Marco Rubio Called Making A Field Goal ‘Hits A 3 Pt Kick’ In An Odd Electoral Analogy

Florida has been at the center of American politics over the last week. Despite the fact that Election Day was on Nov. 6, neither the race for Florida’s governorship nor its race for Bill Nelson’s seat in the United States Senate have been decided. Both have gone to recounts, with Democrats Nelson and Andrew Gillum narrowly behind Republicans Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis, respectively, in their races.

It’s not unusual for Florida to be a hotbed for debate regarding American elections, but that’s especially been the case this week. The recounts in both races have led to numerous debates about how we approach voting in the United States, as Republicans have done whatever they can to stop or limit recounts, whereas Democrats have done everything in their power to make sure every vote that was cast in the state gets counted.

There is a long post that someone — likely someone who follows this stuff far more closely than my general interest in the subject — can write about the disregard for voting rights in the United States and how a healthy democracy should encourage all of its citizens to be involved in the electoral process by making it as easy to vote as possible, but instead, I’d rather talk about a tweet from Marco Rubio.

If you haven’t been following along with Rubio since his run for president in 2016, he is now the Republican Party’s most prominent voice (outside of Donald Trump, that is) pushing that something sinister is occurring in Florida. He has been throwing together Twitter threads on the subject with the hopes of expressing his discontent and riling up conservatives about Gillum and Nelson wanting votes to be counted.

On Tuesday, Rubio (or, perhaps, a social media person he employs) started out one of these threads with this tweet.

Again, the political side of this is for someone else to discuss — like this guy — but the football analogy here is baffling. No one in the history of humanity has ever described kicking a field goal as “hits a 3 pt kick.” It’s called a field goal. You “make” or “kick” it. This isn’t even like a universally-accepted synonym for the action of kicking a field goal, like “boots it through the uprights” or something. It’s like if, say, a politician tried talking about basketball and called the hoop a “basketball ring.”

The most likely outcome here is that whomever posts for Rubio, whether himself or a staffer, decided that a not insignificant amount of people don’t know the rules of football, and that saying “kicks a field goal to try and win a game that was 24-22” would have been not relatable enough. As such, they determined pulling a Big Shaq and laying it out so folks could do quick maths was a better approach.

This, however, was not the case when Rubio ran for president in 2016, as he put together an entire ad that was entirely focused on his love for football — a sport which he played on scholarship when he attended Tarkio College in Missouri. It involves him catching footballs at various speeds in color and in black and white, and on occasion, discussing his love of the Miami Dolphins.

Rubio also is well-known football poster, as he has tweeted about the NFL and college football a lot.

He, like many fans of the non-New England Patriots teams in the AFC East, really does not seem to like Tom Brady.

Plus he coaches the sport and famously once hit a kid with a football while campaigning in Iowa, though in fairness to him that young man has to be an athlete and make a play on that dang ball even if it wasn’t a perfect throw. What I’m saying here is that he knows that “hits a 3 pt kick” is a phrase no one has ever used, and it is my sincere hope no one ever refers to it as such earnestly again.