Pollster Tom Jensen Asks if Marco Rubio is Overrated

Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling (PPP), a firm with ties to national Democrats, posted a blog piece on a recent poll -- and what it shows for incoming U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio.

Marco Rubio is probably the most hyped of the 2011 freshman Senate class, to the extent that there's already discussion about him as a possible 2012 presidential candidate, noted Jensen. Our latest Florida poll, though, suggests that it might be time for everyone to slow down a little bit on that front. Rubio is the most hyped new senator ... and he might be the most overrated too.

Rubio is not unusually popular with Florida voters -- they're pretty evenly divided in their feelings about him, with 43 percent rating him favorably and 42 percent unfavorably, continued Jensen. He does have an unusual amount of appeal to Democrats, with 25 percent viewing him positively. But his 28/52 favorability with independents isn't a whole lot better than the 25/56 we found for new Governor Rick Scott, who's pretty universally thought to be highly unpopular.

When it comes to the 2012 presidential contest in the state, Rubio trails Barack Obama by 8 points -- a worse performance than Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Newt Gingrich posted in the poll and better only than Sarah Palin, Jensen added. In fairness to Rubio, he's not the one pushing himself as a 2012 candidate, but it does seem safe to say that if he couldn't pull his own home swing state, his chances of winning the other major swing states wouldn't be too good either.

One thing frequently lost, because Rubio's margin of victory in the Senate race was so impressive, is that he still got less than half of the vote in an electorate that skewed heavily toward the GOP, concluded Jensen. With the Democratic vote splitting nearly evenly between Charlie Crist and Kendrick Meek, Rubio was going to win big pretty much no matter what he did, and that didn't require him to be an unusually appealing candidate. Given where the race started, it's still somewhat amazing and impressive that Rubio's going into the Senate, but folks might want him to serve at least half a Senate term before the White House bid.

Jensen has a point. With the exceptions of war hero Dwight Eisenhower and Woodrow Wilson, every president of the 20th and 21st centuries had more than two years of elected or Cabinet-level experience. But there is a recent trend of both parties going to fresher faces with less experience -- namely Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. Rubio could cash in on that recent trend -- either in a presidential campaign or, more likely, as the Republican vice presidential nominee who would provide a solid balance for some of the leading possible Republican presidential candidates, such as Mitt Romney.