Pete Spiliakos says that conservatives should be glad that Rubio’s ongoing implosion is happening now instead of later on:

One suspects that some conservatives supported Rubio not only because they thought they agreed with him on the issues, but also in the hopes that nominating Rubio would lead to Republican gains among Hispanic and young voters.

Conservatives should count it as a blessing that Rubio has turned out to be a disappointment so early in the 2016 presidential election cycle. Rubio never over-performed among Hispanic voters in national opinion polls.

As I pointed out more than a few times, this was the “Rubio mirage”: the illusion that a younger Cuban-American politician with generally conservative views could somehow “solve” the GOP’s weakness with Hispanic voters. That was a modified form of the fantasy that the GOP could significantly increase its share of the Hispanic vote solely by moving left on immigration. Rubio seemed to be the ideal salesman for bad immigration policy because unlike McCain he enjoyed and cultivated the support of conservatives, and that was supposed to shield him from the negative reaction from the right. The enthusiasm for the mirage caused far too many conservatives to endow Rubio with abilities and broad appeal that he had not yet demonstrated, and it also encouraged Rubio to believe what his conservative admirers said about his status as a leading member of the party. That led him to overestimate how deep conservative support for him was, and it also allowed many conservatives to invest their hopes in an imaginary Rubio that they had created.

All of this blinded Rubio to the backlash that he was bound to face once he supported an immigration bill that most conservatives were sure to reject, and ever since he has been eagerly trying to find ways to repair the damage that his foray into the immigration debate has done. Unfortunately for him, this has only compounded his problem as many of his old admirers are losing confidence in him and accusing him (correctly) of opportunism. His boilerplate hawkish rhetoric once endeared him to foreign policy hard-liners, but now thanks to his somewhat cynical positioning on Syria and his opposition to the Ryan-Murray deal he has managed to place himself in a political no-man’s land where fewer and fewer people in the intra-party debate on foreign policy and national security are impressed by what he has to say. All in all, it is better for everyone concerned that the Rubio mirage has dissolved so that conservatives can start judging him on what he actually does.