Manny Diaz (not the coach nor the ex-mayor) captures state Senate seat

Veteran Republican legislator Manny Diaz Jr., considered a key target by Democrats in their attempt to capture the state Senate for the first time more than two decades, beat back their challenge as he won a solid victory over Coral Gables firefighter David Perez, a first-time candidate.

With 94 percent of the ballots counted in the race for northwest Miami-Dade senate District 36, Diaz led with 55 percent of the vote to Perez’ 45 percent, a nearly unbeatable margin of more than 10,000 votes.

Republicans have held the seat for more than a decade. But with the incumbent, Rene Garcia, term-limited out of office, Democrats saw it as eminently capturable and one of the linchpins of their effort to take back the state Senate. “This is probably the most important — if not, the second most important — race in the state,” said Perez as the contest got under way in September.

But Perez — a relative newcomer to the Democratic party, who shed his lifelong registration as Republican only in 2014 — never got much traction against Diaz, who in eight years in the Legislature earned a formidable reputation as a warrior in the education field. He spearhead legislation to expand charter schools and take their regulation away from local boards and hand it over to a state committee.

Perez tried to make the case that Diaz’s championing of charter schools was a conflict of interest: Diaz earns a six-figure salary as chief operation officer of Doral College, a nonprofit manage by Florida’s biggest charter-school operator. But the accusation didn’t have any more impact that it did when Diaz’ opponent made it during his last legislative race.

In the campaign’s final weeks, the biggest issue seemed to be not education or ethics but a peculiar TV commercial placed by a Democratic Party fundraising unit. It argued — correctly, if not exactly relevantly — that candidate Diaz was not the same guy as the chief defensive coach of the Miami Hurricanes or the coach’s father, a former Miami mayor, both of them also named Manny Diaz.

“Manny Diaz is running for the state Senate? Wait, what?” the ad’s narrator intones. “No. Not the mayor or the coach. The Manny Diaz running for Senate is a different Manny.” A “bad Manny,” he added a moment later.

Diaz the candidate, who had never claimed to be either of the other Mannys (and there’s no reason to think it would have done him much good to try; the mayor was hugely unpopular when voters dumped him in 2009, and the football coach is on a three-game losing streak) seemed bemused by the commercial.

“Voters in my district know exactly who I am,” he replied. “They are not fans of the former Miami mayor at all. The obsession with this item is rather odd.”