The junior senator from Florida is Marco Rubio, who won a riveting contest in 2010 in an early test of the strength of the fledgling tea party movement. Rubio was mostly brought up in a working-class Cuban-American neighborhood in Miami, the son of immigrants from Cuba. His parents had grown up poor and struggled to make ends meet. His father worked long days as a bartender and his mother was a hotel maid with a second job at Kmart. The family moved to follow work; Rubio spent six years in Las Vegas while his parents worked in the hotel industry before returning to Miami for high school. Read More

The junior senator from Florida is Marco Rubio, who won a riveting contest in 2010 in an early test of the strength of the fledgling tea party movement. Rubio was mostly brought up in a working-class Cuban-American neighborhood in Miami, the son of immigrants from Cuba. His parents had grown up poor and struggled to make ends meet. His father worked long days as a bartender and his mother was a hotel maid with a second job at Kmart. The family moved to follow work; Rubio spent six years in Las Vegas while his parents worked in the hotel industry before returning to Miami for high school.

Rubio played football in high school, and despite his small stature, earned a football scholarship to Tarkio College in Missouri. He returned home after the school went bankrupt, spent a year at a junior college, and got his undergraduate degree in 1993 at the University of Florida. He then went to the University of Miami for a law degree. He interned for Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and in his last year of law school, ran the Dade County operation for Republican Sen. Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996. There, he met future Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who later became his political mentor.

Rubio landed a position at the law firm of Al Cardenas, a prominent Republican he got to know on the campaign. He soon met Jeanette Dousdebes, a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader, and they married in 1998. That year, at age 26, he ran for city commissioner in West Miami, a tiny, heavily Cuban town just south of Miami International Airport, and beat an incumbent. Two years later, he won an open state House seat. Rubio quickly endeared himself to party leaders by working tirelessly on redistricting plans. In 2007, he became speaker of the Florida House, making him the youngest person and the first Hispanic in that position. He toured the state, holding “idea-raisers” with voters to find budget-neutral ideas to improve the state. The 100 ideas he liked best were bundled into a book, which former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called “a work of genius.” Many of the smaller proposals passed easily, but his personal favorite, replacing the state property tax with a sales tax, stalled.

Rubio announced his campaign for the Senate in May 2009. He caught the tea party movement’s lightning in its nascent days and used it to power his upstart primary campaign against then-popular Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, who had long been planning his bid for the Senate. Crist began the race with a huge cash and name recognition advantage, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee endorsed him early on. But Crist was never a favorite of conservatives, and his embrace of President Obama’s $787 billion economic-stimulus bill (and his literal embrace of the president at a public event) infuriated many of them. Rubio received early support from Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., a conservative stalwart who was backing insurgent GOP candidates. By the time Crist realized the conservative base was slipping away, it was too late. Rubio had gone from underdog to front-runner. On the verge of losing the primary, Crist quit the Republican Party in late April to run as an independent.

In the general election campaign, Rubio faced both Crist and Democratic nominee Kendrick Meek, a U.S. House member. Crist started off with an early lead in the polls, but his support plummeted as he got caught in the crossfire from Rubio on the right and from Meek on the left, both of whom painted Crist as a political opportunist. Crist tried to become the de facto Democratic candidate with appeals to independents and moderate Republicans, but Meek refused to get out of the race, regularly polling at around 20% of the likely vote and denying Crist a one-on-one contest with Rubio.

Tea party activists, multiplying by the week, embraced Rubio’s campaign and his theme of “Reclaim America.” And although he benefited from the association, Rubio at the same time stood apart from the tea party. Polished and measured in his rhetoric, he was careful to avoid some of the plundering aspects of the tea partiers that could repel moderate voters. But he was diplomatic in giving them their due. He said that early in the campaign, “I noticed a real frustration that neither party spoke to the mainstream of America, their aspirations for their country and their families. And the tea party movement became an expression of that.” Rubio stressed fiscal responsibility, although he sidestepped specific policy proposals. He indicated support for raising the eligibility age for Social Security beneficiaries and giving the president the line-item veto over spending bills. He opposed abortion rights and took a more conservative position than Crist on immigration, supporting Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigrants. Prominent Republicans got on board with Rubio, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

After August, Rubio did not trail in a single independent poll and most polls showed him holding a double-digit lead. On Election Night, he won with 49% of the vote. Crist got 30% and Meek, 20%. At his victory celebration, Rubio made clear he would continue to be his own brand of Republican in the Senate, as he was in the campaign. “We make a great mistake if we believe that tonight these results are somehow an embrace of the Republican Party,” he said. “What they are is a second chance, a second chance for Republicans to be what they said they were going to be not so long ago.”

Rubio declined to join the Senate Tea Party Caucus founded by fellow freshman Rand Paul, R-Ky. “My fear has always been that if you start creating these little clubs or organizations in Washington run by politicians, the movement starts to lose its energy,” Rubio explained in a radio interview. Early on, Rubio stuck to his theme of cutting government spending and came out against raising the debt ceiling. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in March 2011, Rubio wrote, “if we simply raise it once again, without a real plan to bring spending under control and get our economy growing, America faces the very real danger of a catastrophic economic crisis.”

Rubio turned some heads during August 2011 by taking a trip to mostly liberal areas in California, making stops in Beverly Hills and San Francisco. Some viewed his trip as an attempt to raise his national profile, and commentators wondered if he was angling for a vice presidential spot on the GOP presidential ticket in 2012. Rubio gave an address in Simi Valley, California at the Ronald Presidential Library and Museum. In his speech, he irked Democrats for suggesting that Social Security and Medicare had created a culture of dependence on government and "weakened us as people." With the establishment of Social Security and Medicare, he opined, “All of a sudden, for an increasing number of people in our nation, it was no longer necessary to worry about saving for security because that was the government’s job.”

In the fall of 2011, Rubio received negative press over his official biography. During his Senate campaign, Rubio stated that his parents fled Communist Cuba after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. His upbringing was a cornerstone of his stump speech, and he frequently referenced being "raised by people who know what it is like to lose their country.” However, reporting by The Washington Post and the St. Petersburg Times discovered that Rubio’s parents actually came to the United States in 1956, some two and a half years before Castro’s revolution. Rubio claimed he was relying on family lore. He did acknowledge the oversight and his office corrected the dates on his Senate website.

On the legislative front, Rubio occasionally crossed the aisle to work with Democrats. He joined with Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. in November 2011 to propose a jobs bill that would extend tax relief for businesses and ease reporting requirements for small companies. Along with home-state colleague Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., Rubio supported a bill to direct BP fines to Florida and other Gulf states in the wake of the 2010 oil spill. But when the bill came up for a vote in March 2012, Rubio was one of 22 senators to vote against it. He complained that the revised bill would provide too much money to states outside the Gulf that were unaffected by the oil spill.

More significantly, Rubio jumped into the messy politics of immigration reform. Democrats and Hispanic activists have long supported the DREAM Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for children of illegal immigrants after attending college or joining the military. Many Republicans have decried that approach as a door to amnesty. In the spring of 2012, Rubio began crafting his own alternative to the DREAM Act that would provide non-immigrant visas to children of illegal immigrants. He said his plan would provide young people a chance to live and work in the U.S. legally, but would not provide them with a direct path to full citizenship. The Tampa Bay Times noted that he tried to reframe the issue as a “humanitarian” concern. Some Democrats were skeptical, while others slowly signaled openness to his proposal. But conservative pundits on TV and talk radio unleashed blistering attacks on the plan, and observers noted that Rubio had yet to produce an actual bill.

Rubio was preempted in June 2012 by President Obama, who issued an executive order to temporarily prevent 800,000 young immigrants from being deported. Rubio slammed Obama for not consulting Congress. “I think he injected election-year politics into an issue that privately I thought we were making progress on,” he said, according to Florida Today.

Meanwhile, in the summer of 2012, Rubio’s star continued to rise. Many leading conservative voices, including former Gov. Jeb Bush, R-Fla. and strategist Karl Rove, pushed presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to pick Rubio as his running mate. ABC News reported that Romney’s team was not even vetting Rubio for the vice presidential spot, surprising the political world. Yet Romney challenged the report soon after and claimed Rubio was being “thoroughly vetted." Romney eventually chose budget wonk Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., but Rubio’s public image was hardly affected. He remained a key fundraiser for the GOP, and he was tapped to introduce Romney at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla. He also recently published his own memoir, An American Son, and drew big crowds on his book tour. On the night of his Senate election, Rubio writes, he thought of his late father and late grandfather. “I felt their presence, and I will always feel it as I live the life they made possible for me.”