The “Morning Joe” crew set their sights on the Senate debate out of Florida on Wednesday, praising Democratic candidate Val Demings and deriding Republican Sen. Marco Rubio as “sophomoric,” “shrill” and “sweaty.”
He’s “like a frustrated little boy,” co-host Mika Brzezinski said.
“You really could see the experience that Val Demings has as a police chief whose dealt with a lot of characters that might frustrate her,” Brzezinski said of his opponent. “She really had her facts ready, but she was also ready to confront him with some of the kinds of things the Republican party has done of late in order to win.”
Still, for better or worse by their estimate, co-host Joe Scarborough thinks Rubio will win – though it “could be a tight race.”
“We’ll see how it goes. Florida has been trending Republican, obviously, strongly in 2020. But Val Demings did a very good job last night,” he said.
Scarborough then recounted how, in watching the debate Tuesday, he was on and off the phone with various callers who were surprised by how unimpressive Rubio’s performance was.
“Everybody I talked to said, ‘Something happened to him in 2016.’ Like, Donald Trump got into his head. Donald Trump happened to him, got into his head, and he just never recovered,” Scarborough said.
“He seemed off balanced last night, he would have pat answers,” the co-host continued, pointing to instances of the senator incoherently yelling about Second Amendment rights. “It’s just these pat answers that you would hear somebody in a middle school debate make where they were pretending to be in a Senate debate. He seemed shrill, he seemed sophomoric, he seemed sweaty, and I just don’t know that he ever recovered from Donald Trump in 2016 beating him as badly as he did in Florida.”
As Scarborough sees it, Rubio is a case study in how some of the mighty have fallen.
“And I’ve gotta say one other thing, too: Marco Rubio was once seen as the future of the Republican party. There was a Time Magazine cover talking about him being the future of the Republican party, and what I saw last night was just a shadow of that guy … Maybe I’m wrong and people will scream and yell at me on Twitter now, but I don’t think he’s always been that bad.”
Watch the full segment in the video above.
