In terms of his 714,000, 7.7 percentage-point margin in the general election, Rubio won more than 6 times the votes of Trump in Florida, who beat Hillary Clinton by about 114,000 votes, or 1.2 percentage points. Rubio garnered almost 52 percent of the vote in the U.S. Senate race, while Trump earned a little more than 49 percent in the presidential race.
In all, Rubio received almost 218,000 more votes than Trump.
Rubio’s spot on the ticket probably helped Republicans to such a degree in his Democratic home county of Miami-Dade that Democrats say there was a discernable “Rubio Effect” that helped many Republican state legislators survive in legislative districts that Clinton carried. For a modern-day Republican in a presidential election year, the bilingual Rubio won historic shares of support from Hispanics (48 percent) and African-Americans (17 percent), exit polls showed. He even carried a majority-black Jacksonville precinct.
Rubio racked up more total votes than any other GOP senator in a truly contested race from any other state this year, partly due to the fact that Florida has more voters as the nation’s biggest swing state.
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