U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott have both declined to take a public stance on whether or not they plan to join fellow Republicans on Wednesday  in challenging the Electoral College results that will confirm Joe Biden as the official president-elect.

The Florida senators’ silence comes as tensions mount over potential violence surrounding the results of the U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia on Tuesday and planned rallies in Washington, D.C., in advance of, and during, the election confirmation hearing scheduled for 1 p.m. Wednesday.

“The rumor mill has it both of them will likely want to run for president,” said Ford O’Connell, Republican political strategist and former presidential campaign operative. “The reason why Rubio is in greater political danger is because his term is up in 2022. If he isn’t seen as loyal to President Trump, some up-and-comer could challenge him and conceivably win.”

The same holds true for Scott, whose term is up in 2024. O’Connell said that if either fails to challenge the election results, they risk alienating the GOP base.

Read more from Wendy Rhodes at The Palm Beach Post

Republican senators with an eye on running for the White House in 2024 are gearing up to battle against President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet picks, setting up a debate within the Senate GOP conference over how hard to push back on Biden’s nominees.

While the Senate traditionally gives a new president deference to fill his administration’s senior ranks, the environment has changed after four years of bitter partisan fighting under President Trump. 

Four Senate Republicans with potential White House aspirations in 2024 have already signaled their opposition to Biden’s picks, setting the tone for a contentious debate when Biden submits his nominees before what is expected to be a GOP-controlled Senate next year. 

“There is no question that the race is on to seize the Republican Party mantle should Trump not run in 2024,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist, who called Biden’s first round of Cabinet selections “Obama 2.0.”

He said taking “a whack” at Biden’s nominees is a way “to consolidate the party’s base.”

O’Connell said Hawley, Cotton, Paul, Rubio and other 2024 hopefuls could influence the broader Senate Republican conference if they launch an all-out resistance effort against Biden’s picks.  

“There is a lot of room for these folks to define Biden because Biden has never defined himself other than he rode shotgun with Barack Obama,” he said. 

“I think a lot of these Republicans will want to be on the record singing from the same hymn book when it comes to the sort of globalist foreign policy that Biden is talking about,” he added.

Read more from Alexander Bolton at The Hill

Democrats have found some unexpected Republican allies in contesting WikiLeaks’ embarrassing revelations about Hillary Clinton because of Russia’s suspected involvement in the email hacks.

Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican running for re-election in Florida, warned Wednesday against using the leaked emails as political ammunition against Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has seized on the WikiLeaks dump of more than 21,000 emails intercepted from the Clinton campaign as evidence that she is a double-dealing, corrupt politician.

Republican strategist Ford O’Connell credited Mr. Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence, with positioning himself for the postelection political environment.

He said the threat of cyberattacks by Russia, China and others — as well as more WikiLeaks scandals — will not disappear.

“He’s trying to shepherd Republicans in the right direction because he knows what looks good today may not look good tomorrow,” said Mr. O’Connell. “Adam is also part of that sort of foreign policy crew, so he knows what is going on as well.”

Asked whether Mr. Schiff would be “singing the same tune” if the Republican candidate had been the target, Mr. O’Connell replied, “I highly doubt it.”

Read more from S.A. Miller and Seth McLaughlin at The Washington Times

In his long shot bid to defeat Marco Rubio, Republican Carlos Beruff has yet to ignite the type of political grass fire that two years ago took out a top Republican leader in the U.S. House and nearly claimed four U.S. senators.

Following the insurgent’s playbook, Beruff has spent more than $8 million of his own money on television ads. The wealthy land developer has leveled stinging criticism at Rubio on immigration issues. And in a year Donald Trump has stormed the establishment, Beruff has drawn comparisons between himself and the Republican presidential nominee.

Yet, nothing. Not even a spark.

What Beruff is attempting is a rare feat. Since 1970, 632 U.S. senators have sought re-election and just 20 have been defeated in a primary.

Yet while 2014 proved incumbents aren’t always safe, Beruff is missing five key ingredients from that year that were crucial in turning Republican Senate races in Mississippi, Tennessee, Kansas and Kentucky into knock-down drag out brawls.

Marco Rubio surfed a wave of Tea Party fury at Washington into the Senate in 2010. Now, he’s drowning in its undertow.

Six years ago Rubio took on then-Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, a charming, telegenic candidate with strong establishment support.

But Crist’s splits with to the conservative base on the stimulus and global warming and close ties to the "establishment" dragged him under in the year that birthed the Tea Party. Now, it’s Rubio who’s been hamstrung by his Washington and establishment ties and apostasies with the base on immigration.

Rubio was once viewed as the party’s savior. Now he's fighting a steep uphill battle to win Florida's primary on Tuesday. If he loses his home state, as expected, it will likely be a final blow to a hobbled presidential campaign.

"The very forces that pushed Rubio and Cruz into office are the ones that are going to push Trump over the finish line for the Republican nomination," said Ford O’Connell, a GOP strategist who has worked in both Texas and Florida.

"It was about that anti-establishment feeling for Rubio and Cruz. And that’s what Trump has become the beneficiary of - he’s been able to harness that same anger against them."

Read more from Cameron Joseph at Mashable

Marco Rubio has always been a long shot to win his home state of Florida. Not a single poll there since last July has shown the Florida senator overtaking GOP front runner Donald Trump. However, while Trump appears certain to win Tuesday’s primary, it seems to be Sen. Ted Cruz who is serving up the deathblow.

Going into the Florida primary, Cruz, the number two candidate in the GOP campaign, could have approached the race in two very different ways. He could have sat back, stayed out of the state and perhaps let Rubio pull off a win by leveraging Cruz's leftover voter base. Then the two could have gone on and duked it out over the next few weeks with Trump holding far fewer delegates.

Or, Cruz could continue to campaign in Florida, denying Rubio potential access to a new crop of followers, and instead help hand the state directly to Trump.

So far it’s clear that he has chosen the latter.

“Ted Cruz is not trying to win Florida, he’s trying to knee-cap Rubio so he can get it down to a three-person race. Ideally he wants to get it down to a two-person race,” said Ford O’Connell, former adviser to John McCain’s 2008 campaign. “Asking politicians to put the team ahead of their own personal self-interest is like asking a thief to stop stealing—he’s looking at it as protecting Ted Cruz—because he’s thinking that, ‘If we go to a contested convention, I won’t come out on top.’”

While Rubio has a long history in the state, having started there as a member of the Florida House and moved up the ranks to senator, Cruz has more of a defined voter base that comes out to support him in every state.

“Rubio has no base to fall back on,” O’Connell said. “Trump has wiped every base of voters. Cruz has a mixture of the tea party constitutionalists and hardcore conservatives. Who does Rubio have? Establishments? Establishment is the big word of 2016, but no one can define it.”

Read more from Miranda Green at Scripps Media

The sputtering presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio faces its last stand tomorrow in his home state of Florida — where an upset victory could offer him one final hope of political redemption at a brokered Republican convention.

Polls indicate Trump could be on track to capture four to five of the delegate-heavy states that hold primaries tomorrow — Florida, Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina and Illinois. Rubio is only competitive in Florida; Ohio Gov. John Kasich is neck-and-neck with Donald Trump in the Buckeye State.

Rubio has given his supporters dispensation to vote for Kasich in Ohio as a way to keep delegates from Trump, who needs 1,237 total delegates to seal the nomination and avoid a floor fight at the GOP convention in July.

“He recognizes that he can’t win the nomination,” D.C. Republican operative Ford O’Connell said of Rubio. “The only thing he can do is stop Trump from getting 1,237, conceivably.”

O’Connell noted Rubio — once regarded as the party’s most promising young conservative — suffered from not having a “natural base,” unlike Trump and Ted Cruz, and is likely to see donor funds dry up if he falters in Florida.

Rubio, who picked up 10 delegates in Washington, D.C., Saturday night, spent yesterday firing passionate salvos at the front-runner, warning that Trump is inciting violence against protesters at his rallies.

Read more from Jack Encarnacao at the Boston Herald

Florida is the final frontier for GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio, who must squeeze out a win in his home state Tuesday if he hopes to have even a remote chance of getting the nomination. But just as supporters shift from boasting about Rubio’s momentum to whispering and accepting his likely defeat, a last-ditch effort has emerged in the Sunshine State of another kind. Anti-Trump PACs are mounting a media blitz to thwart a Donald Trump win in Florida.

“There are only two people who can win Florida: Trump or Rubio, and right now it looks like Trump is going to win,” said Ford O’Connell, former adviser to John McCain’s 2008 campaign. “Rubio would have to clean up everything in South Florida, all 11.5 percent of the state’s voters there.… There’s only so much you can do, and Trump is literally running away with this.”

The most recent poll in Florida shows Rubio trailing Trump by 23 percentage points.  While Rubio has made gains in the past few days, political scientists and strategists in the state remain skeptical that it will be enough to eke out a win.

Read more from Miranda Green at Scripps Media

Sitting governors in both parties seeking to influence the presidential race in their home states are failing miserably so far in 2016.

Republican governors are batting 1-9 with their endorsements. Only Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) got it right by supporting Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who benefitted from home field advantage.

In the Democratic contests to date, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has won in four of the five states where the governor endorsed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

All told, the governors have ended up on the wrong side of voters in 12 of 14 elections. More often than not, the candidates they’ve backed were defeated in a rout.

Political analysts say the phenomenon is further evidence of the fierce anti-establishment mood of the electorate, which has buoyed outsider or insurgent candidates like Cruz, Sanders and Donald Trump.

“Voters this year don’t want to be told what to do. They want to make their choice free of anything,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “I don’t know why any of these governors would risk their coattails in a cycle this unpredictable.”

Read more from Jonathan Easley at The Hill

The Republican race for the White House is tightening ahead of pivotal clashes next week in Florida and Ohio.

Donald Trump remains the front-runner and is poised for a good night on Tuesday, with polls showing him favored to win three of the four GOP contests on tap, in Michigan, Mississippi and Idaho.

Trump has seen his leads narrow over rivals in Michigan, Ohio and Florida, however, making it clear the race for the GOP nomination isn’t over after a weekend in which Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) gained on Trump in total delegates.

Trump maintains a lead of nearly 100 delegates over Cruz but has been the target of millions of dollars in attack ads amid an accelerating last-ditch campaign by the Republican donor class to destroy him before he can win Ohio and Florida.

Those sharpening attacks, coupled with a trend of late-deciding voters breaking against the billionaire — late-deciders in Louisiana over the weekend almost handed Cruz an upset victory — suggests Trump’s path to the nomination is narrower than it once was.

“I think Trump is hitting a little bit of a speed bump,” Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said in a telephone interview with The Hill on Monday.

“It’s not devastating, and it can be fixed, but he’s got to go out there and put up some W’s in Florida, Michigan and Ohio.”

“He’s losing steam, but he’s still the person who as of today is most likely to go to Cleveland with the most delegates” but not necessarily 1,237, added O’Connell, who worked on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign but remains neutral in the current race.

Read more from Jonathan Swan and Rebecca Savransky at The Hill