But strip away Rubio’s rags-to-presidential contender biography, and his candidacy has more than a little in common with Romney’s — from policy platforms that are largely in sync to a brain trust that boasts a number of the same key figures. When it comes to the substance of what he’d try to do in the job, at least, Rubio is not promising a sharp break from the last establishment favorite the party put forward.

“I think that they are very much on the same place on most of the issues,” Vin Weber, a former House member and special adviser to Romney in 2012, said approvingly. On foreign policy, taxes and economic growth, “their positions are very similar, and on most of the other domestic and social issues they come down the same place as well.”…

“Both John McCain and Mitt Romney ran as conservatives,” Rubio told reporters at one campaign event. So the problem isn’t so much the platform, he went on, it’s that “a lot of working-class Americans have concluded, after years of being told this, that Republicans only care about rich people. And that’s just not true.

“And I think that because of my background and where I come from, it gives me the standing to go to people who are living the way I grew up and say, ‘Look, I’m a conservative. I lived the way you’re living now. And here’s why I’m a conservative and here’s why I think you should be a conservative.”