By most measures, Marco Rubio should be running away with the race for the Republican nomination in Nevada.

Of all the Republicans left in the contest, the senator from Florida has a unique connection to Nevada’s culture and voters.

He lived in Las Vegas for three years as a child, until the age of 11, during which time he also embraced the Mormon faith that is popular in a state that borders Utah. Fully one quarter of GOP caucus-goers in the last presidential election were Mormon. (It was only later that the young Rubio convinced his family to leave the Church of Latter-day Saints to convert to Catholicism.)

In a state where Latinos make up 27% of the population, Rubio – as the only bilingual candidate in the field – should be making deep inroads into Nevada.

When he showed up to campaign at the downbeat Texas Station casino in north Las Vegas on Monday, there were more than two dozen of his family members in the audience.

Mark Hutchison, Nevada’s lieutenant governor who is also serving as Rubio’s state campaign chairman, introduced the candidate by stressing the title of one of the chapters in his autobiography.

“You know what it’s titled? Chapter Seven: Growing up Vegas,” Hutchison said. “Growing up Vegas! Marco Rubio grew up here! Marco Rubio is about Nevada. He has his family members here. Senator Rubio once told me has more family members in Nevada than he has in Florida. He is here all the time for reunions. He knows Nevada.”

Whatever Rubio knows about Nevada, it isn’t impressing the state’s voters. According to the most recent polls (in a state that is notoriously difficult to poll), Rubio is at least 20 points behind Donald Trump and can barely tie Ted Cruz for second place.

In fact, Rubio is faring no worse in this state than he is elsewhere. He is running third in two of the bigger states on Super Tuesday – Texas and Georgia – in line with his third-place finish in Iowa and his effective tie for second place in South Carolina.

For a candidate who exudes confidence in his likelihood of winning the nomination, Rubio has a solid lock on losing for the foreseeable future.

His own state of Florida does not vote for another three weeks, and even there he is trailing in third place in recent polls. He is the winningest candidate who just can’t win.

There is a consistency to Rubio’s underperformance that matches his robotic delivery on stage. If he is now the Republican establishment’s best candidate, the party’s leaders and donors are destined to lose their shirts in Vegas.

So how come Rubio is faring so poorly in a state he once called home?

Much of the answer lies in Rubio’s pitch to voters. At the heart of his campaign is a perfectly delivered stump speech that sells one idea: the American dream. Beyond his personal story of struggling with student debt, and his parents’ story as working-class immigrants, Rubio’s platform amounts to no more than motherhood and apple pie.

Yes, he delivers the now standard Republican promise to repeal Obamacare, increase military spending, lower taxes and beat Hillary Clinton.

But his ideas are so vacuous he makes Trump’s stump speech sound like a seminar at the Brookings Institution. (One of Rubio’s biggest applause lines is a promise to send Islamic State terrorists to Guantánamo Bay. “And in Guantánamo, we are going to find out everything they know,” he says darkly.)

Conventional wisdom – as well as the Cruz campaign – tells us that Rubio is an Obama-like figure – all hope and change and fine speeches.

In reality, Rubio most closely resembles another Democratic candidate from the 2008 cycle: John Edwards. Before Edwards became tainted by sex scandal, he was a masterful campaigner with a pitch-perfect delivery of a stump speech about two Americas: one prosperous, the other trapped in poverty.

Edwards delivered each rendition of his stump speech with identical timing and hand gestures. Every watery eye and dramatic pause was calibrated to sweep his audience off their feet. It worked – as long as you only saw him once. After that, you felt hopelessly manipulated.

Rubio’s delivery has an Edwards-like quality. He places his hand on his heart when he talks about himself, as if to demonstrate the sincerity of his convictions. He emotes so deliberately when talking about how your family is just like his, there really can be no distance between you.

It is easy to see how his supporters could leave a rally convinced by this wholesome and earnest performance. Rubio places himself at the heart of a story of the revival of the American dream, with all the grandiose ambition and sheer hollowness that entails.

“Here’s what history will say of this generation if we get this election right,” he told his supporters in Las Vegas on Monday.

“It will say the truth: we almost got it wrong. But then we remembered who we were. Then we remembered what America was. And we rose up and confronted our challenges. And we rose up and solved our problems. And we rose up and embraced our opportunities. And when our work is done, history will say of this generation, because we did what needed to be done, our children became the freest and most prosperous Americans that ever lived.”

Sadly for Rubio, not enough of them are voting for his American dream. That may be because he is a moderated version of the two candidates ahead of him. He is not as apocalyptic as Cruz and he doesn’t promise as golden a future as Trump.

Rubio is an old man’s idea of young man: a fresh copy of an old Norman Rockwell. He is neither youthful and forward-looking, nor old and backward-looking. In other words, a perfectly good second-best.

Based on his current performance, history will say one thing about his campaign: he almost did what needed to be done. In the meantime, he helped nominate Trump.