[60% or higher maroon (70% saturation)55-59% medium red (50% saturation)50-54% pink (30% saturation)45-49% orange -- Obama ahead (30% saturation)]

New Jersey, Quinnipiac:

President Barack Obama gets a 54 - 42 percent job approval rating in the Garden State, compared to 57 - 40 percent February 21.  

http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes-centers/polling-institute/new-jersey/release-detail?ReleaseID=1872

South Carolina, CD-01 (PPP):

This is a Republican leaning district and Barack Obama's approval rating in it is only 41% with 57% of voters disapproving of him. But Democrats are far more unified than the Republicans are. Busch is winning 87-89% of the Democratic vote while Sanford (76%) and Busch (72%) are both earning less than 80% of the GOP vote. Busch is also up by 16-18 points with independent voters.

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_SC_326.pdf

One district in one very R-leaning state, and interesting in its own right -- but not usable on this map.



60% or higher maroon (70% saturation)
55-59% medium red (50% saturation)
50-54% pink (30% saturation)
45-49% orange -- Obama ahead (30% saturation)
45-49% yellow -- exact tie (30% saturation)
45-49% aqua -- Obama behind (20% saturation)
40-44% blue (50% saturation)
under 40% deep blue (70% saturation)

[least]

What must the republicans do to appeal to Hispanic voters? As stated numerous times on Election Night and throughout this forum, they are the fastest growing voter bloc in America and if the Republicans don't figure out a way to reach out, the party is in big, big trouble.

I thought that NBC's coverage laid out some pretty honest details concerning the Latino demographic:

1) Could represent 30% or more of the American electorate by 2030
2) The immigration issue seems to be #1 on their minds (for obvious reasons)
3) They tend to be the least educated of the growing population, which presents a serious concern going forward
4) Most are not that well-off financially and thus, are part of the lower end of the socioeconomic line.

Obviously, #2 seems to stem off of #3 and #4 and while many Americans commend the GOP for not wanting to make us a welfare state, many Hispanics (and other Americans) are clearly coming here to the states for our education system, healthcare and the chance to improve their lives.  While many of course will abuse the system, they do rely on the gov't for help. 

That whole manner seems to go completely the opposite way of how the GOP is trying to portray itself since they want smaller gov't and Americans to fend for themselves and if you can't or won't, then it's your problem. 

Opinions?

1. Possible. But note the extensive ethnic assimilation. There's much marriage between Anglos and Hispanics, and how will the kids identify?

2. More likely for some groups than for others. Less for Puerto Ricans than for others.

3. They may already be doing at least as well as Southern white people in educational attainment. Except for the criminal subculture that generally does not vote, Hispanics are not an anti-intellectual  group. Poor Hispanics respect the middle class of their own ethnic group more than they trust the economic elite. The divide-and-conquer technique that the Hard Right has done on white people might never succeed on another group until a huge new realignment in politics.

4. The 2008 Presidential election was the one in which economic status least decided one's vote. 2012 was almost the same.  We may have seen a pattern change -- or we could have a reversion to normal.

This is what the map looks like with Illinois on the bubble.



I counted the states -- 36 states and one of  Maine's electoral votes going to the Republican.

Republican winner 332 EV (probably about 54% of the popular vote)
Democratic loser 186 EV (probably about 45% of the popular vote)
Illinois up for grabs 20

1.  Act in accordance with the Cook PVI of the State.  
2.  Don't sell out to out-of-state interests.
3.  Ignore ideological think tanks.
4.  Act with integrity.
5.  Don't use inflammatory rhetoric about opposing interests.
6.  Quit while you are ahead.
7.  Don't try to change the political climate of the state.

Rick Perry has violated most of these and still managed to run Texas for longer than Khrushchev ran the Kremlin. He tried to railroad a major infrastructure project through the Legislature in the early 2000s that would have awarded contracts to a Spanish construction firm; that and his insistence on everyone's daughters getting vaccinated for HPV after Merck persuaded him suggest Perry will sell out to anyone's interest, in or out of state. Ignore ideological think tanks? There is Michael Quinn Sullivan, Texas's version of Grover Norquist; and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, sometimes derisively called the Texas Perry Policy Foundation.

Khrushchev was not freely elected, and he did not lose power as the result of any free election.

Perry has gotten away with such stuff because the Democratic Party is a wreck in Texas. Texas is a plutocracy, and Perry obeys what counts.   

 
Integrity? Toned down rhetoric? Quitting while ahead? Nothing Perry has done since 2011 or so is indicative of any of this.
As for the last rule, I think the jury's out on whether Perry has tried to change the political climate of Texas or if his behavior is more a reaction to it. Ultimately, Perry's main goal has always been to remain in office and accrue favors for as long as possible. I don't think he has any particular ideology or philosophy driving anything he does, and he's certainly not cerebral enough to be a conservative policy wonk like Bobby Jindal or Paul Ryan. If the Tea Party had never come into existence, he would have probably muddled along for one more term, offering up a combination of watered-down Bush Republicanism and crony capitalism with none of the posturing or national attention-whoring. He would have retired in 2011 and been succeeded by Kay Bailey Hutchison, never to be heard from again.

Perry has a machine behind him, and machine hacks don't have to be astute pols. They just have to be puppets. Of course if Democrats can put up a strong challenge, Perry is done.

45+ state GOP sweep

Illinois is closer to 50-50 than the 2008 and 2012 elections suggest.  It would have been 55-43 in a 50-50 election with a Favorite Son, and without a Favorite Son it would have gone about 50-48 D in a 50-50 election. Figure that Barack Obama is about a 10% advantage, and with him no longer on the ticket, the state will be far closer in 2016.

A 53-47 win for the Republican nominee, the mirror image of 2008, flips Illinois to the GOP for the Presidential nominee in 2016.

The Favorite Son effect is real. Clinton lost Texas by 5% in 1996; Dubya won it by 22% in 2000 and 23% in 2004; McCain won it by 12% in 2008. To be sure, the Perot vote of 1996 probably came more from R-leaning voters than from D-leaning voters; add the Perot vote to the Dole vote in 1996 and Clinton lost the state by 11%, which is about how Obama lost the state in 2008.

It would take about a 35-state win for the Republican to win Illinois. I could imagine the Republican losing Michigan and New Mexico but still winning Illinois. That would take a strong Republican and a weak Democrat. It's the sort in which Pennsylvania is called around 9PM for the Republican.

Consider also, that Clinton was perceived as a more moderate Democrat than any of the Dem nominees since then.  That probably had a lot to do with Texas being closer in '92 and '96.  Texas may have been safely R in presidential contests by the early 90s, but it was still a mostly Democrat state at the state level (i.e. Ann Richards, Bob Bullock).
As for Perot as a spoiler, that can easily be debunked.  The exit polls from 1992 showed Perot taking an equal share of voted from Clinton and Bush I.

Perot was more likely to take votes away from Dole in 1996 than from 1992 for the simple reason that Dole was not a Favorite Son in Texas. 

[Democrats]

I figured this effortpost deserved its own thread

Oh cool, according to that wiki link and the corresponding page of gay marriage opponents, a plurality of Senators now support SSM (43 in favor, 41 opposed).

UPDATE

I sperg'd out and actually researched it. Actual breakdown is as follows:

Democrats:
45 Supporters
6 Opponents (Donnelly, Manchin, Heitkamp, Johnson, Nelson, Pryor)
4 Ambiguous (Casey, Hagan, Landrieu, Tester)

Republicans:
1 Supporter (Portman)
42 Opponents
2 Ambiguous (Collins, Kirk)

Notes:

• I counted Carper, Kaine, and Rockefeller as supporters; they haven't explicitly endorsed gay marriage, but have made statements that make their beliefs somewhat obvious (and all three signed onto an amicus brief arguing that DADT be overturned in full)
• Hagan and Tester both sound like they'd be obvious supporters of gay marriage if they didn't have reelection concerns
• Landrieu avoids making any statements on the issue at all costs
• Casey looks to be in the middle of an "evolution" on the issue and is clearly hoping the Supreme Court solves everything so he won't have to make any difficult votes
• Donnelly sounds like he's beginning an "evolution" of his own
• Heitkamp would probably support gay marriage if she was from a liberal state; the other five Democratic opponents appear to genuinely oppose it on principle

Also here's a map!



30% shade means one Senator from the state has an ambiguous position. Gray states have one Senator in support and one opposed. (errors possible, I made the map pretty quickly)

I can imagine some of our Republican pols seeking to establish the Republican Party as the "leading force in politics".

http://fox6now.com/2013/03/12/marine-with-concealed-carry-permit-stops-man-from-beating-woman/

A Marine Corps veteran was able to stop a man early Tuesday, March 12th from nearly kicking a woman to death. It happened near 102nd and Lincoln, and Wisconsin’s concealed carry law made his efforts possible.



Liberals of course openly favor this man's war on women.

Concealed-carry laws are not within the attention of current reforms against reckless distribution of firearms. Getting a concealed-carry license is itself a rigorous process.

Criminals legitimately fear concealed-carry laws.

Richard Nixon -- assuming that he is reincarnated.

No love for Detroit?

I just looked and the Democrats have never held there convention in Detroit. Detroit should be at the top of the list for the Democrats. Detroit has a bad reputation but would do a great job with the convention. It would be a nice boost for the city to host a convention.

Detroit? Of course that assumes that Rick Snyder is still around.

The obvious analogue to this decade is the 1930s. History tends to repeat, more or less, about every 80 years due to the extinction of memory of the oldest adults. It's not perfect; we will not be fighting a war against the British for independence, we won't have a civil war over slavery, and the chance of war between the US and either Germany or Japan is nil.

Dubya was a horrible President, the sort who appeals to mass greed and materialism but eventually betrays both through incompetent stewardship of the economy (much like the combination of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover if those three kept us out of costly wars, but telescoping twelve years of political disaster into eight). Even the Enrob scandal is about an 80-year parallel to Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s, and the novel Babbitt fit the Double-Zero Decade as it fit no other decade since the 1920s.   The economic meltdown that began in the autumn of 2007 resembles the first year-and-a-half of the economic meltdown that began in September 1929.

http://advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/markets/TotalReturn/4-bad-bears.gif

Barack Obama saved the anatomies of a huge number of people in 2009 just as FDR did in 1933 -- except that Barack Obama got a start at the needed turnaround in the equivalent of March 1931. It may be blasphemous to compare Barack Obama to FDR or Lincoln yet -- but just think of what President Obama has read most about and insists that people read more about. 

Please, please, please let a national convention be held in Sin City.

The whores who take money from johns would have a big money-making week with the whores who have sold out to right-wing special interests if the Republicans held their convention in Las Vegas. Democrats would bring their spouses and keep their marriages intact.

Pennsylvania, like Michigan and Wisconsin, is a swing state.

Michigan is a swing state.  Bush only lost it by 5 points in 2000 and 3 points in 2004.  Obama won it pretty comfortably in 2008 and 2012, but those were Democrat years nationally.  Michigan was considered a swing state in 2004, and only two presidential elections don't change that.  Republicans currently control the governor's office, the attorney general's office (since 2002), and the secretary of state's office (since 1994).

The Republican Governor won in 2010 in the best year in decades for Republicans as a stealth candidate, and he is now wildly unpopular as is the Republican-dominated State Legislature. The Democratic Senator up for re-election won in a landslide in 2012.

Michigan becomes an R state if the Hard Right is able to convince Michiganders that they appreciate freedom from abortion and from high wages, but until then... the Governor is about as unpopular as Commies were in Poland in 1989.

45+ state GOP sweep

Illinois is closer to 50-50 than the 2008 and 2012 elections suggest.  It would have been 55-43 in a 50-50 election with a Favorite Son, and without a Favorite Son it would have gone about 50-48 D in a 50-50 election. Figure that Barack Obama is about a 10% advantage, and with him no longer on the ticket, the state will be far closer in 2016.

A 53-47 win for the Republican nominee, the mirror image of 2008, flips Illinois to the GOP for the Presidential nominee in 2016.

The Favorite Son effect is real. Clinton lost Texas by 5% in 1996; Dubya won it by 22% in 2000 and 23% in 2004; McCain won it by 12% in 2008. To be sure, the Perot vote of 1996 probably came more from R-leaning voters than from D-leaning voters; add the Perot vote to the Dole vote in 1996 and Clinton lost the state by 11%, which is about how Obama lost the state in 2008.

It would take about a 35-state win for the Republican to win Illinois. I could imagine the Republican losing Michigan and New Mexico but still winning Illinois. That would take a strong Republican and a weak Democrat. It's the sort in which Pennsylvania is called around 9PM for the Republican.

Don't you mean, "how come President Obama can't amass the unpopularity of governors"?

Getting elected Governor of some states is fairly easy if one is the pick of some powerful machine. One says the right things to urban crowds or to special interests, and one gets elected. Governors so elected may well fit the political culture of a State, get along well, not stir up problems, and get their political careers set in stone. They might be hacks, but they are the right hacks.

Governors who enter office with a desire to make sweeping reforms (not all reforms are good -- just ask about Rick Scott and Rick Snyder) step on well-entrenched special interests and those special interests bite back. Those with a missionary desire to reshape the political climate of their states discover to their surprise that the people don't want their values changed.  

Some are just simply incompetent (Brownback, R-KS). Some get caught in an economic downturn that makes governing a difficult process of imposing budgetary cutbacks even upon supporters. Some who stick around long enough (Perry, R-TX) find that voters increasingly notice their deficiencies. Some (Corzine, D-NJ) fall far short of their promises. Some (Blagojevich, Crook-IL; Sanford, AWOL-SC) do something so egregious that they become laughing stocks or jailbirds.  

Were I to give advice to a Governor, I would say

1.  Act in accordance with the Cook PVI of the State.  
2.  Don't sell out to out-of-state interests.
3.  Ignore ideological think tanks.
4.  Act with integrity.
5.  Don't use inflammatory rhetoric about opposing interests.
6.  Quit while you are ahead.
7.  Don't try to change the political climate of the state.

No particular order here.

 

Governors have records as administrators. Some Governorships are good analogues to the Presidency in that a Governor is in charge of a huge political entity with much diversity. Of course the States are not divided as federal entities, so that is an imperfect analogy.

Governors might have to deal with emergencies -- like earthquakes, floods, and storms. Such can show extreme competence (Christie, 2012?) or incompetence (Blanco, 2005?) in a Governor. Governors can shake things up, but if they shake things up the wrong way (Scott, Snyder) they can get into big trouble and wreck whatever image they came in with.

...It could be that long-term Senators become increasingly un-Presidential as they get accustomed to the Senate. Kennedy and Obama were short-time US Senators.  One might have thought that someone with long and varied service in government (George Voinovich was Mayor of Cleveland, Governor of Ohio, and a US Senator) would be ideal because one would have the trifecta of high public service. But every politician at a certain level has some individuality, and it could be that some pols are wrong for the time. No President had a longer and more diverse record of public service than did James Buchanan.

So, I guess the only "Fair and Balanced" news coverage is that of extremely conservative talking heads.

If Fox is to the left, what is CNN and MSNBC???

To these people, KCNA...

You know, you may not know this...

But Breitbart tells me that Rachel Maddow is actually KGB.

Do you mean that she is in the service of the government of Belarus?

http://www.kgb.by/eng/

The other one is mercifully defunct.

While most of the talk regarding immigration reform is about fences and 'pathways to citizenship' for 'illegals' already here, the bigger issue is actually improving the process for legal immigration. One solution to the issues of Medicare and Social Security funding is to bring in more young workers to fund the olds who are going to retire in the 2020s , 2030s and beyond.

This.  Why are we essentially discouraging people from moving into the US?  Most of the first world will be suffering a population crash, but the US seems to be in position to avoid it by attracting immigrants. 

Latin-American immigrants may not face the culture shock in America that Middle Eastern, Asian, and African immigrants would find in Europe. Latin America is undeniably Western in culture. It's not race.    

4 million Japanese. Why don't more immigrate to the U.S.?

Few would want to relocate to crowded, expensive Japan with its fiendishly-difficult language and especially its writing system. (I could never understand why the Japanese did not adopt a Roman alphabet unless it is to keep foreigners from fitting in). That said, if one grew up in Japan one has a huge personal investment in schooling just to learn the writing system. Japan has one of the lowest crime rates in the world in part because of the harshness of the legal and penal system on violent offenders and drug users. 

The economy has stagnated, but it has stagnated at one of the highest levels of economic development in the world. (European countries and the US may have hit that). Japan has a culture inimitable anywhere else, and assimilation of people from anywhere else into it is difficult.

Want growth? Go to a poor country in the early stages of industrialization -- but know that poverty comes as a norm at that level of growth. 

Who wins and why? Also please indicate whether you think the opposite party would have a shot at picking up Gillibrand, Ayotte and Rubio's Senate seats. (they would all be up in 2016)

Rubio is a political hack who barely got elected in a great year for Republicans. He would have difficulty enough getting re-elected to the US Senate in 2016. Ayotte is much to the right-of-center in a somewhat-liberal state in Presidential elections, and she too would be vulnerable in a re-election campaign.

Ayotte may be a good VP candidate, but not for Rubio. Question: who is a really-good GOP nominee?  Christie and Huntsman seem the least objectionable, but they neither could ever lock up the paleoconservative vote in the primaries.

2016 will be a year of huge losses for the Republican party, at the least in the Senate.   

This is exactly why marriage amendments are extremely important in preserving marriage. I think we need a Federal Marriage Amendment.

This will stop activist judges and far-left radical legislators from redefining marriage for America

This train of thought is already antiquated in many quarters it will be pure comedy to view in another 15 years. Bigotry of the past.

Same-sex marriage is in about the same position as interracial marriage soon after Loving v. Virginia.

: There is more to it than that. And I agree with Rick, what he said, but the biggest problem with poverty in America, and we don’t talk about here, because it’s an economic discussion — and that is the break down of the American family.

You want to look at the poverty rate among families that have two — that have a husband and wife working in them? It’s 5 percent today. A family that’s headed by one person? It’s 30 percent today. We need to do something, and we need to talk about economics. The home — the word “home” in Greek is the basis of the word “economy.” It is — it is the foundation of our country. We need to have a policy that supports families, that encourages marriage…

that has fathers take responsibility for their children. You can’t have limited government — you can’t have a wealthy society if the family breaks down, that basic unit of society. And that needs to be included in this economic discussion.

I'm not saying he spent the entire debate bringing social issues into the mix, but that he was willing to go where no other candidate really was, I think that's important.  If the other candidates all go ECONOMY ECONOMY ECONOMY I think there's an opening for Santorum to be able to appeal to a significant amount of republican voters by connecting fiscal and social problems. Speaking their language, as it were.

In all likelihood, the economy will be better in 2016 than it was in 2012. People will still be grumbling about the national debt, but people have always grumbled about it. If the ACA is still around by the primaries, it's never going away. Any discussion of it from then on will be about tinkering with it; instead of "Kill Obamacare!" the battle will focus on things like preventing abortions from being covered and making sure employers aren't required to offer coverage to same-sex partners or something.

There is definitely an opening for Rick Santorum to run as a social conservative - but not as a '90s era SoCon who goes on and on about school prayer and the immorality of Hollywood. If he runs as a social conservative who sees a more traditional family structure as aiding the economic situation of the working class, he could very well have an audience. If he doesn't harp on gay marriage, he could run as the sort of Republican that David Frum and Ross Douthat have been pining for since 2006-ish. If he's willing to bend his party's Randian, laissez-faire economic views, he may even find some sympathetic ears among those in the Democratic Party who are not part of Obama's "gentry coalition" of minorities and upscale whites.

Same-sex marriage will be largely a non-issue in D-leaning states and every imaginable swing state as of 2012. Santorum is enough of a political chameleon to attract enough people of the sorts who did not vote against him in Pennsylvania in 2006. Democrats are going to be silent about him until he wins the nomination, and then they will tie him to Dubya and abuse of power while in the Senate, after which he would be lucky to lose only as badly as Goldwater.

Barring an economic collapse that Republicans can tie to President Obama, Democrats win the Presidency if they keep the "gentry" vote of government employees and middle-class.  minorities. Laissez-faire economics are increasingly being connected to rapacious elites who act as tyrants in their own domains.

The Republican coalition remains the sorts of people who demand that everyone else suffer for their greed so that as obedient servants in abject poverty they can get pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die, their brutal enforcers, and the people who accept the offer.   

Research shows that every legal method of recounting the votes in Florida in 2000 would have given Bush the election.

What research is that? 

It depends on whether you look at the full statewide results or only recounted a few counties.  Under a full statewide recount, Gore probably would have won by about 100 votes. 

Not true.  Gore's campaign specifically wanted selective recounts in only a few counties because they knew Bush probably would win a statewide recount.  A 2001 study found that the only way Gore could have won was by recounting methods that were never requested, including counting overvotes.  Again, the burden of proof is on you, my friend.

All I'm saying is this:  Manually recount every vote in Florida, Gore probably wins.  I'm not 100% sure that he would but, that's what the major study indicated. 

The Gore legal team erred in their strategy, I agree with you on that.  But, suppose the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a statewide manual recount of undervotes and overvotes in every county.  That could have won the election for Gore.

Why would you count overvotes? How do you know who they wanted to vote for? Which of the two people who the person voted for would thier vote count? My guess is, if one of the two people voted for were Gore, then Gore automatically gets the vote. I also find it offensive that Gore put out a strategy to eliminate as many votes as possible from overseas servicemen for political purposes

Rumors existed of such ballots being stuffed. Rumors also existed that political hacks decided to stop counting only when the count got in their favor.

All in all, the problem isn't that Dubya won. The problem was that our 43rd President was the most reckless, unprincipled, dishonest President that we ever had. Contrast the consequences of the 1960 election: John F. Kennedy was good enough to keep Americans from having regrets about the results even if there remained many rumors about political hacks distorting the results. 

The 2000 Presidential election will go down as one of the shadiest events in national history. Does Al Gore get the fault? Sure. Joe Lieberman was a horrible choice for a VP candidate. He allowed one state to decide everything, and the opponent's brother was Governor. If he had chosen Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), Al Gore would have had a better chance of winning  Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire or Ohio and would have won with or without Florida. Gore needed a beat-the-cheat strategy. Barack Obama played a beat-the-cheat strategy in 2008 and 2012 and won.

The post-election bump is gone, federal politics have returned to acrimony, Republican pols are returning to their "Obama is evil" mode... but all in all President Obama seems to have roughly the same support as he did at election time. 

The President so far is not hurting the chances of any Democratic nominee to win in 2016. 

The sequester divide returned everything to normal.  Now it's up to the economy to make Obama popular.

Or successes in foreign policy.

[Obama]

Rubio as Presidential candidate would not make FL much more Republican actually.

FL was 3 points more GOP in 2012 than the nation (50-49 vs. 51-47).

But if we use Quinnipiac's latest national poll (Hillary+16 over Rubio) and this, then Florida is only 5 points more GOP than the nation.

A 2-point favorite son effect for Rubio in Florida.

That's a weak "Favorite Son" effect. He barely got elected in the best year in decades for GOP pols, and he has done little to prove himself out of the ordinary.  He has been a US Senator for two years plus, so he should be somewhat known.

In only one Presidential election since WWII has Florida been the difference between winning and losing the Presidential election. The Cook PVI shows Florida R+3 between  2008 and 2012 for the Presidency -- eminently winnable for a strong Democratic campaigner who takes the State seriously.


A Republican nominee will have to win all states that Romney won in 2012, Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and one of Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Iowa, or Nevada.  Closing in on Florida, Ohio, and Virginia and putting Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, and Pennsylvania at risk for the Democratic nominee by the Republican nominee puts the 2016 Presidential election in the situation that President Obama was in early September in 2008 or 2012:

   


Intensity  Margin
 70%          10% or more
 50%           6-9%
 40%           4-5%
white          3% or less    

In essence the Republican nominee is close to having things tied down with a reasonable assurance of 266 electoral votes and four different states scattered across the country as toss-ups. The Democratic nominee could win by winning every one of them, but that is one chance in 16 as Ohio, Virginia, and Florida drop out of reach; Arizona, Georgia, Missouri, and North Carolina are pipe dreams that seemed available as late as June and are out of the question. The Democratic nominee is on the defensive and has no easy way of winning all four states with one appeal that wins them all. The Republican nominee wisely abandons any quixotic effort to win Michigan, Minnesota, or Wisconsin because he is going to win Iowa anyway if he picks off any one of those but such an effort might put a state like Ohio or Virginia at risk to a spirited campaign by the Democrat.

This said --

1. Marco Rubio, as a right-wing Cuban-American, has no more appeal to center-left middle-class Puerto Ricans or Mexican-Americans than John Hickenlooper has an appeal to right-wing German-Americans. Latinos in America are no more a political monolith than are German-Americans.

2. He has pandered to Protestant fundamentalists for their votes, which is a good way to lose other votes. People who put a high value on rational education don't want public schools teaching creationist claptrap.  

3. He would be a consummately-weak nominee for President. The last open-seat elections in the last century were

2008 -- Obama vs. McCain
2000 -- G W Bush vs. Gore
1988 -- G H W Bush vs. Dukakis
1968 -- Nixon vs. Humphrey and Wallace
1960 -- Kennedy vs. Nixon
1952 -- Eisenhower vs. Stevenson
1928 -- Hoover vs. Smith
1920 -- Harding vs. Cox

I don't see an obvious recent analogue so far for Marco Rubio. A three-way split with the Party of the incumbent having a dissident wing (1968) is unlikely. It is highly unlikely that the current Vice-President will run for President, so we can rule out 1960, 1988, and 2000.  We are unlikely to have a high-profile military hero as a major candidate, so we can rule out 1952. 1928 (Is America ready for a Catholic President?) was answered again very differently in 1960, and if America could elect a black man as President in 2008 it can certainly elect a Latino male in 2016. That leaves 1920.

Warren Gamaliel Harding was long regarded as a political mediocrity, first by his opponents, and after some of his consequences as President, about everyone else. If he wins in 2016 Rubio demonstrates that Americans are tired of the current administration for its foibles and for social ferment and want 'normalcy', whatever that is.  

So far Marco Rubio has shown himself one of the lesser lights in the Senate (much unlike Barack Obama in 2008), but he has well served the interests of well-heeled heels who want government to heed wealth and privilege but little else. Mediocrities like Harding and Dubya have become President.

Republicans better hope Obama's approval falls into the 20s/teens like Bush's did.

Bingo. Question: can we afford a President that bad -- again?