Floridians for Immigration Enforcement, a group that opposes illegal immigration, supported Rubio in his campaign for Senate that election cycle, in part due to an hourlong-conversation they had with him on that fateful day in 2009. During that meeting, Oliver said, Rubio pledged never to support “amnesty or legalization of people” in the United States without documentation.

“He ran for president as a graceful way to exit. He would have lost the Senate seat if he had run for reelection, I think,” Oliver said.

Cynthia Lucas, who is a coordinator of the Martin, Florida 9/12 Tea Party Committee, said she even had more sympathy for democratic socialist Bernie Sanders than Rubio, though she wouldn’t be able to bring herself to vote for either. The reason, she explained, is that while Sanders has the wrong answers, he is at least asking the right questions.

“[Sanders’s] heart is in the right place,” Lucas said. “He understands the bottom line: Everyone in this economy has been affected. When corporations get in bed with government, we get fascism. That’s what we have on both sides of the aisle.”

The Rubio campaign declined to respond to a question about whether it had made its outreach to various Tea Party groups while stumping recently across the state.
“If Marco Rubio had kept his promise to Florida voters and had gone up there to oppose amnesty… Donald Trump wouldn’t even be in the race. It would be Marco Rubio up there, with the rest of the field trying to knock him out,” Oliver predicted.