Except in the improbable event that he comes back to win the Republican nomination, Marco Rubio is likely to become a political idiom. As Mike Huckabee is synonymous with a candidate who wins Iowa on the basis of evangelical support but can’t expand beyond that, or Fred Thompson is a stand-in for a candidate who launches his campaign too late, a “Rubioesque” candidate will be one who is everyone’s second choice.

For a long time, polls have shown Rubio as perhaps the most broadly acceptable candidate within the Republican field, with high favorability ratings1 and competitive performances in hypothetical one-on-one matchups against Donald Trump. But Rubio has just about 20 percent of the Republican vote so far and has won only Minnesota and Puerto Rico. Hawaii results are still pending as I write this, but he did terribly everywhere else on Tuesday and will probably fail to receive any delegates from Michigan, Mississippi or Idaho.

Data like this can produce cognitive dissonance. At times during the campaign, Rubio perpetually seemed to be either overrated or underrated, depending on who was doing the rating. But there’s nothing inherently contradictory about it. If Trump is the candidate with a high floor of support but perhaps a relatively low ceiling, Rubio is the opposite, with a lot of potential supporters but a low floor — he doesn’t have much of a base.