MIAMI — Buried by an avalanche of awful Florida poll numbers, Marco Rubio’s campaign for president has hit the last stage of grief: Acceptance.

“Marco’s at peace; he knows he put it all out there and whatever happens happens,” said a longtime Rubio backer and fundraiser. “His faith is real. He knows he has been blessed. But don’t get me wrong: We’re still praying.”


More than one Rubio supporter has described the likelihood of a win as a “miracle.”

Barring divine intervention, the cold hard math of the polls will come to bear. The surveys vary wildly, showing Donald Trump with anywhere from a 5- to a 23-percentage-point lead. But they all share one common trait: A Rubio loss. And they’ve been that way since August.

Making a Rubio win even more unlikely is that so many Republicans have already cast early and absentee ballots, a record 1.14 million. That’s probably half of the electorate who will vote in the entire primary. So in order for Rubio to have a shot at winning, he’d need to win Election Day by the same margin that he has likely lost the early vote by.

Based on the averages of the recent Florida polls, Rubio’s deficit could be as big as 16.5 percentage points. If that’s accurate, it’s a nearly insurmountable lead by Trump: 190,000 ballots heading into Election Day.

“What’s that old line from the movie: There’s a million-in-one shot, so I have a chance, right?” said Mason-Dixon Polling & Research pollster Brad Coker, referencing the popular internet meme from the movie “Dumb and Dumber.”

“I just can’t see any way Rubio can salvage a win,” Coker said. “The numbers just aren’t there.”

Coker, who surveyed the race more than a week ago, found Rubio trailing by just 6 percentage points. But a raft of more-recent polls found that Rubio was behind by 20 points or more.

Though Rubio has denied he would drop out if he loses Florida and its 99 winner-take-all delegates, no one believes he’s serious. The campaign is running on fumes. Donor money is drying up. The staff can’t work for free. A father of four, Rubio is also feeling pressure at home to leave the campaign trail if he has no shot.

Rubio’s bulwark – his home county of Miami-Dade – probably won’t be enough to save him. It’s the most-populous county in Florida with the most Republicans, 350,000. And about 73 percent of them are Hispanic, most of them Cuban-American like Rubio. So far, more than 102,000 Republicans have cast early and vote-by-mail absentee ballots in the county.

But even if every remaining Miami-Dade Republican voted, Rubio would have to carry 75 percent of the vote just to tie Trump’s likely statewide performance. And that’s assuming Trump gets none of the remaining vote in Rubio’s county.

Miami-Dade’s turnout rate so far, 29 percent, is higher than the statewide average of 27 percent. Yet counties that most likely favor Trump are seeing stronger turnout rates that indicate he can afford to lose Miami-Dade to Rubio while cushioning his margins elsewhere. In Lee County, where Fort Myers is located, the turnout rate is 39 percent. And in The Villages Retirement community in Sumter County – where Rubio campaigned this weekend – more than half of the voters have already cast their ballots.

Rubio supporters have also looked hopefully to Hispanic Republicans, who favor the Florida Senator with 49 percent of the vote, followed by Ted Cruz (21 percent) and Donald Trump (19 percent), according to a Bendixen & Amandi International/Tarrance Group/Univision/Washington Post poll last week.

But there simply aren’t enough Latino members of the Florida GOP to build a high enough margin in favor of Rubio. The poll shows what Bernadette Pardo, host of the Spanish-language “Pedaleando con Berny” show on Radio Mambi in Miami, hears every day – Cuban-Americans don’t mind dividing up their vote between Rubio and fellow Cuban-American Cruz. Also, she cautioned, Trump might do better among Cuban-Americans than some might think.

“There is support for Trump because he’s a strongman,” Pardo said. “He’s like the little Fidel Castro that we all have inside.”

Trump’s campaign made sure to steal Rubio’s thunder in Florida on Monday by announcing the endorsement of the state’s popular attorney general, Pam Bondi in Tampa, the capital of the state’s most-crucial political media market. Trump critics and some rank-and-file Rubio supporters instantly criticized Bondi by claiming her office failed to investigate fraud accusations against Trump University -- a charge she has denied.

Rubio is also unlikely to score the endorsement of his political-mentor-turned-primary-opponent Jeb Bush. Not only did the two have hard feelings, those familiar with Bush’s thinking say the former governor, after dropping out, doesn’t want to squander an endorsement on a candidate who likely won’t win and who probably doesn’t find much use for his support anyway.

“Loser endorses soon-to-be loser,” is how one Republican summed it up.

In the final days of the campaign, Rubio was beset by news reports based on thinly source rumors that advisers wanted him to drop out before Tuesday. None did.

His campaign faced numerous obituaries before its death as he stampeded across Florida and campaigned in every corner of the state. Super PACs supporting Rubio and opposing Trump targeted the airwaves in Central Florida and parts of conservative North Florida to keep Trump’s margins down. Rubio’s campaign also redoubled its phone-banking efforts to turn out early voters.

But Trump’s lead appeared only to grow.

Rubio at times seemed more-tired than usual. At other points, the oft-guarded candidate loosened up and tore into Trump over the unrest in Chicago that led the front-runner to cancel a rally there.

This weekend, Rubio’s extended riff bashing the “frightening, grotesque and disturbing” anger-stoking rhetoric by Trump was watched nearly 400,000 times in two days and grabbed the attention of the pundit class that once wrote him off.

“For the sake of common decency in America and the nobler side of Republican politics,” wrote Tom Krattenmaker, a member of USA Today’s board of contributors “let’s hope these are not the final days of Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign.”

But as if offering one final twist of the knife, the Chicago unrest may have helped Trump more than hurt him.

A Monmouth University poll released Monday found that 60 percent of likely Florida Republican voters said the scenes from Chicago made no difference to them – while 22 percent said they would be more likely to vote for Trump.

“At a certain point, it’s like nothing works against that guy. Nothing seems to hurt him,” said another Rubio longtime supporter who volunteered with the campaign. “That’s been the story of this campaign.”

And yet, Rubio’s campaign publicly kept up a brave face and issued a Monday fundraising pitch that, despite all the evidence to the contrary in Florida, said “it’s too close to call."

Campaigning early in Jacksonville, Rubio strained credulity with his prediction of an upset: “We’re going to shock the country.”