WHERE WAS MARCO? Tim Alberta dissects a campaign that never got off the ground:

In one of 2016’s great unsolved mysteries, he spent much of the summer avoiding voters, so conspicuously absent that opposing campaign officials would ask reporters about his whereabouts. Officially, Rubio aides often claimed that he was on private fundraising swings. And yet for the entire third quarter of 2015, spanning from July through September, Rubio raised less than $6 million — a haul dwarfed by those of Bush, Cruz, and Ben Carson. Even Carly Fiorina raised more.

At the same time, news clips piled up detailing Rubio’s poor attendance record in the Senate. Stories alleged he’d missed half of his committee meetings; others claimed he had the Senate’s worst voting record. It was enough to prompt multiple Florida newspapers to pen editorials demanding his resignation. The “truant senator” narrative, on top of his absences from the trail and his lackluster fundraising, gave pause to Rubio’s friends and foes alike. “He’s not visiting the early states and organizing. He’s not raising money. And he’s got the worst Senate voting record,” Rick Tyler, the Cruz campaign’s former national spokesman, recalls thinking during that period. “So then people began to wonder: What exactly is he doing?”

Read the whole thing.