Levine Cava holds small lead over Bovo in 2020 race for Miami-Dade mayor, poll says

Daniella Levine Cava holds a narrow lead over Esteban “Steve” Bovo Jr., in the Miami-Dade mayoral race, according to a new poll of a race likely to test the power of party politics at the local level.

Levine Cava leads Bovo by seven points in the poll by Bendixen & Amandi for the Miami Herald, 39% to 32%. That leaves 29% undecided in a race where about 40% of voters said they held no opinion of either candidate in the contest to succeed term-limited Carlos Gimenez in November.

While the mayoral race is nonpartisan, the contest features two candidates who have touted their party support: Levine Cava as a Democrat and Bovo as a Republican.

“It’s the Democrat versus the Republican,” said Fernand Amandi, managing partner of the Coconut Grove firm and a longtime pollster for Democratic campaigns.

The live-caller survey of 500 likely voters was conducted from Sept. 1 to Sept. 4, and has a 4.4% margin of error.

Amandi said Levine Cava’s main asset is the sizable registration advantage Democrats enjoy over Republicans in Miami-Dade, and the likelihood that Democratic nominee Joe Biden will turn out far more voters in the Democratic stronghold than President Donald Trump will.

“As more voters come to realize she’s the Democratic candidate, her support should start to mirror what Joe Biden’s support will be in Miami-Dade County,” he said.

That formula hasn’t worked in the past. When another Democratic county commissioner, Jimmy Morales, ran for mayor in 2004, the Republican, police director Carlos Alvarez, won the race even as John Kerry beat George W. Bush by six points in Miami-Dade’s presidential ballot that year. The last Democrat to win a county mayoral race was Alex Penelas when he was reelected in 2000.

Miami-Dade’s biggest problems

Running for the top spot in county government, Bovo and Levine Cava face an electorate worried about a problem that didn’t exist when they launched their campaigns in 2019. The Bendixen & Amandi survey showed 29% of voters considered COVD-19 the most important issue facing Miami-Dade, followed by the economy (21%) and education (7%).

The two candidates have clashed on the COVID issue, with Levine Cava generally pressing Gimenez to be more aggressive on restrictions — including a call for a 25% capacity limit for restaurant dining rooms, instead of the 50% Gimenez allowed at the end of August. Bovo opposed Gimenez’s July order that temporarily closed dining rooms entirely.

The survey asked respondents about what approach Miami-Dade should take with the virus. Forty-four percent favored “tighter restrictions and enforce social distancing” and 27% favored “open up further and get back to work.” Another 26% said to “keep restrictions as they are.”

Levine Cava, 65, would be the first non-Hispanic to serve as county mayor since Stephen Clark held the post in 1993. Bovo, 58, is a Cuban American.

Where is their support?

The results of the latest poll show voters picking sides along partisan lines, and each candidate enjoying strong support along ethnic lines, too.

Bovo, who included photos of him with Trump on his campaign mailers this summer, was the pick of 63% of Republicans, according to the Bendixen Amandi survey. Levine Cava, who also included photos of Bovo with Trump in her mailers, was the pick of 58% of Democratic voters.

“The race is pretty much headed in the direction everyone had expected,” said Christian Ulvert, Levine Cava’s top consultant. “Daniella has consolidated Democratic support, and Bovo has consolidated Republican support.”

The Bovo campaign declined an interview request, with consultant David Custin saying in a text message that his candidate “was busy campaigning, connecting with voters and sharing the clear contrast with Levine Cava’s radical agenda and Bovo’s common-sense solutions for Miami-Dade’s future.”

Partisan favorites don’t provide equal boosts in Miami-Dade, where 41% of the voters are registered Democrats and just 27% are Republicans. But county races remain officially nonpartisan, and Bovo and Levine Cava won’t have Rs and Ds next to their names when Miami-Dade mails out its first set of ballots to local voters on Oct. 1.

The two each took 29% of the vote in the Aug. 18 nonpartisan primary, where Bovo finished about 2,000 votes ahead of Levine Cava. Penelas finished third after outraising the other two candidates in his comeback bid. Because

no candidate took more than 50% of the primary vote, the top two finishers are competing in a November runoff that will decide the election, no matter the margin.

Results from the Bendixen & Amandi poll show how Miami-Dade’s ethnic profile could provide a path to victory for Bovo.

He’s a Cuban American who is fluent in Spanish and the son of a Bay of Pigs veteran. She’s a white non-Hispanic who moved from New York to Miami after law school and who speaks Spanish but would fumble for words during Spanish-language debates.

A language split

Among Cuban Americans polled, 58% held a favorable opinion of Bovo, compared to just 22% for Levine Cava. Bovo was also the pick of 52% of the people who opted to participate in the survey in Spanish, beating Levine Cava by 30 points in that subset. Levine Cava held almost as large of an advantage with respondents answering in English, beating Bovo 47% to 22%.

Bovo holds a narrower lead in the broader subset of Hispanics, beating Levine Cava 41% to 32%. Levine Cava enjoyed overwhelming support from Black voters in the poll: 51% to Bovo’s 7%. For white non-Hispanic voters, the split was Levine Cava 45% and Bovo 32%.

Dario Moreno, a Coral Gables pollster and Florida International University politics professor, points to the 1996 race for county mayor as context for the 2020 dynamics.

That year Penelas, a Cuban-American Democrat, faced former commission chairman Arthur Teele, a Black Republican, in the November runoff. Penelas won, and precinct data showed the two swapped traditional party bases for ethnic identities: Cuban Americans went with the Democrat, and Black voters went with the Republican.

“What is stronger in Miami-Dade: ethnicity or party?” said Moreno, the pollster for Gimenez’s 2016 successful reelection effort against fellow Republican and Cuban American, Raquel Regalado. “Twenty-four years ago, it was no contest. But in this extremely polarized, partisan environment, has that old rule changed?”

This story was originally published September 9, 2020 at 7:00 AM.