Fact check Q&A: Missed votes by senators running for president

Q: Sen. Marco Rubio claimed that Barack Obama and John Kerry ​missed 60% to 70% of their Senate votes when they ran for president. What are the facts?

A. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has missed nearly 34% of the U.S. Senate votes in 2015, partly due to campaigning for the Republican nomination for president.

Some of his constituents are not happy about it.

Southern Florida’s Sun-Sentinel, which endorsed Rubio for the U.S. Senate in 2010, published an editorial on Oct. 27 with the headline “Marco Rubio should resign, not rip us off.”

Sun-Sentinel, Oct. 27: You are paid $174,000 per year to represent us, to fight for us, to solve our problems. Plus you take a $10,000 federal subsidy — declined by some in the Senate — to participate in one of the Obamacare health plans, though you are a big critic of Obamacare.

You are ripping us off, senator.

During CNBC’s Republican debate on Oct. 28, moderator Carl Quintanilla asked Rubio about the newspaper’s criticism. Rubio said that the editorial was “evidence of the bias that exists in the American media today,” and noted that the paper had previously endorsed two Democrats, Secretary of State John Kerry and President Obama, who both ran for president while serving in the U.S. Senate and missed even more votes than Rubio has.

Quintanilla, Oct. 28: So when the Sun-Sentinel says Rubio should resign, not rip us off, when they say Floridians sent you to Washington to do a job, when they say you act like you hate your job, do you?

Rubio: Let me say, I read that editorial today with a great amusement. It’s actually evidence of the bias that exists in the American media today.

Quintanilla: Well, do you hate your job?

Rubio: Let me — let me answer your question on the Sun-Sentinel editorial today. Back in 2004, one of my predecessors to the Senate by the name of Bob Graham, a Democrat, ran for president missing over 30% of his votes. I don’t recall them calling for his resignation —

Quintanilla: Is that the standard?

Rubio: Later that year, in 2004, John Kerry ran for president missing close to 60 to 70% of his votes. I don’t recall the Sun — in fact, the Sun-Sentinel endorsed him. In 2008, Barack Obama missed 60 or 70% 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.

A few readers have asked us whether Rubio was right about the percentage of votes missed by Obama and Kerry. In short, yes, he was.

While campaigning for the Democratic nomination in 2008, then-Sen. Obama of Illinois missed 64.3% of votes in calendar year 2008, according to the website GovTrack.us, which tracks missed votes by members of Congress.

Obama, who announced he was running for president in February 2007, missed 37.6% of votes that year. So, over the nearly two years that Obama was a candidate for president, he missed 46.3% of votes in the Senate.

And he still got the Sun-Sentinel‘s endorsement in 2008, as Rubio said.

In comparison, Sen. John McCain, who was the Republican nominee for president in 2008, missed 80.5% of votes that year, and 55.9% of votes the year before that.

John Kerry, who was the Democratic nominee for president in 2004, missed 89.8% of the votes that year, while he was still a U.S. senator for Massachusetts. Kerry also missed 64.1% of votes in 2003, but he didn’t formally announce he was seeking the Democratic nomination until September of that year.

The Sun-Sentinel still endorsed Kerry over President George W. Bush.

Rubio also mentioned Bob Graham, a former U.S. senator for Florida, who briefly ran for the Democratic nomination for president in the 2004 cycle.

Graham was officially a candidate from May 2003 until October 2003, when he dropped out of the race. He missed 32.5% of the Senate votes that year.

But while the Sun-Sentinel may not have complained about Graham missing votes — as far as we could find — other newspapers certainly have been critical of Republican and Democratic senators for missing votes while pursuing the White House, as the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump pointed out on Oct. 30.

Rubio, at 33.7%, has missed the most votes this year of the five senators currently seeking the presidency. And Sen. Bernie Sanders, at 3.4%, has missed the fewest.

In between them are Sens. Lindsey Graham,Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, who as of Oct. 31 have missed 26.9%, 23.8% and 4.8%, respectively.

We should point out that Rubio gave the percentage of missed floor votes by Kerry and Obama in election years (2004 and 2008, respectively). Those figures — “60 to 70%,” as Rubio said — cannot be compared with the percentage of votes missed in an off-election year.

In order to make an apples-to-apples comparison, we calculated the percentage of missed votes through the first nine months of the year before the general election year for the senators currently running for president and those who won their parties’ nominations in 2004 and 2008.

Below is a chart showing those percentages. By this measure, Rubio missed a higher percentage of votes than Obama, but not higher than Kerry.