In 2016, Florida voters in a predominantly black Jacksonville precinct rewarded Sen. Marco Rubio for championing their concerns about a mismanaged public housing project by supporting the Republican for reelection by a healthy 4 percentage points.
“Not only was his mind in it — but his heart was also in it,” said Pastor Mark Griffin, who worked with Rubio to improve living conditions at the Valencia Way apartment complex situated near his Wayman Temple African Methodist Episcopal Church in Jacksonville. “The election results were that people can always tell when an elected official is genuine — and that’s what people saw in Sen. Rubio.”
As Rubio, who is Cuban American, mulls a second presidential bid in 2024, he is taking steps to burnish his image as a Republican positioned to win the White House in an era of profound demographic and social change.
“We have a significant percentage of our population who believe that their lives matter less and their problems receive less attention,” Rubio, 49, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner, during which he embraced Black Lives Matter as a philosophy but was careful to distance himself from left-wing groups that have adopted the slogan. “No nation can prosper when you have a significant percentage of your population that feels that way.”
White voters are shrinking as a percentage of the electorate. Simultaneously, they are embracing more liberal views of race relations. Two polls released Wednesday are revealing. Nationally, 60% of white people believe the police treat African Americans unfairly. In battleground Wisconsin, 57% of white people approve of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Rubio is sponsoring key elements of a police reform package proposed by Sen. Tim Scott, a black Republican from South Carolina. The legislation is stalled in Congress because of Democratic opposition, with liberals complaining it is an insufficient fix for the problems plaguing local law enforcement in the wake of the death of George Floyd, who is black, at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. But Rubio’s contribution to the bill is part of a record of addressing minority issues dating to his tenure in the Florida Legislature.
“I believe there are inequities in America; they are statistically impossible to ignore,” Rubio said. “Oftentimes, people who are in positions of power and influence are either oblivious to, or simply not deeply aware of the unique challenges and obstacles facing African American and other minority communities in this country. And, as a result, those unique challenges are often left unaddressed.”
Over the years, Rubio’s attentiveness to black and Hispanic priorities has generated praise from the Democrats who have collaborated with him. In interviews, they describe the senator as authentically interested and action-oriented — even as they acknowledge ideological differences. Four years ago, Rubio’s approach also produced results at the ballot box that propelled him to a second Senate term after his presidential campaign flamed out.
The senator received 17% of the black vote in that contest, 9 points better than President Trump, who is hoping to achieve Rubio-levels of black support this November.
Rep. Frederica Wilson, a black Florida Democrat, has been friends with Rubio since each served in Tallahassee and cooperated on the “5,000 Role Models of Excellence Project,” a mentoring program for young black men in Miami that she founded and that he is still involved in.
“He very early on let me know by his actions with the 5,000 [role models program] how sensitive he was to issues in the inner city as it relates to poor people of color — poor black people, and how they needed a hand up and how they needed to be given some kind of hope,” Wilson said. “This isn’t something he just came up with since he’s been in Congress.”
Rubio has plenty of critics. Democrats accuse Rubio of, in general, placating Trump and maintaining viability with a GOP base that has embraced the president’s populist agenda. Some Republicans mock the senator with claims that he perpetually chases the shiny political object. This month, that would be police reform and race relations.
But Rubio supporters point out the senator’s focus on racial injustice is not new to his political career — nor is his support for various provisions of Scott’s police reform bill.
The legislation includes a Rubio proposal to create the “Commission on the Social Status of Black Men and Boys” — a federal version of a program he worked on in Florida to study racial disparities affecting black males and develop ways to assist them. Other items in the package are co-sponsored by Rubio, among them measures to deter lynching and form a national commission on criminal justice.
But Rubio rejects the notion that the United States and major institutions are infected with systemic racism.
“The nation that was founded by very imperfect people, but whose founding principles are so powerful that if you look at every great cause in American history — the end of slavery, the Civil Rights movement, the right to vote, women’s suffrage — all of these great advances were an appeal to our founding principles,” he said. “They were not a demand that we overthrow our founding principles.”
