Marco Rubio (R-FL) has been a U.S. Senator for 11 years now, and over that time he’s committed to being mealy-mouthed about abortion (see article here).
He’s also flip-flopped. Back in 2013, he sponsored a Senate bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks, with exceptions for the life of the mother, rape, or incest. But now he’s saying he “opposes abortion in all cases — including rape and incest.” (See story here.)
And he dodges the issue. Asked what kind of Senate bill he would support now, he claimed the Supreme Court bucked the issue to the states, which isn’t true; nothing in the court’s decision precludes Congress from legislating on the issue.
Taken together, all of this indicates he has a survival instinct. Or at least did have. You may not like slippery politicians, but being slippery is how they avoid being devoured when they find themselves in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma.
Rubio is running for re-election this year. Let’s talk about that. He easily won a 3-way contest in 2010 (by 49%-30%-20%), won easy re-election in 2016 (by 52%-44%), and appeared to be coasting to re-election this year, too, until late July.
That’s when trouble began to appear. In the last week of July and first week of August, two polls showed him tied with his Democratic opponent, Rep. Val Demings, who is a former police chief. By mid-August, a University of North Florida poll showed her 4 points ahead. This is almost certainly fallout from the Supreme Court decision. Many political observers think abortion will be the issue in the 2022 midterms. In surveys like this one, it has shot to the top of voter concerns.
While this is going on, Rubio appears to be calibrating his position to align with the increasingly hardline stance being adopted by his party in various state legislatures. Here you want to keep him mind this stance is largely the doing of Republican white males in those legislatures. For Rubio, going that route doesn’t seem to make political sense, when recent polling shows “67% of Floridians and more than 50% of Republicans … saying abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Only 12% of Floridians said that it should be illegal in all cases.”
Given public sentiment like this, opposing a rape and incest exception looks politically suicidal. He’ll come across as blind, deaf, and dumb to the suffering of raped women. And preachy and sanctimonious, too, because being a man, he’ll never have to birth a rapist’s child, raise that child, and be forced to deal with the rapist (visitation, etc.) for years to come. To women, he’ll appear clueless. And his opponent is a woman who does understand what he proposes to put them through.
Now you know why he wants voters to believe abortion is a state issue that he won’t vote on. But this is a lie; he did vote on it on May 3, 2022, when he and the other Republican senators, along with sometime-Democrat Joe Manchin, blocked a House-passed bill that would codify in federal law the abortion rights the Supreme Court took away.
I’m not predicting this seat will flip, only that it now looks possible it might flip. Rubio has always been a weasel, and a Senate lightweight, and if he has miscalculated such that angry women voters put him out to pasture, I suspect few people will miss him.
Photo: Val Demings (L), Marco Rubio (R)
