Two days have passed since Donald Trump won the presidency, Democrats are still trying to figure out what went wrong and are casting blame on anyone or anything that they feel could have been a factor in their losses nationwide.
In Florida, Rep. Patrick Murphy (D) and his team are pointing the finger at Senator Marco Rubio’s fundraising prowess as being the deciding factor for their senatorial loss in Florida.Rubio delivered a pretty hefty beat down on Murphy, besting him by over 700,000 votes, or 8 percentage points.
Groups like The Club for Growth and other political action committees supporting Rubio’s campaign spent $34.5 million on top of what Rubio’s campaign was able to raise on their own.
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Murphy on the other hand, only received outside support in the amount of $11.3 million, which included money his father donated to both his campaign and supporting Pac’s.
Remember, the Democratic Party held back close to $16 million in advertising for Murphy because they felt they needed to spent that money elsewhere. The money was there and they pulled it.
Why?National Democrats wrote off Murphy because he did not convince them that he could beat Rubio on his own merits and accomplishments.
When Murphy first ran for the U.S. Congress in 2012, he defeated then-Rep. Allen West (R) because of the anti-West money he was able to raise from around the country, and the advertising dollars his party spent against West that election cycle.
It wasn’t about his message, because like it was the case this election cycle, Murphy didn’t have one.
Back then, Murphy solely campaigned on Allen West being an “right wing extremist.”
He tried that same line of attack against Rubio this year, but Floridians knew better.But aside from trying to label Rubio as an “extremist” like Allen West, Murphy played the “Trump” card, and in doing so, Â Murphy may have galvanized many anti-Rubio Republicans and Independents who were supporting Trump, but not Rubio.
Affixing himself to Hillary Clinton’s hip also didn’t help Murphy, as Trump defeated her in Florida by a larger  margin than Obama beat Romney with in 2012.
Murphy tried to paint the picture that he was a middle-of-the-road  or centrist Democrat, but the American electorate smartened up a bit since 2018 and saw right through Murphy’s smoke-and-mirrors senatorial campaign.
Americans repudiated President Obama’s failed foreign policy and domestic agenda, the same agenda Murphy embraced and ran on.
