Friends for 20 years, Marco Rubio and Florida Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera were at the scene of the Orlando massacre on Sunday when they had an unusually frank conversation about their political futures.

“You should reconsider running for your seat,” Lopez-Cantera told Rubio as they sat in the senator’s pickup truck about an hour before sunset, after witnessing the aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.


Rubio was caught off guard. After all, Lopez-Cantera has been running for his Senate seat in a crowded GOP primary for more than a year — with Rubio’s encouragement.

Lopez-Cantera made clear he was still fully committed to running, even as he initiated a gut-check moment for both of them. Until then, Rubio had resisted the entreaties of Senate leaders and donors to rethink retiring from the Senate. Lopez-Cantera’s conversation removed one of the biggest obstacles to Rubio running again: a longtime friendship that he wouldn’t want to ruin due to political ambition.

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to say that because of outside pressure,” Rubio responded.

But Lopez-Cantera said he felt “compelled” to continue talking it through. The two of them were shaken by what they saw in Orlando, the bloody sidewalks and the ashen faces of local, state and federal authorities.

“This is bigger than me. And this isn’t about me. And it’s not about you. It’s about our country and this election,” Lopez-Cantera said to Rubio, recounting the conversation for Politico. “It’s deeply consequential. … In the current field, I’m the best candidate in the general election. But I’m not looking at this through rose-colored glasses.”

Bottom line, Lopez-Cantera said in the interview: “Nothing has changed. I’m still running. Marco isn’t.”

The filing deadline for the race is June 24, when Rubio is scheduled to hold a fundraiser for Lopez-Cantera. If Rubio decides to run, Lopez-Cantera won’t file. Right now, longtime friends of both men believe Rubio ultimately won’t run: The lure of a much bigger paycheck and proximity to his family will outweigh another term in the Senate.

But in the next breath, they say no one really knows what Rubio will do, except the senator himself — and even he might still be agonizing over the decision.

“I’ll go home later this week, I’ll have some time with my family,” Rubio told reporters in the Capitol on Wednesday as he headed to a classified briefing on the Orlando attacks. “If there’s been a change in our status, I’ll be sure to let everyone know.”

Polling shows Rubio is the strongest Republican in a potential race against the Democrats’ strongest candidate, Rep. Patrick Murphy, in a contest that could decide control of the Senate.

The Republican Senate race is crowded. And the full-court press to recruit Rubio to run for reelection has frozen fundraising and dampened Republican enthusiasm for all five major GOP candidates for the seat. None is as well known as Rubio.

Some Republican and conservative groups have suggested they won’t spend big in Florida, while more donors will give to oppose Rubio in order to hand him his second defeat in a year and brand him a double loser after his crushing loss in the presidential primary.

As part of the maneuvers to get Rubio to reverse course, Lopez-Cantera and allies of his and Rubio’s say the amount of disinformation spread by party insiders has been somewhere between staggering and absurd.

For weeks, Lopez-Cantera and Rubio had privately mocked the rumors of them striking a deal or hatching some elaborate plot. In one telling, Rubio would run for reelection, win and then resign before the 2020 presidential election cycle, at which point Lopez-Cantera would run for his seat. In another version, Lopez-Cantera agreed with moneyed interests to drop out of the Senate race, endorse Rubio and then run for chief financial officer in 2018.

All of it is false, Lopez-Cantera said.

“There is no deal. There is no plan,” Lopez-Cantera said. “None of it is true. Anyone who says that is lying and doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

But those who haven’t been privy to the two friends’ talks have been deeply skeptical about what they’re up to. And if Rubio ultimately runs and Lopez-Cantera doesn’t, some of the rumors will appear true.

“You can’t tell me this hasn’t been orchestrated,” said one Republican who supports one of Lopez-Cantera’s rivals in the Senate race said, echoing Democrats. “Marco is running and you can talk about all the friendship stuff you want, but this shows Marco is all about Marco.”

The campaign of one of Lopez-Cantera’s Republican opponents, developer Carlos Beruff, fell for one of the rumor-filled reports and issued a statement Wednesday about Rubio in which the candidate said voters are “sick of career politicians and power brokers in Washington who care about one thing: holding on to power. But the voters of Florida will not obey them. They don’t get to pick our candidates.”

As for the other Republican candidates, U.S. Rep. David Jolly said he’ll announce his plans Friday. He might run for reelection to his Tampa Bay-area 13th Congressional District seat. Defense contractor Todd Wilcox indicated he’ll stay in the race with or without Rubio, and those close to U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis say he’d give strong consideration to running for reelection in the 6th Congressional District if Rubio runs.

Lopez-Cantera acknowledges that his decision to bring up the race — especially after witnessing the aftermath of the carnage at the Pulse nightclub — put unexpected extra pressure on Rubio.

Rubio’s plans since last spring were to win the White House or return home to West Miami, where he lives less than a half-hour away from Lopez-Cantera’s Coral Gables home. Rubio has hired Washington dealmaker Robert Barnett to field job offers and get the biggest payday possible, without lobbying or working on Wall Street. He also planned to hit the paid-speaker circuit.

After two years, if Hillary Clinton wins this election, Rubio is expected to begin mounting a challenge to her in 2020.

“Marco ran for president as a senator and we saw how that played out,” said one backer. “This is his chance to be at home, spend time with Jeannette [Rubio’s wife] and their kids and make some real money so he can put all four of them through private college in the Northeast if he wants to. People forget he’s the son of blue-collar immigrants. Things like this are more important to him than politics.”

Lopez-Cantera, who is also married and has two children, emphasized the importance of family to Rubio.

“Until I mentioned this, he was really committed to spending time with his kids, being able to be home for more than 10 days without having to go somewhere on the campaign trail or back to Washington. He looked forward to coaching his son’s football team,” Lopez-Cantera said.

Miami-Dade County Commissioner Steve Bovo, whose wife works as a policy adviser for Rubio, said he wasn’t surprised by Lopez-Cantera’s discussion. Bovo served in the Florida House when Lopez-Cantera was majority leader just after Rubio left as Florida House speaker, a post he held in 2007-08.

“Carlos is not only thinking about their friendship but the country,” Bovo said. “We all know each other, go to each others’ kids’ birthday parties. In the difficult business we’re in, we separate the friendship and the politics. But we never do anything to endanger our friendship.”

One Rubio insider said he believes Rubio should run for reelection because, as a senator, he’ll have more ability to affect policy he cares about, raise money and draw attention.

“From a political perspective, this is about having a platform,” the Republican said. “When CNN calls, does the booker want former Sen. Marco Rubio or do they want, say, current Sen. Tom Cotton?”

A member of the Committee on Foreign Relations and Select Committee on Intelligence, Rubio has made foreign policy a specialty. And, friends say, he’ll miss getting classified briefings and being in a position to do something about it.

About 12 hours after Rubio and Lopez-Cantera spoke on Sunday, the senator was interviewed by conservative radio show host Hugh Hewitt, who likes to talk about foreign policy and the threat of terrorism. Hewitt unexpectedly switched gears on Rubio by asking whether the terrorist attack changed “in any way your resolve not to seek reelection.”

Briefly caught flat-footed, Rubio said “I’ve been deeply impacted by it. I think when it visits your home state, and it impacts a community you know well, it really gives you pause to think a little bit about, you know, your service to your country and where you can be most useful to your country.”

“I have a friend of mine who is running for the U.S. Senate,” Rubio said later. “So I want to be fair, Hugh. I haven’t thought about it in that context. I really don’t want to link the two things right now, because I don’t want politics to intrude in all of this.”

By then, though, it was too late.

“I brought this up. It wasn’t mutual,” Lopez-Cantera said. “He is in a position where he will make a decision. We’re friends. We support each other.”





Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.

