MIAMI (AP) – Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio dropped out of the race for president Tuesday, ending his White House bid after a humbling loss in his home state to Donald Trump.
“It is not God’s plan that I be president in 2016 or maybe ever,” the Florida senator told a crowd of supporters in Miami.
While he didn’t name Trump, Rubio warned against embracing his brand of divisive politics: “I ask the American people, do not give into the fear, do not give into the frustration,” he said.
Rubio’s decision was prompted by losses in all but three of the presidential nomination contests, but Florida’s winner-take-all primary proved the most devastating. Only six years earlier, he was a tea party favorite who crushed the GOP’s “establishment” candidate to win a seat in the U.S. Senate.
But the political tables turned on him in the 2016 presidential race, where he was lambasted as mainstream in a year when voters cried out for an outsider.