While Marco Rubio has been the Republican establishment’s favorite presidential candidate for a while now, he’s struggled to take off in either Iowa or New Hampshire. Nationwide, he’s a distant third with 11 percent — more than 25 points behind Donald Trump.
Nearly a quarter of Marco Rubio’s supporters don’t know what he looks like
Dylan Matthews was a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy.
Vox and Morning Consult’s facial recognition poll might help explain why: Only 54 percent of American voters overall, and only 62 percent of Republican voters, could correctly identify a photo of Rubio in an online survey:
Digging into the poll internals, Morning Consult’s data team found something even more surprising: Only 76 percent of Rubio’s supporters can recognize a picture of the candidate, implying that 24 percent of his fans saw a photo of him and either misidentified it as another candidate or didn’t know who it was.
Maybe this doesn’t matter; you don’t need to know what candidates look like to vote for them, of course. But Rubio’s relative obscurity among his own fans is still striking — especially compared with a candidate like Trump, who had no supporters misidentify him.
See More:
Most Popular
- Take a mental break with the newest Vox crossword
- Data centers could actually be good for your hometown
- You have more time than you think. Here are 5 science-backed ways to find it
- Photos reveal strange sea creatures that scientists have never seen before
- The Air Quality Index and how to use it, explained
