5% in the RCP average (excluding Romney), and when Romney is included he drops to 3.5%.

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