Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, has made it pretty obvious that he wants to run for the GOP nomination for president in 2016 (even though he has not officially announced his candidacy). Some political pundits give him a pretty fair chance of winning that nomination, and others don't -- but it's still very early.
Personally, I don't think he could win it. And one of the reasons I think that is that the voters in his home state don't want him to run. Note in the chart above that only 15% of registered voters in Florida think he should run. Even worse, only 19% of Republicans and 30% of Hispanics think he should run -- and those are groups he would have to have to carry the state in a GOP primary.
This doesn't necessarily mean that Florida voters don't like Rubio -- just that they don't want him running for president. In fact, 57% of those voters (and 68% of Republicans) think he should run for re-election to the U.S. Senate. And I do believe he would be very hard to beat if he ran again for the Senate. He's not a very good senator (in my opinion), but he's still popular in Florida.
Support for another Floridian is a little stronger. About 42% of Florida voters think Jeb Bush should run for president (while 43% think he should not -- and 59% of Florida Republicans think he should run (while 31% say no to a Bush presidency). That strikes me as some very lukewarm support (even among Republicans) for a "home-state" candidate.
If he runs, I think Bush would probably win the Republican primary in Florida. But I'm not at all sure he could take his home state in a general election (and if he can't, then he has little chance of getting the required 270 electoral votes).
Both of these charts were made from information in a new Mason-Dixon Poll. That survey was done between January 27th and 29th of a random sample of 625 registered voters in Florida, and has a margin of error of 4 points.
