Obama's Back in Florida Today to Prop up Patrick Murphy

Expect President Obama in Florida today to stump for Democratic Senate candidate Patrick Murphy. This is a race that offers perhaps the most glaring example of the president’s work for down-ballot candidates coming up short.

It’s the second time in eight days the president is campaigning in Florida to defeat incumbent Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. According to The Washington Times, the White House is trying to take advantage of the president’s rising job-approval ratings to elect more Democrats everywhere from the U.S. Senate to governorships to state legislatures. The president is personally pushing for as many as 150 candidates in some 20 states across the country.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Obama is working for candidates “up and down the ballot.” The White House hopes the president’s efforts will, at a minimum, turn the Senate Democratic for Clinton’s first two years in office, assuming she wins.

The president's role as campaigner-in-chief in his final months comes after a dismal record in eight years as the head of the Democratic Party. Since he took office in 2009, Democrats have lost 11 governorships, 13 Senate seats, 69 House seats and more than 900 state legislature seats.

Nowhere is the president’s recent campaign work looking less promising than the Florida Senate race, where a Bloomberg poll Wednesday put Marco Rubio ahead by a whopping 10 percentage points. A handful of other state polls this week showed Murphy, one of the first candidates to be endorsed by Obama, trailing by two to six percentage points.