Like almost every Republican incumbent in a battleground state this year, Florida senator Marco Rubio had to survive the Donald Trump portion of a debate Monday night before he could focus the event on his own race. He succeeded in doing both—and he took advantage by outmaneuvering Democratic representative Patrick Murphy for most of a 60-minute forum that contrasted the candidates’ backgrounds and legislative records.
Rubio’s complicated support for the GOP presidential nominee dominated the opening portion of the debate, and he was still unable to reconcile it with his longstanding distrust of Trump possessing the nuclear launch codes. “I stand by everything I ever said in the Republican primary,” he stated, as he has said for months. But Monday’s stage afforded him the opportunity to play off of Murphy, his relatively scripted challenger, and make his reelection bid about holding the eventual president accountable, regardless of who it is.
“I don’t trust either one of them,” Rubio said of each of the major party candidates. “And the job of a U.S. senator is not to blindly trust the president because they happen to be from your own party—the job of a U.S. senator in our republic is to represent their state and to fight and uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, and I am prepared to do that no matter who is elected to the presidency.”
The onetime presidential hopeful made an impassioned case against Clinton’s fitness to be president, concluding that the Democrats chose a nominee with “a 30-year record of scandal and outrage,” setting up “a disturbing choice between someone who I disagree with on many things and someone who I disagree with on virtually everything.”
Murphy challenged Rubio on that stance, saying he “should know better” given his own low opinion of Trump’s national security qualifications and Trump’s relatively high opinion of Vladimir Putin. But when moderator Jonathan Karl tried to press the matter in a follow-up question, Rubio pivoted to an attack on Clinton.
“I don’t trust Hillary Clinton on foreign policy, which could lead to a conflict anywhere in the world that this nation cannot afford and should not be involved in,” he said.
Once Rubio passed the Trump challenge, he engaged Murphy head-on about issues before Congress and Florida, and repeatedly charged that the two-term representative was an ineffective legislator. The first example concerned gun control. With Orlando—site of the Pulse nightclub terrorist attack in June—serving as the debate’s host city, Murphy slammed Rubio for rejecting measures to address the “terrorist loophole” that Republicans have opposed over due process concerns. Rubio responded that his counter-proposal, which he introduced last month, would give federal investigators the tools and time to investigate attempted firearms purchases by an individual on a terror watch list while honoring the Fourth Amendment. (Rubio’s bill would flag gun buyers who were “the subject of a federal terrorism investigation within the last 10 years,” which Rubio says would account for people like Omar Mateen, the Pulse attacker, who wasn’t on a watch list at the time he committed his crimes but had been probed by the FBI twice.)
Rubio turned his disagreement with Murphy about the issue into the central criticism of his opponent.
“The law that I wrote has a chance of passing, which is a fundamental difference between Congressman Murphy and I,” Rubio said. “I get laws passed. I get things done. He does not. And we cannot afford a U.S. senator that cannot turn ideas into policy.”
Rubio used a similar strategy to try making his history with immigration reform—a liability during his presidential campaign—a strength, highlighting the Democratic lawmaker’s inexperience with the issue. Murphy accused Rubio of being a flip-flopper after his work on the Gang of Eight. The incumbent hit back hard, saying Murphy had “never even been involved in the immigration reform issue” until he “started talking about it like four weeks ago.” He also pointed out Murphy’s 2013 vote for a bill “to restart deportations of dreamers”—something Karl pressed—and the representative’s own personal flip flops.
“Congressman Murphy, in December of 2011, you changed your name, you changed your party, and you moved from South Beach to West Palm Beach to run for Congress. That’s not a flip flop, that’s a metamorphosis,” Rubio said.
In the Real Clear Politics average of polls, Rubio leads Murphy by 4.7 percentage points. The race is widely considered a toss-up.
