Marco Rubio, former rival to presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, will skip the Republican National Convention.
“Marco had planned to go to the convention before he decided to seek re-election,” Rubio Senate campaign spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas said in a statement. “Since Marco got into the race late, he will be in Florida campaigning and meeting with voters instead of going to Ohio.”
Rubio has not distanced himself from his rebukes of Trump, including saying that he could not trust him with the nuclear codes. But he has reluctantly endorsed him, heralding him as better than the alternative, Hillary Clinton.
Rubio had suggested when he entered the Senate race that this decision was coming.
“I’ll have to re-examine that now that I have a campaign to run in Florida. I’ll have to spend a lot more time there and a lot less time — I’ll have a lot less free time,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju.
