Former presidential candidate Marco Rubio told a group of Minnesota supporters Wednesday he is hoping one of the remaining candidates for president will stop Donald Trump from winning the Republican nomination — and that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz could be the best option for conservatives.

Rubio, who dropped out of the race Tuesday after losing his home state of Florida, didn’t endorse any of his former rivals in a conference call with dozens of Minnesota supporters. In the call, he explained his decision to leave the race and why he felt his presidential campaign didn’t do better, and suggested he might run for office again at some point in the future.

He said he saw no real path forward for his campaign after losing Florida and its 99 winner-take-all delegates. He acknowledged he could have stayed in the race with the intention of seeking the nomination at the convention, but said he would have had to run a shoestring campaign with no money to defend himself on the airwaves. Even if he had won the nomination against the odds, Rubio said, the victory could prove pyrrhic.

“Winning a general election with a nominee that a significant percentage of the base thinks stole it, even though you did it through the rules of the RNC, would be pretty much fatal for the party,” Rubio said, though he added that many Republicans will not vote for Trump, either.

But he’s rooting for someone else to stop Trump from winning the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination — someone who can go into the convention with more delegates and a better claim than Rubio believes he would have been able to muster.

He didn’t endorse either Texas Sen. Ted Cruz or Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the two other remaining candidates. But Rubio praised Cruz as “the only conservative left in the race.”

Rubio said his positive campaign message didn’t match the national mood, and said media coverage helped snowball Super Tuesday losses into the end of his campaign.

“This election was entirely driven by national media coverage, in many ways,” Rubio said, in audio of the conference call obtained by the Pioneer Press. “When the media narrative goes negative on you, and all the news is bad, it kind of knocks us off.”

Minnesota was one of only three primaries or caucuses Rubio won in his year-long presidential campaign and the only state he won. His other wins were in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.

“We’re always joking the last 24 hours at home that we need to move to Minnesota with a winter home in Puerto Rico and work in D.C.,” Rubio said.

The Florida senator said he had tried to run an upbeat campaign, but didn’t think that message resonated in an election when “there’s a lot of frustration in this country.”

“I really believe we’re on the verge of an incredible era in our history,” Rubio said, but added: “This is not the greatest year for that kind of message.”

Describing the arc of his campaign for his Minnesota supporters, Rubio said he endured an “unprecedented” amount of attack ads from the Super PAC supporting former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Though he “weathered” those ads, Rubio said he “probably could have won Iowa if it weren’t for the TV attacks.”

He said he “saw the bottom fall out of our support” after the March 1 elections, when Rubio won Minnesota but lost everywhere else.

“The media kind of just said, ‘Marco Rubio had a terrible night, and it looks like the strongest anti-Trump alternative is Ted Cruz,'” Rubio said.

He rejected an unidentified supporter’s suggestion that negative coverage by Fox News was particularly to blame for his defeat, but said “there were a couple people on (Fox) that went full Trump.”

The “drumbeat” of negative news about his chances made it harder for Rubio to raise money, he said, and also turned away potential voters.

“When the media is constantly telling you, ‘So-and-so is winning and so-and-so is losing,’ it impacts voters,” he said.

Rubio said polling showed him trailing in Florida by just 5 points last Thursday — “We were closing fast on Donald Trump in Florida,” he said. But by the time Tuesday came around Rubio got blown out by 17 points.

“The only thing that happened over the weekend was the constant drip drip drip of ‘Rubio’s losing’ ” in the media, he said — as well as a Trump rally in Chicago that was canceled after a heavy presence from protesters. “I don’t know for a fact it had an impact on voters, but there’s nothing else that happened during that three-day period.”

But Rubio acknowledged that media narratives cut both ways.

“When we won Iowa, we came in third place, but the media coverage treated us like the winner. We were raising $250,000 a day online,” Rubio said. “We benefited from that narrative, but in the end, we were hurt by it, too. That’s just the way it is.”

He said he is “at peace” with his decision to leave the race but believes he might seek office in the future — though he joked he doesn’t “have any ‘Rubio 2020’ signs printed out or anything like that.”

“I remain open to public service in the future if the opportunity is right for me,” Rubio said.

Rachel E. Stassen-Berger contributed to this report.

This story has been updated with additional information.