News broke late Wednesday that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will not attend the Republican Convention in Cleveland, Ohio later this month.

A number of other prominent Republicans — including former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and former GOP nominees Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain — had already announced they would not attend the convention because they did not support this year’s presumptive nominee Donald Trump.

Rubio, who had previously said that he was willing to speak at the convention to promote a conservative agenda, cited the need to concentrate on his primary campaign.

“Florida has always been a competitive state and it will be this fall,” Rubio spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas told The Capitolist. “Marco had planned to go to the convention before he decided to seek re-election. Since Marco got into the race late, he will be in Florida campaigning and meeting with voters instead of going to Ohio.”

The Republican primary is on August 30, with early voting from August 20 to August 27 and mail-in ballots scheduled to be sent between July 26 and August 2. A string of polls establish Rubio as the overwhelming favorite, with the most recent one putting the Senator up 71 percent to 7 percent over developer Carlos Beruff.

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