News

This Map Explains Rubio's Loss In Florida

by Alex Gladu

Marco Rubio didn't lose Florida on Tuesday, as much as it ran away from him. The Florida senator desperately needed a win to boost his slowly growing delegate count in the wake of big leads by frontrunner Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Unfortunately, his home state did not come through for him when he needed it most, and Marco Rubio had to suspend his campaign for president, an announcement he made in conceding the Florida primary to Trump.

Rubio hadn't been expected to win Florida's GOP primary easily. In fact, according to most recent polls, he hadn't been expected to win at all. Still, a victory seemed possible for the Florida-based senator, who worked his way up to Congress through local politics in the Miami area. After all, it is his home state.

When it was all said and done, the results that came out of Florida weren't even particularly close. Rubio was only able to claim victory in one county: his very own Miami-Dade County. Every other county went to Trump, including the I-4 corridor that Floridian voters are so proud of throughout the center of the state. To visualize just how sweeping Trump's win in the Sunshine State was, check out this map:

Judging by the map, it probably didn't make a difference that Florida's primary was winner-take-all in terms of delegates. Trump picked up the state's 99 delegates, but even if the delegates had been awarded on a county-by-county basis, Rubio would have still suffered a devastating loss. Meanwhile, no other candidate would have had any inkling of a chance (although that was to be expected).

It makes sense, then, that Rubio chose to suspend his campaign on Tuesday night. He picked up important wins in Minnesota, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, but heading into Florida's primary, he had only secured just north of 150 delegates. That left him more than a thousand delegates shy of the majority needed to win the nomination before the convention. What's more, Rubio could not have reached that majority, which constitutes 1,237 delegates, even if he had won all of the remaining delegates left in his party's race.

Angel Valentin/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Above all else, Florida's Republican primary showed that Rubio did not have the support of his own people. It also showed that Trump would virtually sweep the southern states, an important Republican voting bloc in general elections. Fortunately for Rubio, he gets to return home to the sunny beaches of Miami, where he can at least know he's a popular guy.