November 8, 2016 2022 → 52.0% 44.3% | 4,835,191 4,122,088 Date 8 November 2016 | |
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Winner Marco Rubio | ||
The 2016 United States Senate election in Florida was held on November 8, 2016 to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the State of Florida, concurrently with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as well as other elections to the United States Senate in other states and elections to the United States House of Representatives and various state and local elections. The primary elections for both the Republicans and Democrats took place on August 30, 2016.
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Incumbent Republican Senator Marco Rubio ran for another term but faced well-funded Republican primary opposition after initially announcing he would not seek re-election to his Senate seat. He had openly considered whether to seek re-election or run for President in 2016. He stated in April 2014 that he would not run for both the Senate and President in 2016, as Florida law prohibits a candidate from simultaneously appearing twice on a ballot, but did not rule out running for either office.
In April 2015, Rubio announced that he was running for President and would not seek re-election. Rubio had initially said he would not run for re-election to the Senate even if he dropped out of the GOP presidential primary (which he did after losing Florida on March 15, 2016) before he would have to qualify for the 2016 Senate primary ballot, for which the filing deadline was June 24, 2016.
On June 13, 2016, despite his previous statements that he would not run for re-election to his Senate seat, Rubio "seemed to open the door to running for re-election," citing the previous day's Orlando mass shooting and how "it really gives you pause, to think a little bit about your service to your country and where you can be most useful to your country." On June 22, 2016, Rubio announced that he would seek re-election to the Senate, reversing his pledge not to run.
On August 30, the Republican Party nominated Marco Rubio, and the Democratic Party nominated Representative Patrick Murphy. Rubio won with the largest raw vote total in Florida history, taking a greater percentage of the popular vote than Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who won the state in the election. He is the first Republican Senator from Florida since 1994, and only the second with Connie Mack, to be reelected to a second term. Also, with Mel Martinez's victory in 2004, this marks the first time that Republicans have won one of Florida's Senate seats three times in a row (Mack succeeded Lawton Chiles, a Democrat, and was succeeded by another Democrat, Bill Nelson).
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Libertarian primary
On October 1, 2015, Adrian Wyllie and Lynn House, Chair and Vice Chair respectively of the Libertarian Party of Florida, resigned their seats in protest after the executive committee refused to oust candidate Augustus Invictus from the party. According to Wyllie, Invictus had defended eugenics, called for a new Civil War, and brutally slaughtered a goat, and is not representative of the Libertarian Party. Invictus has refuted these claims, calling Wyllie's accusations, "deliberate misrepresentation[s]."
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Candidates
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