Marco Rubio Turns Toward the Personal on the Campaign Trail

To hear his rivals tell it, Senator Marco Rubio is a robotic candidate, soullessly spitting out canned lines on the stump — “constantly scripted and controlled,” in the words of Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has derided him as “the boy in the bubble.”

But as the presidential campaign enters its most intense phase yet, Mr. Rubio’s cautious style has quietly but unmistakably evolved, shedding its impersonal rime and offering intimate — and increasingly improvised — glimpses into his childhood, his family and even his finances.

When a retired voter here despaired over the sinking value of his home, Mr. Rubio surprised the audience by recalling, in painful detail, his own real estate travails, right down to the cost of having a next-door neighbor’s home slip into foreclosure. “They sold it for $300,000 — half what I paid for my house,” Mr. Rubio explained. “So that reset everyone’s value for years.”As he reconstructed a loud night of beer drinking in a Miami park, Mr. Rubio stopped himself and smiled. “Please don’t tell my kids,” he asked his audience playfully.

From the start, Mr. Rubio, 44, has operated under the assumption that his relative youth and lack of executive experience required him to display the firmest possible command of facts and figures, of ideology and geopolitics.But the newly personal and unguarded approach to campaigning is a recognition that the assets he has worked hardest to develop — mastery of foreign policy, and a bruising critique of the Obama era — are not enough by themselves to capture the hearts of voters. And that the ones he was born with — a compelling family history and an innate charm — will only grow more important as he appeals to broader sections of the electorate.It is also a reminder that Mr. Rubio, for all his dexterity as a public speaker, did not start campaigning for president full time until December. He required time, advisers said, to become comfortable with the daily rhythms of interacting with and fielding questions from hundreds of voters from morning until night.