Marco Rubio’s third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses was a sign of hope for moderate Republicans, but the candidate himself is far from moderate. PHOTOGRAPH BY CHIP SOMODEVILLA / GETTY

If you were in the market for a Republican candidate who could actually win in a general election, Marco Rubio’s third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses Monday was a sign of hope. Coming in just behind Ted Cruz and Donald Trump meant he’d done better than expected: he was having a surge, a moment, a comeback. In a Times column headlined, wishfully, “Donald Trump Isn’t Real,” David Brooks banished the pugnacious billionaire to the past tense (“Trump was unabashedly masculine, the lingua franca of pro wrestling”) and said of Ted Cruz, “His is a Tea Party wing in the G.O.P. But its size and geographic reach is limited.” That left Rubio as “the only candidate who can plausibly unify the party.” Writing for National Review Online, David French touted the Florida senator for similar reasons, reminding restive Republicans that “winning a general election means uniting every G.O.P. constituency under one banner, and happily so. Thus, we want a candidate whom establishment voters will want to support, along with populists, Tea Party conservatives, and every other wing of the GOP.” Rubio, to him, was looking like that guy.

From a distance, it’s easy to see why. Rubio is more presentable than Cruz or Trump (or, for that matter, Chris Christie)—more likable, as Cruz keeps reminding people, trying to make it sound like a curse. At times, Rubio can project a soothing, authoritative calm not unlike Ben Carson’s but without the mooniness. He has a legitimately stirring family story: he’s the Spanish-speaking, Cuban-American son of two immigrants who worked, respectively, as a bartender and a hotel maid. (“If I’m our nominee, how is Hillary Clinton going to lecture me about living paycheck to paycheck?” he asked, memorably, at the first debate. “I was raised paycheck to paycheck.”) His wife, Jeanette Dousdebes Rubio, is the daughter of Colombian immigrants, did a stint as a Miami Dolphins cheerleader, and seems to have perfected the art of the blandly convivial interview. At home, in Florida, he and his family attend both a Catholic church and a Baptist one—the faith equivalent of suspenders and a belt. In Iowa this week, Rubio humble-bragged that the pundits had dismissed him because “my hair wasn’t gray enough and my boots were too high.” In other words, Republicans, at least this one, can get their millennial groove on, too.

One thing Rubio is not, however, is moderate, or even close to it. And to the extent that far-right politics are actually off-putting to voters in a general election—to Democrats but also independents and younger voters, who are instinctually liberal on social issues—that poses a bit of a problem for the scenario in which Rubio is the savior of reason and the G.O.P. He ran for his Senate seat in 2010 with Tea Party support. He is firmly opposed to same-sex marriage and to abortion, with no exception for cases of rape or incest or the health of the mother—only for the mother’s life. In an article in National Review, in which Jim Geraghty lays out the case that “Marco Rubio Is Plenty Conservative,” he quotes Rubio in the first Republican debate: “Future generations will look back at this history of our country and call us barbarians for murdering millions of babies who we never gave them a chance to live.”

Rubio has a perfect record from the N.R.A. and a lifetime rating of ninety-eight per cent from the American Conservative Union. He is opposed to raising the minimum wage. As Geraghty notes, he “contends the legislative efforts to fight climate change are economically self-destructive and expresses skepticism that human behavior is driving climate change.”

The one issue on which Rubio showed some bipartisan flexibility was immigration: in 2013, he worked with the so-called Gang of Eight group of senators on an immigration-reform bill that would have opened a path to citizenship for the undocumented. But, during the Presidential campaign, Rubio has renounced his support for such policies. His new partisans likely believe that Rubio’s ethnic identity will neutralize his defection from immigration reform, and win Latino voters over. But that seems like wishful thinking, too—especially after a Republican primary campaign in which the tone of anti-immigration rhetoric has been so harsh. It’s true that Latino voters care about issues besides immigration: in polls, they often rank education or the economy before it as a top priority. But, on those issues, they are generally more in line with Democratic values. (Latinos support a bigger role for government, for example.) In a dispatch last month from Nevada, one of the swing states where Latino votes may be especially important, Mary Jordan, of the Washington_ _Post, spent two days interviewing Mexican-Americans in Las Vegas and could not find a single person who planned to vote for Rubio or Cruz. “Rubio says things that are not good for Mexicans,” a sixty-two-year-old retired casino housekeeper named Maria Herrera told her. “I would never vote for him just because he’s Latino.”

Telling moderate Republicans that Rubio is the obvious, joyous choice for them means asking them to ignore who Rubio is—or, perhaps, to abandon their notions of moderation. What Rubio’s anointment as the establishment candidate really shows is how far rightward the Republican Party has moved. And, maybe most striking of all, in his case, how intolerant it has become on immigration. In 1984, in a Presidential debate with Walter Mondale, Ronald Reagan said the following: “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” The last comprehensive immigration-reform bill that granted such amnesty to undocumented immigrants—nearly three million of them—was in 1986. Reagan signed it.