Even though the presidential campaign is grabbing the majority of the headlines, there's still a high-stakes Senate race happening here in Florida.

Recently, Democratic challenger Representative Patrick Murphy from South Florida noted that current Republican Senator Marco Rubio is absent from the Senate a lot, and with those absences come missed votes. How bad does Murphy say it is? Here's what Murphy had to say, quote ...

"Senator Rubio has the worst vote attendance record of any Florida senator in nearly 50 years."

Our partners at PolitiFact decided to look at the official records to see if this was an accurate claim. Politifact reporter Joshua Gillin says that Murphy's claim rates MOSTLY TRUE on the Truth-O-Meter.

"We looked at Rubio's absentee rate, which is the number of votes he cast compared to the number of votes he could have participated in," said Gillin.  "We found that his voting absentee rate is 14 percent, meaning that he voted in just over 85 percent of all votes that were held in the Senate."

Is that the worst, though? Gillin says that there are a couple of ways that you could look at it.

"We checked with the other senators that are currently in office, and they average a 1.7 percent absentee rate when it comes to Senate votes," said Gillin.  "In that comparison, Rubio's rate is significantly higher than the average.  Now, when it comes to the 50-years claim, we went back and looked at all of the senators from Florida for the last 50 years, and yes, you have to go back to George Smathers, who was the Senator from Florida between 1951 and 1969.  Smathers' voting attendance absentee rate was 23.6 percent, far higher than Rubio's 14.5 percent rate."

Gillin notes that, while the numbers support the claim, there are few things to keep in mind.

"You have to remember that Rubio did run for president, so he was on the campaign trail quite a bit while votes were happening in the Senate," said Gillin.  "You also have to take note that back when Smathers was in office, the overall average absentee rate was 14.5 percent, which is well higher than the current 1.7 percent of today's senators."

Murphy did get the numbers right, but mitigating factors played a factor in the absentee rates, which leads to a MOSTLY TRUE rating from PolitiFact.

SOURCES:  Marco Rubio's voting attendance record