Sen. Marco Rubio is gearing up to seek a third term in 2022 after coming under attack from Democrats just days after the conclusion of this year’s general election.
The Florida Republican has made no formal announcement, but after Democratic operatives in the Sunshine State unveiled retirerubio.org and activated the Twitter account @retirerubio, the senator issued a fundraising appeal in an email to grassroots supporters and began taking steps to mount a campaign for reelection, knowledgeable GOP sources said Tuesday.
At the moment, Rubio is focused on helping Republicans win two runoff campaigns in Georgia, set for January, that will decide which party controls the Senate majority in the next Congress. He is set to stump for Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler on Wednesday in Marietta, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb.
Although on track to lose reelection to presumptive President-elect Joe Biden, President Trump won Florida comfortably — 51.2% to 47.8%. But that does not appear to have discouraged Democrats looking ahead to 2022, likely to be Biden’s first midterm elections.
“Retire Rubio’s chief objective is to focus like a laser on Little Marco’s failures and to ultimately defeat him in 2022,” Ben Pollara, a Democratic strategist behind the effort, told Florida Politics, which first reported the news of this effort.
Rubio ran for president in 2016 and had planned to retire from the Senate after a single term. But after Trump defeated Rubio in the GOP presidential primary and his colleagues lobbied the senator to run for reelection, he reversed course, winning a second term that November. Rubio has not ruled out running for president again in 2024.
