Sen. Steve Daines (R., Mont.) told Andrea Mitchell Wednesday that he was endorsing Marco Rubio for president, making it Rubio’s second endorsement from the Senate, and they had a telling exchange about Rubio's voting record as Mitchell tried some on-air fact-checking.
Mitchell had asked Daines whether he had any concerns about reports that Rubio has missed 42 percent of votes. Daines pushed back on the double standard and said that President Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton had each missed hundreds of votes while running for president. Mitchell refuted Daines' claim.
"I will have to check those numbers because I don’t think any of the people you cited missed as many votes as Marco Rubio," Mitchell said.
Rubio was asked about his missed votes during CNBC’s Republican debate and the call from the Sun Sentinel for Rubio to resign. Rubio had turned the conversation around to point out the large number of missed votes from Barack Obama when he was a senator, and that the paper had endorsed him but did not call for his resignation.
"In 2008, Barack Obama missed 60 or 70 percent of his votes, and the same newspaper endorsed him again. So this is another example of the double standard that exists in this country between the mainstream media and the conservative movement," Rubio said.
Politifact Florida had rated Rubio’s claim as true.
In 2007, CNN reported that Obama had missed nearly 80 percent of the votes while Biden had missed 68 percent of the votes in the same time period. Factcheck.org reported that John Kerry has missed 89.8 percent of Senate votes during his run for president in 2004. In 2008, Hillary Clinton missed 77.9 percent of votes.
Combined, the number of missed votes from Democratic presidential candidates who were senators is still higher than what Rubio has missed this year.
From the start of this year until October 22, Rubio missed about 33.7 percent of votes.